Monday Morning Music Ministry

11-18-13

The late Malcolm Muggeridge was an iconic figure in British life and English letters. An essayist and critic, soldier and spy, journalist and satirist – he served as editor of Punch, the venerable humor magazine – he was, until his death at age 87 (1990) a thinker who was forever interested, and always interesting. He walked a path that similar intellectuals walked: an early interest in Socialism or Communism (his wife’s aunt was Beatrice Webb, the famous Fabian Socialist), then a roughly simultaneous conversion to conservatism and Christianity.

Those others include G. K. Chesterton; C. S. Lewis; Hilaire Belloc; in America, Whittaker Chambers – literary men whose early views were either Marxist or atheist or both (Lewis’ friend J. R. R. Tolkien wound up his journey as a profound Christian, but did not commence from a radical origin). Like these persuasive apologists, Muggeridge not only came to understand the gospel’s relevance to the contemporary world, but he was an extraordinarily gifted apostle, a missionary to his own people.

I recently came across Muggeridge’s thoughts inspired by, of all things, a caterpillar: “Quite often, waking up in the night as the old do, and feeling… like a butterfly released from its chrysalis stage and ready to fly away. Are caterpillars told of their impending resurrection? How in dying they will be transformed from poor earth-crawlers into creatures of the air, with exquisitely painted wings? If told, do they believe it? Is it conceivable to them that so constricted an existence as theirs should burgeon into so gay and lightsome a one as a butterfly’s? I imagine the wise old caterpillars shaking their heads – no, it can’t be; it’s a fantasy, self-deception, a dream.”

These are reflections not so much on the miracles of resurrection and of new life in Eternity – or, indeed, new life on earth after accepting Jesus – but upon humankind’s congenital disinclination to accept supernatural gifts of God. Deliverance? Healing? Forgiveness? Salvation? Eternal life with God? Available to ME? “No, it can’t be; it’s a fantasy, self-deception, a dream.”

At another time, perhaps inspired by the same encounter with a caterpillar, Muggeridge was challenged by his friend William F Buckley, on the latter’s television program “Firing Line,” to invent a parable whose meaning was unambiguous.

“I was actually watching a caterpillar in the path of my garden, a furry caterpillar. And I thought to myself: Now, supposing the caterpillars have an annual meeting, the local society of caterpillars. And my caterpillar, an older caterpillar, addressing them, says: ‘You know, it’s an extraordinary thing, but we are all going to be butterflies.’

“‘Okay,’ the caterpillars say. ‘You poor fool, you are just like an old man who is frightened of dying, you’re inventing something to comfort yourself.’ [But] these are all the things that people say to me when I say I am looking forward to dying because I know that I am going to go into eternity. You see?”

Buckley asked, “Please explain.”

“And so he – the caterpillar – abashed, draws back, but in a short time he is in his chrysalis, and, sure enough, he’s right. He extricates himself from the chrysalis, and he is no longer a creeper, which is what caterpillars are; he is flying away.”

As before, the lesson I derive is not – I should say not ONLY – that there is a New Life. Because we know that truth from God’s word; from examples of uncountable transformed sinners; and because some of us have experienced profound inner, spiritual changes. And in terms less prosaic but no less miraculous, we see examples of amorphous tadpoles become distinctive bullfrogs, and, indeed, creepy caterpillars become beautiful butterflies.

But in the parable of Muggeridge there are, once again, the other factors as old as humankind’s sentience: doubt, skepticism, ridicule, denial, and the old “scientific proofs” against the miracles of God Almighty. These attacks, and myriad attackers, can be daunting to a lonely believer.

Yet that scenario does not affect, at all, the Truth. Yes, it is the case that we can be (and, as Christians, are in the process of being) transformed from ugly and common, to precious and unique. The Truth does not rely on people’s opinions of it. Neither do God’s promises wait for the world’s vote on whether He will keep them.

Muggeridge’s predecessor C. S. Lewis wrote of the night his frankly intense devotion to atheism was transformed, melting (kicking and screaming at first?) to a realization of the Fact of God’s existence: “You must picture me alone in that room… night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. … I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most… reluctant convert in all England.”

And the rest of his days were glorious. The author of “Mere Christianity” and “The Screwtape Letters,” as Malcolm Muggeridge was to do a generation later – and as you and I may do this week – spread his new and colorful wings in splendor, affirming God’s transformative power… as a new creation in Christ.

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I have taken us back a century or so, visiting names of great converts, great exegetes. We can also visit the 1970s, when the Jesus Movement and other manifestations of “Born-Again” Christianity swept the nation. A children’s song that was savored by adults too – still, to today, as we all are a little grayer or (in the case of singer-songwriter Barry McGuire) balder. But still appreciating the joy, and the truth, of “Bull Frogs and Butterflies.” From a backstage interview in Australia recently:

Click: Bullfrogs and Butterflies

9-10-12

The political conventions are over, but I have found myself thinking of the past, not the future. Forty years ago a political convention, in a rather unconventional way, led to my career as a journalist and author. It was 1972, Nixon vs McGovern, a time and a campaign famous for “dirty tricks,” and an invitation I received to be a minor player turned a national footnote into my personal narrative.

I had been a middle-level player in college political movements during the tumultuous era of student protests and campus activism, on the right. State chairman of Young Americans for Freedom chapters (the youth movement founded by William F Buckley); employee at YAF headquarters; cartoonist for New Guard magazine; Editor of Free Campus News Service. Et cetera. A budding activist.

