Monday Morning Music Ministry

6-20-22

Recently, here, on that other Hallmark Holiday (Mothers Day) I presented a view of motherhood that I fear is being lost in the shuffle of modern culture. To our cultural and physical DNAs, the role of mothers and the bonds between – let me be Politically Correct – between “Birthing Units” and their Tax Deductions are immutable.

I argued against the tugs of the Post-Modern lunacy that reigns today. The radical elements of the French Revolution actually tried to change clocks and calendars, not only religions and governments. Today’s revolutionaries attempt similar social atrocities. They are in our midst, not, as in “the best of times, the worst of times,” in barricades and city squares on the other side of Paris. They already run our government, the media, the entertainment industry, the education-industrial complex, and thanks to our electronic hypnotists called the internet, our minds.

… or nearly so, which is why we need yet another Great Awakening.

Before commencing a counter-revolution, and essential to it, is a basic rediscovery of our Christian heritage, and from a secular perspective at least, a commitment to its core values and disciplines. “To go forward we must first look back,” a Classical Italian thinker wrote. We are lost enough as a people without furthering the self-swindling lies that we can, and should, discard old values and discover – or invent – new ones.

I am not talking about… excuse me: I am not only talking about the Athenian Republic; nor Roman laws; nor the “Germ Theory” of self-governance that arose in Germanic forests; nor the Magna Carta; nor the Renaissance of art and thought in Florence; nor the mercantile and capitalist systems that arose in Augsburg; nor the Reformation explosion of literacy; nor the Enlightenment and Great Awakenings that inspired bourgeois revolutions and prosperity…

As magnificent as this March of Civilization has been, it seems incredible that a persuasive portion of our contemporary establishment despises its thrust. Liberal secularists seek to overthrow the basic premises of Christian society (not only to distort Christianity itself). As with most revolutions and revolutionaries, the proponents know what they hate; are dedicated to destroying institutions; and, typically, have an inchoate idea of what will constitute their brave new world.

So their imperative is to… CANCEL. Cancel what they can, tear down indiscriminately.

At the moment, in much of the world, especially Europe and America, they are quite successful. Are they clever, or are Christians, traditionalists, patriots lazy and defeated in spirit?

I began these thoughts by revisiting my Mothers Day message, and for a reason. On this Fathers Day. There is little that is more elemental to our essential selves than parenthood. The ties with our mothers and fathers. And for those so blessed, with children of the next generation. I tried to express my ineffable amazement of motherhood, the psychic (and all other) forces that exist, fierce, tender, and everything in between. That truth is what should make us despise and defeat those disordered social malefactors among us who want to destroy families, “change” sexes, and play God in uncountable ways.

But this is Dads’ Day. I did not, of course, disparage fatherhood by pausing to savor the role of mothers. But how unique is the inheritance fathers can bestow – literally, a patrimony. How special are the roles and duties God ordained: leading, providing, instructing. God Almighty has self-identified in Scripture as a He (which I am willing to concede is likely a construct of language’s limitations more than a description He must transcend as He does all matters of understanding) – which ultimately means that we are to look to His qualities with His children to form our relationships with our children.

So as a “point of personal privilege,” I am going to spill some attitudes of the best human father I knew, and share my appreciation and what I learned from his examples.

His own father was born in Germany (as were all my forebears) and was a gentle old man, yet I saw the razor strop in the closet by which he enforced discipline.

My father loved jazz as a boy, and his father let him listen and play (he was to perform with ensembles) but Sunday was the day restricted to hymns and… opera. My father developed a passion for Classic music too; as I did – through his example and the ubiquity of the music in our house, But never forced.

My father was a polymath, member of Mensa, interested in myriad things. I would not have become an obsessive collector, I think, without his example. On Saturdays he would bring me to Book Store Row in Manhattan, those ghettos of used-book stores. I caught the bug!

Dad never wrote, but when I became a journalist and author (now almost 80 books) I never have finished a piece without wondering what he would think or say.

He never drew, but he collected cartoon books and subscribed to a dozen papers so he could read – and save – the color comics. He charted my course without intending it, as cartoon work became a vocation.

He was a chemist, but never urged that profession on me (to the world’s relief, believe me). We used to argue politics until my mother cried – but it was never substantive: Mom never understood how we always flipped a switch to chat about Jack Benny or the latest best-seller. He taught me disputation, and to defend my ideas. And have them. (He became a conservative…)

He was a dedicated churchgoer, a Lutheran. Our family prayed daily and attended church weekly, but like many ‘50s families my parents smoke and drank and partied in suburbia. When I was to leave for college I told Dad my faith was getting shaky, and I wouldn’t want him to think that college would be changing my mind. “Oh, it’s just a stage,” he said. “You’ll stick with Jesus.”

