Monday Morning Music Ministry

9-11-23

“9-11” will never lose its meaning in America; maybe it will have evocations as long as the world lasts. More than a mere “event,” it is one of those moments in history that people will always associate with where they were, what they were doing, when the news of the terror attacks occurred.

It might not lose its meaning, but will it lose its significance?

My son Ted was an intern at one of the major cable news networks at that time. Its studios are across the Hudson from lower Manhattan, and every day – before 9-11 – he could see the Twin Towers from the station’s parking lot. On that day he put in extra hours, working non-stop on the breaking news, correspondents’ feeds, editing video footage, some of which, featuring falling bodies and splattered corpses and collapsing monoliths, have still never been publicly shown.

I frequently have challenged audiences in some of my speeches if anyone could state, even approximately, the number of victims of terrorism there were on 9-11. Hands go up, and the invariable estimates are around 3,000. And my invariable response is this correction:

No. There were approximately 3,000 victims of murder on 9-11. The victims of terrorism are about 330-million… and still growing.

If there were “silver linings” to the clouds of smoke and dust on 9-11 it was that America was briefly united, even unified, in our response, grief, and resolution. Skeptics worried that clarity, patriotism, and some common purposes would be short-lived.

Of course, the skeptics were right. Many young people responded by volunteering for military service. American adventurism, however, has led to ambiguous results if not Pyrrhic victories. A Patriot Act inherently is flawed, perhaps compromising as many rights as it purports to protect. According to elections, surveys, and streets filled with spilled blood and broken glass, our citizenry is more divided than ever.

The terrorists are following an agenda. But who wrote it?

We are in this state not because of a few hijacked planes on 9-11. There were attacks before; many since; and 9-11 only represented the most palpable and perhaps symbolic of the threats America faces. In fact, as with the Roman Empire and all empires and decadent societies throughout history, such attacks are virtual metaphors for the self-destruction that essentially plagues us.

America has invited this situation by our abandonment of core values. Our society – indeed the West in general – is a Post-Christian culture. Among those who might say “I told you so” are the “great cloud of witnesses” described in the Bible (see Hebrews Chapter 11) and, by the totality of His Word and Commandments and Judgments, God Himself.

For further commentary (“Don’t take my word for it!”) I will commend some reflections by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He was the Soviet exile, a man who fought Communism and somehow survived persecution and prisons (the gulags) and escaped to the West after his writings were smuggled out of Russia; they won praise and Nobel Prizes.

I will quote him briefly but wish I could share his thousands of pages. Find his books! His analyses – his warnings – are dispositive today. They are not mere critiques of monstrous Communism. They recognize the Bureaucratic State that threatens “democracies” today. They attacked all of the decadent West. They recognized that the Crisis of the Twentieth Century was not confined to the Communist State into which he was born.

The infection, he said, is not Communism per se – although, of course, Marxism is alive in American education, media, and party politics – but secularism. The rejection of God. Therefore he attacked not only Stalin of the past but the Bidens of the present; not only the Soviet apparatchiks but the American Dark State:

If I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than… “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”…The failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century.

We are witnesses to the devastation of the world, be it imposed or voluntarily undergone. …sucked into the vortex of atheism and self-destruction. This plunge into the abyss has aspects that are unquestionably global, dependent neither on political systems, nor on levels of economic and cultural development, nor yet on national peculiarities.

It was Dostoevsky… who drew from the French Revolution and its seething hatred for the Church the lesson that “revolution must necessarily begin with atheism.” That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that preached by Marxism…. hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions.

Through decades of gradual erosion, the meaning of life in the West ceased to stand for anything more lofty than the pursuit of “happiness”, a goal that has even been solemnly guaranteed by constitutions. The concepts of good and evil have been ridiculed for several centuries; banished from common use, they have been replaced by political or class considerations of short-lived value. It has become embarrassing to appeal to eternal concepts, embarrassing to state that evil makes its home in the individual human heart before it enters a political system.

