Tragically, there have been more shootings in Bastrop, Monroe, Baton Rouge, and other places in Louisiana.  And the same solutions are being presented – stricter judges, more police with better training.  These are needed, but this does not go to the root of the problem.

Man is not just a body and a brain.  He also has a soul, a heart, a conscience, a nous.  He is created in the image and likeness of God, the All-Holy Trinity, and his highest calling in life is union with this same God Who has made him, through the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ and the descent of the Holy Ghost into this world, through life in and union with the Church, which is the resurrected, ascended, and glorified Body of the Lord Jesus.

Anyone who hides these truths from young men and women, anyone who causes them to stumble and reject them – by teaching them they evolved from lifeless protoplasm over billions of years, by indoctrinating them with hate-filled ideologies, by making them worship the false gods of sports, money, sex, drugs, etc., – anyone who does this shares the responsibility for the rise in violent crime we are witnessing.

We must do the opposite in our communities; we must saturate them with the Grace of God, as our forefathers once did, by filling them with churches, cathedrals, monasteries, prayers, crosses, Bibles, mosaics, icons, hymns, holy days (not just one or two), pilgrimages, fasts, feasts, saints, liturgies, processions, and other such things.  This involves public and private figures:  teachers, coaches, pastors, businessmen, senators, mayors, parents, grandparents, monks, nuns, laymen, police jurors, judges; no one is exempt.

We have sown the wind of secularism and now we are reaping the whirlwind of numerous murders (Hosea 8:7).  It is time to repent.