Monday Morning Music Ministry

10-19-15

Later this month we will observe the 157th anniversary of Theodore Roosevelt’s birth. One of the greatest presidents of the United States; the “Most Interesting American”; and, often forgotten, one of the most devout and observant Christians to have served as Chief Executive.

TR frequently quoted Bible verses (and titled two of his approximately 50 books from Biblical passages); he volunteered to teach Sunday School while a student at Harvard; he often delivered impromptu sermons when requested at churches he visited (and seldom missed Sunday worship throughout his life, whether in the wild west or in the White House); and, despite higher-profile and more lucrative offers after he retired from the presidency, he became Contributing Editor of The Outlook, a modest weekly Christian opinion journal.

His faith, of course, was “manly,” in the parlance of an earlier age – bold, unapologetic, encouraging. He once said, in an address to the newly formed Gideon Band: “The Christianity that counts is the kind that is carried into a man’s life. The man who does ordinary work well is working for the Lord. I do not like to see a slack man…. If you do not find in a man any outward manifestations of the Spirit, I am inclined to doubt if it ever has been in him. I like to see fruits…”

In the same manner he also spoke at a church dedication: “In business and in work, if you let Christianity stop as you go out of the church door, there is little righteousness in you. You must behave to your fellowmen as you would have them behave to you. You must have pride in your work if you would succeed. A man should get justice for himself, but he should also do justice to others. Help a man to help himself, but do not expend all your efforts in helping a man who will not help himself.”

Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite Bible verse was Micah 6:8 – “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Imagine this today, but in 1917 Roosevelt wrote an article for the Ladies’ Home Journal magazine, and the subject was “10 Reasons Men Should Go To Church.” Imagine a president of our time writing for magazines as diverse as Ladies’ Home Journal, The Outlook (and National Geographic and the children’s magazine St Nicholas and The American Historical Review and Cosmopolitan and The New York Times and American Museum Journal and…). And imagine a president today exclaiming Christian faith. Frequently. But to TR every venue was a pulpit, and a bully one at that.

Words for then, words for now: here is his article on Why men should attend church.

In the actual world, a churchless community, a community where men have abandoned and scoffed at or ignored their religious needs, is a community on the rapid downgrade.

Church work and church attendance mean the cultivation of the habit of feeling some responsibility for others and the sense of braced moral strength, which prevents a relaxation of one’s own moral fiber.

There are enough holidays for most of us that can quite properly be devoted to pure holiday making. Sundays differ from other holidays, among other ways, in the fact that there are 52 of them every year. On Sunday, go to church.

Yes, I know all the excuses. I know that one can worship the Creator and dedicate oneself to good living in a grove of trees, or by a running brook, or in one’s own house, just as well as in church. But I also know as a matter of cold fact the average man does not thus worship or thus dedicate himself. If he strays from church, he does not spend his time in good works or lofty meditation. He looks over the colored supplement of the newspaper.

He may not hear a good sermon at church. But unless he is very unfortunate, he will hear a sermon by a good man who, with his good wife, is engaged all the week long in a series of wearing, humdrum, and important tasks for making hard lives a little easier.

He will listen to and take part in reading some beautiful passages from the Bible. And if he is not familiar with the Bible, he has suffered a loss.

He will probably take part in singing some good hymns.

He will meet and nod to, or speak to, good quiet neighbors. He will come away feeling a little more charitably toward all the world, even toward those excessively foolish young men who regard churchgoing as rather a soft performance.

I advocate a man’s joining in church works for the sake of showing his faith by his works.

The man who does not in some way, active or not, connect himself with some active, working church misses many opportunities for helping his neighbors, and therefore, incidentally, for helping himself.

Think about Theodore Roosevelt on October 27… and then think about the things one of our greats president thought about!