Atheist teachers in the West are bringing up a younger generation in a spirit of hate for their own society. Amid all the vituperation, it has been forgotten that the defects of capitalism represent the basic flaws of human nature, freed from all limitations just as the various human rights are; that under communism (and communism breathes down the neck of all moderate forms of socialism, which are unstable) — under communism the very same flaws become completely unbridled in any person with the last degree of authority; and that everyone else under that system truly does attain ‘equality’ — the equality of destitute slaves.

Instead of the ill-advised hopes of the last two centuries, which have reduced us to insignificance and brought us to the brink of nuclear and non-nuclear death, we can only reach with determination for the warm hand of God, which we have so rashly and self-confidently pushed away…. If we perish and lose this world, the fault will be ours alone.

From more than 50 years ago Solzhenitsyn speaks to us. Prophesies fulfilled before our eyes. Solutions under our noses.

Several correspondents have written lately to me about so many “gloom and doom” subjects in these messages, when I promise “a song in your hearts.” Well, yes. But I am a reporter of Biblical things and current events – I try to eavesdrop on the Lord. So these messages convey the facts of our situations, not fantasy.

God, however, writes “between the lines”! Turning to Him, repenting and reforming, will heal our land and dispel gloom and doom!

It is not too late – as individuals and as a nation!

For I the Lord will hold your right hand; Fear not! I will help you! (Isaiah 41:13)

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A dear friend has written that this is a song not in our hearts but to our hearts:

Click: Hold to God’s Unchanging Hand

6-14-21

Do you ever have the feeling that life has slipped its moorings? Not necessarily your personal life, but the world today; tradition and stability. Sanity! Do events sometime seem out of control? Or… maybe more than “sometimes”?

Do not check your personal “check engine” light. Life has slipped its moorings.

There are times we are in charge of our own fates. And many more ways in which we are not. It has always been thus, and always will be. I am not a defeatist, nor fatally pessimistic. Mathematically, we are individuals in a big world, crowded with people. If we are, in many ways, pilgrims and strangers, or a leaf in a stream, we can feel helpless… but never should feel hopeless.

We balance – or we must balance – the secular and the sacred. This world is not our home, we believe; we are only passing through. Yet, even with the Celestial City in view, the passage can be rough. We have been warned; hard times should not surprise us.

I invite us all, having framed these thoughts, to take a long look at humankind’s history, a very long overview. Civilizations and societies have had distinctive periods, and “we” have responded in very different manners to some challenges that are very similar in nature.

In primitive times, up through pre-Modern civilizations, when societies felt helpless, they turned to superstitions, or to religious hopes, and finally to reliance on the revealed God.

In subsequent Post-Modern and Enlightenment eras, societies tended to become reliant upon “progress” and science, education and literacy.

In the Post-Christian, self-oriented, nihilistic age we now endure, societies have become reliant on “self” (instinct and appetites) and chance – which really means trusting to blind luck, the inertia of daily life, seemingly confirmed by prosperity.

The next stage, whenever we slide there, cannot bring anything but unprecedented dislocation, change, and misery. And, probably, expressions of surprise from those who ought to have known better.

Anyone can reckon that in a state of such drift, something – a nation, a movement, a philosophy – will fill the void. Secularism? Communism? A revanchist and aggressive China? It will be something malign: we cannot assume, as many observers have done, that through all history’s changes, one thing that evolves positively is a steady “progress” – a march toward ever-expanding personal freedom and profitable responsibility.

This is self-swindling nonsense. Every phase of humankind’s history, whether in small primitive pods or in continent-wide empires, has revealed a common impulse whose name is Domination.

And, I suggest, stronger than the need to dominate is humankind’s ultimate need to be dominated. It is a genetic imperative, a cultural inclination, a social excuse… a choice, even if inchoate. Of course, this trait is universally and rhetorically denied.

