Life is one grand, sweet song, so start the music.
Ronald Reagan
The big party day has come and gone…
A smashing good time was had by one and all…
And I think the birthday boy, despite succumbing to exhaustion by day’s
end, truly enjoyed his cake…the blue lips give it away…
(The sheriff and his blue icing lips / Julie Cook / 2021)
Train up a child in the way he should go;
even when he is old he will not depart from
Proverbs 22:6
“There is no such thing as moral phenomena,
but only a moral interpretation of phenomena”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
(Dr. Seuss’s Sneeches)
There was a time when we would catch a cold, or more accurately the crud, as those sorts of symptoms
are lovingly referred to a catch all crud…you know the symptoms…
that of a sore scratchy throat,
a runny or stuffy nose, a post nasal drip
with a hacking or phlegmy sort of cough…
at times, it’s even accompanied by aches and / or light chills.
A typical winter visitor.
Nowadays however…those sorts of symptoms have folks looking at you a bit sideways.
Leary and skeptical as they step an extra 6 feet away.
“Did you just cough???” an alarmed voice practically shrieks.
Fever, do you have a fever???
Can you smell??—
Well if your nose is all clogged up and your sinuses are giving you fits, breathing,
let alone smelling, are both difficult at best.
Suddenly you feel the need to tie a bell around your neck.
You feel you’re living in Nathanial Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter…
although your letter is not a giant red A but rather the mark of the Covid beast.
Colds, sinus infections, even the flu are now all considered Covid unless otherwise noted
by a medical professional— and then people are still skeptical.
You saying you’ve gotten a cold or suffering from allergies is no longer good enough.
Folks want to tie you down and slam a giant swap up your nose.
I’ve had Covid and I’ve had a bad cold.
I know the difference.
And right now, it’s a bad cold.
But try letting the general population know the difference and
‘them become fighting words.’
No one believes you anymore.
Your word is no good.
I ran into the grocery store the other day and almost had to laugh out loud.
Naturally we were all wearing our masks like good stewards,
but one young lady had also added a pair of ski goggles.
I looked for a biohazard suit but she just had on a major mask with some
serious goggles.
I thought to myself…”you know, I would hate to live with that much fear…”
So before you mark me as some capitol rioter or uber conspiracy theorist…
just know that I realize that we’ve been hit with half a million deaths in this country.
And yes I’ve known those who have succumbed and died from the virus.
And I have even known some who took the vaccine and died two weeks later.
So yes, I do know it is real, but I also know hysteria when I see it.
So while we’re talking about hysteria, let’s take a look at, for instance, Dr. Seuss.
That almost mystical and rhythmical child’s author of yore.
Seems that our dear Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, is rapidly becoming persona non gratis.
A pariah of sorts.
The once beloved children’s author, who was the epitome of tolerance,
had he still been living, would have turned 117 yesterday.
Yesterday, as in “Read across America Day”, as in my grandkids went to daycare
in their Dr. Seuss pj’s all for Dr. Seuss PJ reading day…as in we all love Dr. Seuss…
or so I thought—we loved him last week.
This week, obviously, not so much.
As in my beloved The Grinch Who Stole Christmas book that I still have these 61 years later…
is now looked at sideways.
(1957)
Sadly it seems that our current Woke folks out there have decided that Sneeches and Whoos and
red fish, blue fish are currently out of step with our suddenly perfect society.
Isn’t it just grand knowing we live in a perfect society?
However, I fear that in that perfect society, it might just be filled with
imperfect residents.
Woe be unto us all.
For these days will pass by like a puff of wind.
And all those who are perfect among us will be caught up in the wind…
Grab the hand of a Sneech because we’re all about to be blown away.
Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy,
and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it,
because the time is near.
Revelation 1:3
Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.
For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow.
But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up!
Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone?