At the time I thought he was a lazy Christian or indifferent about my soul! But I knew it was his brand of confidence-building. I soon did appreciate the quiet endorsement, his style.

I could go on, but most of you did not know him; maybe do, a little bit, now. I rolled out these snippets for a reason beyond nostalgia. I hope you all have similar stories, similar touchstones, and can identify through memories of your own.

There are two things to do with the collective memories we have of our fathers. We realize that we cherish not only their faces or personalities, their jobs or hobbies, even their successes or shortcomings. Those aspects combine to make one single, and singular, person. Especially if it is too late to say it to them, we must cherish our fathers.

But more, we must cherish the motive force behind fatherhood – and that is an aspect ordained by God. The continuum of family lines… our spiritual inheritance… responsibilities and joys…

With our fathers (and of course as I have said, mothers in different and special ways) we are not mere individuals thrown together by accident. And a family is not a club; a house is not a home. God has ordained the family unit, and as He is our Heavenly Father, must look to – and be – examples of the special nurturing only fathers can provide,

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The gifted songwriter Steve Goodman wrote this emotional tribute to his father. Don’t skip it!

Click: My Old Man

3-28-22

In these busy days, crowded about as we are with wars and rumors of wars, turmoil seemingly on all sides – the economy; trans-national health crises (or not); political and social recriminations; crime; challenges to traditional values that threaten to turn our world upside-down – a news item this week barely peeped amid the din. What it represents is in inverse proportion to its significance.

The poll revealed that for the first time, a minority of the population of the Netherlands claims adherence to a religious faith; membership in a church; belief in God. The majority claims to be atheist or agnostic.

To my suspicious point of view, this perhaps is the “first time” in the history of polling, but not in the history of our contemporary Western Civilization (what used to be called Christendom). We long have been living in a post-Christian society. I do not need to begin rants, no matter how valid, about “God being taken from our schools” or the Establishment’s war on Christian values, or the growing categorization of the Bible as “hate speech.”

I think what has been polled in Holland – the site of such fervent theological studies and activities in generations past, where English Pilgrims lived before sailing to the New World – is true throughout America and Europe these days.

The “Christian West” no longer holds Biblical truths as a priori components of society, government, law, justice, and relationships. This devolution seems to have happened during our lifetimes, but secularism, virtually a religion in itself, is a symptom, not the cause, of liberal theology, of pluralism, of modernity. The Enlightenment was not the first crack in our spiritual foundation, but actually the last gasp of the Theocentric view of life. Despite what many schools teach, the great Enlightenment thinkers were Christians who sought to reconcile, not separate (or “liberate”), the role of God in the world.

God’s place in the world has never changed, and cannot change. The role He plays can change, because it is what humankind practices and grants Him. When Nietzsche said that God Is Dead, he meant in the sense that society failed to acknowledge Him any more.

I frequently remind myself that Martin Luther, back when the Renaissance was evolving into Modernism, maintained that “Reason is the enemy of Faith.”

That is hard to accept. But it is impossible to refute. The intellectual anarchy from which we suffer is the result of 500 years of futility: the culture’s vain attempt, whether benign or hostile, to reconcile Reason and Faith. “Yes, but…” many people will be quick to say. But we must recognize that “progress,” as we routinely identify it, is difficult to define,. And it is a false god in any case.

Some truths need not be improved upon, because that reveals that… they are not truth at all. “Truth” – Biblical truth, Absolute Truth – is not conditional, relational, nor of any other qualification. The deadly temptation of humankind, and a sin of organized societies, is to think that we can without peril discard Biblical standards. Frankly, this started in the Garden: our problem is the sin of pride – our belief that we know better than God.

I write these words during the Lenten season. And part of my Lenten devotion brings these thoughts to my heart, more than usual.

Lent has become, to many Christians who even think about it, a vaguely religious version of New Year resolutions. At best, to some people, a way to remind us of Christ’s sacrifice. In fact that is not why Lent entered the Church calendar. I confess that this will seem glib, but it suggests that Jesus Himself, our model, might have avoided the cross by giving up chocolate for 40 days.

No, if Lent has real meaning and efficacy, it was commended to followers of Christ as a discipline in order to repent of sin. “Successful” denials of habits or entertainment can be, rather, celebrations of self. Even fasting can be self-centered, when we should seek to know God more than please God. Lent was meant to be a time to find Him anew, not hope that He will notice our obedience.

I am not disparaging motivations, but I do want us to focus properly. My own experiences includes a week once spent at a monastery. All comforts (like phones) were banished; silence was mandated; and I lived among monks. On the grounds were Stations of the Cross, and – as I hoped would be the case – I could do nothing day and night but pray, read, and meditate.

At the end of a week that was planned to draw me closer to God, I felt like I knew less about Him. However, I felt closer to Him than I ever had. A mystery, really — but with God many mysteries are to be cherished. The difference, perhaps – an important distinction – was that He seemed to draw closer to me, rather than vice versa. That is how I felt; the solitude and study allowed that.

