Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

• Galatians 5:2-23

I call to you, Lord, come quickly to me;
    hear me when I call to you.
May my prayer be set before you like incense;
    may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice.
Set a guard over my mouth, Lord;
    keep watch over the door of my lips.
Do not let my heart be drawn to what is evil
    so that I take part in wicked deeds
along with those who are evildoers;
    do not let me eat their delicacies.
Let a righteous man strike me—that is a kindness;
    let him rebuke me—that is oil on my head.
My head will not refuse it,
    for my prayer will still be against the deeds of evildoers.
Their rulers will be thrown down from the cliffs,
    and the wicked will learn that my words were well spoken.
They will say, “As one plows and breaks up the earth,
    so our bones have been scattered at the mouth of the grave.”
But my eyes are fixed on you, Sovereign Lord;
    in you I take refuge—do not give me over to death.
Keep me safe from the traps set by evildoers,
    from the snares they have laid for me.
Let the wicked fall into their own nets,
    while I pass by in safety.

• Psalm 141:1-10

“I believe that the primary moral principles on which all others depend are rationally perceived. We ‘just see’ that there is no reason why my neighbour’s happiness should be sacrificed to my own, as we ‘just see’ that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another.”

• C. S. Lewis, Miracles

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you’d never know which were which.”

• C. S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia

I think the last quote came from Prince Caspian when they discover some of the Narnians had “gone wild” and you could not tell them apart until they acted like an animal in the human’s world.

Again, I read something from the Chronicles of Narnia, a book meant to be fantasy with a touch of allegory, but C. S. Lewis again becomes prophetic.

In combining the two quotes, in a total rejection of the Christian doctrine and total acceptance in Evolution and how we are mere accidents with no real purpose in this world, the prevailing mantra of today is a complete rejection of that inner voice saying that our neighbor’s happiness is of our concern.

You definitely see it on the highway.  Over half the drivers are aggressive, and the other half of the drivers cringe in fear.  There may be a few aggressive drivers that simply see no one on the highway except themselves.  They drive aggressively only because they do not acknowledge your existence.  The rest just deny your right to pursue happiness, or safety, or the ability to drive without going in the ditch.

You see it in business.  If the average person has no confidence that their skills are better than the other person, they blame the other person for what they did wrong.  They start rumors about the other person to make them look bad, and thus, by comparison, they do not look so bad themselves.  And management sees this aberrant behavior of trashing their neighbor’s career as a good quality and the dull, uninventive person gets promoted.

Sadly, there can be some parallels drawn in some churches.  Whatever nasty trick you can pull to get your ideas moving forward and thwart the ideas of others.

Maybe most of these people who have “gone wild” were the sibling that knew how to needle and provoke the other sibling into retaliation so that they could cry, act innocent, and watch their brother (or sister) get punished.

Maybe C. S. Lewis was not prophetic at all, he probably saw it at work in his time.  He had to jump ship from Oxford and go to Cambridge to get the promotion that he sought.  Probably, even in his day, his Christian writing and his popularity were considered trivial, beneath the level of an Oxford Don.  Again, making the other guy look bad, even though Lewis’ books are still in print over fifty years after he died.

But even when people protest that one group is not being heard or helped in some way, they find a means to infringe on everyone else’s right to simply be happy.  Do not come knocking on my door to shout your demands about people that I do not even know and have never harmed.  I love peace and quiet, and loneliness is only an attribute of a creative work inducing environment.  Your knocking disrupts that.  And interruptions?  Please, not when I am in the groove of writing.

So, have we lost a bit of our humanity?  I think so, but each time we deny the rights of our neighbors, especially the poor who do not have a voice in the first place, we have become a bit less than what God intended.  God created mankind in His own image.  In rejecting that fact, we begin to rot into a state where “gone wild” doesn’t look that bad.

But we can repent and turn to God.  The question is: Will we?

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.