When one reaches a certain age there is an inclination to reminisce about how much nicer, better, or easier things were forty or fifty years ago.
For most of us our youth was a special time, not so much materially, more so in a spiritual sense. As children we are less spiritually inhibited, more prone to anamnetic experiences, and innocent enough to believe in an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God who, if you mind your p’s and q’s, will take really good care of you, your family, and your pals.
Theology was simple back then; just listen to the nuns and priests and what you didn’t "get" one of your pals would eventually pontificate upon during the almost daily polemical discussions that marked discourse as an intrinsic attribute of our specie.
I have always been grateful that the time of my youth was the 1950’s because the Church had not yet experienced Vatican II and continued to tenaciously cling to the old Latin rite that celebrated the Mass in an ancient language that echoed down the corridors of history. The miscreant radicals who were working to vitiate the Church’s teachings had yet to affect the parish, consequently the credo that sustained the laity was the Incarnation. That the Word was made flesh made transparent the order of man’s existence under the Triune God and answered the age-old question of what man is quite satisfactorily.
To be honest I really do think things were "better" then. I feel a great empathy for those children, today, who will not experience the "magic" of God’s love or gain the knowledge to fully comprehend the birth of the Messiah; children condemned to a contracted, immanentized existence.
In the spirit of the season, I must confess that in a day or two I’ll put my copy of The Christmas Story in the ever reliable VCR, sit back and reminisce. Ralphie is a little older than I but close enough in age that we shared many of the same experiences. For Ralphie his special Christmas was centered on a desire for that damned bb gun, ever destined to put his eye out! For me it was an answer to a seemingly unanswerable prayer.
Merry Christmas to all, with no intent to offend, nor concern about doing so.
