Getting Tired of All The Drama Yet?

Getting tired of all the drama yet? You know, the talks with the Chinese government re tariffs, the endless trail of court cases immediately opposing all those Executive orders, all those Executive orders, the constant whipping up and down of the stock market, the Fed's endless meandering babbling about how inflation is a concern but that inflation is down, the government statistics that keep in insisting the economy is strong, that unemployment is historically low, the...well, you get the point. 

Not that any of this is unique or even unusual. Except for the Tariff Opera, all the rest is business as usual for government, the Fed, markets, and the media that feeds off of it. And, oh, how the media has been gorging itself!

But don't you get tired of it from time to time. Maybe this is one of those times. What to do?

The sane response is to STOP GAWKING! You really don't need to sop up all the droppings coming from the usual suspects. Let them lie where they fall. There's a real life out there calling each of us. Make time for it.

And for all those drama junkies out there - and the rest of us - let's start the ball rolling with something truly dramatic:

First, today begins the Novena to the Holy Spirit for us Catholics (and maybe some other Christian "sects" - I don't know.) A Novena, for those of you who have been raised bereft of a proper religious upbringing, is basically nine days of prayer leading up to some particular event. There are many Novenas in the Catholic Liturgical Year. This one's purported to be the oldest of all. It leads up to Pentecost, which arrives next Sunday. So we start today, nine days before Pentecost. And Pentecost is one of the most important days of the Liturgical Year. Frankly, it is one of the most important days in all of history.

On the first Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descended up on the disciples of Jesus in the form of fiery tongues. This was preceded wind, basically a ruckus that likely put a fright, or perhaps more accurately the Fear of God, into those gathered together in some room in Jerusalem. 

With that, the folks were "on fire" with the Light of the Holy Spirit. They began to talk in the tongues of the various languages that would have been spoken by the residents and the visitors who were in the city for the Jewish feast of Pentecost, more accurately called "Shavout." ("Pentecost" is a Greek name for the feast.) According to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, it commemorates the single most important event in Israels' history: the giving of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai.   

You can read up on this yourself if you care to. But can you see the connection here? The Torah - first five books of what we know as the Bible - gave the Hebrews the foundation for their religion, their spiritual life, indeed - if one takes the life of the spirit seriously - of all of life itself. So too with the Holy Spirit's descent upon the gathered disciples at Pentecost. There were not new Scriptures given, but there was an all-powerful enlightenment of mind and spirit that so stirred these people that the confusion they experienced after Christ left them (His Ascension into Heaven) dissipated. They were literally on fire to spread the Good News of His teachings to the rest of the world. And so they did, many at the cost of their own lives.

Those outside that room that day could hear the cacophony of languages being spoken by the disciples. They thought they must be drunk - so it says in the account in the Acts of the Apostles written by St. Luke. 

Anyway, as mentioned, you can read more about all this if its totally foreign to you. And why not? It's better to spend time with this real drama rather than all the stuff that's been ginned up and constantly thrown at you these days.

And if you're already familiar with, or maybe have some cursory knowledge of, Pentecost, it would be well worth your time to bone up on the details and go deeper into this powerful, albeit mysterious, event in our human history.

For those who really get all this, and know how important the coming feast of Pentecost is, well, it's time to begin the Novena. (You can find it easily on the Internet. Or you can click HERE.) 

But whatever you do after reading this, at least do yourself the favor of taking a break from all the useless drama we referenced when we started this post. You must be tired of it all by now, right?