And though a man might prevail against one who is alone,
two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-12
(The Mayor enthralled / Julie Cook / 2021)
(The Mayor feeling some love for her Sheriff / Julie Cook / 2021)
(Da shares his cupcake, one bite at a time / Julie Cook /2021)
(The Mayor dresses the part of Elsa for her birthday, complete with ice cream scooper /Julie Cook / 2021)
(Happy Birthday to you!!! / Julie Cook / 2021)
The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.
Madeleine L’Engle
Happiest Birthday to the Mayor who turns 3 today.
Our little woo boo is growing up so quickly!!!
(The Mayor fresh home from the hospital basks in a jaundiced glow / Julie Cook / 2018)
(The Mayor turns one / Julie Cook / 2019)
(the Mayor turns two, pre pandemic / Julie Cook/ 2020)
(This morning the birthday girl readies for “school” as the day’s princess / Abby Cook / 2021)
“The Lord bless you
and keep you;
the Lord make his face shine on you
and be gracious to you;
the Lord turn his face toward you
and give you peace.”
Numbers 6:24-26
The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose
all the other ages you’ve been.
Madeleine L’Engle
(The Sheriff enjoying Da’s cake / Gregory Cook / 2020)
We interrupt our scheduled dose of heavier topics as we need to recognize
a most momentous occasion.
Someone on staff at the satellite Woobooville office turned 71 this past week
and thus the Mayor, Sheriff, along with their entourage, came to celebrate.
We’ll get back to the serious stuff after everyone finishes enjoying their cake.
Doesn’t matter whose birthday it is, the Sherrif loves cake!
A party without cake is really just a meeting.
Julia Child
“Today you are you!
That is truer than true!
There is no one alive who is you-er than you!”
Dr. Seuss
(James, aka the Sheriff, turns 1 / Julie Cook/ 2020)
Not the birthday celebration we had exactly wanted nor planned–
but joyous none the less…
more to follow later my dear grandson…
“God gave us the gift of life;
it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.”
Voltaire
The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all
the other ages you’ve been.
Madeleine L’Engle
(the festive table of the day /Julie Cook/ 2020)
Our lives have been forever changed because of you.
It began with a subtle announcement in September of 2017
Followed by an exciting sense of anticipation later in October as seen through a cake.
(baby shower)
Then came the exuberance of the marking of a milestone,
the first Birthday…complete with a cake in February of 2019
And so today, with the blink of any eye and the whirl of time, we now find ourselves having
moved from life with a baby to life with a little girl…as seen through the festivities
of a 2nd-year-old birthday cake
And always with your trusty sidekick is by your side…
And whereas you will not remember these early days of cakes and festivities or
presents and toys…
nor will you remember the early days of our handholding, our sleepovers, our kisses,
our laughter, our tender embrace…
I do pray, however, that you will always be filled with both joy and wonderment
not to be contained by limits or disillusionment…
I pray that you will always know that when I am long gone,
my love will transcend both time and space.
And I pray that you will always remember that no matter what,
God will always hold you by the hand and He will never leave your side.
(The first snow / Julie Cook/ 2020)
Start children off on the way they should go,
and even when they are old they will not turn from it.
Proverbs 22:6
“Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is,
than falling in a love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings,
what you will do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends,
what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
Pedro Arrupe, S.J.
We’re off to celebrate a certain Mayor’s 2nd birthday.
Birthday on Monday.
Party on Saturday.
But before we get to birthday celebrations, we need to remember the day of all things Amore…
Yes, Dean Martin is indeed crooning in the background…
I wanted to stop long enough to consider the real person of Saint Valentine.
A Christian martyr versus the modern-day commercialized king of roses,
chocolate, and amore.
I caught this great piece yesterday on the Federalist regarding the life of the real
St. Valentine along with the story of his martyrdom.
The question posed was what might be St. Valentine’s thoughts regarding
today’s modern 21st century’s concept of marriage…?
Would he still sacrifice his life for today’s shifting thoughts on marriage?
Because that’s what St. Valentine did—he gave his life over to martyrdom for
performing Christian marriages— of which ran counter to the pagan thoughts of
marriage throughout Imperial Rome.
