WHAT DAY IS THIS?

I do not ask this in the sense that I have no idea. I’m not asking as a way to throw up a smoke screen for persuasion sake. Regarding that, it’s not my fault, it is in the wee hours of Sunday morning, Dec. 15th, 2019. Oh my, there I’ve gone and spilled the beans before I can even start the analogy, which I wanted to use alongside the leading question in the title. And quite frankly, old men can’t often sleep past 3am, so let’s talk, shall we?

On November 1st, the year of our Lord, 1970, when the song, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is” by Chicago entered Billboard’s Hot Top 100 chart at position #72 peaking at #7 nearly eight weeks later, on December 27th,

Robert Lamm was not asking rhetorically about what time it actually was, but more a question as to what it was we were doing with our time. So, go ahead and criticize my analogy, but I did pique the interest of you old farts who long for the good old rock and roll days. By the way, it was not an analogy I was trying for, but more of a set up for allowing myself the phrase, “the year of our Lord”, and that is really where I want to start.

I don’t know what you really believe to be fact and what you accept as truth with a bunch of faith mixed in. I do know that those Roman like abbreviations, BC, AD, CE, BCE, and even the acceptance, as late as 1582, of the Gregorian calendar, likely isn’t worth a single bitcoin to you X-geners and less of a whit to you old farts like me.

I know something else as well. Historians have no clue about the first calendar put into use, however, notched bones seemingly recording moon phases have been found in Africa and Europe dating back to 20,500 BC.

Everyone I know places all their calendar eggs in a single basket revolving around one date. That date, well, given plus or minus five years, was the birth of our “Lord” Jesus Christ. In 10 days, or depending when I post this, we will be celebrating the birth of that polarizing historical figure. What I am sincerely surprised about with all this recent liberal anti-Christian political correctness, you know, the “absolutely no mention of this event in public” mantra, is that we’ve heard no mention of “fixing” the calendar.

Maybe this generation will do away with the calendar all together. After all, as Robert Lamm made it famous, “Does anybody really care?”

But here is the challenge all humanity has sought to solve for at least six thousand years. How did we come to be here and is this all there is? I got an interesting request from an old classmate, truly a great friend, born out of our secondary parochial school days. He had begun to contemplate all that he had learned, disentangling the stories, rituals and dogma the world population subjects itself to, as we pass it from generation to generation. Each undergoes some baptismal experience that qualifies the soul to pass to a new stage, and many if not most, graduate through a number of additional stages to find themselves somewhere along life’s journey, just trying to be successful and survive.

My friend found himself at the door of one of those stages. After reading my recent comments on Facebook about my beliefs in regards to “salvation,” or the absence thereof, and having scoured my lengthy dissertations in my blog, he had come to an understanding, that he just might believe the way I do, and asked me to clarify in order to confirm that suspicion.

Simply put, one only has to look about themselves and consider how things are organized in our biological, geographical, yes even our environmental realm, to come to an understanding, even belief, that an intellectual power above or beyond that world is practical.

To think in agnostic terms about that power is normal, hence faith, but to be atheistic is a fool’s folly. The expressions, be them cave drawings from non-biblical century’s, the campfire yarns of pre-“Adam” antiquity, the inspiration of Moses and John, and yes those carvings on sticks way back when, all speak to man’s insistence to find the answer concerning our existence.

I enjoy that study, in fact, I expect to continue finding new ways to express it in my own terms. As many have found it in the religious scene, as an old 60’s fart would state it, it really is not about understanding from whence we’ve come, but supporting a hope that there is a place to go, and finding the path on which to travel to get there.

“We” have been on that journey for over two thousand years and in some circles the culmination of that journey is imminent. I’m not totally drawn into that, but I’m not dismissive of the organization that has been harvested through the years along that path. The values driven life and the moral paradigm by which we conduct ourselves daily, produce fruits by which we can judge which belief system, if not most practical, are most beneficial to the human experience.

