BECOMING UNHINGED

THIS WEBPAGE IS ALSO
AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST HERE

I'd like to start this essay with a short prayer:

Dear Lord, as society becomes more and more unhinged, help me and everyone I pray for, along with those most in need, not to become unhinged ourselves! May we all stay as close to you as possible, especially now, in prayer and in the sacramental life, and persevere in faith, hope, and charity, helping you to bring as much good out of all the evil around us as possible, so that where sin abounds, following the words of St. Paul, grace may abound that much more!

The key to staying focused on what is right in this crazy world is to stay focused on God, now more than ever, in a spirit of humility to let Him take charge of your life as much as possible, and equanimity, that He may give you the grace to keep a level head in good times and bad.

We are living in times so tumultuous and chaotic as to make us all wonder either where is God in the midst of all this or perhaps that we are approaching the end times. There are numerous websites and YouTube videos and such trying to read the tea leaves as to where we might be in the Divine panoramic design of things.

You might have heard or read these words from our Lord from the Olivet Discourse somewhere on the internet or in Podcasts for example:

“And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the sufferings….And because wickedness is multiplied, most men's love will grow cold. But he who endures to the end will be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all nations; and then the end will come..(Matt 24: 6-8; 12-14)

With all the uncertainty around us it certainly feels like the end times might be just up ahead a decade or a few more straight ahead. Or is this era but another one of those birth pangs, the “sufferings” Jesus spoke about?

Is the ultimate man of iniquity, the Antichrist himself waiting in the wings getting ready to spring into action promising his counterfiet Godless utopia only to be defeated after much bloodshed and persecution of our faith?

Right now we’re all trying to emerge from the pandemic and the loss of lives as well as livelihoods from businesses shutdown after the lockdowns. With the supernatural virtue of Hope we can well believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yet all many of us see these days is more and more tunnel up ahead!

Traditional mores and family values are under assault in ways we have not seen before in this country, in media, academia, government, and even some of our churches!

The Justice Department seems more threatened by parents who object to the pornification of their schoolchildren’s curriculum, traditional Catholic Latin mass goers, and those who pray peacefully outside abortion clinics, rather than actual criminals and corrupt leaders.

We see today in all walks of life, but especially among those who are woke, a heartbreaking mixture of ignorance and arrogance! There are spiritually malnourished and undernourished young people all around us clinging to various narcissistic narratives concerning sex, gender, pronouns, and so-called oppression without having God or prayer in their lives.

When you don’t pray you can easily fall prey to the one who will not serve, Satan, whose maxim would be more like the famous occult saying “Do What Thou Wilt” rather than “Thy [that is God’s] Will Be Done”.

We in fallen humanity as a whole seem not to notice a tragic corollary between a society turning away from God and the amount of hatred, destruction, mayhem, and despair that follows!

The big lie so prevalent these days is that each person can have their own truth, whether or not it actually corresponds to reality. This puts a sardonic spin on Rene Descartes' famous saying that helped sow the seeds for what Pope Benedict XVI once called the dictatorship of relativism: I think therefore I am.

The notion of God having created two sexes, male and female, is considered too “binary” in a world that would rather have you believe that there are more genders than Baskin Robbins ice cream flavors and that you can pick and choose among them as you see fit.

The nature of truth has become so distorted that we see biological men competing as so-called trans women in women’s sports in the name of “trans rights”.

Mayhem seems to be breaking out all over our cities in various ways. Shoplifters are somehow more noble or at least deserving of more empathy than shopkeepers. What is considered to be corruption is in the eye of the beholder, at least for those who have enough money and power to force their will on the rest of us.

Mother Earth is to be heralded not Mother Mary! We are being encouraged more and more to eat bugs rather than beef, supposedly for the good of the planet.

Fights over small matters are seemingly breaking out everywhere, as are random shootings and carjackings as a number of our once great cities are now under siege from crime, decay and drug abuse from an increasingly homeless population not receiving treatment or therapy.

And on top of all that, we definitely hear of “wars and rumors of wars” involving Ukraine, China, and the Middle East that could bring about World War III sooner than we might think!

And if all that weren't enough, those who should know better even think of Satanism somehow as being a religion entitled to constitutionally protected freedom. There’s even been a convention held in Boston sponsored by an organization calling itself the Satanic Temple that is also involved with “After School Satan clubs”.

Besides the fights we see against the sixth commandment regarding adultery and chastity we have fresh assaults on the first commandment as well. There are those in high echelons of power and influence trying to make themselves Gods in charge of some Great Reset leading to a New World Order where man and machine are to merge.

They are planning a world in which Artificial Intelligence, robotics, and modified genetics will supposedly create Heaven on earth without God, but will more likely become just one more utopian society in theory that becomes quite dystopian in practice.

It’s not like we haven’t been here before. Resistance to Christ started when he was just the baby in the manger, as the murderous King Herod had all babies in Bethlehem under the age of 2 slaughtered in a bloodthirsty attempt to get rid of him. And it was only a little over 80 years ago that Hitler was conquering one country after another before he was defeated in long, drawn out battles in World War II.

