Monday Morning Music Ministry

5-9-16

I have been asked many questions these days about the proper attitude and informed decisions to be made by Christians and people of faith about the elections this year. To be more precise, I have been asked the same question by many people: Is Donald Trump someone to be trusted; does he know or understand biblical principles and basic Christian creedal tenets; is he someone who will “make deals” with the devil – so to speak – once in office?

I am asked those questions by a variety of folks, in my putative role as a social critic, political commentator, and Christian writer. I have no special insights, not holy ones I claim, anyway. Among those who ask me these burning questions is… myself.

A crazy political season. A crazy world, crazier and more ominous by the day. If it is not the advent of End Times, we might wish it were. We all should be primarily seeking spiritual, moral, and ethical answers – because our major challenges in America are, and have been caused by, spiritual, moral, and ethical lapses.

I will don another one my hats, my actual training as a historian, and posit some observations. Those who make stark critiques and censure are Jeremiahs. Most of us historians, as Gibbon and Macaulay did, wait millennia to make sense of history, to discern missteps.

There is an aspect of the human spirit that tends to think that contemporary crises are unprecedented, perhaps apocalyptic. It cannot always be true; but someday it will be. Oddly, we occasionally adopt the attitude of Dr Pangloss, that “this is the best of all possible worlds,” and in certain ways it too sometimes is correct.

But has our society, in our days, begun its ultimate dissolution? Is it possible that we are past “sliding down the slippery slope” and, rather, in the maelstrom of the flushing toilet of history, a vortex going “down the tubes”?

I think it is reasonable to think so. Too many of our foundations are crumbling, too many moral traditions are denigrated or ignored. But our political season, as crazy as it is, is not unprecedented.

We can look back at other crises in presidential contests. In 1800 the election was deadlocked – at the time, the House of Representatives, not the general populace, voted for president and vice-president, separate votes for each of two candidates; all later adjusted by a Constitutional amendment. Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr each had more votes than the incumbent president John Adams, but a secret deal withheld some of Burr’s electoral support and resulted in his defeat. The invective, chicanery, and dirty dealing all led to what history calls the “Revolution of 1800.” A few years later, Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel, and eventually fled west where he reportedly attempted to organize an uprising against the United States and/or Mexico.

Let us gloss over the social aspects of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, bereft by scandals, charges of “loose women” in the White House kitchen, and White House events where the president invited the general public, leading to shredding of carpets, destruction of furnishings, and theft of property. Jackson’s presidential campaigns led to the “spoils system” of trading votes for jobs.

In the 1860 election, the Republican Party, then only six years old, gained the White House as beneficiary of four candidates in the field. Abraham Lincoln’s nomination was secured by his manager who forbad Honest Abe from attending or knowing anything about their machinations – such as promising the same federal offices and cabinet positions to more than one person. The campaign was dirty (Secession was imminent) and dangerous (Lincoln reportedly travelled through pro-slavery Baltimore on his way to the inauguration in a plaid cloak and Scottish cap to evade assassins).

In 1896 a virtual unknown, William Jennings Bryan, delivered a speech (the “Cross of Gold”) to the Democrat convention that stampeded the delegates to nominate him in a frenzy. Barely old enough to serve as president, Bryan’s radical, socialist agenda split the party in two and had Americans, those who were not seduced by the firebrand, fearful of blood in the streets.

Theodore Roosevelt, wildly popular on his retirement in 1909, went on an African safari and tour of Europe for a year, partly to grant the spotlight to his hand-picked successor William Howard Taft. But during Taft’s term, there were personal slights of TR; reversal of many Roosevelt policies; serious broken promises; and a calamitous decline in the GOP’s popularity, including the loss of Congress. Severe affronts to Roosevelt, and an irresistible demand from many Republicans, persuaded him to challenge Taft for the nomination.

An ex-president versus a sitting president. Friends became enemies. “Liar” and “Fathead” were among the many epithets. There were mass defections from the GOP after the nomination was wrested from TR, who had won most of the new-fangled primaries. The speakers’ platform at the Republican convention had barbed wire under the bunting, in fear that riots would break out. TR’s bolt of the convention led to the independent Bull Moose party, which soundly trounced the GOP; Taft won only two states. A Socialist, Eugene Debs, polled nearly a million votes. In late October, a bartender who had been persuaded against a Third Term shot Roosevelt point-blank in the chest. TR insisted on continuing to his speech; with blood streaming down his shirt, he spoke for almost 90 minutes. Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the four-way election.

