“Go to church.”

I surprised myself when I said it.

My friend had been quietly explaining her deep concern about her experience with public school. After years of homeschooling her children, she and her husband enrolled them in school. She said the curriculum no longer uses ‘BC” and “AD” as historical measures. Instead, they use  ‘CE ‘ and  ‘BCE ‘ (common era, before common era.)

“We’re a Judeo-Christian culture,” she exclaimed, “How can this happen in American schools?”

She explained further. Each day of the new school year begins with a television assignment. The kids are to watch and take notes on ten minutes of CNN news. Her older boy had told her about his first day. It was memorable because the first day of CNN news had been entirely about the lifestyle of homosexuals.

My advice, “Go to church,” was in response to her statement that she felt powerless. Our conversation happened during a group dinner. Therefore, we couldn’t talk further. And so I sent her an email. It was a very long email that explained things I had neither thought nor talked about for many years. I have pondered why I did what I have never done before. Particularly to a person whom I know has little interest in church or religion.

Why would I tell her that I believed we were engaged in a spiritual battle?

That we were fighting a war?

In an email?

And tell her that she could not fight this battle alone?

Long ago when I converted

to Christian Catholicism while living on the East Coast, I learned the phrase, “God put her in my heart.” Or “The holy spirit placed this in my heart” from new devoutly religious Protestant friends. When this happened, they taught me, you know it and you must act. So when this recent conversation echoed in my mind in the middle of the night and during idle moments, I decided to write the email. The conversation had been placed in my heart.

The warning by Christ to “read the signs” rings more loudly this year. And the ‘signs’ appear more portentous.

• This past Halloween, the first American Luciferian Church opened in Texas- the little town of Spring, a suburb of Houston. Lucifer, the Angel of light, he who was thrown out of heaven. The website, in clever use of our cultural norms, so porous that anything can enter, describes the mission in the most innocuous of ways. We are ‘nice people….merely wanting to make use of freedom of religion to enlighten and teach. The word devil appears nowhere on the site.
• While watching the Democratic debate last night, I became aware that abortion on demand and paid for by our taxes is considered a basic right by the Democrat Party, is inherent in the platform.
• Hillary Clinton did not say it that way, of course. She knows better. Rather, she speaks of Planned Parenthood as a reasonable partner of the government. The organization presents itself as a site for sex education but in the last three years, over one million abortions have been performed at Planned Parenthood.

The beauty of the euphemism

Each of us learned as kids to use words that veiled their real meaning-euphemisms. Words which make something unacceptable seem reasonable, acceptable. ‘I wasn’t lying, I just didn’t tell you’ or ‘It’s not stealing, look at how many they have, they will never notice one less!”

In a former career in academic medicine, we became proficient in the use of euphemisms. Fear of suit for wrongful discharge led to creative ways to get rid of poor performers.Lay-offs became RIF’s, reduction in force, re-engineering invariably led to lay-offs. For us managers, it was more palatable to think in terms of phrases rather than people, just like calling babies fetuses or the murder of innocents collateral damage.

The recently released movie Spotlight tells the story of a Boston Globe journalist’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series on then Cardinal Bernard Law and the Boston Catholic Church for their protection of priest pedophiles. I joined the church in Massachusetts during those years. Cardinal Law was demonized. Any of his attempts to explain were ridiculed.

What fascinated me then, as now, was the magnitude of the rage, the content of the vitriol- ‘this will be the final nail in the Catholic Church,’ ‘this Law is a monster–he should be in jail’. The fury was directed at him personally rather than the actual abusers.

Our culture believes that homosexuality should be ‘taught’ to our kids; among those homosexuals, there will likely be a small number of them who are attracted to kids. Isn’t there an obvious disconnect here?

None of these things is in and of itself, new.

Covens and devotion to Satan have existed for centuries, and women have aborted unwanted babies since the beginning. There is nothing novel about same sex attraction or attacks against the church. Emotional manipulation is at the heart of any persuasion. What feels new to me is that none of these things is hidden. They are displayed by leaders as the norm, worse, the truth.

When my friend said her children would not be taught the truth in public school, my suggestion was not intended as a panacea, far from it. Churches are filled with people-sinners. That is why we are there. Homosexuals, abortionists, thieves, liars, cheats, adulterers, fornicators, we’re all there. We are not alone in our sickness. We don’t pretend we’re not sick because we know where to find the physician. Go to church.