"A new commandment I give you, that you love one another. As I have loved you, so you also love one another. By this all will know that you are Mine, if you have love for one another.”
John 13:34-35
Stocks were on a tear higher today, with the SP 500 setting a new high over 4,000.
Both the SP and the NDX went out on the highs.
The VIX fell to a level we have not seen since March of last year, at the beginning of the pandemic.
Gold and silver bolted higher, both running up to the overhead resistance at 1730 and 25 respectively.
The next upper resistance level will be telling, if we are going to slip into a trading range or break out
The Dollar gave up the 93 handle.
It seems that everyone wants to be the best, because they have a natural desire for acceptance, recognition, and praise.
And in a dark and pathological time such as ours this means that everyone wants to have power. Power becomes the standard of value, the coin of the realm in a deeply fallen world. And in such a perverse world the only virtue is greed.
So they who serve the world with greatness want to be tough, unafraid, quick and intemperate on the attack, and harsh. Yes that is the mark of power, a formidable wielders of weapons.
If by some accident that person may wish at least nominally to serve God, then they too often desire to take up the sword like an avenging angel, and smite those enemies of God, who are all too often those who merely annoy and offend them. This is because their idea of what it is to be a human being has been subtly poisoned by the times; in their broken emptiness they exalt themselves. And all too often that feeling of offense simply becomes a blind hatred of 'the other.'
The will to power hates and despises weakness. Then they are no longer of God, but have given themselves over to the darkness. And they fully become its creature. Those who take up the sword of judgement for their own purposes will die by it, by a pride which is the first of all sins, in a death without redemption.
This is a subtle but very effective snare, a sin wholly against the Spirit. We embrace the world and its values not in our love of it, but in our hatred of it as we see it. This is not service, or greatness, not as it is measured in God's economy. This is a willfulness and a destruction of the self that comes from sin, but that in its own insidious way may encompass many of the trappings of a religion: the ornaments of ritual, and symbols, and all the showiness, the noise and pomp of human office— but always and remarkably devoid of God's love.
We may love the services and outward manifestations of religion as we prefer them, the old and familiar or the hip and modern, or whatever our personal preference may be, but come to despise the very people, the body of the Church, that gives it life and meaning. We destroy what we have loved because we will to possess, to compel it, not to serve it as God has created it, with love.
Worldly power is a perversion of heavenly power in that it expresses itself in the ability not to create and fulfill life, but to diminish and destroy it. And it exults in what it thinks is its power over life, which is death. How much money, how much power is enough? The will to power is a pathological sickness, that becomes all consuming and insatiable.
Be on your guard always, and do not allow yourselves to be among those simple ones who will be taken in during the dark times, as the love of many grows cold. Stand firmly, but humbly, to the end. And you will have your greatness.
How sad it would be, not to be able to hear the endless song of praise of creation, and the music of the cherubim, as they sing their hymns of love to their Lord. In hell, all love is drowned out by the anger and complaints of the unworthy who can never have enough, and so suffer in an endless desert, devoid of all beauty and love.
Need little, want less, love more. For they who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.
Have a pleasant and blessed holiday weekend.
