Now we have to decide if we will embrace God’s saving purpose the way He has embraced us with His own life, or if we will try to wriggle away from it.

Well, here is what we can know: Scripture, Prayer, and Marriage (and many others) are signs in the Christian world. That means they contain what they signify, and since they are signs of heaven, that means they all contain bits of heaven. We don’t know how the Bible is in heaven, but we can know that heaven is in the Bible, and in Prayer, and in Marriage, and in many other things, especially the Mass.

“Christian Nationalism” is a poorly defined bogeyman that in nearly all its iterations exists only to tar Christians as advocates of ideas and policies that critics don’t like. It is tendentious in the extreme to say, for instance, that someone who opposes abortion on the basis of her faith is a nasty Christian Nationalist, while a person who opposes racial segregation on the basis of the same faith is not.

Distortions of the life of Jesus have continued to this very day, this very hour. The distortion du jour is that the person and work of Jesus can be safely ignored, and any benefits of His person and work can be adequately obtained in other religions or spiritual traditions.

Anti-heroes are a riff on noble enemies – they are more complicated, often darker than the straightforward noble enemies. They make people uncomfortable, but also satisfy the human desire for elusive goodness. They include characters like Dirty Harry, Sam Spade, Raskolnikov, Dr. Gregory House, and Huckleberry Finn.

The problem with contemporary non-belief is that it is so uninteresting, and intellectually sterile. The influencers of today, however, largely non-believers, have been more skillful in operating the machinery of public opinion.

Tombs have a disobliging tendency to become shrines where death and vengeance are turned into virtues and sacred obligations. Maybe that is why the only tomb we celebrate is an empty one, where life, not death, is a sacred obligation, and vengeance is none of our business.

On Judgment Day we will all stand before the Throne of Grace, and only the very foolish will dare to utter the word “I.” I believed, I followed, I trusted, I loved. Anything that starts with “I” is something we have held back for ourselves rather than let ourselves be filled with Him.

When families and parishes, schools and universities, hospitals and missions, are focused on the living God and Him alone, the cultures they create will form billions of people for centuries, even as civilizations, empires, republics, and presidents rise and fall.

Christmas is what will get a lot of people through the door. It is always Easter that will make them stay.

There are signs available – hundreds of them – because God has been playing a very long game for a very long time. They are available still to anyone who is ready to follow.

Mercy. It’s not just for nice people. It’s for people like us. People like you.

Moral and theological propositions don’t become true for us just because of the words. We look at who is speaking those words, what effect those words have had on her/him, what we can reasonably predict would happen to us, our homes, our culture if we adopted the same words.

This moral decay has been around for a really long time. Ideas have consequences. How’d we get “drag queen story hour,” or boys in girls’ bathrooms, or nearly a million abortions a year, or the trafficking and abuse of children, or the reckless damage to our water, soil, and air? Same.

What if there were a quiet empire, secret agents of the Resurrected Man, a quiet empire that muddled along, often just below the radar, amid the rising and falling of louder empires, of which the USA will certainly someday be one, proposing a countercultural message which over time has led to the end of slavery, rights for all, and the emergence of modern science.

The Christmas Story is about an unmarried, pregnant teenager from the projects, and shepherds who in those days were only a short step from gangbangers and thieves. It is about undocumented foreigners and their wild astrology, who gave a false address to the authorities, and escaped the armed agents of the state who were looking for them. It is about corrupt and paranoid leaders, and uncontrolled violence in poor neighborhoods, where children were the principal victims.