"Troubled............................"

Beth is not so much 24/7 addicted to Fox News anymore, still watching, but somewhat selective and relaxed in her vigil. Most bulletins, therefore, concerning the world around me, come to my attention on a daily basis via the computer. The main screen provided by my Internet Server displays several lead-ins to various items of interest, the bulk of which tends to leave me wondering if Armageddon isn’t, indeed, sitting just over the horizon. Forget the political and economical state of the world. Never mind that “big money” has globalized us into one big happy family that thinks government should put us all on welfare. It’s the moral condition of men everywhere that gives me problems, the Church, herself, maybe “alive and well”, but certainly failing in any real “leavening of the loaf”. It’s nearly nothing lately to read of another man gone berserk, mass murder in a mall, a hair salon, a place of business, children killing their own classmates with guns and pipe bombs. It makes me question why “terrorist” should be so limited in its definition, bringing forth a mental image of an Arab with hatred in his heart, especially after encountering, yesterday, a report of four mentally challenged adults found shackled in a small Philadelphia basement room, malnourished, dirty, fed but once a day, and with only a bucket to relieve themselves. Two of them had endured such conditions for the last ten years, moved from state to state by a middle-aged woman they referred to as “mom”, she and two companions living off the others’ Social Security or disability checks. It can be said, of course that humanity has always known such depravity within its ranks; but, in such frequency, in such volume, in a country where it is not uncommon to find thirty churches or more positioned within a short drive from each other? God shake us and wake us from our slumber……