Love Your Enemies - A Short Sunday Homily

"Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you," turn the other cheek, says Jesus, and it sounds a bit like a pacifist manifesto, but isn't. Our Lord is not issuing a divine command to the Joint Chiefs of Staff forbidding the use of lethal force in a just war or self-defense. He is ordering us to love our enemies, which means willing what's good for them and acting accordingly.

This doesn't mean we've got to like or agree with them, much less feel romantically inclined towards them, but we must will and act in their best interest as opposed to lashing out in wrathful hate-filled vengeance upon them when they attempt to destroy us. So tempting, don't do it. Our Lord sums up the spirit of the thing:

Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven..."

 

Love, mercy,  forgiveness. Divine values which conform our hearts to the heart of Christ, instead of the satanic anti-values, vices, of hatred, vengeance and wrath. Embrace the former. That in mind, a churchman came up to me after Mass and said:

"Father LSP, I've thought a lot about those verses and know them by heart, but here's the thing. A few years back someone stole all the tools out of the back of my truck in Itasca," bear in mind, readers, that this is a contractor who needs those tools for his livelihood. He continued, "Well, we got his license plate on a game cam and reported it to the police, who did nothing."

"Huh," I replied, "That's entirely useless," and he agreed, "Right, so what we did was trace that plate to an address, a meth lab, loaded up with AR15s and shotguns and paid those boys a night time visit." I pondered the scene: 

Midnight, meth lab, pock-marked malfeasants cooking away under fluorescents with a shop full of stolen tools as our guys turn up, weapons hot, "What then?" My friend looked me in the eye and said, "They gave us our tools back. Was I wrong, Father?" I looked him right back in the eye and replied, "No, you were not. Good thing the place didn't blow up, eh?"

If you had told me, back in the early '90s, that I'd be a rural mission priest in North Central Texas some 30 years later, I'd have laughed. You know what? I'm not complaining.

Here Endeth The Lesson,

LSP

Weapons Hot Or Not So Hot?

It's 11.30 pm in North Central South Dallas. 3 shots were just fired close to the house, and there's sporadic gunfire in the distance. Choppers constant. Probably some Mexicans celebrating Wednesday; this is, after all, south of the river. Whatever, weapons hot. Or are they?

Comsymps and self-loathing, bend-the-knee libs think they aren't. Get rid of guns and you'll get rid of violence and everywhere will be Sweden, a veritable Ikean utopia. Unless you're one of the Swedish women who's recovering from being raped by a military age, Moslem refugee. 

Sweden aside, what makes you think a disarmed populace has nothing to fear from criminals who notoriously don't obey the law? By the time those three shots are slamming into your house or a gang of joggaz are running at you with 2x4s it's too late, right?

Point being, you don't need to be armed until you do, and if you're at that point without a weapon it's pretty much too late.

That we've come to the point where I feel that it's necessary to guard my Mother's house with a gun(s) is abhorrent to me. But there it is, humanity's fallen and pretending otherwise doesn't cut it.

In the meanwhile, gunfire's stopped for now, chopper overwatch continues.

Weapons hot,

LSP