People look toward, and for, leaders. Humans organized under caesars and kings; they needed space, and placed rulers over themselves. When restive, they reorganized as serfs and subjects, but loving to love a sovereign. The spread of churches was quickly under control of popes, bishops, and metropolitans. In Post-Modern times, organization and centralization were behind the facades of freedom and liberty. Constitutions drafted to protect citizens from government are being used to enable government intrusion and control. America, having “thrown off the yoke” of royalty, reveals in uncountable ways – celebrity mania, hero-worship, blind trust placed in the “influential” – that we are a people eager to find a boot to place upon our heads. The internet heralded unfettered freedom, but is, rather, intrusive, agencies of spying, favoring lackeys but censoring everyone else. The web and Dark State know what we think, and tell us what to desire. Things to crave. And whom to hate.

This is not moral progress; nothing at all resembling a positive evolution toward freedom and responsibility.

We must acknowledge the mechanistic truth that humankind instinctively does not seek liberty. Subconsciously, I believe we all desire to choose, if we can, whom we will serve; not really that we be free from servanthood. Whether the boot will be velvet-covered, or full of hobnails. Like infants as they grow, actually desiring discipline and direction? Yes.

We all desire a leader; and we all need a Savior. In that way humankind has not changed over the world, over the millennia.

If it were possible, in the world’s current state of moral anarchy, toxic materialism, and social anarchy, to throw this vehicle called Western Civilization in “reverse” gear, there would be a chance. It is a slim chance, of course, because the evolution-chart indicates that human beings do not usually make choices in our own self-interest. When we don’t… we invent terms and philosophies and lies to fool ourselves that we have learned lessons.

The general solution has been available for many millennia; and specifically available for 2000 years. We know that.

The God of Judgments can seem harsh (He is not, but His judgments are; your choice). And His Son, the Creator of the Universe and Savior of your soul, softly and tenderly is calling us home.

It is returning “home,” to God’s teachings and promises; and not charging off toward new promises, philosophies, and chimeras, that will have us secure in our moorings – where we, subconsciously perhaps, have always wanted to be.

“Know today whom you will serve.”

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If you can tolerate the Alberti Bass, let Will Thompson’s old musical plea, and Jesus’, touch your heart:

Click: Come Home – Softly and Tenderly Jesus Is Calling

4-11-16

What would you call the age we live in? When I was a child, we were told that the Machine Age had been superseded by the Atomic Age. But that was marketing of sorts. Anyway, nuclear energy and the ability to incinerate the planet have become mundane topics. We might be in the Computer Age, but that term soon will sound as musty as new-fangled “horseless carriages” and “talkie movies” that once inspired awe.

I think we all flatter ourselves that we are blessed to be “modern,” up-to-the-minute (if not quite hip). So is this the Modern Age?

Actually, philosophers and artists maintain that the Modern Age ended long ago, followed by Post-Modernism… which has also ended. Eclipsed by – Post-Post-Modernism? Some people use this term. Do you get the feeling that we have just taken our seats at the stadium, and the game is already in extra innings?

My preference, and it seems very logical to me, is that our age is best described, in perspective of history’s grand sweep, as the Post-Christian Era. Some people would dismiss that as being too theocentric… but in view of the cultural, artistic, intellectual, economic, even diplomatic, and yes, religious, core of two millennia: yes, “Post-Christian” describes where we are.

“Modern” and its permutations are terms that tend to elude us. Whether the Renaissance was the last whiff of Classicism or the dawning of Modernism is debated. But we must go back in history that far. Luther was the last Pre-Modern. The Age of Reason was on the horizon in Europe, espied from the platform of Humanism. Yet Luther, the last Medievalist, held fast to the proposition that “reason is the enemy of faith.”