Lent ought to be (and, God help us, not only confined to the Lenten season!) something like that experience. I am trying this year to meditate, contemplate, read the Word, and pray… and I realize more than ever how contemporary life robs us of quiet time and the ability to consecrate moments. “Yes, but…”

The Lord will manage, as He always has, with wars and rumors of wars, and all the challenges in the headlines. As if we can change, in major ways, the course of human events.

Christ came to earth – and Easter, which lies before us – not so we can save the planet, but so God can save us.

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These essays offer to “put songs in our hearts” to start the weeks. But not all songs are pretty tunes, much as such anointed music can bless us. During Lent, in the spirit not of duty but of humility, repentance, contemplation, spiritual sorrow, intimacy with God, re-dedication, and obedience, there are other forms of Christian music.

If there be a “song for our hearts” during Lent, we might adopt “Lachrimae,” a lute song pavane written by John Dowland around 1600. Its melancholy tune was set to words of a forlorn theme titled Flow, My Tears.

Click: Lachrimae: Flow, My Tears

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

7-6-20

Another thought? Gee, haven’t we discussed it enough with the protests and riots?Haven’t we put it into context with all the rules about confronting the virus? Isn’t the Fourth of July over? Are we going to debate these things endlessly? Don’t we have freedom? Didn’t we end slavery?

Well, no; yes; no; yes… not so fast!!!

Whatever views have been weaponized in these recent controversies – offensive and defensive – at the end of the day it is a good thing that citizens consider the value of freedom. Even if opponents characterize each other as using freedom to destroy, or freedom to suppress (the middle ground of debates has been abandoned), freedom is the essential matter at hand.

For those us who might confuse the terms – most of all us, at times – and to save yourself from registering for three or four college courses, a problem with contemporary society is that we have lost the distinction between freedom and liberty. Basically, freedom is an internal matter of the mind, a gift from God that is a matter of the heart. We are free from… fill in the blank; sin, for instance. And we are free to… fill in the blank; worship, assemble, speak, and publish, for instance.

Liberties are what we do with freedom. The Enlightenment thinker Rousseau mistakenly thought that freedoms were bestowed by the state (and not by God) and ten years after his death, the French Revolution erupted, defacing monuments and churches, massacring and beheading people. Significantly, the Revolution’s slogan was “Liberty (not Freedom), Equality, Fraternity.”

The Bill of Rights – the first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution – carefully recognized and guaranteed freedoms in America. Since then, and no doubt into the future, liberties have been debated, granted, modified, withdrawn. When slaves were freed, they became at liberty – subject to further efforts and guarantees – to exercise that freedom.

It is a distinction with an enormous and consequential difference. In times like these crazy days, we are reminded that Jefferson said that the Tree of Liberty needs to be watered with the blood of patriots every generation. How that blood is shed, or for what causes, are dispositive questions we ask of Mr Jefferson, yet the willingness to rebel ought to be cherished.

Whether Christians and patriots are as willing to fight for things they believe in, as nihilists are willing to fight for things they don’t believe in, is the question that confronts history right now.

Who the Son sets free is free indeed.

John 8:36 records that promise. It is one of those wonderful Bible verses that is short in words but unlimited in meaning. Simple but profound. Every word should be parsed. “Who”? – a notice to all, without restriction. “Sets free” – as we discussed, all manner of things we might be free from… and we can joyfully consider all we are freed to! “Indeed” – God puts a period on the sentence; an emphasis; a promise of totality; no reservation.

“Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, free at last!” Dr King said. Carefully. Free… to enjoy liberties. History is littered with societies that have confused liberty with license.

Jefferson, seduced somewhat by some of Europe’s philosophers, did insert “liberty” in the Declaration of Independence’s famous passage, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Brilliantly crafted needle-threading: Rights including liberty are secured by governments supported by the people… in order to guarantee God-given rights… fulfilling Natural Law… and our Creator’s will.

And “Equality,” unlike a mere slogan and goal of the French Revolution, is addressed as something that is.

Next – as it always has been – is the question of what a free people will do with their liberty.

We know what anarchists, subversives, and nihilists do with it. What will Christian patriots do?

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Click: I’m Free

7-16-18

That we live in an upside-world ought to surprise nobody who has even a cursory relationship with history and tradition. Our age is often called “modern times,” but according to philosophers and cultural anthropologists, the Modern Age ended after the Renaissance; after the Enlightenment came Postmodernism, in which many people we currently are mired… but we are past, or below, that. Clearly this is a post-Christian Age; but is has also been described as Post-Post-Modern (yes), Nihilistic, and so forth.

