Book Excerpt Three.

Saint Thomas the Divine on Obedience to
Parents and Godly Christian Authority

Back in 1992, WABC’S World News Tonight reported on how some
people got together in Portugal to rebuild exact replicas of the Nina,
the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in celebration of the 500th anniversary
of the founding of the Americas. They showed pictures of the finished
ships sailing majestically across a vast expanse of peaceful, pristine
ocean, above it an endless dome of cloudless sky out of which shone
the bright sun whose pure light danced off of tiny waves surrounding
the boats as they glided onward toward a limitless and distant horizon,
silent and dreamlike over the sea.

The above tableau was positively abysmal and filled me with
absolute awe; it filled me with one of the most overwhelming senses
of peace I have ever felt. I said to myself after seeing this: Thank God
there are still some people on earth that have the good sense to obey
the rules. Imagine, that after five hundred years, the very descendants
of the original builders of those vessels were able to do the exact same
thing. The ships certainly weren’t anything special from a technological
point of view of course; even the how of the replication isn’t really
important; it’s the fact that men were able to do it after all this time
that was awe inspiring - the stark contrast between the past and the present and how man has progressed. It’s something that revealed to me part of the
difference between the madness of folly and the sublime genius and
common sense of tradition, even of Jewish Tradition - tradition that preserves knowledge instead of destroying it and that allows skills to be passed down from fathers to sons even over thousands of years.
The trouble is that some traditions just don’t work; you have to
be sure to establish just the right ones if you want to have a fantastic
progression as opposed to entropy and anomie – a general breaking
down instead of building up of things. It is not good to attack kings because God Himself is higher than all. To attack kings is to attack God. Yet, this too is tradition to some. These days many people forsake
obedience to parents, especially in America, and many have the arrant
nerve to challenge well-established order and authority in general. Most
people are looking to get rich and do not honor folk that don’t have
much. But, I submit to you, that if the above observation makes sense
to you, beware of choosing your own ways over that of godly, well-established,
Christian authority understanding that such authority is always Jewish in all the ancient ways; the little you might gain by doing so will not compare favorably with what you lose; remember Saint Peter and to establish right tradition.....