Another year of the gun, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy, after a primary victory in California, were killed. A sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, was forced from running again when he could not endure widespread protests and a rebellious Democrat Party. Millions in the streets and campuses; a bitter primary; riots outside the convention; the anarchist Yippies; a candidate nominated (VP Humphrey) who had not even run in the primaries; the return of the has-been Richard Nixon; and the amazing grass-roots revolt of third-party candidate George Wallace. The story of 1968.

So… does this year’s election cycle seem tame yet? For all the elements that foreshadowed our current season of discontent, I think the campaign of 1884 has the most parallels. So far. The GOP, in the White House for 24 straight years, was rife with divisions. Factions called “Half-Breeds” and “Stalwarts” hated each other and vied for power. An office-seeker of one faction had assassinated President James Garfield, of another, when he was frustrated in securing a federal job. Bosses continually attempted a comeback for ex-president Ulysses Grant, whom they could control.

Sen. James G Blaine was the favorite for the nomination. A former Speaker of the House, he had been involved numerous. He sold influence; he had solicited bribes. He arrogantly admitted many of these discretions, but he was a magnetic speaker who swayed crowds and inspired devotion. He faced opposition, however, not so much from strong candidates, but a field of lesser names.

The major threat to Blaine instead was from the reform movement in the GOP, a gaggle of veterans and newcomers. Among the former were George William Curtis and Carl Schurz, whose political careers went back to the Civil War. Leaders of the latter group were young Henry Cabot Lodge and 24-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, a major force in the convention. Their efforts to advance reform candidates failed on the floor.

There was public revulsion against Blaine (“Blaine, Blaine; James G Blaine! The continental liar from the state of Maine!” street crowds chanted) but a lot of GOP voters fell in line. Grover Cleveland, the Democrat candidate, was “ugly honest,” a good reputation for 1884; but midway through the campaign it was revealed that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child – remember, this in the staid Victorian era. (“Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!” rival crowds chanted.) THAT was some campaign.

As in 2016, a large number of Republican politicians and activists faced moral and practical dilemmas. Many of them sincerely believed that Blaine was toxic for the party’s self-esteem and for its future; and they had made threats – or promises – never to vote for Blaine. Excruciating.

There was, collectively, a Solomonic decision. Reformers like Curtis and Schurz and Henry Ward Beecher, America’s most prominent pastor, whose sister had written “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” left the Republican Party, and supported Cleveland. They were dubbed “Mugwumps.”

Reformers like Roosevelt and Lodge, however, reluctantly remained within the party. Never endorsing Blaine, they “supported the ticket,” stating that the only way to influence the party was from within the party. Young TR, whose wife and mother had died a few months earlier (on the same day), left for an understandable “sabbatical” on his cattle ranch in the Dakotas. For two years he was a cowboy, out of the public eye. He made one or two campaign speeches for down-ticket candidates, including Lodge who ran for Congress.

Lodge lost. He and Roosevelt both considered their political futures ruined.

Both were mistaken, of course. Many of the Mugwumps eventually returned to the GOP, which thereafter always had – has had – a reform wing. Cleveland won, but a dozen years later he and many establishment Democrats boycotted the agrarian radical Bryan. Blaine lost the 1884 election, but by a whisker.

The final detail of the final moments of that crazy 1884 campaign might be relevant if not dispositive to troubled Republicans weathering Hurricane Donald this year: a moral, specifically a religious, aspect.

Just before election eve, Blaine attended a dinner of industrialists and monopolists at Delmonico’s in New York. One of the speakers, a nonentity minister, in his speech described the Democrats as the “party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” Rum was a smear on lowlife aspects of stereotyped Democrat voters; Rebellion was a reminder of the Democrats’ association with Secession.

Romanism, however, was a word that touched social and religious nerves. It was a direct reference to Catholicism, imputing a congenital association between Democrats and the Pope; and was not meant as a compliment. The consequent furor over the insult (which Blaine had ignored) energized New York City’s Irish immigrants. New York City went Democrat; New York State and its electoral votes narrowly went for Cleveland… enough to tip the national outcome away from the GOP.

The scenario is a different animal than whether to endorse a candidate you distrust or despise in 2016 – but it reminds us that religion is never far from the larger debate. Our civic consciences might still roil over whether to Trump, or not to Trump. Life has gone on in America despite, as Kipling wrote, “The tumult and the shouting dies.”

