Monday Morning Music Ministry

4-14-25

I have spent a good portion of my years commenting on social challenges and political problems. As a political cartoonist, columnist, speaker, and blogger (and, I suppose, curmudgeon) one of my well-worn hats has been Commentator. So I am going to comment on matters that have been impressed on me lately – different realizations, different responses, than I, and most of us, I think, have considered.

For all of America’s vaunted blessings, we have been cursed, too, with myriad maledictions. “American Exceptionalism” does not mean, as professional detractors claim, that we believe that a US birth certificate bestows special privilege; it means that the American experience has been unique in practice and promise.

… or used to be.

Despite American dominance in trade and military might and financial activity we all sense that these are roller-coaster rides at best and, currently, chimeras at worst. Are we living past the expiration-dates of such aspects of national life?

I think that throughout most of history, if we asked average citizens of this country or that land or some territory what they thought their greatest Problem was – for all peoples have had some complaints – the responses would be hostile enemies, or persistent illnesses, or cruel leaders. Welcome to life; the human condition; societal struggles. Ask sentient Americans, however, and the answers would be different.

Most people would go straight to a long list of problems, challenges, and American crises. They would choose the most onerous or threatening to their conditions. Their fears and face over-extension and essential concerns would be reflected by their choices. Different than history’s list of civilizations and their discontents, the average American would tick off things like low morals, drug addiction, failed marriages, crime in their actual neighborhoods, corruption, low literacy, the anarchy of gender dysphoria, and similar social malignancies.

In other words, today’s threats – America’s threats – are more of attitudes and morals than of physical intimidation and dangers. With few exceptions (the Roman Empire, for instance, after centuries of strength and a robust economy before it slid into decay) civilizations have not dissolved in the way that America has. There is an inertia of good fortune (squandered) and a matter of false security (strength; manipulation of conditions; and the bully’s attitude of global hegemony – a hallmark of empires when they approach collapse). The malignancy of imperial passions is one of the confirmations of the Law of Civilization and Decay, in the parlance of Brooks Adams. A pattern from which societies have not learned.

It strikes me that the current state of analysis of American problems is, as a discipline, weirdly schizophrenic. “Deep thinkers” and academics of the Left, long dominant in America and Europe, lately have been answered by intellectual technicians of the Right. The debates go on, and are robust.

But so does the dissolution of our society. We have social theories, but few social palliatives. We have some new answers, but many more new questions. To endemic challenges to the human condition, we tend to return to failed, even disastrous, modes despite the attempts of History to teach us.

Pollsters and analysts discover “new” things. They draw conclusions from wrongly posited questions. They address the superficial, even as the Emperor parades before them, scarcely clothed. Omar Khayyam wrote,

All the saints and sages who discuss’d

Of the two worlds so learnedly are thrust

Like foolish prophets forth; their words to scorn

Are scattered. Their mouths are stopp’d with dust.

I believe that our current age, and “pundits” especially, have missed the main points of the crises we endure – whether from ignorance, strategic distraction, or naivete. I used the word “moral” above, describing the nature of the threats we have allowed, and which will be the vehicle of our destruction. This is our fate. But a moral crisis only partly defines the origin of our situation.

We have a spiritual problem.

And only a spiritual response can overcome it.

Nobody can argue that America was not founded on spiritual principles; nor that the Founders and Framers – even “Deists” – did not revere Biblical injunctions and models by which to fashion a society and government; nor that laws were written (and obeyed) adhering to Christian precepts. We are a Christian nation, the Supreme Court once declared. God is acknowledged on public buildings, including Congress, and on our currency. Dozens of our presidents have invoked Christ and pleaded for His guidance.

… until recently. The sick and destructive elements of Everyday Life in America are man-made, and not mere absent-minded choices, but willful rejection of God’s commandments and Jesus’s teachings. After uncountable generations of spiritual laws and spiritual examples… we now think we can tell God that He made mistakes when He assigned sexes to His children? That love and marriage are trivial matters? That we no longer need to obey His commands?

Our destruction is sure unless we, as a nation, return to God, to Christian principles.

