Signs of the Times by Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose) (Excerpts) In the realm of moral teaching, it is quite noticeable, especially in the last twenty years or so, how lawlessness has become the norm. (The abnormality of the world. Never have such weird and unnatural manifestations and behavior been accepted as a matter of course as in our days. Just look at the world around you: what is in the newspapers, what kind of movies are being shown, what is on television, what it is that people think is interesting and amusing, what they laugh at; it is absolutely weird. And there are people who deliberately promote this, of course, for their own financial benefit, and because that is the fashion, because there is a perverse craving for this kind of thing.) Solzhenitsyn mentions specifically in his Harvard lecture what happened in New York City three years ago when the electricity was cut off. He said: The center of your culture is left without electric power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin. Your social system must be quite unstable and unhealthy. . . . Forty years ago in America, if the lights went out, people would have helped each other out, lit candles, and so forth. Now, instead, they go and break windows, loot, take everything they can get for themselves, kill people and get away with whatever they think they can get away with. Something has changed in a short time. --------------------------------- In modern music, it is the same way. A historian of modern music, Albert Frankenstein, wrote a complete history of Western music, came to the twentieth century and stopped, saying: I cannot write any more because what comes from here on is no longer music which I know. That is, he appreciated that there was something there, but he said it does not obey the laws that music obeyed up until the end of the nineteenth century; therefore, it is something else; let someone else write about it. Because, again, some kind of lawlessness, a new principle entered into it. --------------------------------- Even in politics and government-which make no sense at all unless you have the idea of order-this idea of lawlessness is entering in. --------------------------------- All this is a sign of what St. Paul calls the mystery of lawlessness. It is a mystery because a mystery is something which is not fully revealed in this world; it is something which comes from the other world. And the mystery of righteousness is the whole story of how Christ came from heaven and tried to save us. The mystery of lawlessness is the opposite: it is some kind of mystery coming up from hell, which breaks into this world and changes this world. Therefore, this mystery of lawlessness or anarchy is preparing for the coming of the man of lawlessness, who is Antichrist.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 01:00:32 +0000