Myself, I greet with dubiety Trump’s assurances that he is familiar with the Bible, understands doctrine, and has a saving knowledge, as we say, of Jesus Christ. But we are not to judge: I question, however. “God judges the man; voters judge the candidate” is, this year, less of a maxim and feels like more of an excuse.

Many of us have the nagging feeling that things are different this time, that past is less than prologue. The Captains and the Kings may depart, yet we seem closer to our destiny, maybe an apocalypse.

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Click: I Am a Pilgrim

9-14-15

We are witnessing, night after night on television news, and in photographs on newspaper front pages and magazine front covers, one of several things, depending on how you categorize it.

A humanitarian crisis. The flight of refugees from war-torn Syria. Migrations from lands surrounding Syria toward areas of a prosperous Europe. People, some of whom might be terrorists or, certainly, potential terrorists, pushed to migrate. Many Arab and Muslim countries refusing to accept the refugees. White European nations’ reactions, ranging from declining to rend their social fabrics, to countries accepting of them.

And ascribed motives across the board – from prejudice to shaky economies to needy workforces to guilt bred of political correctness.

In all our lifetimes we, sadly, have witnessed similar “humanitarian crises,” usually fomented by natural disasters, or famine, or war. But this might be the first time that virtually every picture and story features the hordes, instead of orderly, hopeful, and grateful… angry, resentful of their benefactors, shouting curses at their hosts, making obscene gestures to cameras, and, from their scanty provisions, leaving mountains of trash in their wake.

Different. Different in many ways. We plausibly can say that these scenes comprise the largest funeral, or funeral parade, in history. It represents the funeral of the West.

As a funeral cortege – I hear strains of the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, labeled “March Funebre,” when I watch the videos – these people are not mourners nor pall-bearers, but rather headed straight for the wake and after-party, so to speak.

In yet another view, this flight of uncountable migrants is war. The invaders’ strategy we know, for the pawns are being resettled by the vilest forces of the region, ISIS especially (the more benign of Arab and Muslim countries, for instance Lebanon, have absorbed many refugees).

The tactics – war’s other side of the coin – play upon the West’s weaknesses; guilt or self-loathing among the elites; force of numbers; and the most effective weapon, propaganda and the pliant media. The world should be suspicious or hostile to Muslim machinations these days, yet the Christian West (that is, the post-Christian world) is, despite a few speed bumps and detours, paving latter-day Trade routes and Spice routes from the neighborhoods around Syria through Turkey to Greece and Macedonia, to Serbia and Bosnia. Through Austria, to the promised land of Germany.

Those who do not know history are doomed to criticize my analysis. Of this I am certain. Save your letters; I am not a hater but a lover. I love our nations and our peoples. Opening our hearts, and our wallets, is separate from opening our minds to the extent that our brains fall out. I endorse and insist on compassion, and invite us all to think of the best way to exercise compassion and love and assistance. Anon.

In the meantime it does nobody any good, and does everybody much bad, to deny that this situation is what is.

* Many of the migrants are from places even far from Syria, like Pakistan and Bangladesh. Discarded identity papers indicate such. Some estimates put the migrants from war-torn countries (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan) at only 30 per cent.

* This instant burden of accommodating refugees is not falling evenly. Neighborhood (and prosperous) Arab states including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait have, between them, taken in zero refugees. Iran, an “enemy” of ISIS, has taken in none. Faraway Germany has pledged to take in 800,000 this year and half a million annually after that.

* The EU, unelected; and Merkel, with no mandate, choose to forever change the character of Christian Europe. Clear-thinking leaders (of the Czech Republic, of Hungary, for example) have framed the issue as a spiritual crisis more than economic or social, to their credit.

* We see photos, like the heartbreaking picture of the dead child washed up on shore… and then read allegations that the man holding her is a human trafficker, a profiteer, from whose overcrowded boat she fell. It is still heartbreaking!

* A real humanitarian crisis would not result in hordes that are 80 per cent healthy young men: in fact, it would be logical to see a majority of elderly, women, and children; but we don’t.

What is going on? A friend, Robert Chandler, recently wrote: “If you have any historical perspective, you would know that Islam invaded Western Europe in force and gravely threatened our civilization very recently. This when Vienna was under siege by Ottoman armies in the 16th and 17th centuries. … in historical terms, not long ago at all.

“It is not ‘ancient history.’ It is, in fact, at the beginning of modern history. The Balkans are an historic hell-hole because Islam did succeed in gaining a large foothold there, and civil war has transpired for all the centuries since. This is for real now. This is deadly serious.

