I had a comment from Hearthie yesterday that we should be joyful. Regardless: and that joy is not happiness. She is correct. Joy is something that happens despite our circumstances:

Joy, like love, is a choice. It is not an affect, or a fleeting emotion. That would be infatuation or happiness. It is a choice: it is a work.

And we are on this planet to do the work of Christ, which is to reconcile ourselves with him, and with each other.

From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Working together with him, then, we appeal to you not to receive the grace of God in vain. For he says,

“In a favorable time I listened to you,
and in a day of salvation I have helped you.”

Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.

(2 Corinthians 5:16-6:2 ESV)

We have to remember that this is completely unfashionable. We are told by the right-wing ideologues that we are autonomous, and work towards good — missing the old conservative idea that society regulates our passions so that we shall not have a life that is nasty, brutish and short — and on the left that we should feel guilty for our privilege, and (since they have not any way of understanding the good) harm ourselves and call it altruism.

But they cannot live that way.

The typical moralistic Leftist therefore advocates policies which harm other people like himself now – and finds excuses (or just feels guilty – ‘liberal guilt’) for the fact that his own position remains insulated from these bad consequences, in the short term.

The typical moralistic Leftist therefore has policies against his own interests – his sex, class, race, social situation – but in practice exempts himself as much as possible from these bad consequences, because he is a short-termist coward who lacks the real Christian basis to be anything else.

So we see strategic, abstract ‘class warriors’ who in practice accept knighthoods and peerages; strategic abstract egalitarians who are the ultra-rich; those who in principle argue in favour of high taxes, yet avoid paying them; white family men who occupy high status jobs but who argue that blacks, women and those of unconventional sexuality should ideally occupy such jobs; those who favour population replacement by mass immigration in the West elaborately cocooning themselves from the social destruction and suffering this brings; those who strategically and abstractly crusade against ‘private’ schools and health care (i.e. against the possibility of going outside state-controlled provision) yet avail themselves of its advantages; those who advocate a ‘small carbon footprint’ yet who travel everywhere by private jets and dwell in vast and wasteful mansions – and so on and on and on through all the other gross hypocrisies of the Left.

The spirit of this age does not understand sin, nor redemption, nor reconciliation. It does understand guilt, and hatred. It reserves great hatred for those who shame it. Yet shame has a purpose: it makes us sorrowful, and willing to change, to repent.

Yes, this is unfashionable. But fashions change. The current leftist hegemony is corrupt and bankrupt. To them, and to all, I say now is the time for salvation: we should not look for Jerusalem in this earth, even in England’s green and pleasant land, but it the return of the king and in the new earth to come.