Monday Morning Music Ministry

9-21-20

Growing up, to the extent I did, in suburban New York City, in the little town of Closter NJ, I remember that at the corner of one of our parks was an enormous bell, probably used in Colonial times to warn residents of British troops approaching (a Closter farmer was our own Paul Revere) or to call volunteers to fight a fire.

It was not a bell whose shape probably comes to your mind. It was circular, metal perhaps five inches wide, like a gong but without the gong-bell in the center. This was an enormous metal ring, like a circular (rather than triangular) dinner bell that must have been heard for miles. My friends and I could never find anything big enough that we could lift that would sound a tocsin, as alarms were called.

Through the centuries, communities relied on substantial bells like that for various reasons; and the frequency or pattern would provide signals to residents. Churches, of course, ring bells to call people to worship, and during the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are lifted. Carillons were invented to play music in concerts. Eventually electricity brought alarm clocks, amplified sirens, cell-phone alerts, and other efficient saboteurs of the good old days.

But the concept of “alarm bells” lives on in culture, in literature, in our consciousness. Sometimes we view events as they seem, but sense that they seldom are hopeful harbingers, but dangerous signals. Predictors of bad things ahead; seeds that will sprout ugly weeds, not beautiful flowers.

“For whom the bell tolls.” Ernest Hemingway took the title of his novel from an essay by the mystical theologian John Donne (1572-1631). Donne, in his Meditation XVII, “Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,” addressed the ambiguity. Events, customs, announcements, traditions, expectations might be very different than we confidently think… and different observers will have different opinions and conclusions.

We all have separate views of life, and therefore, Donne (who was near his own death when he wrote these words) reminds us of two things. The surety that God is in control, and all will see Him, followed by the end of delusions. Second, Donne’s famous aphorism that “no man is an island.”

By the first point he reminded us (even if Hemingway neglected this aspect) that our understanding is insignificant compared to God’s omniscience. In the second point he observed that the human race is organic; that when something dies or is degraded in one place, the rest of humanity suffers. When reforms and enlightenment and “progress” occur here, people there, so to speak, also will benefit.

I invite you to view the long-brewing but sudden-occuring nihilism and violence, destruction and death in American cities and towns, and see them hear them, as alarm-bells.

The “demonstrators” (what kinds of fools are we to be persuaded by the media’s gentle characterization of vandals and criminals?) might indeed think that the alarm-bells they set off are announcing a brave new world. I am sure that their ringleaders and puppet-masters do. Aldous Huxley’s dystopia, that is; not a pending utopia.

Here are Donne’s passages, in contemporary words:

Perchance the bell tolls for someone so sick or so deluded that he doesn’t even recognize that the bell announces his impending death. Maybe I am that deluded person, deluded that I am better off. Others see me in reality, know I am ill, and have caused the bell to signal my own death, but I am ignorant of it.

Are we dying – as a culture – and do not realize it?

And then:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Rioters and vandals, attacking statues of Jesus and Mary and saints, are not offending brass and stone, but storming Heaven. That is how they see it. Why do Christians not see it, too, and erupt in defense?

Looters and shoplifters vandalize stores, and empty them – often minority-owned shops – and are not stealing sneakers they need; but flail at capitalism itself.

Those who terrorize a city for a hundred days, and occupy police stations… are telling the truth when they declare that your police, your homes, your lives are next.

These things look like news clips and headlines, but they are alarm-bells.

The veneer of historical bad guys’ statues is long gone. When churches are covered in obscene graffiti; invaded and set on fire, the object of these domestic terrorists is not some dead general, but the Living Savior.

Hear those bells? Do they toll for them… or for us?

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Click: When They Ring Those Golden Bells

8-22-16

There are many worldviews by which people live today, as there always has been in all societies. The difference in contemporary America, I think, is that the majority of citizens have no idea of what a worldview is, or whether or not they care about operating under any established and consistent precepts.

