I know it's been a long time, but I think about you often. Yesterday I had to get out my giant journal again and open it to one of my Flannery pages on which I draw and paste and write all things F.O'C. I was looking for this quote which you wrote in a letter to John Hawkes:
"Cutting yourself off from grace is a very decided matter requiring a real choice, act of will, and affecting the very ground of the soul."
What's happening is that my own people are choosing to do this. People in my church, in my own congregation, my neighbors, my friends, my extended family. Turns out many of them---it appears it may end up being most all of them--- would rather take up the world's various popular banners than stick with God. I totally get it. It's easier. It's more convenient. It's more comfortable. But it's disaster in the making. They don't seem to be able to see past the ends of their noses. They don't see that without truth there is no lasting comfort.
Things have changed a great deal, just in the last few years. How do I describe it? It's a form of terror, but a creeping, silent terror. We do have the regular guns and bombs and blood kind of terror going on, too, and people are being randomly slaughtered at Christmas parties or in restaurants or concerts by Islamist jihadists. But there are worse things than death. The insidious kind of terror is much worse to my way of thinking and actually adds up to more amounts of violence. Violence against innocence, against nature, against God, against freedom, against reality. There are principalities and powers that have taken over completely. Do I sound like some religious fanatic? I'm not. I'm just a regular person who believes in essential absolutes and who believes in the greatest story ever told. For that I am labeled an "extremist," not just by liberals but increasingly by my own people. And yet it is their own brains they have allowed to be washed into smooth dull lumps of useless gray matter. Evil and insanity is being called love. Good and reality and goodness are being called hate.
But I am being much too cryptic. I'll give you one example. My son reported to me yesterday that a local person is becoming quite famous on the internet's social media. This person is a fifty-something-year-old man who abandoned his wife and seven children to announce to the world that he is actually a seven-year-old girl. He even found himself some people who are pretending to be his parents. I kid you not. There are all sorts of crazy things going on. Come to think of it, you might find it intriguing, what with your pet three-legged chicken. Get this. People are cutting off their healthy body parts to turn themselves into the opposite sex and doctors are doing this for them. Here's the catch, the part you won't go for at all. Most people, yes quite a lot of people, are acting as if this kind of thing is anywhere from just the ways things are to perfectly acceptable,even respectable and worth celebrating. How does one live in such a world?
I like what you wrote in a letter to a friend, "You survive in this atmosphere by minding your own business, and by having plenty of your own business to mind; and by not being afraid to be different from the rest of them."
My husband and I don't do much socially anymore. Is this wrong? I just don't have much interest in being with people who have no backbone, who pretend at religion, who surrender their God-given intelligence, not to mention how they have offended to my face my deepest and most sacred beliefs. Nah, I don't think I'm required to party with them. The best I can do is be polite when I am thrown together with them. What I try to remember to do is think of everybody as God's children.
We have many blessings. All our children and grandchildren, and they are quite a few, are with us. They are bright and funny and striving. We also have an eclectic group of new friends who are like-minded with whom we do some underground sort of work.I am very grateful for them, but I've learned not to put too much stock in anybody. People are turning on us regularly. Still, the Lord prepares a table before us in the presence of our enemies. The world is full of interesting and beautiful things to see and do. There is so much to learn. I'm reading a lot. And writing. It's a strange time to be be living here on earth. I feel as if I'm trapped in a lonely filmy dimension between the world and heaven and not a part of either.
I wonder what you would say about it.
J.
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