St Francis de Sales & St Mary Magdalene

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Laws as Objets d’Art

Q-131 - 22 Jan 22 - Laws as objets d'art?

In Psalm 118, we read the expression, "How we love your laws O Lord", but my Q-anon is this - Are we really and honestly supposed to love something as nasty and negative as a Law? And is this really fair since in all personal honesty, just to be brutal and honest, I cannot see how something as negative and nasty as laws can be the object of any kind of religious charity or emotional love in any way. Am I being fair, or am I being very much mistaken? Riddle me this?

Yes. We in the West have had 3 years now of laws most nasty and most negative and most nomian, so we have all become tired of laws, especially tired when we are told by the mass media that the lawmakers and policy makers were secretly hijacking Downing Street for their liquid parties while the rest of the country was suffering grievously. So the whole country is now tired of laws, made more grievous and agonising by the fact that the elites far above were not practising those selfsame laws for themselves - they were carrying in suitcases of bottles of wine into the gardens thereover. A difficult time, maybe they were so relieved at simply being alive that they needed to celebrate life as a force in the universe, who knows, but a difficult question.

But in the Jewish world of the time, in a world of barbarism and anarchy and much human sacrifice all around the borders of pale and clinical but open minded Israel, it was largely otherwise. The laws of the Israelites as believed, as handed down like the Decalogue of the Ten Commandments after the mystical experiences of Moses on the high mountains of Sinai, were regarded then as quasi-mystical experiences, but also they were regarded as antidotes to all the anarchy of the then ancient world, as real medicines in themselves to the barbarism of the human race untouched by God's good laws and God's prevenient grace. So for the Israelites who sang songs and wrote poems and composed prayers, law became an object of love and regard and respect and admiration - they were not nearly as negative and nasty as the restrictions of the Covid Lockdowns, however necessary these were at the time to stop 50% of the world's population dying and to stop the hospitals of the NHS being overrun. So examine your premises about law, and consider whether your feelings about laws are actually feelings about the downside of moderne civil laws of the usual Austrian kind, rather than religious supernatural laws based on charity and fairness and justice. Not the usual vendetta kind of the social contract theories of the evil French republics, but the kind built on achieving the just measure of rightness in all things - to dikaion.