I raise these definitions not because there will be a quiz in in-boxes tomorrow. We are better off if we understand where we are in the sweep of time, to what twigs and leaves we cling as we helplessly ride the rapids of time.

Why? Perhaps we can discern the evidences of madness that beset us; perhaps the better to resist. In my biography of Johann Sebastian Bach a major goal of mine was to pain the absolute centrality of faith in that composer’s life. It is almost impossible to understand the genius of Bach, and his music, without understanding the role of faith in his life.

His jobs were not merely at churches where he wrote to order. He was as learned as professors of religion; he had a large library of Christian books; he taught Catechism; two-thirds of his approximate 1800 compositions were church music; and his secular music was virtually always dedicated to God.

It is how life was in Germany of the 1700s. And his fellow Protestants took their cues from Martin Luther and other Reformers of the 1500s. Remember, Luther rejected the term Modern, and declared Reason to be the enemy of Faith.

The son of friends recently returned from a bicycle semester in Europe, 11 countries. We had an evening enjoying his photos, including the great town square in Prague, where there is a statue of the great Reformer Jan Hus, bound to the stake before his immolation as a martyr for the faith… a hundred years before Luther. (From my visit, years ago, I assumed that it was the spot where he was put to death for his faith, but that was in Konstanz; the great Bohemian was commemorated in his home city.)

In those days people died for their faith. Today, they still do… mostly in what we call the Far East and in the Middle East and south of the Equator. Not so much in Europe and America. Here we largely, at best, endure annoyance for our faith; or complain to each other.

Some, like the Masterpiece Cakeshop decorator, are not asked to die for their faith, but probably would. At moment people like Jack Phillips sustain abuse, vandalism, and sacrifices to their businesses and home lives. The most our culture forces, at this moment in time.

I bring up Bach’s livelihood and terms like the Dark Ages because, as noted, it can be a healthy thing to realize how different we are than those of earlier generations. In the days of Bach, Luther before him, and especially back to the Dark Ages, churches were at centers of every community.

The center? Yes, for prolonged worship, several days a week; for municipal events of all sorts requiring space; for schooling and civil ceremonies. And many churches, especially cathedrals, took decades and even centuries to build – and every citizen took on duties. Often when a day’s work was done in fields or shops, people ate and hurried to put in long hours – willingly – for carpentry work, masonry, sculpting, stained glass arts, and so forth.

It is what they did. And desired to do.

And in ages where illiteracy was common, the churches also “spoke” the Revealed Word of God – every color of vestment or altarpieces, every carved lectern, every sign and symbol in elaborate tapestries and stained-glass windows… MEANT something, telling the Gospel story, representing Biblical truths, reminding worshipers of the lives of saints and martyrs.

In other words, as Henry Adams noted in his great book Mont St-Michel et Chartres, the “Dark Ages” where not so dark at all. One of the only times in human history – certainly the last time in Western Civilization – when an entire culture was of one mind in matters of heart and head; when societies were unified in belief and purpose.

I was reminded of this when I came across a video of singers and musicians gathering to rehearse a performance of Vivaldi’s great Gloria, in Venice, in a cathedral, at night, dedicated in a haunting performance. Chilling, and a little taste of people gathered just more than 300 years ago at the School for Wayward Girls, where Vivaldi was Music Teacher and Priest. The profound liturgical words likely date from the Fifth Century.

Appropriate association: it was in 400s that Christianity largely had been swept off the European continent. At outposts like Hippo in northern Africa, Augustine kept the scriptures alive; and in far-off Ireland Saints Columba and Patrick kept Western Civilization, and scholasticism, alive, in shrouded monasteries. Slowly, Patrick made missionary journeys to Germanic lands, converting the Vandals who previously had chased and slaughtered Christians, from Rome and elsewhere.

Look, if you can, at this video of performers gathering in Vivaldi’s place to perform Vivaldi’s sacred music. You will get a taste of times when spare times of people were devoted to serving, and praising, God.

And note the great sacred environment, also a symbol of forgotten times. Today, in this Post-Christian Era, we have tunred many churches into museum, empty of spirituality. And we have turned museums in today’s equivalence of sacred places – venerating the art of music of earlier Christians into exhibitions and concerts.

An upside-down world.

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Click: Gloria

10-2-17

This month is the occasion for a grand remembrance. The last Sunday in October traditionally is observed by Protestants as Reformation Sunday, when, on All Saint’s Day, Father Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses – basically, theological complaints – to the castle church door in Wittenberg, Germany.

Extra special is the fact that his act was in the year 1517, so the 500th anniversary is now observed. Half a millennium, roughly 25 per cent of the age of Christ’s Church on this earth. Even unchurched people know the basics of the revolution that commenced with those hammered nails – Luther’s nails ironically recalling the nails that Christ endured as He offered Himself a living sacrifice for us.