“Your children, your grandchildren, not just in Europe, but in America, are threatened by this. The cruelty of ISIS is a foretaste of what could befall us. The cathedrals of Europe, blown up like [historic temples in] Palmyra. Our sons and men tortured and beheaded. Our daughters and wives raped and tortured and enslaved.”

For 1500 years, Islam has been trying to take over Europe, and defeat Christianity – an equal goal in its eyes, if not to contemporary Westerners and Christians. Vicious battles, “soft” invasions, from Bulgaria and the Balkans, to Greece and Italy (Sicily once was an Emirate), to Spain almost totally, and a significant part of southern France, to Hungary, and the “Gates of Vienna.” And of course by waves of migration, forced by their Mohammedan masters.

Many brave defenders of European culture and Christian tradition, some famous in history and lore, sacrificed for their values. The difference today is that many citizens and most leaders in the West do not care about their heritage. Mostly because they do not know about it. A shame and a crime.

One reason the West is losing this war, or has already lost it, is because once we believed in God, and we do not today; and the invaders believe in their god and are thereby motivated. I talk about God, but for a moment I am being secular. We no longer have foundational values; we are indifferent to guiding principles; we mock morality and a heritage worth defending; we have no will to resist.

People see the Muslim baby washed ashore in that photograph and are shocked into action. But we are the same people who read of abortionists in our own country, slicing babies for so many pennies per pound. And to that we are indifferent.

How can such a people – that which we have become – prevail?

Next. We still do have the situation of displaced people and war-caused refugees and migrants. As Grover Cleveland said in another context, “it is a condition, not a theory, that confronts us.”

The present “refugee” “crisis” exists in the first place because of the West’s longtime collectivist, statist, mindset. That is: governments must be all, do all. Answer all, provide all, solve all. The proposition, of course, is absurd; yet it has become the guiding principle of the West.

What? Governments should not respond to the humanitarian crisis? My answer is as revolutionary as it is hopeless in the Year of Our Lord 2015: Governments should respond minimally. Governments, by socialistic and collectivist paradigms, have usurped the roles of individuals, families, churches, guilds, unions, corporations, and associations in such cases.

From hurricane relief to famines to displaced persons and victims of war, governments sometimes help… but sometimes hinder. Corruption often creeps in. Monies are appropriated, against wishes of citizens, who seldom are provided much information. Usually coercion is involved; and, always, gargantuan bureaucracy.

Private agencies are more sincere, and usually more effective. Individual action often means just that – people involving themselves, volunteering, even travelling and serving. Peoples’ consciences are at work; and they invest their concern as well as their sweat or resources.

This is how God intended it. “Faith, hope, and charity,” Jesus said; “And the greatest of these is charity.” To be our brothers’ keeper never meant to let Rome, as it were, take our money and decide what “projects,” what people and causes, to pursue… often against our wishes. The Good Samaritan knelt down, did not send a text to the local relief agency, so to speak, instead.

To support “refugees,” even to sponsor some, perhaps to take some into households: governments should let citizens decide such things. Individually. Would things “work out” in crises such as the present one? I am absolutely certain, after inevitable adjustments, the migrants and the hosts, and our next generations, would be more at peace, and living in higher security.

But then let me tie this together like the end of a Seinfeld episode. If we recognize this current “crisis” as just one more chapter in a 1500-year-old war; if we protect our own heritage, values and traditions (first, by re-learning them!); if we deal with the causes of the swelling migrant tide – Islamic radicalism, which hates portions of its own people – and if we return to private initiative, love, and compassion…

Then we will have the chance to fulfill the Lord’s commands, as we operate with renewed hearts – something that Western governments would never allow – to witness to lost souls about the love of Jesus.

Heal the sick that are therein, and say unto them, the Kingdom of God is come nigh unto you (Luke 10:9). In this way we minister in love. Instead of being victims ourselves of war, we can wage Peace.

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As an allegory, I offer a video of “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1688). She commits suicide… needlessly, as America is doing. “When I am laid in earth, May my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast; Remember me! Remember me! Remember me! but ah! forget my fate,” we may sing to History, and begging God’s mercy. Dido played by the amazing Maria Ewing.

Click: When I Am Laid in Earth… Remember Me.

10-20-14

I want to tell you about two remarkable women.

Fanny Crosby’s name is known by some people today, but her great number of gospel songs fill the hymnbooks of many denominations, and the airwaves even today, sung in every musical style you can think of. She lived almost 95 years (1820-1915) and was a prominent poet and librettist until about the age of 45. Then she began writing lyrics for hymns. Before she died she wrote almost 9000 hymns, many of them, as I said, familiar today.

