Recently at Morning Prayer I read Isaiah 5, which describes God’s judgement upon faithless Israel, and it gives this description of God’s wrath:

“Now I will tell you
what I am going to do to my vineyard:
I will take away its hedge,
and it will be destroyed;
I will break down its wall,
and it will be trampled.”

I keep musing on the link between boundaries and holiness. We see, daily, more and more evidence of the collapse of virtue in our society, the moral bankruptcy that causes chaos and disorder. So I think: is the lack of boundaries a result of this collapse, or does the collapse flow from the removal of the boundaries? The hedges around the West have been destroyed and now we are being trampled. We are in the place of After Virtue – and, as the man said, the barbarians have been governing us for quite some time.

How to rebuild the boundaries? How to reclaim virtue? This has been my avatar (or one of them) for a few years now: