It wasn’t until my journey back to Jesus that I truly understood how much the times and culture I grew up in had affected my way of thinking. It is even worse today which is why I am so concerned about the consequences of the current lack of God in the world today.

Let me try to explain what I mean. I started high school in 1970. I graduated from college in 1978, meaning that the seventies were my formative years. Those who came before us in the sixties had started the ball rolling as far as changing the culture to a more permissive one. Drugs became more prevalent. Sex was more open and no longer taboo for those who weren’t married. The Vietnam War was still going on with soldiers dying, and this carried on into the seventies.

I know I changed my way of thinking about things. I started thinking maybe the Catholic Church wasn’t right about a lot of things, and I thought I knew better. This way of thinking was constantly reinforced through the music we listened to, by the television and movies we watched, and the magazines and newspapers we read.

Slowly but surely at first, then rapidly speeding up, the moral compass began turning upside down. I started thinking about how things weren’t really black and white but there were a lot of grey areas. Things we were taught as true, we learned were not as true as we thought.

We had a president who lied to us on television. We learned that we had been lied to about the war. We learned the government wasn’t quite as honest as we thought and that they were doing some pretty bad things.

As we rolled into the eighties and nineties, we had a president who told us oral sex wasn’t real sex, and it was okay. We learned that the priests we were taught were like God and we could trust them to protect us from the devil were actually the devil themselves.

And things have only gotten worse.

After I fell off that truck, I thought of all these things and realized that it was all the work of the devil. He had been spreading his lies, and people were listening. They were falling for his deception, yes, even some of our priests. Why? Because we are surrounded by the lies of the devil and we are told that God is just a myth and we should not believe in Him. Satan tempts us with pleasurable things. Take cheating on your spouse for example. Something is exciting about this, and it feels good. He leads us to believe that something that feels good can’t be wrong. True, we might be sorry at first, but he keeps on tempting us by reminding us how good it felt. Soon we succumb. I still think about when I cheated on my wife over 40 years ago. At least now I know it is Satan entering me and trying to tempt me. I look to Jesus and resist the temptation. I will not succumb to Satan and his wishes.

Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel

St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.