Keeping Order In Our Work Day With Chaos At The Gates - 5

We continue with our "chaos" theme. To recap:

We need to keep order in our work day. Surely we know this as a practical requirement. But it's critical to our being able to sanctify our work.

More so these days - days of chaos.

Chaos may not be on the tip of everyone's tongue, nor may it be front and center in our experience every day. But it sure does seem to be a force of nature that's been building for some months, no, years now.

We've identified three areas to address: our Church, our Government, our Culture. Last time we discussed our Culture. We continue today with that.

Having provided just one example of the impact of a degraded culture on the workplace last time, we could continue with a long list of others. But instead, let's use some common sense and get ourselves - body, mind, and soul - ready to greet this day of work in the midst of this degraded culture.

When we really dive into all that has happened in our country and Western civilization in recent times, we see some common threads. First and foremost, a lack of Faith. Not just the Catholic Faith, but any serious belief in God. For so many this belief is some mix of non-existent, weak, or something reserved for private use only. And these are the folks we encounter each day as we ply whatever might be our trade.

With God firmly ensconced as our Creator, with Jesus Christ appropriately enthroned as not just our Lord and Savior, but as Christ the King, the world would look and people would behave quite differently.

Governments have always tried to usurp God's Sovereignty. And indeed they have and continue to use their power to prevail over us even as we try to remain faithful to God in our thoughts, words, and behavior. Particularly in our behavior, they prefer obedience to whatever laws they concoct, even as these laws circumvent or contradict God's Law. Such regimes - and our own U.S. government is no exception, have promoted abortion, contraception, pornography, child pornography, and just about every form sexual deviancy, and has been finally getting at least some exposure (albeit far too little), child sex trafficking - just a few egregious examples of the almost complete disregard for the Ten Commandments. Indeed, we've seen how any expression of religious belief is considered unacceptable, even offensive, in public places. And while a work place has business as it's primary focus, there could be, maybe should be, some public acknowledgement of God's Presence. But there never is.

And with God' absent, and the culture promoting all forms of dismissal, disregard and disobedience to the Ten Commandments, the result can only be - and has been - that people feel free to lie, cheat, and steal with impunity.

Not that such offenses have not always been with us. But when there's no sense of guilt or shame associated with these behaviors, those who perpetrate them are simply empowered to forge ahead without hesitation. 

Sure, this is rather general. But is it not accurate? And while we've never had a perfect world, this world of ours appears to have devolved or drawn closer to, those cultures that the missionaries spent centuries trying to change with the message of the Gospel. And yet, even that effort has been curtailed by a Church, in cooperation with governments, to label all those past efforts as misguided manifestations of colonialism, triumphalism, jingoism, nationalism, etc. The effort to bring Christ to the world has no place in the world.

And what sort of world would we expect with this prevailing attitude?

We've purposely kept the critique broad and general. It's intended to give the backdrop to all the particulars we've become all too familiar with. And the workplace has been no exception. 

If your workplace and your colleagues are relatively free and clean of this degraded culture, count yourself fortunate. If not, well, it can be quite challenging to remain free and clean in the midst of a workplace tainted by a degraded culture.

One last point: We noted that the chaos was "at the gates." Why this? The reason is simple. With all that's penetrated and degraded our culture, it is up to each of us to bolster our defenses. We do this by strengthening our spiritual life, keeping our Interior Life intact and holy, and growing closer to Christ. This is our one and only defense against the chaos. And if we keep at it, with God's grace, we will keep chaos at the gates of our soul. It's the first and most important step we can take in our struggle to become saints in the midst of a degraded culture.