He would not bow to Ceaser nor Rome’s pagan gods.
This is a great piece—so please enjoy.
And just remember…there actually remains a real-life story…one of true agape love
which lies buried beneath those roses, chocolates and special romantic
dinners out.
Now off for the Mayorial celebrations!
Would Saint Valentine Be A Christian Martyr For Marriage Again Today?
We can especially feel an intense hostility towards the very idea of marriage that
Saint Valentine represented: the union of one man and one woman, centered on Christ,
and loyal until death.
One of the many legends about Saint Valentine is that he was a Christian priest martyred
by Roman authorities for secretly performing Christian marriages.
We used to think of Saint Valentine as the good guy in that scenario.
Today?
Not so much maybe, given the hostility towards the idea of Christian
marriage in our culture.
Saint Valentine would have committed a double offense by the time he was beheaded
in 270 A.D.
First, he defied Emperor Claudius II’s ban on marriage, a ban intended to create a
larger pool of effective soldiers by preventing young men from becoming attached to wives and families.
Second, as a Christian, Saint Valentine would have refused to bow down to false gods and the state,
and taught his brethren likewise.
The custom of burning incense to the pagan gods and to Caesar would have violated
the conscience of any devout Christian because it would be a public betrayal and rejection of Christ.
In addition, incense is significant in worship.
When the custom was in force, the authorities didn’t actually require anyone to
believe in the gods, but simply to go through the motions.
They thought it was no big deal. But it was a very big deal,
because the point was to enforce conformity and capture people’s consciences.
That’s not to say Christians uniformly resisted. Most likely obeyed,
while those who resisted were persecuted, even put to death.
Needless to say, this caused some division among Christians.
Christians during the great persecutions had a special example of
steadfastness in Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, who was 86 when he was arrested
and martyred around the year 155. According to tradition, when brought to judgment,
the Roman proconsul was astonished to see in Saint Polycarp a venerable old man
he did not want to execute.
So he offered him what he thought was a generous out: if Polycarp would just
toss a teensy pinch of incense (not even noticeable) to Caesar, then he would be set free.
Of course, Polycarp would have none of that. So he was burned alive instead.
Sacrificial Love versus Shiny Object Love
There are plenty of other legends about Valentine and other saints.
The point is that Valentine’s Day originated as a celebration of the sacrificial love
upon which Christian marriage is based. To “be true” is to be willing to make the
ultimate sacrifice for someone, and to proclaim that love for better or for worse, until death.
Valentine’s Day is still filled with beautiful traditions, such as exchanging
heartfelt notes of love and gifts to those we care about.
Who doesn’t enjoy the beauty of roses and the deliciousness of chocolate?
Commercialization is a given, and often a testament to things we love anyway.
But in many ways Valentine’s Day got hijacked by the shiny objects offered by
the sexual revolution: self-gratification, “free love,” etc. For many, sexual attraction
or hooking up is the only reason to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Self-sacrifice?
What’s that?
Sacrificial love doesn’t sell.
Often people seek out others who practice it because they prefer not to practice
it themselves.
Funny how that works.
By 1998, Eve Ensler, author of “The Vagina Monologues” decided to dub the day “V-Day,”
which she said stood for “Victory, Valentine, and Vagina.”
Well, not much love and sacrifice there. V-Day is still around, with the
mission of raising awareness of violence against women, “both cis and trans.”
(Since 1998, of course, the V-Day folks discovered that “men can have vaginas.”)
In any case, the V-Day project represents a trend that seeks to separate men and women—
on Valentine’s Day.
Such separation is the end result of the sexual revolution.
After all, the push to legally abolish all sex distinctions is nihilistic,
especially towards marriage.
Hostility Toward Christian Marriage
As V-Day plods its cheerless way onward, we seem to be witnessing a revolve back
in the direction of persecution. First, there was a celebration of Saint Valentine
and sacrificial love, particularly in Christian marriage.