These and many other works were accomplished despite the fact that Fanny Crosby was blind. Little Frances had an eye infection as a baby in Brewster NY, was mistreated with medicines, and thereafter had no sight. It was a handicap she endured without complaint, testifying that if she had “normal” sight she “might not have so good an education or have so great an influence, and certainly not so fine a memory.” She further testified that “when I get to heaven, the first face that shall ever gladden my sight will be that of my Savior.”

She was a teacher of blind students at an institution in New York City – where her secretary, transcribing her dictated poems, was a teenaged future president, Grover Cleveland – and a published poet, a librettist for opera-style stage cantatas, author of patriotic works during the Civil War, and an evangelist. She shared the gospel message from street corners to rescue missions to crusade meetings.

Fanny Crosby wrote words for her hymns, and seldom the music. Dozens of prominent and amateur composers provided the music to her miraculously simple but profound verses. In fact many of her poems were published under assumed names, so hymnbooks could maintain the appearance of variety. She and her husband, a blind organist, shared evangelistic work.

She never received more than five dollars for a song, and routinely much less; sometimes nothing. While her songsheets sold millions, she invariably lived in poverty. She was befriended by many, including Ira Sankey, the “music man” in D. L. Moody crusades in the US and England; but whatever money she made through her long career she did not tithe – she usually gave away half, sometimes all, of income receipts, to churches or missions. In New York City she served at the Bowery Mission, and lived in extreme poverty in places like the Tenderloin District or Hell’s Kitchen.

If you don’t know Fanny Crosby’s name, you might know her hymns including “Blessed Assurance,” “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior,” “Safe in the Arms of God,” “Near the Cross,” “Jesus is Calling,” and “He Hideth My Soul.” She is buried in a humble cemetery outside Bridgeport CT, her modest gravestone telling the world: “Aunt Fanny: She hath done what she could.”

When I met Cliff Barrows of the Billy Graham Crusades, he told me how the words of Fanny Crosby had touched his life, sometimes with the impact of Bible verses themselves. That day I had with me an old copy of Fanny’s autobiography, “Memories of Eighty Years,” and I presented it to him. A jewel-encrusted heirloom would not have meant more to him; it was impressive to see evidence of how, indeed, he had been touched by Fanny Crosby in his life.

Fanny never considered her affliction a handicap, and she did not complain about her poverty. She wanted to write hymns; and, in countless humble missions and fetid soup kitchens, she wanted to share Jesus with “her boys.” Her work lives on, beyond the people she met, in the hymns that still affect listeners today.

The other woman we visit today was Fanny’s contemporary and, like her, a poet, evangelist, missions worker, when these activities were uncommon, in churches and in general society, for women. She also suffered physical affliction, and wrote the words to at least one hymn of great fame and comfort to generations of people. Katherine Hankey, 1834-1911, was born in London and did all her work in England except for a period as a young woman, as an evangelist in “darkest Africa.”

Katherine’s father was a prosperous banker, so she never endured the privations of a Fanny Crosby. Yet she caught the evangelistic zeal – despite her staid Anglican roots – and preached on street corners of poor urban neighborhoods, in factories, and at docks. While only in her thirties she contracted a disease that had doctors confine her to bed, not merely her house.

Her greatest regret over this news of a life-threatening illness was that she could not preach, share the Word, and talk about the love of Jesus to “her boys.” She determined, if she had to find an alternative, to write what was on her heart. From a very long poem grew the verses that embodied her zeal to “tell the old, old story.”

Two women in two cities, two different societies – different from each other; different from today, especially regarding the role of women – both challenged by horrible afflictions, but overcoming them. Gloriously.

Their biographies are lessons for us all, not only contemporary women, young or old. They are inspirations to what we may do as fighters in the arenas of life, as warriors wielding the gentle weapons of God’s love and mercy.

Two women speak, and sing, to us over the many years. One, blind, wrote, “Tell Me the Story of Jesus.” The other, weak and bedridden, wrote, “I Love To Tell the Story.”

Two women’s stories are… one story. The story of Jesus and His love.

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The separate but equal testimonies of two remarkable women live on through two powerful and beloved gospel songs. As musical sermons they have touched the lives of millions since they were written in quiet and humble circumstances by two servants of God.

Click: Tell Me the Story of Jesus – I Love To Tell the Story