Even Christians, including dedicated and fervent church-goers, often fail the test of worldview standards. Many Christians love God and believe in Jesus, but as if in the world but not of the world, know more what they oppose than what they should defend. As we recently noted, most people these days are not so much ignorant of history as indifferent to its relevance.

In the political realm, partisans on the Left know their socialist and Marxist dogma, even if they reject the labels. On the Right, there are patriots who love liberty and know the Constitution. In the vast Middle, well-intentioned people are malleable, their opinions inevitably shaped less by events than by the media and the culture.

This situation in America and the West was foretold by Aldous Huxley in a letter to George Orwell (both notable futurists and dystopian thinkers) in 1949: “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than [sticks] and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.”

The Bible, inevitably, put the same thought – the same prediction – most clearly: “The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables” (II Timothy 4: 3-4). Indeed, we love our servitude.

Counted among those “teachers” are not only members of the educational-industrial complex, but also politicians, role-models from popular culture, and… “people of the cloth” – ministers, preachers, priests, rabbis.

I am pessimistic about the future of American civilization (as well as of our “democracy,” republic, and government) because we are the inheritors of at least 500 years of a corrupted worldview. The worst aspects of a cultural secularization were unlikely to have coexisted with theocentric virtue. America was a “last best hope” of mankind, not for democracy’s sake – never an ideal of the Founders and Framers – but of a virtuous society. Respect, self-respect, order, justice, charity: these were among the characteristics recommended, and recognized, by Pilgrims and Great Revivalists; by our civic architects like John Adams and James Madison; by admiring observers like Alexis de Tocqueville, who retained enough equanimity to state: “When America ceases to be good, she will cease being great.”

One of the infections of the half-millennium cited above is the belief in progress, a hallmark of the Modern Age. Most Americans will think my definition, and certainly my analysis, is loopy. But that shows how pervasive this worldview has become. Earlier societies and civilizations, however, neither believed in the inevitability of human progress nor its efficacy, if they thought much about it at all.

Inherent in the concept of progress, and history’s plodding march “forward,” is perfectibility. Once that belief is subscribed (and we have made a fetish of it in the West), then it naturally follows that laws can be passed, rules enforced, behavior modified, all to achieve perfection. In society; in individuals. Justice. Heaven on earth. Utopia.

Of course, this leads not to progress but to schemes, warring factions, and, for example, the parade of monsters of the past century who consigned millions to servitude and battlefield slaughters. Secularism, the glorification of Self, will do that. Human nature without its restraints reveals the worst, not the putative best, aspects. We have arrived at the 21st century thinking we know better than all societies, in all of history – better than the Word of God – about the structure of the family, the role of authority, the sanctity of life, and a host of such truths. Gosh, we’re great.

I cannot decry progress in certain areas by certain characterizations. My late wife, a diabetic since the age of 13, would not have had a 14th birthday party if not for medical science. I could not be enjoying Bach as I type a message that (still magically, to me) will be read by thousands of people. I am not an all-in Luddite.

But our conceited conviction that, quoting Dr Pangloss from Voltaire’s “Candide,” this is the best of all possible worlds, is as self-swindling and ridiculous as, well, Pangloss himself. It might just be the case that the world will never host a greater philosopher than Plato; no better sculptors than Michelangelo and Rodin; no better composers than Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. The works of Rodin and the Viennese masters do not vitiate my point, but encourage us always to create and emulate. Not be perfect, because only God is perfect; but to create as He inspires us to be creative. (I mention Rodin, having last week stood in awe before sculptures in the Rodin Museum…)

The most pernicious effect of this modern malady is that we humans make a god of perfectibility: to the extent we can think, innovate, reform, and devise according to a faith in Progress, we commensurately surrender faith in God. We have replaced it with a faith in humanistic progress, in humankind’s perfectibility, in our selves.

Foolish us, we are doomed to fail. If you can lift your gaze from the muck – the bread and circuses as well as the disintegration of our social fabric – you will see how well the seduction of Progress’s inevitability and modern definition is working.

“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served… or the gods… in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15).

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Purcell’s Funeral Sentences