More than two centuries later, Luther’s artistic disciple Johann Sebastian Bach summed up the heritage of the Gothic, Renaissance, and early Baroque eras. Intending to summarize more than innovate, he was not seduced by potential acclaim nor his effect on the future. In fact, he was rejected by the first “Moderns” in Rococo Europe. Bach’s scientific contemporary, Isaac Newton, was representative of the Age of Enlightenment.

I am aware (all too aware, because it is clearly counter-factual) that many schools today teach, when they teach at all, that Enlightenment scientists and philosophers freed Western Civilization from the shackles of religion and superstition. That’s what “enlightened” meant, right?

Wrong. Philosophers like Pascal and Locke; scientists like Galileo and Newton; and creators like Bach and William Blake, all saw the substantial advances in their fields as confirming, not disproving, the existence of God and His plans. Newton concluded, it has been said, that we live within the space of God’s mind. The poet Alexander Pope wrote: “Nature and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night; God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ And all was Light!”

But then, 50 years or so later, the mad swirl of Romanticism, revolution, industrialization, and social turmoil broke forth as like a lanced boil. It has not healed; the burst dam has not been mended. We have had Marxism since the 1840s, Darwinism since the 1850s, wars and rumors of wars since the 1860s, and the Industrial Revolution that brought many blessings but also brought poverty, injustice, dislocation, and wage-slavery instead of less pernicious traditional slavery.

Many people have not yet come to full realizations about the enormous disruptions caused by elements of contemporary life specifically of the past 200 years. As people became educated; climbed the ladder of prosperity, or were crushed under it; and earned the new commodity of leisure time… religion became less important.

People relied less on God. And for those vulnerable souls who need God’s blessings, the Modern State and its Socialist and Marxian manifestations are there, attempting to substitute for the Church. These tendencies have multiplied and accelerated. Not only the Dynamo (Henry Adams’ term for the Machine Age’s deity, supplanting the church) but the arts and ever-more secular philosophers, all worked to convince people that God was dead.

God has indeed died, in the Nietzschean sense that society no longer acknowledges Him, depends on His Word, worships His Son, or serves Him.

This is true. The inclination of sinful souls to reject God finds comfort in a culture that makes it safe to reject Him. Denominations even twist scripture and call evil good. Humankind’s soul is no less dark then ever, wars are more brutal, and the world hurtles toward unprecedented chaos, envy, and strife.

The Secularists have an answer: that we distance ourselves even further from God and His Word.

We have itching ears, as the Bible foretold – we hear what we want to hear. We invite cultural enablers.

We are happy to revel in wine, women, and song – or what seduced the decadent Romans, called “Bread and Circuses.”

How do we respond to all the biblical prophecies, all the warnings of our wise forebears, all the lessons of fallen civilizations gone before? We laugh and ignore the certainty of calamity.

The anti-religious impulse of scientists, of Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Relativism, Secularism, the negative effects of finance capitalism and repressive Socialism, the pollution of the earth and of our minds; indeed, human nature unfettered for the first time in history – where has it gotten us? Where are we headed? Adherents of those false gods should repent, as should we ALL.

Given the signs of the times and biblical prophecy, those who reject God ought to repent or at least desperately HOPE there is a God. For their alternative ideas have not worked, but rather have brought the world to chaos. Welcome to the brave new world of Post-Christianity.

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Our Click this week is a song by Merle Haggard, the iconic American poet, songwriter, and singer who died this week on his 79th birthday. Of the many genres he mastered, God and Country predominated. This song is among his best. Sadly, it is as pertinent now as when he recorded it, 1971.

Click: Merle Haggard – Jesus, Take a Hold

Fifty years ago, on July 9, 1961, Whittaker Chambers died. His life had a profound impact on my life, and this was because, during Chambers’ career of brilliant achievement and sordid intrigue, God came to have a profound impact on his life. Along the way, Whittaker Chambers affected American life at two times, in two ways, not just in profound ways, but with profound implications.