I wonder how the church will observe the “anniversary” of the Reformation. I have noticed that package-tour groups are available to cities in Germany and places associated with Luther’s life. More than that, I don’t know. I made a pilgrimage of sorts to Augsburg, Germany, in 1983, the place and 500th anniversary of his birth. In the Augsburg Cathedral I had reasonable expectations of a grand worship service, and a stirring rendition of his great hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

There was, however, a small service attended by mere dozens of worshipers, in a side chapel and a charming but very modest, ancient free-standing pump organ.

Martin Luther is honored only in the breach, as they say, in many of the lands where his spiritual revolution once seized the hearts of men. The reforms of the reform-ation are evanescent; or in dire need of revitalization. Brother Martin is, possibly, in 2017 more of a historical than a theological figure.

I have said that unchurched people know something of his life. That is, to be precise, only to the extent that anyone knows much or cares much about history these days. To paraphrase George Santayana, those who have not learned from history are already doomed. The young Luther, training to be a lawyer, decided after what he perceived to be a life-saving miracle to join the clergy, and became an Augustinian monk. God’s hand might have been in that choice, because there are clear philosophical and theological lines from Platonism to the early Church fathers to St Augustine to Luther.

As a faithful clergymen he made a pilgrimage to Rome, walking from Germany. At the Vatican he was repelled by corruption and open scandals. Even back in Germany, the Roman church was becoming an agency of money-hustling, famously among other acts selling “indulgences” that promised poverty-stricken givers that souls of dead relatives would be boosted closer to Heaven in proportion to their “donations.”

Other offenses Luther identified, such as non-Biblical cosmology, veneration of saints, and Mariology, also led to the 95 Theses. Local Catholic clergy, representatives of the Vatican, and the Pope himself were much displeased, especially as Luther’s critiques gained currency. Germany was a land of greater literacy and ecclesiastical freedom than other corners of Christendom. Rome, already making a practice of suppressing and executing other critics (Luther was not the first voice of protest) sanctioned Brother Martin; demanded that he recant his many writings (including, strangely, those that were quite orthodox); excommunicated him; and sought to imprison him.

Luther was certain that Rome intended to kill him for his ideas, as it had done with previous reformers like Jan Hus in Prague and John Wycliffe (posthumous excommunication of desecration of his remains) in England. But the rising spiritual sophistication of German princes coincided with their growing desire to be free of the Catholic Church’s political and military dominance.

Religion, culture, and politics coincided. So did another great factor: Literacy. The average German could read better, and with more depth, than other Europeans to whom words and ideas were anathema, as so decreed by Rome. Largely proscribed from reading their Bibles and having to sit through Latin church services, Christians outside the German states beheld Christianity as dear to their hearts but largely alien relative to their daily lives.

My Catholic friends will dispute my characterizations of the fervor of Catholics of the day, or of the spiritual hunger of Luther’s fellow Germans and Scandinavians, yet two counter-arguments stand: Luther’s foundation-stone, based on Ephesians 2: 8,9: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God, Not of works, lest any man should boast,” which confronted the authority of the Pope and efficacy of indulgences and putative good deeds. And… the empirical evidence, the speed at which the Reformation spread through Europe. And the world.

A lightning lesson. We will visit some other aspects of the Reformation in coming weeks. When I refer to “literacy,” I mean more than Luther translating the Bible into German, and common believers having access to God’s Word. We must understand:

Suddenly, men and women could read the Bible themselves. And think for themselves. They could write, and publish, and exchange ideas. Literature, poetry, and philosophy flourished – contemporary works, and those of the past – and political ideas were exchanged. Luther became the patron saint of democracy and the Enlightenment (although he must be considered a Pre-Modern, just as his musical disciple J S Bach, two hundred years later, must be similarly regarded, theologically).

Not a Humanist, yet of the Age of Humanism; living during the Renaissance but not a typical Renaissance man, Martin Luther astonishingly bridged the worlds of total subservience to Word of God, and the absolute independence of the human spirit. The soul. By looking back, to the faith of Jesus Himself, he was able to portend the future.

Threatened in the Church’s kangaroo court in the city of Worms – knowing that torture, burning at the stake, and death awaited him – he nevertheless refused to recant any word he had written, any sermon he had delivered, any “thesis” in his list of complaints.

No.

“Here I stand,” he said. I can do no other.”

At that moment one of the great souls of Christianity, and one of the greatest figures in Western civilization, changed the course of history. Fortified by utter conviction, Luther was also secure in the fact that when when one stands by God, one never is truly alone.

Martin Luther challenged more than Rome – he challenged humankind. In the face of authority, in the face of injustice, he challenges us today.

How would we have responded? How do you respond today… because Authority and Oppression are ever present. No less threatening, even more dangerous.

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From the sublime to the ridiculous? Many readers might consider the knee-jerk reactions of football players during patriotic exercises, in relation to Luther. They kneel; he stood. Not an absurd contrast to discuss. We shall take it up.