Politicians need to discover humility. Cultural icons need to acknowledge and respect God. Pundits and pollsters need to discard reliance on false premises (because statistics don’t lie, but statisticians do). The clergy needs to shed ephemeral political correctness and return to the Word of God. Parents, and children, need to ignore the seductions of what is “in,” and follow the Bible in their daily walks. Corporate leaders, the military, the educational-industrial complex, need to follow God and not whims.

Spiritual problems are at the core of the crises we face and will destroy us… unless America experiences a spiritual revival. And God will not send a revival: We must be the conscious, willful agents of such a change.

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Click: Satan’s Jewel Crown

3-18-19

I am not sure whether the American trait of consumerism has metastasized on the body of our character. Or, as a prime suspect, post-modernism has infected religion. Or, in the latest of history’s inexorable pendulum-swings, heresy rears its ugly head once again.

Of course it is a combination of all three tendencies (and more sociopathologies), the main debate being what factors predominate. A movable feast… or infestation, I reckon.

To me, the causes are easy to spot. And the effects are hard to confront; harder still to ameliorate; virtually impossible to reverse. Regarding the reversal of the crisis in contemporary religion, I look not to the Bible (which assures me that God can bring revival) but to history books (which reminds me that His apostate people seldom seek it).

Christianity in the West largely has become a business of spiritual specialties, no longer a smorgasbord of nuanced beliefs but, virtually, a food fight. Denominations, hundreds of them, are not in themselves the problem. When the church split in two – Roman and Eastern Orthodox – that largely was political and geographic, hardly a schism. When the Roman church grew corrupt, it fostered Reform, thank God, resulting in denominations. Eventually, denominationalism. Sometimes good (Solo Scriptorum) and sometimes bad (self-styled junior popes and contorted creeds).

I think the root of all these evils – of all evil – is the Sin of Pride. Going back to the Garden, it undergirds every other sin we routinely decry: hating, lying, lusting, unforgiveness, the rest. It is why God rebuked and chastised those whom He loved. It is why He codified the Ten Commandments. It is why He sent prophets. It is why Jesus taught. It is the reason that the Holy Ghost was sent. It is why the early Church formulated Creeds.

Pride. The belief that we know better than God; that His rules might be right for others, bit not us; that – frankly – we know better than God.

The human mind has an infinite capacity to fool itself. This dangerous attribute becomes deadly when combined with a society that is encouraging, indifferent, or enabling of these self-destructive impulses, as now.

Churches no longer squabble over whether Christ’s blood is present or symbolic in the Lord’s Supper. Or whether we have free will or are predestinated. Or if the Gifts of the Spirit are for today.

Just see what many, many churches and denominations are advocating in North America and Europe these days; or countenancing under their watch –

Toleration of homosexuality, abortion, adultery, divorce. “Hating the sin, loving the sinner” often has yielded to acceptance, and even enablement.

Doctrinal views of heaven, hell, forgiveness, and sin have been abandoned or have been stretched beyond traditional recognition.

Personal – that is, spiritual – crises seldom are addressed with spiritual answers in today’s churches. Sociological solutions of “acceptance,” and the New Morality (which is no morality at all), are offered instead. One’s problems originate with society or tradition or intolerance or faulty upbringing… never one’s own sinning.

The secular ingredients of these poisonous formulas always include an appeal to Pride, and seldom an acknowledgment of God. It is almost axiomatic, isn’t it, that flouting God’s clearly presented Will is self-destructive? God has sent Commandments and prophets and teachers and inspired scribes and councils, and His Son – out of love, and for our well-being.

Why do we scramble and scratch, confuse and contort, when He has laid out beautiful paths for us?

Christianity is shrinking in North America and Europe. Thank God it is expanding – sometimes by the proverbial leaps abounds – south of the Equator, in Africa and South America, in Southeast Asia, and even in China despite persecution and killings.

And the reaction of the contemporary churches in our countries that are dotted with cathedrals and church spires?

If you don’t like a spiritual belief, ignore it. If rules regarding certain sins are unpleasant, regard 2000 years of Christianity as “backwards” and “mistaken.” If Bible passages and sermons make you uneasy… move on; elsewhere, or to nowhere at all.

In that last option, people choose to move on, but it very possibly is to hell. To those who pick and choose what they should believe, that destination is not theirs to decide. The truth does not depend on your opinion of it.