Forty years ago, on the 10th anniversary of his death, I was a student at American University in Washington DC. I was active, locally and in the nearby national headquarters, in Young Americans for Freedom, the conservative campus youth group founded by William F Buckley. A small confraternity in DC that called itself the Whittaker Chambers Society wanted to meet in commemoration of their friend, and they contacted our chapter to see if we could provide a room at AU. It was not a large group, loosely organized but tightly knit, and this anniversary meeting bid to overflow a living room.

There were few in the group whom I recognized – the legendary writer Ralph deToledano chaired the evening, which largely consisted of reminiscences – however I knew that I was in presence of battle-scarred veterans and authentic heroes, each with a poignant story. And there was a ghostly echelon in attendance as well. The great battle of the 20th century, between Communism and freedom, still raged. In this room were former Communists, once so dedicated they were willing to die for the cause… and bring down America in the process. Also in the room – in fact, virtually the same people – were folks who knew what freedom was; what it cost; what it is worth; and that it, too, demands a willingness to die in its cause. They had all lived through what Arthur Koestler called “Darkness at Noon” in the erstwhile belief that Communism was mankind’s salvation.

Chambers was merely the most prominent of many similar intellectual warriors, a representative of types. His father Jay was a cartoonist and illustrator, drawing for the children’s magazine St Nicholas (I see innocent line-drawings in my collection of that magazine). Whittaker’s parents divorced; his grandmother went insane; his brother committed suicide. The troubled youth entered Columbia University, where he wrote a campus play of a blasphemous nature that was controversial beyond Morningside Heights, throughout New York City. He wrote essays and poetry that caught the eye of his instructor Mark Van Doren, and of fellow students Louis Zukofsky, Lionel Trilling, Clifton Fadiman, and Meyer Schapiro, all destined to be distinguished in the arts.

Chambers was attracted to radicalism; he became a Communist and, among his jobs, he served as editor of The New Masses. (The magazine’s cartoonist Jacob Burck, another eventual renegade from Stalinism, in later years told me stories of Chambers sleeping in his Union Square studio.) Behind the brutal polemicist and radical advocate, however, was, always, the sensitive artist. Chambers translated the gentle children’s classic Bambi into English – a tender masterpiece in itself.

During the 1920s he drifted further toward radicalism and radical associates, including Soviet spies. He was recruited to be a courier for Soviet spy rings in Washington. Many secret Communists held middle- and upper-level positions in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Chambers’ job was to protect false identities but coordinate the collection of government documents and deliver them to “handlers” in New York. These government officials were also “in place” to influence American policy during the New Deal and the War. Among the social (and Communist Party) friends of Chambers and his new wife Esther Shemitz was Alger Hiss, State Department official, and his wife Priscilla.

Gradually, despite the glamour of espionage, but also because of the danger of espionage, Chambers’ love affair with Communism waned. Additional factors included an introspective contemplation – stirrings of a spiritual awakening – of the miracle of his newborn baby’s ear; the Hitler-Stalin Pact; and the brutality of fellow operatives being murdered by Moscow for ideological “impurities.” Finally, instead of passing along all stolen documents, Chambers kept some that implicated spies, and hid them away as insurance so the Party would not harm him or his family. He blended back into society.

Chambers bought a farm in rural Maryland. He and his wife became Quakers (though not pacifists), and he lived close to the soil. But his talent could not be sublimated; his soaring intellect, far-ranging sympathies, and sensitive prose brought him to the attention of TIME Magazine’s publisher Henry Luce. Chambers eventually became a reviewer, staff writer, and editor. For TIME and LIFE he wrote cover stories and essays that were widely admired. He tempted fate as a former member of the Communist underground who “went public,” but that very fact became a sort of insulation too. In the 1940s he privately warned the Administration of the spy network permeating the New Deal, but FDR himself dismissed the information, and disciplined nobody, removed nobody.