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Protestantism has spread worldwide. More than one-fifth of South Korea, for instance, is Protestant. Here are the famous SoKo Christian singers “Golden Angels”: –

Click: Where No One Stands Alone

7-4-16

Our recent essay concluded with a question posed by the successful Brexit vote, wherein the United Kingdom voted to end its membership in the European Union, and the certainty that many other countries soon will do the same. That question is this: If the current mode of virtually unbridled democracy had existed on July 4, 1776, how different would that world, and our world, be?

Men gathered from 13 colonies in Philadelphia to air and share their grievances. The Mother Country had dismissed their concerns, levied taxes, and arbitrarily stationed troops throughout the colonies. An emerging people – a nation of newly minted, self-conscious Americans – had chased off their lands the armies and representatives of the Netherlands, France, and Spain; pacified or cowed numerous native tribes who previously had squabbled among themselves for the same pieces of earth; and generally adopted English as the common and legal language.

In short time there arose common bonds of affection within the colonies, also trade and “commercial intercourse,” and the shared values of daily life’s fabric. Many “Americans” believed that the Crown and Parliament owed deference and special status to these British colonies. So did some prominent Britons, like Edmund Burke, whose “Conciliation With the Colonies” is still a literary classic. But London answered with less, not more, deference.

Eventually the leading figures of politics, government, business, trade, and society gathered in Philadelphia. They knew it was not to compose another letter, another petition, to the Crown. They had schooled themselves in biblical history, Greek democracy, Roman law, the Magna Carta and English Common Law, and philosophers of the Enlightenment. They were a remarkable collection of intellects, representing yet other luminaries of American history who did not attend these sessions, but supported the deliberations.

Those deliberations were no mystery; there was no shroud of secrecy, no imminent surprises. Their councils were idealistic… but grim.

The men who gathered were not, strictly speaking, suicidal. Yet they all declared – they so agreed and announced to the world – to “pledge their lives, their fortunes, their scared honor” to declare independence, to formalize nationhood.

Independence. It is a word that should still cause inchoate swelling of pride and even defiance in the descendants of those rebels, 240 years later. It is, strange but true, the motivation of the Brexit campaigners in the UK, and the nationalist movements in a dozen other European nations right now. The establishment press and political elites are trying to argue for 2-out-of-3; or claiming that voters were unprepared for the vote; or… any desperate evocations they can muster of King Canute of legend: the futile inability to order back the crashing ocean waves.

Ironically, King George III is reincarnated in the Bureaucrats of Brussels. It is the critique of Kafka and the jibes of Jefferson, however, that animate the workers and middle classes of traditional Europe these days. The soul of Sobieski, martyrdom of Martel and others who, over 15 centuries, battled to keep Europe Christian and white. But today we remember the Declaration of Independence.

The question I have posed is not rhetorical: if the document that was introduced to England and the world on July 4, 1776, in all its literary and ideological brilliance, had not been a manifesto and call to arms, but rather a Brexit-like Referendum, what would have happened? If Parliament had bound itself to the results of such initiatives, well… just think.

Historians agree that the colonies of ’76 were fairly divided in their passions: roughly one-third each loyal to the Crown, favoring independence, and indifferent. Alexander the Great felt no such restrictions; nor the Roman legions; nor waves of conquering Vikings, Huns, Mongols, Vandals, barbarians, Saracens. The European imperial powers for centuries enforced their worldwide hegemonies by means ranging from suzerainty to brutality.

Athens would have voted to be free of the Spartans; India attempted plebiscites against British rule; Zionists resorted to terrorism to establish Israel and in turn Palestinians employ bombs when ballots are not available.

Let us return to July 4. If the Declaration had been a Writ of Attainder against the King (more pacific Colonists did try to cast it so), there might not have been battles of Monmouth and Saratoga, nor the stirring examples of Valley Forge. No Yorktown, no Lafayette or Steuben, no heroes like George Washington. We cannot know these things.

But we do know that a list of grievances, not a declaration of war or even a “declaration of independence” was nailed to a church door in a German village in 1517. Martin Luther’s 95 “theses” were, basically, opinions, complaints, and pleas for reform within the Roman Catholic church. Luther was a priest in that Church, and had no desire to start a revolution.

But Christian reformers, German princes, and God Himself had other visions. The Protestant Revolution, in substance and in effects, has been as profound as the famous battles at Thermopylae, Marathon, Hastings, and Waterloo.

But I am not asking us, even on July 4, to turn to history books. Let us turn to our Bibles. Scripture tells us that we are pilgrims and strangers in this world – indeed a world of woe, a “vale of tears” – but we are Citizens of Heaven. Nevertheless, here we are now, and we are commanded to be, if not “of” this world, to be obedient residents in it. Uncomfortable passages for Tea Partiers of 1775 and today alike, but we “render unto Caesar” and recognize the Divine Right of Kings; and read that God ordains the positions of those in positions of power.

