Monday Morning Music Ministry

5-10-21

I have been reading, and re-reading, classic novels and old books lately. I don’t really live in the past, although these days I find myself wishing I could.

But as I get older I realize how much I have missed of life, and in life. Rather than regret this, I make up for that lost time – reading, as I say, the classics. And I discover music of the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Classical periods of music; and even have been enjoying music of the early Romantic period that I previously disdained. How odd that music of the 1840s can be “new.”

I know that not everyone will have the same tastes that I do, but my point is that we have a vast heritage that most of us never explore and appreciate, much less know. There is an old Italian saying that we cannot move forward without looking back. Truth in irony. “What’s past is prologue.” The greatest application of this view is that it is difficult to know the Savior, and gain Heaven, without a grounding in ancient scripture.

Well. A few of the old books I lately have read have surprised me in startling ways. Two were by Oscar Wilde. In a Christian essay, yes, I will mention them.

First, a true story about him. Near the end of his life, after surviving two brutal years in prison (for morals offenses) he encountered a friend on the sidewalk. The friend knew of Oscar’s impoverished state and the shabby room he rented. He asked how Oscar was doing, and the reply was, “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”
Ever ready with an epigram, Wilde suggested that he was near death, and knew it; and the comment was a stereotypical remark of a fastidious homosexual. It was his flouting of Victorian sensibilities in the 1890s, and affairs with famous men, and libel suits, and public scandals, that resulted in his two-year sentence at hard labor.

Some day, here, I shall write more, but pertinent to my topic are the two books he wrote while in prison. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (that is, the Jail near Reading Town) and De Profundis (“From the Depths”) are extremely moving short works. They are introspective confessions, not of his acts, but of larger matters of the soul and God’s loving justice – not what one might expect. He dwells upon the Savior, and understands Scripture, and speaks with clarity through the moral fog and fetid world to which he presumed he justly was consigned.

In his philosophical anguish we finds his lines that Some do the deed with many tears, And some without a sigh: For each man kills the thing he loves, Yet each man does not die.

There are some people yet today who debate whether Oscar Wilde’s last days and last writings were searching for Christ and forgiveness. Yet his earlier fairy tales clearly were Christian allegories; and indeed on his deathbed he had a friend summon clergy that he be baptized, and made confession.

Not the impression history has of Oscar Wilde. Similarly, I have just finished reading three very thick, and fascinating, volumes, the complete letters of Vincent van Gogh. How he produced such an abundance of paintings in his short life, much less the massive amount of letters, is astonishing. History tries to tell us that he was a tortured, odd man, hermit-like and obsessive.

The van Gogh of his letters has constant money troubles, but chats with his brother, encourages other artists, comments on illustrators and cartoonists (!) in England and America, dwells on artistic scenes and painter’s tools… and he talks about God. In his youth he considered becoming a minister; he visited a rescue mission in London; and he was a Christian. Doubters today search for evidence of his occasional doubts, sigh, but once again, history paints a distorted picture.

My theme here is that there was a time not so long ago when Western Civilization – and I mean the arts; not only “common people” – believed in God, belonged to the church, accepted Christ. Of other recent “reads,” probably more than half of Hans Christian Andersen’s many tales have Christian themes. Robinson Crusoe as a character constantly dwells on Christ’s mercy and the ways of God. Mozart’s letters, to his father, and to his wife, frequently referred to God in the most natural way.

And so forth. Not Sunday-School lessons, not religious tracts, but much of popular literature and the arts, and “common” life, revolved around God and the Bible and Jesus Christ. Once upon a time.

Is it like that that today? Remotely? Speaking of “remote,” just take TV, for example. Condense the plots or jokes, the “situations” of situation-comedies, the premises of dramas and… realize how far we have fallen.

We can use another barometer. The man serving as president promised to appoint a cabinet that represents America, but has more transsexuals than professing Christians. An avowed Catholic, on his first day in office he directed that taxpayer funds be used to promote the killing of babies in foreign countries.

And this week’s “National Day of Prayer” proclamation did not mention God once.

We may expect God to respond accordingly.

Even the contemporary culture’s perfunctory “God bless,” uttered as if to say, “Have a nice day,” and unfortunately common with Christians, was not tossed into the proclamation when read to cameras.