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Click: Satan’s Jewel Crown – Bruce Springsteen

7-11-16

Next week the next chapter of the political season commences, a national political convention. Otherworldly events, horrible and startling, have intruded on the already turbulent political news of recent weeks. We scarcely can catch a breath.

Nevertheless the conventions will come. Partisans and opponents prepare for a summer of conflict and confrontation, claims and calumny. And these things seem to be the mode à la mode for most people. Reasonable discourse is obsolete; debates are extinct; persuasion has been replaced by insults and invective.

We are in the midst of a revolution in America.

Of this there is no doubt. It is one of those revolutions, as approximately half of history’s examples, that did not begin with a Lexington and Concord or 95 Theses; that is, one seminal moment or event. Some profound revolutions have commenced with general discontents and scattered protests. Cultural angst usually derives from myriad sources, and then manifests itself in myriad ways. And when the dust settles (as ephemeral as dust is, things slowly come into focus), societies have been transformed.

To consider the ironies of many cultural revolutions, and citing the two examples above, Lexington and Concord led to a military confrontation, bloodshed, and a course-change among nation states. Yet the United States, newly free and independent, was in most ways indistinguishable from Great Britain. But Martin Luther’s mere petition and modest hammer and nails resulted in convulsive changes to Christian theology and worship, the political alignment of the European continent, literacy of the masses, and democracy.

We can also look to the Protestant Reformation – properly, Revolution – and see why it is difficult to distinguish between hard and soft revolutions in their midst. The Counter-Reformation’s Council of Trent was so intent on proving the reformers incorrect that it doubled down on dogma, rather than meeting minds and answering questions. Galileo’s requirement to make the sun stand still, so to speak, was a result of the revolutionaries’ challenges and the church’s orthodoxy. The Inquisition resulted. Ironic, but so goes the course of intellectual effects.

Even in anti-intellectual periods of history (and they outweigh the sober, rational times) intellectualism directs the affairs of humankind, like Archimedes’s fulcrum. So: by these criteria, I claim we are in the midst, not on the verge, of a revolution in America. And likely in all of the West: Europe also.

The breakdown of social order hurtles along with compounding velocity. We can fool ourselves that it is otherwise. Or that “incidents are merely more reported than in the past.” Or that this is a passing phase. No, the tentacles of Islamic terrorism have reached into the American and European heartlands, and, scarcely rebuffed, are met with excuses and “tolerance” as unique welcome mats. Domestic terrorism, in the guise of Black Lives Matter, gangs of illegal drug and gun lords, and other PC-protected thugs, inflict fright on the homeland.

In the Land of the Free, legal abortions have killed more babies than all the “holocausts” of recent history combined. Among Blacks, unwed mothers account for 80 per cent of the babies who are not snuffed. Urban-school dropout rates are at all-time highs, and increasingly so. Academic test scores fall, despite constantly lowering definitions of passable scores. (I think the math competency of American students currently is behind that of Chad.) (Which is a country, not a high-school kid in the next town.) Borders, the security of which is a historical marker for statehood, are a joke. The flow of drugs is less a function of porous borders than a perverse population of addicts and moral zombies who provide lucrative markets. Failed marriages; homosexuality; spousal abuse; human trafficking; political corruption; sexual perversion; kids into cutting; poverty; violence; prejudice; child predators; suicide among veterans…

Et cetera. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam.

And the church. Supposed to be a bulwark, in this supposedly Christian nation. The church – you and I, may I presume? – has been the Great Enabler. The church has compromised its standards. Christians became so deadened to Peter Abelard’s warning (in Expositiones) against “the world, flesh, and the devil” that it surrendered. It became so “tolerant” of alien beliefs that it lost its own. It was so centered on contemporary culture that it morphed from roaring lion to timid chameleon. We have lost our faith in faith.

The great historian of culture Jacques Barzun wrote in his monumental book From Dawn to Decadence that “the cultural predicament after a revolution is how to reinstate community, how to live with those you have execrated and fought against with all imaginable cruelty.” His use of the world “community” is dispositive in this discussion, the canary in the mineshaft of our cultural abyss.

For a generation we have been hearing of “community”; in fact the popular culture harangues us with the word. “The African-American community.” “The gay community.” “Community organizers…” Where are these communities? Are there boundaries and welcome signs? No, today, “community” is a concept of diffusion and disruption, not comfort and cohesion.