More dilemmas, especially for Christians in democracies. And more reason for us to search the scriptures and seek spiritual guidance. All the time. To pray, not just over jobs or romances, but in EVERY question affecting our daily lives… and our country’s future.

We should adopt the mindset that every choice between candidates is also a spiritual question. Every ballot item – referendum – presents us with spiritual choices. Electing representatives who decide questions of education policy; judges who will rule on abortion; presidents who send us to wars, or not – these are all decisions that God would have us consider prayerfully.

“Consider prayerfully” is not an empty cliché – well, yes it is, if we allow that. The problems in America virtually all stem from Christians surrendering their prerogatives. We have lost our way, insecure in our faith, ignorant of our heritage. Otherwise we would be throwing bums out of office, overturning noxious laws and regulations, and storming courthouses.

Whether it is time for a Convention of States (as per Article Five of the Constitution), civil disobedience, or armed resistance if, God forbid, things get that bad, Christian Patriots should think about a new Declaration of Independence. Read the old one, write a new one!

Better yet, Christians should act according to a Declaration of DEpendence… dependence upon God Almighty. Among other things, that will make America great again.

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Click: Looking For a City

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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

2-11-13

This is the Age of Specialization. If you don’t agree, look at the Yellow Pages (oh, OK, or a Google search) for local physicians. You will find categories for ailments and body parts – left and right; upper and lower – you never heard of. The same with, say, magazines. They say print journalism is dying, but “niche publishing” flourishes: serving every interest, hobby, and need.

I think of all us accept that God has some specific gift, a certain talent, apportioned to each of us. Surely we sense an aptitude we might have, as we proceed in life; we must. And, I hope, we all pray for guidance and grace as we exercise God’s career counseling, so to speak.

But do you ever wonder whether we short-change ourselves, and neglect more of God’s blessings, when we pursue one “gifting”? After all, the Bible lists nine spiritual gifts, given at different times to His children, when needed for their benefit and His purpose. I believe he has created us all as multi-talented, potentially multi-tasking, budding “polymaths” – people of many interests, capacities, and knowledge. For our fulfillment, and His glory.

The German Enlightenment philosopher (and dramatist, and critic, and, well, polymath) Gotthold Lessing made this point about the arts – about human creativity – when he dissented from Horace’s classic prescription “as painting, so poetry.” In other words, Lessing said, every art form has its own language, structure, and standards; and should be liberated from other forms. In his day, the 18th century, this was a strange concept, and is why his book “Laocoon” was revolutionary.

Stick with me! There is a theological point, and a life application. In Lessing’s play “Emilia Galotti” he takes to another level his question about whether our creative urges and emotional investments must be focused, or may be generalized, in our lives. A painter in the play asks whether Raphael would have been as great an artist if he had lost his hands.

It is a question that is not meant to address discouragement over a handicap, or whether Rafael would have merely retired to a life as a fishmonger. The implication is that we all have the creative spark; we are all capable of sensibility and creativity; and what we have to SAY is what matters. Whether it gets expressed in art or music or poetry or literature or dance; or charity or service or individual devotion, is a mere detail. We might not be blessed with a Rafael’s singular talent for dramatic composition and depiction, or a Bach’s intuitive mastery of melody and harmony… but creative urges, the talents we possess, have similar potential. And can be just as powerful in their expression.

They are from God, after all. He gives us gifts, and expects us to use them. He gives us direction, and instructs us to follow Him. He gives us commands, and He wants us to obey them. To quote Mother Teresa, God does not need us to be successful; He wants us to be obedient.

What is our job – not only our profession – in this world? What would God have us to do? And should we restrict ourselves to just one of the many tools He offers us? The singer/songwriter Stephen Hill thought about these things. He wrote a simple song with impactful lyrics, “Will He Look At Me and Say ‘Well Done’?”

When we imagine that day, that meeting, it can make things clearer for us now. Heavenly perspective. The light burden of great opportunities. The amazing array of gifts God has spread before us.

A week before Hill died last year, he wrote on his Facebook page: “Jesus said a lot of great things. He did a lot of great things. He changed the course of history with His words and deeds. The best thing He said was to love God and everybody else. We can’t judge, and that’s hard. Loving people doesn’t mean changing them. That’s even harder. I hope He gives me a break when I see Him face to face. I also hope that He forgives the mistakes I make in my zeal. Love and forgiveness. Love and forgiveness. Love and forgiveness. I’ll let God change what He wants to in other people. Change me first, oh Lord.”

Be open to the MANY ways God can change you. If you don’t sing, write. If you don’t write, paint. If you don’t paint, preach. If you don’t do anything else, love. And forgive. Be creative. You are made in the image of the Creator.

