Monday Morning Music Ministry

8-16-21

The thoughts I want to share here are important, I think. They are to me, and I think should be to patriots and people of faith. Reflections on a theme are what constitute essays (rather than articles or sermons) and this week I also share a little diary of reading-matter that have paralleled and fueled my thoughts.

… I could say my “angst.” For many of us share an apocalyptic view of the current condition of America – of the West, of the cultural period in which we live, post-Christianity. Overall, we are encouraged since we have peeked at the end of the Book and know how our story ends. But we are in an awful place now; growing worse by the day in myriad aspects; and there will be torment before the End of Time. The Book of Revelation also makes that clear. A glorious spoiler, as it were.

I was talking with a like-minded friend this week, crying in our beer (seltzer water, actually) about the state of things. The virtual impossibility of turning things around. How can we resist? Fight back? Redeem? Rescue? How to insulate? What is next? Where is safe? Who is sane?

I have been re-reading the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, an enigmatic American who was personally reclusive but simultaneously specific and universal in his free verse about everyday people and their character. Pessimistic, said some; fatalistic. He invented a town that was his setting, Tilbury Town. Edgar Lee Masters did the same with Spoon River, but of a different flavor.

Theodore Roosevelt, who “discovered” Robinson and gave him a government job with the instructions to think of poetry first and paperwork second – his lone exception to bending Civil-Service rules! – admitted that he did not always understand Robinson, but he recognized his genius.

In his poem “The Dark House” Robinson wrote,

Where a faint light shines alone, Dwells a Demon I have known.
Most of you had better say “The Dark House,” and go your way.
Do not wonder if I stay….

There he is who was my friend, Damned, he fancies, to the end–
Vanquished, ever since a door, Closed, he thought, for evermore
On the life that was before….

There’s a music yet unheard By the creature of the word,
Though it matters little more Than a wave-wash on the shore –
Till a Demon shuts a door.

So, if he be very still With his Demon, and one will,
Murmurs of it may be blown To my friend who is alone
In a room that I have known.

After that from everywhere, Singing life will find him there;
And my friend, again outside, Will be living, having died.

Before the poem was published in The Children Of the Night Robinson sent the poem to Roosevelt, who replied – mirroring its poetic and metaphysical tone, rare for Roosevelt – “There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us; he who never failed has not been tempted. But the man who does in the end conquer, who does painfully retrace the steps of his slipping, why, he shows that he has been tried in the fire and not found wanting. It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.”

An undying truth, even if seemingly banal. Whether he was trying convince Robinson to look upward – or convince himself – it is a moral watchword. I memorized those lines as a boy and called upon them often. Roosevelt, for all his ebullience, knew about the Dark House, or at least was not unrealistic about the perils of life and our national destiny. In a remarkably revealing story, we are told that he entertained the writer H G Wells at Sagamore Hill and gloomily surveyed the challenges facing America in the future.

But he grabbed Wells by the lapels and fiercely said (again, probably more to himself): “But, it… is… worth… the… fight!”

Yes, America is worth the fight, not the least because we are trashing our foundational commitments to Biblical principles and Christian values. America has evolved from facing challenges, to learning from failures… to penalizing success.

I also read this week the very provocative essay by Charles Pépin, “The Virtues Of Failure.” Its refreshing combination of realism and honesty make an encouraging case for optimism. Translated, I hope well, from the French:

“As a teacher, I often see pupils mortified by the bad grades I dispense. Apparently nobody has informed them that human beings can fail. But it is a simple concept: we can fail…. Animals cannot fail, because their behavior is dictated by instinct. In order not to be wrong they just have to obey their own nature. Every time the bird builds its own nest it does so perfectly. Birds do not need to learn from their own failures.

“Being wrong, facing failure, we manifest our truth as humans — we are not animals determined by instinct; nor perfectly programmed machines; nor gods. We can fail because we are men and we are free. Free to make mistakes, free to correct them, free to progress.”

And here we diagnose the cancer that afflicts us. “Free” is becoming a dirty word. “Freedom” is being canceled. We have accelerated the slide from “cradle-to-grave” welfare to government answers for everything. Light bulbs to sneezes. Encouraging children to choose their gender – as if they could – before they can spell the word. Killing babies. Paying people not to work. Inviting hordes to invade our land, no health screening, no terrorist checks. Equating the Bible with “hate speech.” Reviving race-based bigotry.