As the 1972 political season began, my girlfriend and I were invited to a meeting in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan by a person who went on to prominent roles in Republican politics, lobbying, and government work. He shows up as a talking head, these days, on TV news shows, and so do several of his old partners. Generically, these days, a “consultant.” His proposition that day was this: the Democrats were going to hold their convention in Miami Beach; their 1968 convention had been crippled by violent protests in the streets; and Would we be willing to travel to Miami and mix with the inevitable protesters? Not to provoke anything, of course, but to… encourage the angry, to seek out TV cameras, those sorts of benign things.

There were enough winks to know what was desired. It was an odd request, I thought, not the least because no recent grad looked LESS like a hippie than I did. My girlfriend might have blended in, but I would have looked like a pit bull at a cat show. No matter: I confess that I was interested. It was a season of dirty tricks. My friend Lucianne Goldberg pretended to be a reporter, and gained a spot on the McGovern press bus. Some goniffs visited the Watergate Hotel late one night, too…

My main interest, frankly, was what I perceived to be an expenses-paid front-row seat to history. Of course I didn’t know Lucianne yet or had a hint about Watergate. Wanting to wear a second hat, however, I had the idea to go to my local newspaper, the Press-Journal of Englewood NJ, which was so small they had trouble covering local school board meetings. But I asked the editor, Laurette Kitchen, if she would be interested in some reportage by a local guy, no charge.

She was not tempted for a moment – Laurette surely was realistic about the weekly’s modest scope in the community – but did ask if I would be interested to apply for an open position, for a local reporter. School boards. Town councils. Obituaries. Since I was floating, at the time, between grad courses and a vague idea to be a teacher, I jumped at the chance. As mentioned above, writing, cartooning, editing were already in my bag of ambitions. I took their writing test on the spot, did HORRIBLY on it (believe me), but was hired on the spot anyway. I have never looked back.

I did not go to Miami. I was a local reporter (yes, writing death notices, the ladder’s first rung, even for many literary giants); moved to a Connecticut paper where I was columnist, cartoonist, and magazine editor; I became editor at three newspaper syndicates; moved to Marvel Comics and Disney; and… 70 books later, found myself watching the political conventions this year, occasionally wondering “What if?”

One thing is certain, after 40 years. Political parties have changed more than I have. Dirty tricks? I don’t want to sound like a cynic – well, yes; I do – but the schemers we will always have with us. Franklin Roosevelt’s crew committed dirty tricks at their own convention in 1940. Afraid of tdelegates’ reluctance to crown FDR for a third term, the Administration stuffed the galleries and even the ventilation system with leather-lunged partisans who sparked “spontaneous” chants and rallies on cue. Even the hallowed Abraham Lincoln was the beneficiary of dirty tricks. The Republican convention of 1860 was held in Lincoln’s Chicago, so his handlers were able similarly to shape events… and even were on hand to bribe leaders with offers of cabinet positions. Sometimes the same office to different men. “With malice toward none, with offices for all…”

But a lot has changed in 40 years. More than 10 presidential elections have passed. Politics is different. The American culture has changed. Society has been transformed. Religion is on its head; not the Bible, but practice and standards in America. At political conventions, the only thing that has not changed, it seems to me, is funny hats.

A party whose icon, FDR, once led a nation in prayer on radio, and had a signed letter to servicemen inserted in Bibles provided during the war, this year celebrated in myriad ways homosexual marriage, unrestricted abortion, public funding of free contraception devices, and obeisance to those who identify themselves as bi-sexual and transgender.

But the dirty tricks of this convention, not well reported by all media outlets, came when someone noticed that the party’s platform had quietly removed all references to God. Even the perfunctory clichés of all past platforms – “God-given rights,” “God has blessed our nation…” “Boilerplate” language of the last platform was retained, minus the God particle, so to speak.

When this gratuitous omission was discovered, it went viral in certain circles. The party leaders must have feared a firestorm, so in the opening moments of the penultimate session, the convention chairman fast-tracked a rule change that would lead to a re-written platform. What unfolded was an astonishing lose/lose proposition.

He announced the new language and asked for a voice vote; approval requires two-thirds of delegates. But the “nays” outnumbered the “yeas”; the chairman had expected a rubber-stamp but did not receive it. In confusion he asked a second time, and the results also were mixed, to be polite, about re-inserting a mild reference to God in the platform. More delays, consultation with the parliamentarian, and enough time (as revealed in subsequent photos) for the teleprompter to display his script, straight from the bosses. After the third voice-vote, certainly inconclusive, the chairman nevertheless read, “In the opinion of the Chair, two-thirds of the delegates having voted in the affirmative …”

A good result? Good for traditionalists, Christians? Only if it is commendable for a major American political party to attempt to scrub acknowledgement, or thanks, to God, from its official document; to be hypocritical about ramming it back in because a public-relations disaster loomed; to be anti-democratic about the vote… and for the delegates, representing the rank-and-file, after all, to be enthusiastically in favor of abortion, homosexual marriage, and what history has routinely regarded as deviant lifestyles; but clearly, loudly, repeatedly against the very mention of God. Angry arm-waving, red faces.

I could almost hear a sound above the crowd noise as I watched this dirtiest of dirty tricks foisted on the body politic: “Jesus replied, ‘I tell you the truth, Peter – this very night, before the rooster crows, you will deny three times that you even know me.’”

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There is theme music to this situation. The great song by Barry McGuire, from those tumultuous days of protest, more relevant year after year after year in our once-great nation:

Click: The Eve of Destruction