In the horn of that harvest are laws, organization, and judgment. The valuation as to the understanding on how those three effect, (with an e) not affect, the arrangement of our social norms is essential. That takes more than the time we have utilized so far, and to place a limit on that time, while very Christian, is also simplistic and quite frankly, atheistic.

So, about time. What is the thing? Forget about Einstein’s “case of the traveling twins” in his search for an explanation of the theory of special relativity. He does not take into account biological pressures on the aging process, which is to say that when chromosomes are exposed to penetrating cosmic rays, there is significant damage to one’s telomeres, those little molecular “caps” on the ends of our DNA.

Why is what I just regurgitated important? “OH, OH! God is the origin of nature,” you emphatically proclaim.

Well, then, you call when you get to heaven and let me know how that trip went. I do like the idea of a gold road just outside my gate. If God would only allow the building of that gate, the log home behind it, and give me 100 acres to ride my MotoXer, I’d be there with you in a holly minute, but I digress.

OK, so let’s keep it simple. Do you know when time began, or better yet, when the world came into existence? Do you know when a little cloud, the appearance of which could be the size of a man’s hand, might show up? When you discover you have no idea, then calling this time of the year Christmas, and shunning or ignoring those who wish to call it something otherwise, is of greater importance.

In other words, what we do, here and now, how we act in relationship to our human counterparts is of greater significance, than attempting futilely to discover our origin and/or, if or, when we get to hitch a ride on that cloud or just assume some other form down the road. I’m of a mind to put in for a cow’s body in India. To take on that nature might be a poor request for one’s longevity here in America.

In conclusion, you can’t say where we’ve been or where we’re going. Nor can you say with absolute surety there is this super power with a host of names not the least of which, and most understood to be, God. But in man’s attempt to discover and expound on “His” existence, we made some rather stark and relevant discoveries. Coming to terms with those discoveries and developing an understanding about how to act on them is our life’s mission and what gives our life meaning.

God exists however or wherever. My discovery path showed me a set of laws to live by. Breaking those laws have consequences, the likes of which will suppress your full potential. Following those laws will unharness an amazing power and potential the world has yet to realize. God wrote it at Mount Sini, (OK, Moses chiseled it, then gave us a head fake, whatever!) Jesus spoke to it on another mount and later showed us how to fish.

Through the year’s, man has corrupted the law and even negotiated for its diminishment in order to go along to get along. The law that is most under attack recently is; “Thow shalt not bear false witness.” The last four years have produced some liberal whoppers. Could our President be inclined to bear a few himself? Well, maybe, but for those of you completely insane who suggest, just to agitate, that he has born more than his share, consider that the lies this popular culture is propagating on society is astounding and better evidence that there ought to be a God, if not.

When God took Adams rib and fashioned a woman, that was not a religious undertaking but a biological expression by an author to explain the natural organization of things. The expansion of that arrangement is that society is best served by adhering to a “one man, one woman” construct, or in other words, the primary building block of a society.

I choose to include God in that dynamic. To leave Him out makes no sense, in fact, nonsense. If you leave to men the law, they will change it at whim. The wisdom and understanding, America’s Founders relied on, was that there were God given rights, and that a religion called Christianity brought forth the explicit understanding of choice; written onto the character of a man’s soul, and how he chose to organize his life within the parameters of those rights, was his alone to define.

I don’t see leaving God out of the decision-making process nor do I take man’s expansive musings, as to the nature of God, to be a literal or a comprehensive conclusion about that nature. We as human beings have the gift of judgment. “Judge to show yourself approved”. “By their fruits ye shall know them”. By all evidence, there is a God. You better live your life accordingly.

But we most definitely ought not be frightened by some devil in sheep’s clothing. You’ll realize the fruits almost instantaneously. That’s why I say, “Merry Christmas” and that’s why I honor a plan of salvation, the likes of which is manifested by “peace on earth (emphasis on “earth”), good will to all men. Was that sexist, sorry! Let me include women in there, too! That’s a wonderful plan, spread to the world from a nativity scene that ought to be built each year on the steps of every government building in the country.

And that’s why I say Merry Christmas and still enjoy the story that includes, “And to all a good night, Ho Ho Ho!”

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