I have been thinking about this development here in Colorado and a myriad of other similar ones across our country and now that the grandkids have gone home on this Easter Sunday and the house is still I will add some thoughts.

In 1787 when Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia he was asked by the mayor’s wife what they had produced. “A republic,” he replied, “if you can keep it.”

A decade later John Adams, in speaking to assembled Massachusetts guardsmen, made clear what was necessary for this republic to be preserved: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Mother Teresa observed of Westerners that we suffer from a spiritual poverty greater than that of the poorest of the peasants along the streets of her beloved city, Calcutta.

And Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his 1983 Templeton address, related, “…I have spent well nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat (what he had heard as a child at the knee of his elders). “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”

As a kid on an Ozark farm, I often threw rocks into the little pond behind the house. Never did I think that the ripples would not spread out and touch every inch of the pond. “Moral pollution works the same as environmental pollution. The waste products of careless living work insidiously into the soil of thought and the streams of language, poisoning every part of society.” (Eugene Peterson)

The founding fathers knew what they were doing. The sages who followed paid the price to understand and then inform and exhort. We have to decide if they were right or if those who’ve followed and shaped our “now”, those such as Margaret Sanger and Hugh Hefner, Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, along with a whole host of others in entertainment and media and academia, are the wiser ones.

It seems, at least to me, that the hour is late and the day dark for our republic. And I would despair were it not for this very day. Easter evening seems most appropriate to remember, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overpower it.”

We, too, have forgotten God. But because of today, we can remember Him and turn and return and live again. We can.