“Diversity” is the deceptive enemy of unity… the camouflaged term, like “community,” that divides America. For years, America exercised goodwill to build a unified nation, a melting pot. To cherish traditions but eliminating differences. But forces today work to divide and separate us one from another. To incite resentment instead of fostering fellowship.

The Entitlement Society celebrated by the enemies in our midst force-feeds Identity Politics as the new American creed. Divide; hate our heritage; destroy not only the ideals but the people themselves who cling, yes, to their Bibles and guns. Glorify Diversity even if might offend you in any way; but accept Community with those who might hate you.

“Do not put your confidence in powerful people; there is no help for you there,” is our reminder from Psalm 146:3 (NLT). As the political conventions draw nigh, we have this command, not necessarily to reject all leaders and potential leaders… but to not put confidence in them. Psalm 46:1 – The LORD is our refuge and our strength, our ever-present help in times of trouble.

And these ARE times of trouble.

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Click: Bruce Springsteen – Satan’s Jewel Crown

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8-11-14

Old and new. Up or down. Happy or sad. Passive or aggressive. Fast or slow. Liberal or conservative. Hot or cold. Yin and yang. Life is a story of extremes, and our choices between them. Can’t everything, basically, be understood through such a view?

Black or white? Right or wrong? … Good and evil? Not all things that seem like opposites ends of the spectrum are even on the same spectrum. Even mother-daughter relationships can seem, or be, at times anyway, like oil and water. But the bonds are hard to break. And, they are not opposites, really.

Aristotle thought so, that there were the extremes of thesis and antithesis, and the truth, or best formula for living, lay in the center: the “Golden Mean.” His friend Plato disagreed, sensing that there were abstract principles of right, and justice, and truth; and that humans should strive toward that truth, ennobling themselves by the quest for truth, and the fidelity to certain standards. Even before Christ, Platonists recognized Abstract Truth. Aristotelians claimed Relative Truth. The early church fathers were neo-Platonists.

In a civic sense we can say that the Founding Fathers of the United States proclaimed the “pursuit of happiness” as a right. Later politicians elevated “happiness” alone as a right — bestowed by government, since government would define the meaning of happiness every so often, and re-calibrate the Happiness Meter for its citizens.

In the spiritual realm, in religion, the question (and answer!) about two extremes is essential to our existence, not just our happiness or moral equilibrium. Many otherwise serious people secretly subscribe to the cartoon portrayal of good and evil as two silly characters sitting on our shoulders: the cartoon angel, and the cartoon devil. Yes or no; do it or don’t; speak up or shut up.

Many people believe that the figures, silly as they are, represent God and Satan. Of course. Our consciences roil. Whom shall we let persuade us?
But in this life-view of good and evil, such a view is fatally flawed. The opposite of God is not the devil. Neither is Satan’s counterpart Jesus. The Bible tells us that Satan is a fallen angel. In the heavenly realms, Satan’s counterpart is St. Michael, the Archangel… about whom many Christians neither know nor care much, and do not have to, really.

God is above all. Before all, and pre-existent. God is all-powerful, not co-powerful. All-knowing, not a partaker of certain knowledge. Creator, not co-worker. Judge, not jury.

God, not partner.

There is no counterpart to God. The spirit of evil, the devil whom we know, is so far beneath God that if we only realized that true relationship, we could better understand that sin has no power over us. Jesus confirmed this by the Resurrection and Ascension, which should ever remind us of God’s pre-eminent position in the universe, and in our lives, whether we fully comprehend it or not.

The opposite of God is not the devil, but the ABSENCE of God. He is so all-present that the only way we can find an opposite extreme is to shut him out completely from our hearts. This we are free to try, and result is not a variety of things we call sin, but worse: a coldness, a total isolation, a frightening awareness of separation that is horrifying.

Attempted suicide victims, despairing of God, have spoken of that coldness. Listen, by the way, to many atheists, such as the late Christopher Hitchens, who, in spite of themselves, often argued against God as unfair or demanding or confusing. But NOT non-existent. Such positions place them somewhere on the road to belief, not non-belief. Hitchen’s famous book, after all, was called “God Is Not Good,” not “There Is No God, So Why Are We Even Talking?”

