The Tragedies Afflicting the Commons

I'm going to speak on this in podcast.

People have said our society is in decline. I think there needs to be a re-assessment and a facing toward the truth of the situation.

We are not in decline, we have declined, we are scraping rock bottom. Human decency has hidden itself from our souls. And we invoke God for every desecrated thing we do, as if saying His name is proof that we are Right with Him. Like He's in our back pocket the way we carry our cell phones.

The one thing I'm learning is that Love is Conditional. Paradoxically, spiritually there is this unconditional love from God, because sincerely, God cannot help himself but love us, because He is Love, Alpha and Omega, Inside of Him the totality of His Love is All Encompassing. According to Fr. Peter Heers, Alpha and Omega is within God, and if God is Love, then he is the beginning and the end of love, the Eternal never-ending ontological source of love for mankind.

But this eternal love of God has conditions, and those are reflected in His Cross upon which the law was Hung for the sake of our salvation. Love outside of God, is demonic, a distortion of the dignity of the image of God by which mankind was created. Events of the day, have only underscored this fact.

The difficulties of a Wounded Heart

It's difficult for me a person with a chaotic past full of abuse, to contemplate love, having never experienced it in a familial setting... .Life for me was all distortion, and I used to look at the families around me like an alien from another planet. But now I realise that brokenness is the norm in our society, not the exception.

Through the years, I have seen healing in my family, as we are learning to make peace with the absences and the finding of love in our lives. Outside of my biological family, I'm grateful that somehow I learned to protect myself from those broken souls who would attempt to place me back into the dark pit of despair.

Since becoming Orthodox I am learning to not be afraid of that which I'm not familiar with, I am learning to love in spite of my own fallenness and the fallenness of others. I am learning that Healthy Love is Conditional. That healthy love is in the Law, the Cross, the commandment to love God with your all, and then to love others as you love yourself. it is in the Beatitudes, It is in Forgiveness Sunday, It is in our morning and evening prayers, it is in our devotional and liturgical life of our Church...It is the only way we will heal from all the wounds we sustained in our lives, and the subsequent brokenness in our fractured souls,. This conditional love is the only place where we get the courage to look into the eyes of Christ as a mirror and to be able to find the strength to let ourselves be restored to perfectness, to wholeness, to finding the image and likeness of Christ within our hearts.

In these days, men and women and their children are confused because the generation before them made choices that accelerated the descent into darkness, into embarking on the path of love not embued with the grace of God, that is, self-love. Every generation before us re-enacts the events of the first fall, But within those generations, there is the remnant that holds on to the Truth that became incarnate with the consent of the Virgin Mary, and gave us this opportunity to be able to be Recalled to Life. So with each generation, the fallenness becomes more pronounced, but within the darkness, the Lord has preserved His righteous ones. Our Church is Elijah crying out to those that have fallen away, and then Christ succors us and shows us the Holy Mountain whereby we learn to hear and to heed His quiet still voice.

In this way, we are the witness. we are the way to healing. But in the valley of decision, the souls of men will be saved or lost, and this is the choice facing every family today as they encounter the tragedy of the broken family in the commons of our lives and turn and see the Church of Christ, calling the broken to the healing so many desperately seek.

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