The butcher's bill of those felled under Communism’s many attempts to create an atheistic paradise last century, includes over 100 million people, and in China, for one glaring example, the Chinese Communist Party still calls the shots in a totalitarian environment.

But on a more hopeful note, while this isn’t to suggest that prayer and the sacramental life can fix all this, always remember that Christ’s Glorious Resurrection for our Salvation followed his ignominious death at Calvary.This is the most shining example of God being able to bring good out of evil. And following this example of love in the midst of suffering we see how God wishes to use us to do this as well!

“Do not be overcome by evil,” warns St. Paul, “but overcome evil with good” (Rm 12:21). Think in this regard about how people often come together to help each other in times of tragedy.

For one recent example, Frank Siller started his Tunnels to Towers foundation to help wounded veterans find homes following the tragic death of his firefighter brother on 9/11.

Think also of how those parents protesting at school board meetings mentioned earlier only found out how sexually explicit some of their children’s textbooks were when they actually got to take a shocking look at what their kids were being taught following the lockdowns and school closings during the Covid Pandemic!

There is also peaceful resistance happening to the current malaise from those praying outside of abortion clinics, and supporting legal challenges in various states to children being able to receive vaccines, abortion pills or even quite risky so-called “gender affirming surgery”, sex change operations, without their parents knowledge or consent.

Keep in mind as well that there is a growing number of people raising eyebrows as well as awareness about the elitist push to digitize all major aspects of our lives, with a Global Medical ID and a cashless society that is certain to strip away much of our freedom, religious and otherwise, and privacy as well, in service to a globalist corporate bureaucracy.

Also encouraging is the negative response, including boycotts, over woke marketing campaigns from companies such as Anheuser Busch and the retail chain Target.

Thus, in addition to prayer and getting and staying closer to God even in the midst of much chaos and confusion, there’s nothing wrong with taking charitable action and protesting peacefully to help push back the Satanic Juggernaut we see all around us these days.

Never forget when looking over the current chaotic ungodly landscape that since Jesus founded our church telling Peter that the gates of Hell would not prevail over it (Matt 16:18), that our faith has undergone severe challenges over the centuries nonetheless. I

t was no picnic for many of the Christians in the first century who suffered terrible persecution under the reign of the tyrannical Roman emperor Nero. Indeed, one of the early Church theologians Tertullian (who lived from the second into the third century) once wrote that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church”.

And of course, our liturgical calendar includes memorials for quite a few martyrs for the faith worldwide over the past two millennia.

Christ Himself gave us all comforting advice when He told the disciples “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light" (Matt 11:28-30).

Yet this was by no means meant to be saccharine sweet talk. These comforting words come from the same Jesus who told His disciples to take up their crosses to follow him (Matt 16:24), and that they would indeed be hated by the world that also hated Him (John 15:18), in effect, because so many preferred darkness to His light (John 3:19).

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus also said that the gate to Eternal Life is narrow and the way is hard (Matt 7:14). Indeed, St. Paul would later reinforce this message during his first missionary journey when he told disciples that it was necessary to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God (Acts 14:22).

Yet did our Lord not give us great Armor of God and grace in prayer and the sacraments? As He told the disciples at the end of Matt’s Gospel "I am with you always until the close of the age." And indeed besides sending us His Spirit to help guide us in troubled or treacherous times, He gives us His very Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in Communion, and makes Himself available in the tabernacles and in Eucharistic Adoration in churches all over the world!

Take action where you can, peacefully pushing back on all this madness, so that its horrific effects might be mitigated. I’ve linked to some sites below that might be informative and helpful in giving you hope and information for this endeavor.

Don’t let all these bad actors make your righteous anger and understandable concerns for the future harden your heart and fill you with so much confusion that you can hardly think straight.

Pray for all those “deep state” bureaucrats, elitists, woke activists, globalists and such running things… into the ground for their own advancement in power and money.

And yet, while it might not be apparent at all these days, as Jesus told HIs disciples in the Last Supper Discourse “In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world.”

For indeed “The ruler of this world”, Satan, as Jesus refers to him earlier in John’s Gospel 12:31, was the one who suffered an ignominious defeat even worse than that which Jesus experienced on the cross at Calvary. Indeed the cross would be the instrument of that defeat!.

We might still be in enemy territory, thinking here of the devil and his multitudinous minions, but Christ’s Victory over Sin and Death and Satan is assured, and this victory can become ours as well!

How can this happen? By our perseverance in prayer, while offering up sufferings to Jesus on the cross to help Him save souls, and keeping close to Him, our Blessed Mother, the Saints, and one’s Guardian Angel in prayer and the Sacramental life!

Remember as always that our spiritual journey is a marathon not a sprint. Push back against the diabolical forces seemingly all around us these days, particularly those assaulting family and our faith in prayer and in whatever peaceful appropriate action you may find efficacious.

And strive with the humility and equanimity God can give you in prayer with His grace to be a light in the current darkness nonetheless, that you may comfort God while He comforts you!

God Bless,

Christopher Castagnoli
for www.ourcatholicprayers.com