Gadfly's Muse

Featured Photo - Cherry Blossoms

Curmudgeons Unite!

The elevation in tempo of the cultural process is wreaking havoc across the spectrum of human interaction and the degree to which it is bringing about crisis, both within the Church (speaking as a whole) and without it, is perhaps unparalleled in history. There is a psychological/ emotional/spiritual bubble that is quite close to bursting in a manner just as precipitously and as catastrophically as the economic bubble burst in 1929.

 I am not certain how it will ultimately show up but at present it is most prevalent in the 25-40 age group. These are the generally artificially dwarfed products of the educational/cultural experimentation that reached its peak in the late 70's through the 90's. They are discovering just how precariously founded are all the assumptions which they had hitherto taken for granted. They are realizing that they have been sold a bill of goods and now they see all the glittering promises that was to be their inheritance passing to "foreigners" who have the requisite educational expertise and discipline to "pass them by". For all practical purposes they are drifting into a generalized mob of cynical, disgruntled, resentful, entitlement-oriented factions bound together through the internet.

The circumstances have more than a little correspondence to that of the city of Rome at the turn of the eons. Displaced from their traditional roles as the supporting infrastructure of empire, their jobs and lands taken from them by large land owners who profited from the abundance of slaves (read illegal immigrant labor), the Roman proletariat formed into the mass of hysterical plebes who had to be supported on the dole and pacified by the games for the government to continue to function. Our political process has degenerated into an explicit pandering to the whimsical mood of a very similar unstable, ill educated, undisciplined, and generally unprincipled mass. Their thinking is entirely visceral and their relationships are all tentative. Yet they are a potent and powerful force because of the internal communications which gives them an evanescent unity. They resemble a school of shoal fish, unified in mass, sparkling in the light, changing directions instantly, individually featureless but constantly in motion together. Neither the Church, the political institutions, nor the educational establishment are currently able to do with these folks that which has to be done in order for a crisis to be avoided. Their essential identity must be altered into a different form of existence. Otherwise this generation will pass into oblivion to be replaced by another, in the same manner as did that of the post Great War 1920's. Cultural disenchantment is a deadly condition.

Gaining a hearing, awakening them to an entirely different possibility of existence and reinstituting the fundamentals of hope, is a consuming and daunting task, but it is one that must be accomplished.

Longwood Gardens

I recently toured the old DuPont estates ( LongwoodGardens ) for the first time.  The grounds were still dormant awaiting their springtime rebirth but the conservatory was literally blossoming in full.

{Click on Photo for enlarged version]

The main attraction during my visit was the orchid festival and there were many entries to the competition from all over the state.  With all the glamor of those displays as well as the lush brilliance of the ferns, Birds of Paradise, daisies galore and multitudes of other blooms, yet it was the nostalgic appeal of the humble Camellia that warmed me most.

Down South, Camellias are beloved heirlooms often  passed down between the generations through cuttings and loving cultivation.  Somehow they link us to a gentler past when warming twilights on the front porch signaled that, though difficult, yet all was still right with the world.  There is continuity here.  The taste and  appreciation that can only be found when you know that the present experience is not new, but one that has been tasted and savored by those you loved but are now gone, and those they loved who went before them. 

Adam lost the garden for us but God preserved us the flowers.  There must have been a camellia there somewhere.