THE ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD, WE HOPE

With retirement comes downsizing, thankfully. Over the years, if you are like me, we tend to gather more than we needed back then and even more than we need at the present moment in our lives. Retirement brings a slower pace to life – or so I am told, as I have not found it to be so to this point in time – and thus allows one to sort through what one has accumulated and to dispose of the non-essentials.

In doing so, in going though old sermons, I found a clipping I had taken from a Sunday comic section probably twenty years ago. What is interesting, to me at least, and sadly so, is that both sides were relevant back then still are today. The one strip was a Doonesbury panel in which a television interviewer is questioning a citizen about the latest election for governor. Thus:

“Excuse me, sir. Are you a man in the street?” “Why, yes, yes, I am!” was the reply. (Then) “We’re doing a follow-up on last month’s elections. How did you feel about the candidates for governor?” “The candidates for governor? I didn’t feel anything at first…I just didn’t know very much about either man. But then I started watching their commercials. It turns out one of the guys was a tax cheat who abused his wife and favored giving crack to furloughed sex offenders.” “And the other?” “He was a corrupt alcoholic who favored murdering babies and burning the flag.” “So who’d you vote for?” “The wife-beater. I thought he had better denials.”

Has anything changed? And we are in for more of the same for almost the next year. As I said: sadly so. And yet, change is possible: to wit, the other side of the comic page. This one from Johnny Hart in B.C. His peg-legged character is sitting under a tree and penning a poem: “Often times I wonder what the world is all about/ It can’t be just a place for coming in and going out/ It surely can’t be just a place for terrorists and crooks…and dirty, rotten scoundrels that sell pornographic books/ It wasn’t made for wallowing in sickness, death and sin,/ or people who give drugs to kids, or beat-up on their kin./ Our world was once a perfect place, a gift of love, not war/ and we still have the power, through grace, to make it like before!”

Absolutely! We still have the power, through the grace of God and our willingness to do what needs to be done, to change the world. These two, old comics remind that nothing has changed because we who have it in our power to make changes have done little or nothing to do so. It has almost gotten a bit worse, perhaps a whole lot worse.

So how do we change this world “to make it like before”? One step at a time and beginning with ourselves, that’s how. Advent approaches, a time for new beginnings, a time to make changes for the betterment of our own lives and, in the process, to make the lives of those around us better as well. Not easy to do; but with God’s grace we can do our part so that twenty years from now “better denials” will be a relic of the past.