Fortified with such understanding — whose points are posited hundreds of times in hundreds of ways in the Bible — we can stand stronger when we face moral dilemmas and ethical challenges. Jesus reigns in our hearts, and that funny character with a tail and a red suit never really sat on our shoulder at all. And if Satan’s jewel crown (sung about in those terms in an old and profound gospel song) is on your head, you placed it there once when you thought false choices were real. Let God reach down and cast it away.

+ + +

Many singers have sung the amazing gospel song of the obscure past by the forgotten composer Edgar L. Eden. One was Bruce Springsteen, of all people, in a stirring version:

Click: Satan’s Jewel Crown

10-1-12

Old and new. Up or down. Happy or sad. Passive or aggressive. Fast or slow. Liberal or conservative. Hot or cold. Yin and yang. Life is a story of extremes, and our choices between them. Can’t everything, basically, be understood through such a view?

Black or white? Right or wrong? … Good and evil? Not all things that seem like opposites ends of the spectrum are even on the same spectrum.

Aristotle thought so, that there were the extremes of thesis and antithesis, and the truth, or best formula for living, lay in the center: the “Golden Mean.” His friend Plato disagreed, sensing that there were abstract principles of right, and justice, and truth; and that humans should strive toward that truth, ennobling themselves by the quest for truth, and the fidelity to certain standards. Even before Christ, Platonists recognized Abstract Truth. Aristotelians claimed Relative Truth. The early church fathers were neo-Platonists.

In a civic sense we can say that the Founding Fathers of the United States proclaimed the “pursuit of happiness” as a right. Later politicians elevated “happiness” alone as a right — bestowed by government, since government would define the meaning of happiness every so often, and re-calibrate the Happiness Meter for its citizens.

In the spiritual realm, in religion, the question (and answer!) about two extremes is essential to our existence, not just our happiness or moral equilibrium. Many otherwise serious people secretly subscribe to the cartoon portrayal of good and evil as two silly characters sitting on our shoulders: the cartoon angel, and the cartoon devil. Yes or no; do it or don’t; speak up or shut up.

Many people believe that the figures, silly as they are, represent God and Satan. Of course. Our consciences roil. Whom shall we let persuade us?
But in this life-view of good and evil, such a view is fatally flawed. The opposite of God is not the devil. Neither is Satan’s counterpart Jesus. The Bible tells us that Satan is a fallen angel. In the heavenly realms, Satan’s counterpart is St. Michael, the Archangel… about whom many Christians neither know nor care much, and do not have to, really.

God is above all. Before all, and pre-existent. God is all-powerful, not co-powerful. All-knowing, not a partaker of certain knowledge. Creator, not co-worker. Judge, not jury.

God, not partner.

There is no counterpart to God. The spirit of evil, the devil whom we know, is so far beneath God that if we only realized that true relationship, we could better understand that sin has no power over us. Jesus confirmed this by the Resurrection and Ascension, which should ever remind us of God’s pre-eminent position in the universe, and in our lives, whether we fully comprehend it or not.

The opposite of God is not the devil, but the ABSENCE of God. He is so all-present that the only way we can find an opposite extreme is to shut him out completely from our hearts. This we are free to try, and result is not a variety of things we call sin, but worse: a coldness, a total isolation, a frightening awareness of separation that is horrifying.

Suicide victims, despairing of God, have spoken of that coldness. Listen, by the way, to many atheists, such as the late Christopher Hitchens, who, in spite of themselves, often argued against God as unfair or demanding or confusing. But NOT non-existent. Such positions place them somewhere on the road to belief, not non-belief. Hitchen’s famous book, after all, was called “God Is Not Good,” not “There Is No God, So Why Are We Even Talking?”

Fortified with such understanding — whose points are posited hundreds of times in hundreds of ways in the Bible — we can stand stronger when we face moral dilemmas and ethical challenges. Jesus reigns in our hearts, and that funny character with a tail and a red suit never really sat on our shoulder at all. And if Satan’s jewel crown (sung about in those terms in an old and profound gospel song) is on your head, you placed it there once when you thought false choices were real. Let God reach down and cast it away.

+ + +

Many singers have sung the amazing gospel song of the obscure past by the forgotten composer Edgar L. Eden. One was Bruce Springsteen, of all people, in a stirring version:

Click: Satan’s Jewel Crown