Boy, I’ve been a lazy blogger lately. I kind of get the feeling that a lot of us out in the Ortho-blogosphere have been taking it easy this summer. No doubt we’re all preserving the excess calories we would burn up slaving away over a hot keyboard.

In my case, I can’t hide behind that sensible survival ruse, or even just say that it’s summer and I’ve been out somewhere having a life. The unfortunate fact is that I got completely hooked on a STUPID computer game — “Oblivion,” the one that is featured in this domino spill — and I’ve frittered away so many hours that decent people would be using to, oh, I don’t know, sleep or something that I haven’t have enough left over for bloggy bloviating. I was amazed to find that I had no control over how many hours I would put into trying to secure a higher alchemy rating or get the Staff of Wabajack. “I am TOO old for this,” I would say. And it’s true. I’m too old to be having conversations with my husband that include things like “I can’t figure out how to get the kill all the gloom wraiths aboard the “Serpent’s Wake” so I can get the Spectral Greaves of Doom and return them to Count Varulae!”

In the end, I sort of gave up on having a life, had my sleepless nights and thought a lot about how closely it seemed to me to resemble the kind of change that people went through as first radio then movies then television have come into their lives. For those that have thrown all those things out, bravo — although it’s just as well for some of us weaklings to at least know what page pop culture has gotten to in case we ever need to talk to sinners with three remote controls and an X-box.

The impulse to engage a fantasy world at the expense of your engagement in the real one has so many outlets right now — and entire industries and economies that depend on it — that people are just plain burning out. Movies are getting less and less interesting, television more and more dependent on showing “real” people acting like nincompoops for the promise of big cash or big fame. Heck, even this incredibly complex game with more rules and variations than this year’s typikon begins to pale after awhile. Hmm, more undead. Yawn, another electrocution spell.

As I said, I’m too old for this. Greg and I will have a ceremonial uninstall in a couple days. Since my advanced years put me outside of the market niche for these sorts of things, I can go ahead and wonder what the future will be for those who have grown up with these games. If I were a teenager or 20-something and my alternative to playing this game where I am The Hero of Cyrodil (no, really — want a signature?) was to try to find a job or finish my homework, would I ever log off?

In short, what is reality worth? This generation is presented with a world that is in a slow-motion train wreck. Given that the current world climate seems to render Old and New Testament words of love, hope and wisdom more relevant than ever, and given that the false gods of secular humanism are dropping like flies, this should a golden hour for Christianity. But those false gods did such a thorough job of trash-talking us — indeed, still use what little remaining power they have to paint us as the enemy of all intelligent people — that the shift back to any kind of noetic sanity has been tepid at best. Other worlds offer sense, vindication, thrills, satisfaction, discovery, mystery and fun — and the only problem with them is that they’re not real. After a while, given how badly human beings want to find meaning, will reality be able to stack up against fantasy?

Having posed that question, I feel like stepping back from the gloomy sound of it all. I recall a TV movie in the early ’80s that featured Tom Hanks as a college student (hey, it was a long time ago, remember?) who hooked up with a Dungeons & Dragons group and ended up losing his sanity. I’m sure that thing is out there somewhere, but if people saw it now, it would look like “Reefer Madness” with bigger hair. D&D didn’t turn out to send people into insane asylums, and games that are based on it — like Oblivion — won’t either. They take their toll on the culture. They take us one more step away from what we should be and towards something else, but they’re not the whole journey.

At every new twist and turn on the road of our common history, we seem to turn further away from God, we seem to try to get altogether beyond His reach. There are always obstacles to His finding us, calling us, bringing us nearer to Himself. It’s easy to get misty-eyed about how wonderful it would’ve been to have lived in a golden age when Christianity spoke with a strong, clear voice and people listened. But even in the centuries uncluttered by advertising, traffic jams and computer role-playing games, there was unrest, injustice, corruption, slavery, famine and a level of pain and horror that would’ve made it difficult — I would think — to believe that the Kingdom of Heaven existed and was worth going through hell on earth to acquire.

There have always been many, many, many reasons not to believe in Christianity. And yet some number in every generation always seem to discover one reason to believe that trumps them all — that it simply turns out, according to the evidence of their intellect, spirit and heart, to be true. More accurately, Jesus Christ turns out to be the Truth. That small thing which is every bit as fragile in appearance and incontrevertible in fact as our hold on reality wins some number of souls. It’s by the grace of God that the kind of privation and horror that were commonplace to ancient and medieval people are so greatly diminished that we can even conceive of a world without wars. All of the centuries that we’ve been doing many foolish things may not have been completely wasted after all, if we stand on the brink of a time when both the believing and non-believing world will know a Christian ethos so well that even if it doesn’t acknowledge Christ as Lord and Savior, the obstacles to our salvation won’t be conquest by enemies or faintheartedness in the face of plagues and floods so much as distractions by computer games and the other effluvia of a well-fed, muddle-headed and ungrateful population.

So … the game’s not pure evil, but there’s no way I can turn it into a good thing. And there are a lot of angles from which it looks like an unwholesome waste of time.

Couple days to the ceremonial uninstall. I’ll see if I can use them to find my DVD player’s remote. (Kidding.)