In the West, we once devoted ourselves, even in the arts, to seeking, knowing, and explaining God. Today we seem to work hard at avoiding, ignoring, defying, insulting, and denying God. We have crossed the line of even pretending to be Christians any more.

God, You are real. God help us. Forgive us. Help Thou our unbelief.

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Click: Help Thou My Unbelief

I Believe, Help Thou My Unbelief

1-4-21

Regarding the pandemic that has been plaguing the world, many references are made to the Spanish flu of 1918-19. That wave of influenza devastated Europe and North America, overlapping the devastation of history’s bloodiest war to date.

We can note two things. One, as with the Spanish flu, many of the world’s most horrible plagues, epidemics, infections, pandemics, and deadly forms of death, have been accompanied by wars and violent societal dislocations. It is grim logic to suggest that plagues can precipitate disruptions among populations, and just as easy to suppose that, say, the de-populations caused by some wars (more than half of some towns during the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, for instance) brought about changes to arable land, differences in public health, even reforestation and climate change.

Then, some of history’s most famous plagues and diseases (many with bizarre, color-related names like Black Death, Yellow Fever, “Ring Around the Rosy…”) proceeded in some years to kill half the people in Europe.

The other aspect we may note, after the gruesome partnership of malignant effects on physical health and societal health, is the relatively few respites the world has enjoyed from these plagues. When the Spanish flu of a century ago is mentioned, few people realize what a blessing it has been – relatively speaking, of course – for the world to have been spared major health disasters for a century. The swine flu, the bird flu, the Asian flu, and few “Biblical” or Medieval-type epidemics, have been visited upon us for a century.

A very long list of major plagues, mostly in the northern hemisphere, mostly emanating in the Far East and moving westward, can be compiled starting in the 1300s. Some were localized to mere wide swaths of land; some covered entire continents. The effects on people? Obviously, adjustments in migration and living patterns. Clearly, books like Boccaccio’s Decameron and Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Less clear is whether waves of religiosity and piety, or skepticism and humanism, were peoples’ direct reactions.

A history lesson is salubrious, no? There will be no quiz next week, but knowledge is power. I am not a fear-monger, and after almost a millennium we should as desperate for lessons as we are for cures.

On the brink of vaccines whose palliative properties, and side effects, we can in no wise predict, I am persuaded that a look backward, and not only forward, is healthy too. The future is hazy; the past is clear. 2020 vision, I am tempted to invite… except farther back. In fact we may profitably adopt some manners of inquiry that have been considered outré for a long time; regarded as anti-science, even superstitious. But scientists generally ask how something started and how it might be treated; doctors ask how to treat and cure things.

But students of the Bible, believers in God, and theologians ask (or they should ask) why. Many of the judgments of God – I should say the laws and requirements that brought judgments under the Old Testament – were answered by the Person and the work of Jesus at Calvary.

Yet we are not free to sin. Although the law has been fulfilled, the commandments were not made to be broken.

Which mean that I think it is legitimate – no, imperative – for Christians to ask whether God can bring punishments, warnings, lessons, on His children. And the answer is “of course.” The Bible even tell us that God chastises especially those whom He loves.

Uh-oh.

Have we, in the Christian West, plausibly have earned His disappointment, His anger, even His wrath? In this generation, this century, the “advancement” of civilization? Are we serving Him better, are we more faithful… or less so? Has society – has the Church itself – grown closer to the Word; or more secular, more humanist, more relativist?

Do we, perhaps, deserve His chastisement?

Can you picture that a Holy God might grieve over a perverse and lost generation? Wouldn’t you? God has not threatened us, as much as explained to us, that chastisement will come in the case of spiritual infidelity. And as Lincoln quoted and believed to his core, quoting Scripture, “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Can something as horrible as COVID be sent by God as a judgment?

The answer has to be found in another citation by Lincoln that “the Almighty has His own purposes.” And we remember the very plausible fact  that humans often bring problems upon ourselves.

Whether we ever find a cure for that tendency… leaves us wondering. We have not learned yet. Have we learned, alternatively, that when such problems come, as they will, that our first tendency should not be to look to governments, or drug laboratories, for help, but upward to our Heavenly Father, for forgiveness?

And inward, to our flawed souls. To this lost and perverse generation.

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A friend came around, Tried to clean up this town; His ideas made some people mad. He trusted his crowd, So he spoke right out loud; And they lost the best friend they had.

Click: Sin City