After World War II, it became another matter. America’s former Soviet “ally” openly challenged the US across the globe; former “plants” in the government were rising to positions of prominence. Alger Hiss, in fact, was a visible and celebrated architect of the United Nations. Additionally, other former Communist spies and couriers, starting with Elizabeth Bentley, were “speaking.”

The next several years were the stuff of high drama, if not legend. Congressional committees called an array of former spies, accused spies, and “fellow travelers” who variously exposed or protected friends. Politicians like a young Richard Nixon established their careers (in Nixon’s case, on Chambers’ coattails); a young Joe McCarthy fueled his own, shorter, career spurt. The statute of limitations had expired on Hiss’s espionage, but he sued Chambers for libel. In two spectacular trials, a combination of Chambers’ memory, a telltale typewriter used to copy the stolen documents, and Alger Hiss’s self-incriminating slips, resulted in a perjury conviction that sent Hiss to prison for five years.

The Left has always made a cause of Hiss (“he was framed”; “he was persecuted as a progressive”) but documents released after the collapse of the Soviet Union uniformly confirmed the accounts of Chambers and other ex-Communists, the guilt of many embedded espionage agents, and the shame of politicians and journalists who covered for them. Similar to the Establishment’s canonization of Hiss despite the evidence against him, the same Establishment villified Chambers… and still does. It is a gross injustice. It is hardly the Left’s only blacklisting campaign.

In 1952 Whittaker Chambers was formally vindicated but impoverished by all of his legal bills. He wrote a book, Witness, that became a best-seller and placed the excellent publishing house Regnery on the map. It is one of the great autobiographies in American letters. As a political document, it traces Chambers’ life through anguish to righteous indignation over social injustice, to enlistment in the Communist cause that initially was idealistic. It sparkles with intrigue but spares none of the grunge of underground life. He describes the role of minor bureaucrats and no-name couriers in momentous international events. Fascinating.

But we are here to discuss the spiritual side of Whittaker Chambers, and Witness, as well. The book affected me deeply as a youngster: the confessions, the sensitivity, the simultaneous idealism and pessimism, the amazing literary style. What a writer! I was not alone, of course – this man, and his anguished journey including recantations and painful betrayals, changed the political creed of no less a reader than Ronald Reagan, former New Deal liberal.

Implicit in the second half of the Chambers story – after he literally was born again – is one of the greatest faith stories of the age. In characteristically brilliant fashion, he does not grab readers by the lapels to convince them of the Reality of God: he assumes it, he lives it; witnesses to it. That is enough. Not merely an adequate presentation of the role of faith, but supremely sufficient. After his autobiography was published, Chambers served briefly with National Review magazine, and, forever controversial despite his retiring nature, he died suddenly, 50 years ago.

Of the people who gathered at American University 40 years ago, as I looked across that room, most had known Whittaker Chambers. It was a privilege I missed, but it is special enough to know him from his work and his words; to have been inspired, and to try to live a life of faith and fidelity — and a larger patriotism than most people exercise — that he charted.

He was not a Republican: he knew both parties were complicit in treason, and always capable of it. He was not a conservative: he called himself a “man of the right.” He was not even an optimist: he believed that Communism (and the collectivist mentality) would barrel ahead, and that he, Chambers, was actually switching to the “losing side” of history. Of course he was speaking of worldly events, not the biblical perspective. History is not exactly contradicting him.

Having spoken of his eloquence, and his faith, I can do no better, on this anniversary of his passing, to finish with some quotations. America would do well to learn from them, still; Christians would do well to study them; and I wish everybody I knew would find a copy of Witness and read it.

Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies.

I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time.

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Finally, excerpts from a cover story Chambers wrote for TIME magazine (can you imagine TIME running such words today???), the first Christmas after World War II ended:

Peace and homecoming, peace and homecoming rang like the clangor of Christmas bells in the heart of nearly every American last week….

Be still, and know that I am God.

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Fitting to this day, it seems, is the brief Funeral March by Henry Purcell:

Click: Whittaker Chambers, rest in peace.