And – from government, to the news media, to mass entertainment, to the healthcare industry, to churches themselves – teaching Americans in uncountable ways to look anywhere other than churches, the Bible, and God Almighty for answers to our dilemmas. (And, oh, do we have ‘em!) “No problem, you religious nuts! We’ve got it all covered!”

The government big enough to give you anything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have. Look around you. While you still can.

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive. I John 1:9

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Click: I Know the Master of the Wind

10-15-18

A robust element of many stories in the news these days, and a subtext of many articles, particularly political stories, is the resurgence of socialism. Significantly, the church is at the center of matters.

Socialism has experienced an awakening, at least in debates as its governmental structure is being somewhat dismantled. Wasn’t it dead and buried after the Reagan years? Didn’t the failure and overthrow of Communist regimes around the world teach people that socialism was a miserable failure? Weren’t the statistics of misery, poverty, and oppression in socialist paradises enough to inform people of its toxicity?

Quite the opposite. In America, anyway, it has been more than resuscitated. More than acceptable again, it is fashionable and urgently desired by broad swaths of the public and media. The Fourth Estate has become the Fifth Column, and Americans are, among other means of propaganda, “guilted” welcoming the socialist agenda.

No less than politicians and media and wealthy foreigners and the academic-industrial complex, many contemporary church leaders – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish – are fervent cheerleaders. For neo-Marxism.

My problem with Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and Left-wing Socialism is that, at essence, it is anti-Biblical. Church Marxists will argue that Jesus was the first socialist because of His dedication to equality and peace and his rebuke of the wealthy and concern for the poor. They say that His Disciples and the early Church were examples of communistic communities.

Why are these viewpoints anti-Biblical?

Jesus was devoted to equality… but never did He pull people down. He always lifted people up. Equality was a thing to be desired, and all are born with equal opportunities (never in history more than in non-socialist states), but Jesus made references to the real world’s ambitions on one hand and charity on the other.

Peace? We all know that Jesus had a temper, yes, and let His righteousness take precedence over peace as the world might define it yesterday or tomorrow. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

Jesus’s attitude toward wealth? We know that He commanded to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s; and to “forsake all” and spoke of the rich entering Heaven as easily as camels passing through needles’ eyes. His distinction was not that “money is the root of all evil” but that “the love of money is the root of all evil.”

Were the early Christians prefiguring socialism in their communities of sharing? The answer is found in later, more organized Socialist states that have imploded thanks to inequality, wars and counter-revolutions, inflation, corruption, and – have you noticed? – suppression of religion.

In virtually every Socialist state, religion is oppressed; believers persecuted. In mild “mixed” socialist countries, church attendance and fealty to Scripture drastically has been diminished.

I think Christians should be opposed to socialism, moreover, because it is based on the state planning, state supremacy, or state control. Goods and services… economic choices… private enterprise… educational standards… prerogatives of daily life. When the population is reared on a socialist worldview, the government is assumed to be the ultimate answer to every problem, the ultimate source of every blessing, the ultimate judge of every challenge.

The government, not God, becomes people’s go-to resource. Google the proper agency instead of praying to the Lord.

Major culprits – wolves in sheep’s clothing – are “Democratic Socialist” or “Christian Democrat” or Democrat parties that substitute themselves for the church. How do they attempt to supplant the church? It is not always as blatant as pre-censorship of sermon notes, as the mayor of Houston attempted a few years ago; nor the many attempts to proscribe the Bible, and public monuments and celebrations, as “hate speech.”

It is more in the poisonous worldview of modern socialism: textbooks written by unelected secularists; the aspects of national health insurance that would discourage private and personal care, and force caregivers to sometimes act against their consciences.

The foundational aspects of the welfare state discourage (or attack) the concept so strongly commanded by Jesus that we care for one another as individuals. Massive taxes for a welfare bureaucracy allows people, or obliges them, to transfer their giving to the State – and in so doing, “free” them of the Biblical necessity to care for the poor and sick. Ultimately, allowing people to stop caring about the poor and sick.

I believe, as St Augustine believed and wrote, the real meaning behind “the poor you shall always have with you” is not that poverty is a futilely resisted pestilence, but that we need to be aware at all times of those who hurt. For their sake, and our souls’, not to check boxes on tax forms to fund some program somewhere.

Finally, consider: Marx spoke (supposedly) to the working class. Good at first glance?

But Jesus spoke to ALL.

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Click: Just a Closer Walk With Thee

4-11-16

What would you call the age we live in? When I was a child, we were told that the Machine Age had been superseded by the Atomic Age. But that was marketing of sorts. Anyway, nuclear energy and the ability to incinerate the planet have become mundane topics. We might be in the Computer Age, but that term soon will sound as musty as new-fangled “horseless carriages” and “talkie movies” that once inspired awe.

