Monday Morning Music Ministry

3-28-22

In these busy days, crowded about as we are with wars and rumors of wars, turmoil seemingly on all sides – the economy; trans-national health crises (or not); political and social recriminations; crime; challenges to traditional values that threaten to turn our world upside-down – a news item this week barely peeped amid the din. What it represents is in inverse proportion to its significance.

The poll revealed that for the first time, a minority of the population of the Netherlands claims adherence to a religious faith; membership in a church; belief in God. The majority claims to be atheist or agnostic.

To my suspicious point of view, this perhaps is the “first time” in the history of polling, but not in the history of our contemporary Western Civilization (what used to be called Christendom). We long have been living in a post-Christian society. I do not need to begin rants, no matter how valid, about “God being taken from our schools” or the Establishment’s war on Christian values, or the growing categorization of the Bible as “hate speech.”

I think what has been polled in Holland – the site of such fervent theological studies and activities in generations past, where English Pilgrims lived before sailing to the New World – is true throughout America and Europe these days.

The “Christian West” no longer holds Biblical truths as a priori components of society, government, law, justice, and relationships. This devolution seems to have happened during our lifetimes, but secularism, virtually a religion in itself, is a symptom, not the cause, of liberal theology, of pluralism, of modernity. The Enlightenment was not the first crack in our spiritual foundation, but actually the last gasp of the Theocentric view of life. Despite what many schools teach, the great Enlightenment thinkers were Christians who sought to reconcile, not separate (or “liberate”), the role of God in the world.

God’s place in the world has never changed, and cannot change. The role He plays can change, because it is what humankind practices and grants Him. When Nietzsche said that God Is Dead, he meant in the sense that society failed to acknowledge Him any more.

I frequently remind myself that Martin Luther, back when the Renaissance was evolving into Modernism, maintained that “Reason is the enemy of Faith.”

That is hard to accept. But it is impossible to refute. The intellectual anarchy from which we suffer is the result of 500 years of futility: the culture’s vain attempt, whether benign or hostile, to reconcile Reason and Faith. “Yes, but…” many people will be quick to say. But we must recognize that “progress,” as we routinely identify it, is difficult to define,. And it is a false god in any case.

Some truths need not be improved upon, because that reveals that… they are not truth at all. “Truth” – Biblical truth, Absolute Truth – is not conditional, relational, nor of any other qualification. The deadly temptation of humankind, and a sin of organized societies, is to think that we can without peril discard Biblical standards. Frankly, this started in the Garden: our problem is the sin of pride – our belief that we know better than God.

I write these words during the Lenten season. And part of my Lenten devotion brings these thoughts to my heart, more than usual.

Lent has become, to many Christians who even think about it, a vaguely religious version of New Year resolutions. At best, to some people, a way to remind us of Christ’s sacrifice. In fact that is not why Lent entered the Church calendar. I confess that this will seem glib, but it suggests that Jesus Himself, our model, might have avoided the cross by giving up chocolate for 40 days.

No, if Lent has real meaning and efficacy, it was commended to followers of Christ as a discipline in order to repent of sin. “Successful” denials of habits or entertainment can be, rather, celebrations of self. Even fasting can be self-centered, when we should seek to know God more than please God. Lent was meant to be a time to find Him anew, not hope that He will notice our obedience.

I am not disparaging motivations, but I do want us to focus properly. My own experiences includes a week once spent at a monastery. All comforts (like phones) were banished; silence was mandated; and I lived among monks. On the grounds were Stations of the Cross, and – as I hoped would be the case – I could do nothing day and night but pray, read, and meditate.

At the end of a week that was planned to draw me closer to God, I felt like I knew less about Him. However, I felt closer to Him than I ever had. A mystery, really — but with God many mysteries are to be cherished. The difference, perhaps – an important distinction – was that He seemed to draw closer to me, rather than vice versa. That is how I felt; the solitude and study allowed that.

Lent ought to be (and, God help us, not only confined to the Lenten season!) something like that experience. I am trying this year to meditate, contemplate, read the Word, and pray… and I realize more than ever how contemporary life robs us of quiet time and the ability to consecrate moments. “Yes, but…”

The Lord will manage, as He always has, with wars and rumors of wars, and all the challenges in the headlines. As if we can change, in major ways, the course of human events.

Christ came to earth – and Easter, which lies before us – not so we can save the planet, but so God can save us.

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These essays offer to “put songs in our hearts” to start the weeks. But not all songs are pretty tunes, much as such anointed music can bless us. During Lent, in the spirit not of duty but of humility, repentance, contemplation, spiritual sorrow, intimacy with God, re-dedication, and obedience, there are other forms of Christian music.

If there be a “song for our hearts” during Lent, we might adopt “Lachrimae,” a lute song pavane written by John Dowland around 1600. Its melancholy tune was set to words of a forlorn theme titled Flow, My Tears.

Click: Lachrimae: Flow, My Tears