Letter #142: Will God Save Us?

What Will it Look Like if He Does?

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Spawn.

When we were talking on our livestream the other day, you pointed out that God will give you everything you ask for but it will not look the way you think it will. Indeed, you may not even recognize it when it comes. In my experience, too, many answers to prayers steal upon us so gradually we aren’t even aware that they’ve arrived. Of course, once I fired myself as lord of my own life and handed the position over to God, I found he could work more swiftly without me in the way. I wish I had thought of this earlier, but I’m such a nice guy I couldn’t bear to tell me I’d been laid off.

I mention this because, outside of our own needs and desires — our daily bread — many of us are praying for our country, not to mention the world. The situation you describe in your essay, where the smart set is too smart for the simple truths of faith, has not really worked out that well on the large scale. A leadership class of very intelligent people operating outside the wire of spiritual reality has left us threatened with civil unrest and world war, burdened by widespread depression and drug use, mired in sexual dysfunction and loneliness, not to mention so deep in debt that one has to live in a childlike fantasy of economics without consequences in order to stave off gnawing panic.

When thinkers are praised for declaring that the answer to past racism is present racism, the answer to promiscuity is the mass slaughter of unwanted children, the answer to sorrow is medication and the answer to the responsibilities of manhood and womanhood is surgery, one can hardly avoid the conclusion that our best and brightest thought leaders are the worst and stupidest human beings on the planet. I already knew that Satan was the prince of this world, but I wasn’t aware he had such a wacky sense of humor.

What you are writing about in your essay, and talking about in your book — and, if I may say so, what I am dramatizing in my mysteries — is a coming change in what some leftist or other once called the “social imaginary,” the cultural atmosphere that supplies our assumptions about the way the moral universe works. The good news that science and God — indeed science and Christianity — are not opposed to one another but inextricably linked has not yet reached the clerisy. But I think it is gradually stealing upon them, like the answer to a prayer.

I do not know if God’s return to the minds of the elite will “make the world a better place,” but given where we are, it couldn’t hurt. At the very least, it would be edifying if the smartest of men and the best of women were discussing our troubles in the context of a God-made world. This world, in other words.

Yer ever-loving.

Dad