I think we all flatter ourselves that we are blessed to be “modern,” up-to-the-minute (if not quite hip). So is this the Modern Age?

Actually, philosophers and artists maintain that the Modern Age ended long ago, followed by Post-Modernism… which has also ended. Eclipsed by – Post-Post-Modernism? Some people use this term. Do you get the feeling that we have just taken our seats at the stadium, and the game is already in extra innings?

My preference, and it seems very logical to me, is that our age is best described, in perspective of history’s grand sweep, as the Post-Christian Era. Some people would dismiss that as being too theocentric… but in view of the cultural, artistic, intellectual, economic, even diplomatic, and yes, religious, core of two millennia: yes, “Post-Christian” describes where we are.

“Modern” and its permutations are terms that tend to elude us. Whether the Renaissance was the last whiff of Classicism or the dawning of Modernism is debated. But we must go back in history that far. Luther was the last Pre-Modern. The Age of Reason was on the horizon in Europe, espied from the platform of Humanism. Yet Luther, the last Medievalist, held fast to the proposition that “reason is the enemy of faith.”

More than two centuries later, Luther’s artistic disciple Johann Sebastian Bach summed up the heritage of the Gothic, Renaissance, and early Baroque eras. Intending to summarize more than innovate, he was not seduced by potential acclaim nor his effect on the future. In fact, he was rejected by the first “Moderns” in Rococo Europe. Bach’s scientific contemporary, Isaac Newton, was representative of the Age of Enlightenment.

I am aware (all too aware, because it is clearly counter-factual) that many schools today teach, when they teach at all, that Enlightenment scientists and philosophers freed Western Civilization from the shackles of religion and superstition. That’s what “enlightened” meant, right?

Wrong. Philosophers like Pascal and Locke; scientists like Galileo and Newton; and creators like Bach and William Blake, all saw the substantial advances in their fields as confirming, not disproving, the existence of God and His plans. Newton concluded, it has been said, that we live within the space of God’s mind. The poet Alexander Pope wrote: “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night; God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ And all was Light!”

But then, 50 years or so later, the mad swirl of Romanticism, revolution, industrialization, and social turmoil broke forth as like a lanced boil. It has not healed; the burst dam has not been mended. We have had Marxism since the 1840s, Darwinism since the 1850s, wars and rumors of wars since the 1860s, and the Industrial Revolution that brought many blessings but also brought poverty, injustice, dislocation, and wage-slavery instead of less pernicious traditional slavery.

Many people have not yet come to full realizations about the enormous disruptions caused by elements of contemporary life specifically of the past 200 years. As people became educated; climbed the ladder of prosperity, or were crushed under it; and earned the new commodity of leisure time… religion became less important.

People relied less on God. And for those vulnerable souls who need God’s blessings, the Modern State and its Socialist and Marxian manifestations are there, attempting to substitute for the Church. These tendencies have multiplied and accelerated. Not only the Dynamo (Henry Adams’ term for the Machine Age’s deity, supplanting the church) but the arts and ever-more secular philosophers, all worked to convince people that God was dead.

God has indeed died, in the Nietzschean sense that society no longer acknowledges Him, depends on His Word, worships His Son, or serves Him.

This is true. The inclination of sinful souls to reject God finds comfort in a culture that makes it safe to reject Him. Denominations even twist scripture and call evil good. Humankind’s soul is no less dark then ever, wars are more brutal, and the world hurtles toward unprecedented chaos, envy, and strife.

The Secularists have an answer: that we distance ourselves even further from God and His Word.

We have itching ears, as the Bible foretold – we hear what we want to hear. We invite cultural enablers.

We are happy to revel in wine, women, and song – or what seduced the decadent Romans, called “Bread and Circuses.”

How do we respond to all the biblical prophecies, all the warnings of our wise forebears, all the lessons of fallen civilizations gone before? We laugh and ignore the certainty of calamity.

The anti-religious impulse of scientists, of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Relativism, Secularism, the negative effects of finance capitalism and repressive Socialism, the pollution of the earth and of our minds; indeed, human nature unfettered for the first time in history – where has it gotten us? Where are we headed? Adherents of those false gods should repent, as should we ALL.

Given the signs of the times and biblical prophecy, those who reject God ought to repent or at least desperately HOPE there is a God. For their alternative ideas have not worked, but rather have brought the world to chaos. Welcome to the brave new world of Post-Christianity.

