Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces “nice” people, not heroes. — Peter Kreeft

The Mystery of End Times

Perhaps the most contentious issue among serious Christians today is the subject of eschatology or end times.  You’d think that we Christians could at least agree that much, if not everything, about the end of time and return of Jesus Christ is shrouded in mystery.  But we can’t even do that.  Instead we find a little campfire of eschatological opinion positioned sufficiently distant from all the other little Christian campfires so as to make them appear like stars on a dark night.  We gather around one campfire and draw a bit of warmth from the charismatic opinionator who has mastered the interpretation of headlines through the lens of bible verses.  When we tire of his gloom and doom we strike off into the darkness toward another pinprick of light.

More and more of us are finding the darkness we’ve entered as we strike off for the next campfire to be all consuming.  In fact, it appears to our eyes like even the campfire we’ve selected as our next spiritual home is drawing away from us as we move toward it.

This is because we are all idolaters.  We’ve decided to idolize our minds and Israel.  America’s foreign policy is manipulated to benefit a nation that didn’t even exist a century ago.  We do it out of guilt that never really existed.  It was manufactured by public relations experts — marketers.  At the same time we Americans decided to turn knowledge into an idol.  How else do you explain the absolute insanity infused into everything having to do with “higher” education in America today?  Also, look at how potent the internet has become by playing to this weakness in our collective psychology.  We really do think of ourselves as highly intelligent because we have thousands of friends and followers on Facebook and Instagram.  We pride ourselves on being able to think up the perfect google search keywords faster than our colleagues.  We are the super genius because we’ve mastered gmail’s tools that help us focus on only what’s important to us at the moment.

Yet we know we are lost in a gloom.  Our minds feel like they are going to explode.  Without a religion we turn to brilliant creatives like the Wachowski brothers.  They created the most powerful metaphor of wonder in our time.  “The Matrix” inspires far more culturally salient memes than the Bible or the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Why is that?

Their movie painted an accurate picture for us.   On a canvas of gloom and rain the narrative pits a nearly destroyed humanity against superior machines.  The magical powers of the One (not a god) named Neo draw us into the tale.  The magic loses it’s luster faster than the Wachowski brothers lost their genitals.  The Hollywood magic didn’t last into the second movie for me.

God has a sense of humor.  I think it’s perfect that Laurence and Andrew Waschowski chose to become Lana and Lilly.  We need our creatives today to be transsexuals.  It’s perfect because it is truth.  We deserve them.  They are our leaders … our Priests.  It is fitting.  We worship them because of their success in Hollywood.  What could be more righteous than that for Americans!

What we miss in all of this is the fact that their fame and fortune came as a result of the Gospel of Jesus Christ … not in spite of it.  Their movie tapped into sublime and eternal truths.  It pulled back the curtain on God.  It gave us a glimpse of what we’re doing to ourselves with our knowledge and Israel worship.  We’ve surrendered to the machines created for us by rich oligarchs in our world, many of them very proudly Jewish.  The most manipulative and powerful machine they’ve created is the computer and internet which serves up a nanosecond diet of porn designed to take the fight out of righteous men.  Your cellphone is really just a different version of the spike that is driven into the skull of humans in the Matrix so their minds can remain imprisoned while their bodies serve as batteries for the machines.

Returning to Peter Kreeft’s prescient quote with which I opened this column, “Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces ‘nice’ people, not heroes.”

Our hearts are so empty that we cannot feel through movies anymore to the truths they artfully express while our heads are full of distraction, soundbites, movie quips and nonsense.  Our American wallets, both digital and real, are full of numbers representing what we owe to future generations of people who are not our children.  They are immigrants intent on helping us commit the voluntary cultural genocide we’ve determined is needful for our guilty nice race.

So … here we are.

What will you do about it?

Selah.