There’s a local thug and buffoon who’s been aggressively doing up the fingers in the eye thing to me on various and sundry occasions so as to say, I guess, that he’s watching me. Sometimes people get upset just because you don’t fall into line with their train-wreck-lives, frustrated that there is someone who won’t conform to their idiocy. That tells me that there a lot of people who do bow down to any bully who happens along. Kinda creepy, that, all of that. But it also makes me laugh out loud.
Situational awareness is all about assessing situations with a view to deescalation and avoiding trouble if possible. With this kind of silliness, you just let people hang themselves (that’s a trope, by the way), and they do just that, being too self-confident, too powerful in their own eyes, way too narcissistic. Give it time and it takes care of itself.
What I find humorous is the realization that there really are people who are unaware that angels guardian see all, that God sees all. I mean, I tried to be this way in decades gone by. I mean, there were youthful days of idiocy in my life whereby there was even a Sunday or two that I didn’t go to church, to my everlasting regret. I failed in escaping God and my angel guardian. God, who sees all, with the angels, impressed upon me His presence, and brought me quite forcefully by His grace to go to Confession.
While it is sad to see those who are still oblivious in their lives, I see their weak-nothing-aggression as failing before God’s grace. I have hope that they will come around. I laugh previous to any conversion in the hope that they will also take up God’s prompting to turn their lives around. Surely they will laugh at their own antics in time to come. I don’t laugh AT such people. I laugh WITH such people. They just don’t know it, yet.
Meanwhile, it is, in fact, the Lord Himself, who, seeing all, will come to judge the living and the dead and world by fire. The Lord is, to be sure, deadly serious:
- “The Lord laughs them to scorn” (Wisdom 4:18). Yikes!
Pick up your Catholic Bible and look up that oft-neglected passage, taking note of the context. You will find out that, for the Lord, this is no laughing matter. Not at all.
Being situationally aware that God sees all, that our angels guardian see all, brings situational awareness in general to an entirely different level. I recommend it.
Conclusion? Go to Confession!
Knox was very poetic!
I love that reminder from a buffoon guy, of all people, that God and His Guardians are always watching us. Next time buffoon guy does the “I see you” thing to you, you should point your two fingers at your own eyeballs, and then point up to let him know that God is watching everything. Then smile, of course!
Thank you, Father, for the reading assignment. That chapter never makes it into the readings. Why?
Monsignor Ronald Knox’s translation has “What wonder if the sight fills them with contempt? And they themselves, all the while, are earning the Lord’s contempt.” (Wisdom 4:18)