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Somnambula

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Last Friday, I lay with my mouth wide while she picked at my teeth with the pointy wand of stainless. She matched my look with her own yawn. “Been doing that a lot lately,” the hygienist said.

“Me, too.”

Couldn’t tell you why exactly. I’ve fallen asleep sitting upright at least twice in the last week. Can’t remember that ever happening. Nap and Dan don’t often schmooze in the same sentence. I think my reluctance to let the Sandman dance on my widdle head has something to do with this ominous verse:

A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.
—Proverbs 6:10-11

Whoa. Harsh, context or not.

But then, I can’t help myself  on naptime of late.

I’m not the only one, I think. Seems like a lot of people have been struggling to stay awake. It’s as if a collective blanket of snooze has dropped over southern Ohio. Maybe everyone is simply bored to tears with cold, gray skies.

I think it’s something else, though. I think that the global stress of the last six months has taken root in our psyches. The anxiety of earlier days has burned through its wick and left us all spent.

As one who lived through the Carter Administration, albeit just barely, I remember a dusty word bandied about in those days: malaise.

Malaise has once again crept into the American soul and its body politic. Can you not stay awake even one hour?Malaise coupled with resignation. We sit at home helpless to make a difference in what is going on around us. We turned the country over to naïfs lacking in genuine Christian thought, so now we can sleep, oblivious, while they plunder.

What I want to know is this: We celebrated Lincoln last month, but how is it that no one today is as brave as that dead president so as to call for a national day of prayer and repentance? Isn’t that what this country truly needs?

If you want to answer that question, do so quietly. Who knows? I just might be sleeping.

Now at the RCC Carnival: Bingo, Beer, and a Hot Tetzel

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From the big city paper nearby:

Mary Schatzman knew right away what she would do last week after learning that a church near her Green Township home was offering “indulgences” to interested Catholics.

While some parishioners seemed indifferent or confused by the offer, Schatzman didn’t hesitate.

“I’m going to get one,” she said.

Her eagerness reflects a renewed interest among Catholics in a tradition that had for decades all but vanished from their religious life.

In the past year, Catholics across the Archdiocese of Cincinnati and thousands more around the world have gone to confession, taken communion and said the prayers necessary to receive what is known as a “plenary indulgence.”

For the indulgence, a blessing that helps Catholics avoid punishment in the afterlife, it is a remarkable comeback.

The practice suffered a precipitous fall from grace 500 years ago when the Catholic Church began selling them to rich people looking to buy their way into heaven.

Although the church stopped selling them long ago, the stain on the indulgence’s reputation endured for centuries.

The church never abandoned the indulgence, however, and it now is part of a broader campaign by Pope Benedict XVI to revive some fading church traditions and to draw Catholics back to teachings that younger generations know little about.

The article also add this “explanation”:

The shorthand version of the rules goes like this: Confession removes the “eternal punishment” of sin that can condemn a soul for all eternity, but a “temporal punishment” remains. This punishment is meted out in Purgatory, where Catholics must wait to be purified before moving on to heaven.

That’s where indulgences come into play. They can shorten or eliminate the purification process, clearing the path to heaven.

“We must be purified, either here on Earth or after death in Purgatory,” [Rev. Earl Fernandes, dean of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Cincinnati] said. Bang, bang, Martin's silver hammer comes down on their heads...“What an indulgence seeks to do is remit the temporal punishment.”

Click the link for the rest of the Cincinnati Enquirer article on indulgences.

I’m as open-minded as the next guy, but c’mon. Indulgences?  They’re  simply indefensible theologically, unorthodoxy at its finest, no matter what the Vatican says.

Sure, the local archdiocese isn’t selling them as they were in good ol’ Martin Luther’s day, not even on eBay, but “free” doesn’t make them any less nutty.

Wicked, Wicked, Wicked, Wicked…Righteous

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House of the wicked?The local community newspaper listed eight foreclosures in the last week, all residences. That’s just in one week.

I had a hard time reading that and not getting misty-eyed. Eight families, no home.

At that rate, we’ll have 416 foreclosures in 2009 in my locality. Frankly, given the trend of things around here, I’m thinking the real number will tally somewhere closer to 700.

I wish it were zero.

The dread of losing one’s home runs high in most people. In America, it’s the ultimate failure, the financial, social, moral, and intellectual  scarlet letter.

The Bible, in one of its more inscrutable verses, says this:

What the wicked dreads will come upon him, but the desire of the righteous will be granted.
—Proverbs 10:24

When I first started writing Cerulean Sanctum, I got a lot of emails from people with the gist of  “Who do you think you are,  some kind of spiritual brainiac with all the answers?” The letters didn’t last, though. I think enough truth came out in postings here that people realized that I don’t have all the answers, not even remotely.

I don’t know what to do with a verse like the one above. In the case of the righteous of the Old Covenant, one could argue that their end goals were earthly prosperity and a continuing lineage. Time and again, the Old Testament’s discussion of the payout for the righteous takes those two forms. You can’t ignore them.

The New Covenant changes it, at least as I see it, so that Christ is the goal for the righteous.

But it’s not the payout for the righteous that perplexes me, but the wicked’s. The wicked’s jagged little pill bothers me because their end is the same in both the Old and New Testaments. What they dread is what they receive.

So I struggle with this. Not because the wicked should not reap what they sow, but because the Bible seems to make it clear that people will see the practical outcomes of wickedness. They will be clearly visible. We will know who is wicked and who is righteous by what happens to them, not only in the life to come, but in life right now.

Which brings me back to Proverbs 10:24.

I think about those eight foreclosures in my locality, and I apply Proverbs 10:24. Those people who lost their homes received what they dreaded. The verse says it is the wicked who receive what they dread, not the righteous.

Therefore, it would appear that every one of those people who lost their homes to foreclosure were wicked. They could not be righteous.

So I struggle with that. I wonder if Proverbs 10:24 and dozens of verses that say the same essential thing elsewhere in the Scripture are proof-textable clarifications of who is wicked and who is righteous.

Then we come to the following passage and the water murks even more:

When Paul had gathered a bundle of sticks and put them on the fire, a viper came out because of the heat and fastened on his hand. When the native people saw the creature hanging from his hand, they said to one another, “No doubt this man is a murderer. Though he has escaped from the sea, Justice has not allowed him to live.” He, however, shook off the creature into the fire and suffered no harm.
—Acts 28:3-5

The thought of the local people: Paul is wicked because of the misfortune that befell him. They seem to be referencing Proverbs 10:24 here.

How does this all fit with the dozens of OT passages that say that the wicked receive misfortune, while the righteous receive good? Hyperbole? Positive thinking? Rainbows and unicorns? Did the New Covenant wipe all those verses away?

So much for being a spiritual brainiac…

Any wise folks out there with some sage wisdom with regards to this topic? Please share. I think that many people in the days to come will be struggling with this same issue and will need to hear godly words.