Gatekeepers

It has always irked me, that when a major religious holiday occurs, the gatekeepers of the modern world, such as Google, unfailingly flaunt their non-recognition of it. Be it Passover, as it was today, or Easter, as it was at the end of March, or the coming feast of Pascha, the Orthodox Easter that will be observed a week from this Sunday, anything else is more important, anything else is to be celebrated.

Today it was Earth Day, a new holiday of the religion of the Green Movement, the ecology cult. The gatekeepers will defend themselves, as keeping ‘church’ and ‘state’ separate, as not favoring any religion by closeting all, yet they do allow select religions to be out, this time flaunting un-apologetically their double standard, religions just as pushy as they claim Christianity to be.

Why is it they cannot recognize what is going on right under the noses? That others have a right to honor their God? That to acknowledge a religious holiday of any and all religions does not make them devotees of that God or accomplices of His crimes? What are they afraid of? Are they admitting by their disrespect that Someone is objectively above them, and before them?

They do this, all the while knowing inwardly, in their consciences (for now we must admit that we are talking about individual human beings with free will who make choices, not just the impersonal results of those choices that are written large on our windows) that they are commandment breakers.

Commandment breakers? How can they be commandment breakers when they don’t acknowledge the commandments or Him that commands?

They’ve already told us, in not so many words, they do not accept Him or His commandments. These are the self-proclaimed non-religious, even when some of them claim to be spiritual, or even that they are religious only in private, where religion belongs, now that what used to be private, such as one’s sex life, is as public as what hangs out to dry on the clothes lines.

Yes, commandment breakers, and they needn’t go further than the first commandment, ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me’ (Exodus 20:2-3).

The modern translation loses the second person singular in which the original Hebrew is cast, unfortunately also the immediacy of the one-on-one encounter, ‘I and thou’ as spoken by Spirit to soul, the God to the man (or woman). The ‘you’ of our modern talk dulls both edges of the ‘double-edged sword’ (Revelation 1:16 and 19:15) by grouping us in a plural second person where nobody in particular can be blamed (or rewarded). You know, safety in numbers.

The gatekeepers may have excused themselves of not recognizing the Ten Commandments or Anyone who might have issued them, but they are gravely mistaken. We know both the commandments and the Divine Being whose nature it is that there should be commandments, through our own consciences, or I should say, conscience, because there is but one human conscience in which all inevitably share.

Their objections, the gatekeepers’, that the Ten Commandments are part of the Jewish and Christian, and therefore banable, religions doesn’t help them. It is not the form of the commandments, or where we find them written down, that limits them to one segment of humanity. Everyone, religious or irreligious, has the commandments written inside them, to be carried out or to be rejected.

Even the polytheist, even the atheist, knows what is commanded in the first commandment, that Who is not limited by name or number is not to take second place. The Christian has the saying of Jesus, ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these other things will be added to you as well’ (Matthew 6:33), the first commandment in a different form.

‘The truth, the truth, anything but the truth’ must be the guiding principle of the gatekeepers who keep the ‘truth imprisoned in their wickedness’ (Romans 1:18). Just as it is easier to love than to hate, to believe in God than to disbelieve, how hard it must be for the gatekeepers to keep their eyelids shut and their ears plugged not to see and hear the world of life that surrounds them!

‘The whole world was shining with brilliant light and, unhindered, went on with its work; over them alone there spread a heavy darkness, image of the dark that would receive them. But heavier than the darkness, the burden they were to themselves. But for Your holy ones, all was great light…’ (Wisdom of Solomon 17:19-20, 18:1).

Like the unbelieving Jews—those who would disbelieve, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence, such as the raising of the dead man, Lazarus of Bethany, after four days in the tomb—the gatekeepers of today will stop at nothing to prevent the good news from reaching those who are poor enough to receive it. So, the remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt is glossed over by Earth Day.

Celebrating William Shakespeare, who died April 23, 1616, four hundred years ago today, by far more significant than Lazarus, a mere nobody, whose resurrection after four days by the calling forth of Jesus of Nazareth, another mere Nobody, certainly should take precedence on the gatekeepers’ roster, something to cheer them up, to bring a faint glimmer of gladness to their gloomy world.

Meanwhile, as scripture says, ‘The whole world was shining with brilliant light and, unhindered, went on with its work…’