Then the predictable focus on romantic love, much of it in the Victorian era
that popularized the sending of Valentine cards.
With the sexual revolution, we get a more direct focus on sex as the centerpiece
of the festivities.
Predictably, the sexual revolution then spawned resentment rather than love,
now by using the day to raise awareness of wife-beating and other forms of
violence against women.
We can especially feel an intense hostility towards the very idea of marriage that
Saint Valentine represented: the union of one man and one woman, centered on Christ,
and loyal until death. His crime was to bring a man and a woman together while
the state meant to keep them apart.
The marriages he performed were anathema both to Roman imperialism and to
today’s worship of hook-up culture, adultery, divorce, and abortion,
all celebrated in the media and pop culture.
The hostility runs so deep that Christians today are told they must pay homage
to same-sex unions or else lose their livelihoods. It is not only happening in the wedding industry,
as florist Baronelle Stutzman and baker Jack Phillips can attest.
It is happening in all of society’s institutions.
This hostility against the timeless understanding of marriage as the union
of one man and one woman runs so deep that it is a heresy being forced into the
churches themselves, often through evangelical defectors, such as Joshua Harris and David Gushee.
Gushee uses his title as an evangelical ethicist to warn other Christians that if
they don’t follow the LGBT agenda, they’ll be rightfully smeared as bigots.
In a 2016 op-ed, he warned: “Neutrality is not an option. Neither is polite half-acceptance.
Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.”
(That goes for you too, Saint Valentine!)
This sounds like a recipe for forced love, which is quite the opposite of love.
Anyway, for good measure, Gushee shared a laundry list of those who have signed on to
this manufactured, sold-and-bought zeitgeist:
corporate America, academia, psychologists, etc.
That’s been the basic idea behind political correctness all along:
deny your conscience, shut up, and publicly prostrate yourself before the elitists
who operate this zeitgeist machine. Otherwise, to the stake with you.
Devout Christians know, of course, that this is the same old stuff served up to their
forerunners when they were told to bow down to pagan gods.
Yes, bowing down to the pagan gods was popular all right, since the alternative,
as always, was to be smeared and skewered. Just call it “the right side of history”
and you’re good to go.
Yet even one person who does not betray conscience in the face of
such punishment can change the world by injecting some truth into it.
Perhaps that is why the enemies of free conscience are on a constant
search-and-destroy mission to “come and find you.”
But in the end, true sacrifice—the kind that comes without deep-pocketed
lobbying—can breed real love. And, as Saint Valentine showed, real love can’t be forced.
Stella Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist
“Since love completes all, makes all hard things soft, and the difficult easy,
let us strive to make all our acts proceed from love.”
St. Arnold Janssen
(a birthday bouqute graces the dinner table / Julie Cook / 2019)
“The Devil didn’t deal out temptations to Our Lord only.
He brings these evil schemes of his to bear on each of Jesus’ servants—
and not just on the mountain or in the wilderness or when we’re by ourselves.
No, he comes after us in the city as well, in the marketplaces,
in courts of justice. He tempts us by means of others, even our own relatives.
So what must we do? We must disbelieve him altogether, and close our ears against him,
and hate his flattery.
And when he tries to tempt us further by offering us even more,
then we should shun him all the more…
We aren’t as intent on gaining our own salvation as he is intent on achieving our ruin.
So we must shun him, not with words only, but also with works;
not in mind only, but also in deed. We must do none of the things that he approves,
for in that way will we do all those things that God approves.
Yes, for the Devil also makes many promises, not so that he may give them to us,
but so that he may take away from us. He promises plunder,
so that he may deprive us of the kingdom of God and of righteousness.
He sets out treasures in the earth as snares and traps, so that he may deprive
us both of these and of the treasures in heaven.
He would have us be rich in this life, so that we may not be rich in the next.”
St. John Chrysostom, p. 152-3
An Excerpt From
Manual for Spiritual Warfare
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