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Stephen Hill was a Baptist preacher, singer, songwriter, session musician and singer; a humble servant of God whose musical talents were immense, not easily categorized. In this song he turns blues chords and all manner of minor notes into a joyful message of encouragement. He performed this in the Netherlands in 2008.

Click: Will He Look At Me and Say “Well Done”?

8-1-11

As I write this, as you read this, the “debt deal” – negotiations about the debt ceiling, the possible national bankruptcy, the gargantuan deficits, problems with the onerous tax code – are being solved. Or not. Or there will a crisis in the markets soon. Or not. Or America’s credit rating will be downgraded. Or not. If so, it will have long-term toxic consequences. Or not. Forget my dateline – I am certain that if you read this 10 years hence, or 25, the problems and the arguments and the crisis will be little changed. Except, perhaps, for the worse.

At best, the solutions of this “debt crisis” – and I don’t know the details, even if an agreement is signed; and I wonder whether the negotiators themselves really will understand what they hammer out – will be a tip-of-the-iceberg tinkering with numbers that represent a fraction of the problem. The monster has a foot in the door, and maybe we will clip a toenail. The choices in this crisis are like many of the choices in this contemporary world, this Brave New World, the post-modern and Post-Christian era: the choices being Bad and Worse.

So the long, gray twilight of interminable foreign wars, foretold by George Orwell and so many others as hallmark of national decline, will be reflected in endless scenarios of edge-of-the-cliff, floating over the waterfall, brink-of-disaster financial wars. To acknowledge such things is not to trust God less. He can ache for revival in our land, but it is not in His nature to force it. He will bless it, of course, if we bring it about.

To acknowledge such things, however, is to trust, not doubt, the Word of God. These types of events are prophesied in His Word, and have preceded the destruction of every civilization the Bible, and history books, have ever discussed. “American Exceptionalism” does not mean that we are somehow excepted from judgment, from the consequences of our own actions.

The blooming flowers of the Enlightenment (whose leading lights like Isaac Newton in science, and Johann Sebastian Bach in the arts, were devout Christian) and Constitutional Republicanism were beautiful and hearty in mankind’s garden for a time. Then the noxious weeds of Marxism, Darwinism, and democracy spread, seeking to choke out what they may. We are seeing them succeed, for most peoples are now complicit in the New Age proposition that the state can be God, that the state can play the part of God, that they state can judge like God, that the state should compel its subjects to a) subscribe to certain beliefs and b) respond to the state’s requirements anent those beliefs.

Literature’s grand portrait of the mordant but prescient skeptic, Vanya Karamazov, spoke the truth to our own times – Dostoyevsky saw it coming – “If we regard God as dead, anything is permitted.”

Implicit in the US and Europe today is the idea that there is no God. Oh, the modern State says, if you want to believe in a God, we will allow you to. Within limits. Never in history has there been such a complete but bloodless invasion and surrender of a culture. Western Christians have tossed away their crowns and affixed shackles to themselves in only a few generations.

Meanwhile, the reminders of the real New World Order will grow grimmer and closer to home every single day. The evidence is no longer abstract or theoretical. It is becoming things like deciding between medical bills and mortgage payments; like daily news stories of Christian persecution home and abroad; like a runaway ruling class harassing us in myriad ways. Once we worried about planes being hijacked to Cuba; now we fret about politicians hijacking our future.

More than a century and a half ago, the greatest American songwriter wrote a song, Hard Times, Come Again No More. It was not the most famous of Stephen Foster’s many popular tunes… but it has grown to have tremendous impact in our day. It has been recorded by a wide variety of singers and choirs, in different styles. Curiously – or not – it has taken on the status of an anthem in Ireland. Foster is being claimed as Irish-American, although he was born outside Pittsburgh. But we are happy to share him: this song, especially, speaks these days to our common reactions to hard times and hard news.

The Irish, put down for so long in their history, had a brief period in the sunshine with the “Celtic Tiger” of a business boom. Now the Irish are laid low again – economically if not in spirit, for I have been there and have seen certain seeds of rebirth. Even as the Church reels from shameful scandal, there is a revival afoot in small and home churches.

It is not pessimistic, not even fatalistic, but provides a sort of therapy to identify with the poor and downtrodden, and to know where we might be coming from… if we are, somehow, able to revive ourselves. This video is of the Irish singer Tommy Fleming singing Hard Times to an enormous auditorium. Watch the audience, more than him: holding hands, swaying, smiling – leave it to Irish to make an anthem of a dirge.

“Hard times, come again no more”? You know, this is at base not an economic question, but a spiritual one. Its answer is still ours to make.

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The video of the audience joining Tommy Fleming and band singing Stephen Foster’s Hard Times, Come Again No More.

Click: Hard Times, Come Again No More