Positive Advice
Americans have an expression, “To think outside the box.” It means to think outside of one’s usual way of thinking. If ever there was a time for “thinking outside the box,” that time is now. For six or seven hundred years mankind has been turning away from God, in a process which it has freely chosen and which God does not intervene to stop, as he could easily do, because he does not give us men our free-will to take it away again. Also, if he is now allowing this process to be reaching in our own time its logical conclusion, he must be hoping that as the crisis deepens and the pressures increase, so there will be more and more souls driven to think outside the box of their materialism, and by so doing get back on the road to Heaven.
Now how the next few years unfold remains God’s secret, especially the calendar. However, it seems highly probable that the suburban and urban areas where most of us live will be seriously destabilized, firstly because these areas are largely immersed in materialism and “happily” living without God, which must call down his wrath, and secondly because these areas are as intrinsically unstable as they are cut off from nature and artificial, depending more and more on the fragile system of supermarkets for sustenance and survival, on the under-manned police forces for any peace and order, on the Internet’s vulnerable satellites for their information and communications, on the villainous banks for the roof over their heads.
In fact only when the crisis really hits will we truly realise how fragile was our environment that seemed as natural as nature. Therefore for subsistence and survival it surely makes sense to lay in a stock of food and water; for information and guidance to lay in a battery-operated radio (with batteries); for law and order to lay in some physical means of self-defence, and to make contact with one’s immediate neighbours, however little one may have chosen them, because friends in need will be friends indeed; and for the roof over one’s head, to get as far as one can, as soon as one can, out of debt and out of the clutches of the bankers, although we are late in the day for that.
A Catholic reader goes further by suggesting that Catholics in a given area band together to set up Catholic refuges, even material as well as spiritual, invisible as such from the outside, but where the joy of the Faith will reign on the inside. That seems a strange thought. It is certainly “outside the box.” It depends upon a number of Catholics living close to one another who share the same sense of urgency as to imminent events, but it is an idea whose time may come. Also some ‘student’ should make good use of his time at ‘university’ by doing a thesis on how Catholics kept the Faith under brutal Communist repression. Globalism is not yet physically brutal, but that can make it all the more dangerous for souls.
And finally a priest makes a few classic suggestions for spiritual means to meet the present spiritual needs, which are urgent enough, even without grave events being imminent. The full 15-Mystery Rosary every day has Heaven’s guarantee for its efficacity. A 24-hour fast on bread and water can obtain miracles. A corporal work of mercy, eg real alms to a real beggar (more difficult than writing a cheque) pulls down grace. So does a spiritual work of mercy, like giving a Catholic leaflet or a Miraculous Medal to non-Catholics. Total abstinence from the Internet for one or several days can put a brake on habits of wasting time, and it can make half an hour available to meditate instead on the Passion of Our Lord, who is only waiting and longing for us to make use of all that He suffered.
Kyrie eleison.