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Our Click this week is a song by Merle Haggard, the iconic American poet, songwriter, and singer who died this week on his 79th birthday. Of the many genres he mastered, God and Country predominated. This song is among his best. Sadly, it is as pertinent now as when he recorded it, 1971.

Click: Merle Haggard – Jesus, Take a Hold

1-13-14

The recent comments about capitalism and socialism by Pope Francis – although he never used the terms – probably excited more interest than the many other topics of his lengthy Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. A new pope, especially history’s first from south of the Equator and from the Western hemisphere, will have theologians and the laity alike looking for tea leaves to read.

A religious leader’s predictable censure of materialism was heightened by sharp condemnation of secularism and relativism in today’s world. But he went steps further, with several and specific denunciations of capitalism, free-market finances, and even “trickle-down” economics by name. Some commentators and apologists (that is, those who advance Christian apologetics) have claimed that selected passages were taken out of context, that the Pope condemned socialism and collectivism elsewhere with equal reproach.

In fact this is not the case. His harshest words for totalitarian governments were directed against persecution of Christians, and relatively few words of that. Little about suppression of rights and basic liberties around the world, even in some countries where the Catholic Church predominates. As a non-Catholic and as a basic free-marketeer (but not a capitalist, a distinction I make because prefixes like “corporate-” and “crony-” too often are endemic these days), I come neither to bury nor praise Francis, but to consider his comments about wealth. It would do us all well.

In Point 54, Francis wrote: “…some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the… workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.” From this, not only capitalists but statisticians can dissent. While the poor we still have with us, more souls have been lifted from poverty by the prescriptions of Adam Smith than any other system: surely more than have benefited from Karl Marx.

Later, in Point 56, he continued: “[Economic] imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, [some people] reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.”

I suggest that Francis confine his Absolutes to the areas of morality and theology. There are no countries in the world, and virtually no political economists, who advocate “absolute autonomy” of the marketplace or “any form of control.” Some ideologies might pay lip service to such theories, but in reality even the most extreme libertarians compromise on myriad points.

So we have the Pope’s words as one of our culture’s periodic talking-points. My own talking point, just stated, is that the lack of balance he displayed about world economics does not mean that the critiques on the heavier side of his scale are not correct.

It is accurate, as he wrote, that materialism has tended to create a “globalization of indifference” where the prosperous are “incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them.” I don’t think the logical extension of this observation – whose remedies are, after all, as old as any commands in scripture – is to advocate governments and economic systems that co-opt Christian charity. Can we not let free people grow their prosperity freely, and governments cease micro-managing… which has evolved to include managing the work of churches and the charitable work of individuals? Not to mention having become everyone’s Conscience Police and Compassion Monitors?

In the meantime, we do have a moral crisis, not just an economic crisis, in the United States. We rot from within because of false values, overweening materialism, and deadened consciences. Pope Francis can stand behind me, no one ahead of me, in this line of criticism. The problem is as old as human nature, and is not capitalism per se – money — but, as the Bible specifies, the LOVE of money. It is the root of all evil. It is difficult not to notice, by the way, that despite press-agentry about the Pope’s decision to live in less opulent sleeping quarters, and wear simpler vestments, that the jewel-encrusted aspects of the Vatican – thrones, crowns, rings – contradict his words. He is neither the first pope nor the first human being to hunt for sawdust in the eyes of others:

“And why worry about a speck in your friend’s eye when you have a log in your own? How can you think of saying to your friend, ‘Let me help you get rid of that speck in your eye,’ when you can’t see past the log in your own eye? Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend’s eye” (Jesus quoted in Matt. 7: 3-5 NLT).

But we all are awash in contradictions, and we seldom feel the need to set the course straight. Francis made some wise observations. I am praying that he is saving fusillades against totalitarian governments and repressive “planned economies” for a future encyclical. For surely, in this world there are crises of hearts and minds, not only stomachs. In the meantime, there are places to look to start solving this crisis from which we all may be infected. We look to moral leaders; we look to the Bible.

And we can look around us. Even comedians and singers, wise in their way, have characterized our moral predicament in simple terms: Do we just have too much stuff?

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The comedian George Carlin, not exactly a Prophet Jeremiah, nevertheless made some sensible observations about “stuff” in a famous routine. Recently the singer Delbert McClinton, with Lyle Lovett and John Prine, put the observation to music. Zeppo’s slideshow is money… er, classic. When opening the link, if prompted to click “YouTube,” do so to open the vid.

Click: Too Much Stuff