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Judy Collins and the Boy’s Choir of Harlem, at the U S Capitol:

Click: Amazing Grace

6-31-13 / 4th of July, 2013

The Fourth of July is as close as the United States has to a secular holy day. Considering that actual holy days rapidly are becoming secularized, July 4th deserves our attention, more than mere celebrations. The days around July 4th are when the rebellious representatives of the American colonies put their names (“and fortunes, and sacred honor”) to a revolutionary declaration that continues to stir hearts around the world. The days around July 4th are when the ragtag Rough Riders, on the heights above Santiago, Cuba, fought through withering gunfire on open ground and captured Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill, effectively sealing the land operations of the enemy in the Spanish-American War.

And the days preceding July 4th – three long, bloody, momentous days – are when the Army of Virginia’s invasion of the North was repulsed in the streets, wooded hills, and fields of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. There, and in faraway Vicksburg, Mississippi, which surrendered to the US Army’s forces of Gen. Grant on the 4th itself, the outcome of the Civil War largely was sealed. Hundreds of thousands of deaths still lay ahead, but the dreamers and the fearful in the North and South alike generally apprehended the outcome.

The coincidence of significant national events around July 4th is just that, a coincidence. But modern holidays are observed too often as artificial consolidations for vacationers and retailers. The Declaration of Independence, the impromptu heroism and success represented by the Spanish-American War, and the salvation of the Union – and the hundreds of noble impulses and human dramas that hover, as benign angels, over Gettysburg’s fields – are well worthy of our contemplation today.

“Revisionist” history has become a cottage industry of late. Napoleon defined history as “lies agreed upon” by succeeding generations. To challenge conventional wisdom is seldom a bad thing, even when Revisionists have points of view to advance. But the exercise – that is, a society’s discussions and considerations of new viewpoints – is beneficial only so far as solid facts underlay. People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.

So it becomes a disgrace when bad history, or, worse, “no” history replaces the proper sense of heritage in a culture. We read polls today that large percentages of American youth do not know why the colonies sought independence; who major presidents were; why important wars were fought. I am afraid (in the context of a pop-culture society, which we are) that more teenagers know Lincoln as a vampire slayer than as the central character of another movie, “Lincoln.”

Recent events persuade me that we might be engaged in another civil war, or its opening stages. And it is hard to answer, or resist, or overcome, when you have no sense of self, in a civic context. How can we know who we are and where we are when we don’t know how we arrived here?

But among the things we do know – or should know – is that a nation was founded on a set of noble ideals, dedicated over and over again to God, and was established in various places and by people of different backgrounds with a common, burning devotion to liberty. Or, to be precise, an UNcommon devotion… unique in human history. Among the anomalies the founders knew would have to be solved, never assuming it would be easy, was the institution of slavery. When the time came, men – and their wives and children – took a collective breath and prosecuted a grinding, nightmarish, burdensome conflict. A somewhat bloodier reflection, Lincoln was wont to wonder, of slavery itself: perhaps national penance for its sin.

Past the fratricide and carnage, a century and a half later, we still are astonished by the bravery and nobility and sacrifice and endurance and faith of those soldiers.

Theodore Roosevelt said, when he visited Gettysburg: “As long as this Republic endures or its history is known, so long shall the memory of the Battle of Gettysburg likewise endure and be known; and as long as the English tongue is understood, so long shall Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech thrill the hearts of mankind.”

Every American should know this by heart:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

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Julia Ward Howe, a poetess, met President Lincoln in the White House in November, 1861. That night, as a guest at the nearby Willard Hotel, she responded to requests to write new words to the popular song “John Brown’s Body Lies A-Moldering in the Grave.” It was an incitement to fight the Confederacy, but Mrs Howe took it a step further, writing the immortal Battle Hymn of the Republic to its tune. Ironically, Mrs Howe’s life-long crusades included abolitionism, women’s suffrage… and pacifism. But she knew that some battles were proper to fight. This amazing video clip is of Judy Collins performing before tens of thousands of citizens on the National Mall 30 years ago, with the US Army Band Soldiers’ Chorus, and the Harlem Boys Choir. Significantly, Judy sings some little-known verses – reminding us that this is a Christian hymn, not just a battle song.

Click: Battle Hymn Of the Republic