Monday Morning Music Ministry

9-14-15

We are witnessing, night after night on television news, and in photographs on newspaper front pages and magazine front covers, one of several things, depending on how you categorize it.

A humanitarian crisis. The flight of refugees from war-torn Syria. Migrations from lands surrounding Syria toward areas of a prosperous Europe. People, some of whom might be terrorists or, certainly, potential terrorists, pushed to migrate. Many Arab and Muslim countries refusing to accept the refugees. White European nations’ reactions, ranging from declining to rend their social fabrics, to countries accepting of them.

And ascribed motives across the board – from prejudice to shaky economies to needy workforces to guilt bred of political correctness.

In all our lifetimes we, sadly, have witnessed similar “humanitarian crises,” usually fomented by natural disasters, or famine, or war. But this might be the first time that virtually every picture and story features the hordes, instead of orderly, hopeful, and grateful… angry, resentful of their benefactors, shouting curses at their hosts, making obscene gestures to cameras, and, from their scanty provisions, leaving mountains of trash in their wake.

Different. Different in many ways. We plausibly can say that these scenes comprise the largest funeral, or funeral parade, in history. It represents the funeral of the West.

As a funeral cortege – I hear strains of the second movement of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony, labeled “March Funebre,” when I watch the videos – these people are not mourners nor pall-bearers, but rather headed straight for the wake and after-party, so to speak.

In yet another view, this flight of uncountable migrants is war. The invaders’ strategy we know, for the pawns are being resettled by the vilest forces of the region, ISIS especially (the more benign of Arab and Muslim countries, for instance Lebanon, have absorbed many refugees).

The tactics – war’s other side of the coin – play upon the West’s weaknesses; guilt or self-loathing among the elites; force of numbers; and the most effective weapon, propaganda and the pliant media. The world should be suspicious or hostile to Muslim machinations these days, yet the Christian West (that is, the post-Christian world) is, despite a few speed bumps and detours, paving latter-day Trade routes and Spice routes from the neighborhoods around Syria through Turkey to Greece and Macedonia, to Serbia and Bosnia. Through Austria, to the promised land of Germany.

Those who do not know history are doomed to criticize my analysis. Of this I am certain. Save your letters; I am not a hater but a lover. I love our nations and our peoples. Opening our hearts, and our wallets, is separate from opening our minds to the extent that our brains fall out. I endorse and insist on compassion, and invite us all to think of the best way to exercise compassion and love and assistance. Anon.

In the meantime it does nobody any good, and does everybody much bad, to deny that this situation is what is.

* Many of the migrants are from places even far from Syria, like Pakistan and Bangladesh. Discarded identity papers indicate such. Some estimates put the migrants from war-torn countries (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan) at only 30 per cent.

* This instant burden of accommodating refugees is not falling evenly. Neighborhood (and prosperous) Arab states including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait have, between them, taken in zero refugees. Iran, an “enemy” of ISIS, has taken in none. Faraway Germany has pledged to take in 800,000 this year and half a million annually after that.

* The EU, unelected; and Merkel, with no mandate, choose to forever change the character of Christian Europe. Clear-thinking leaders (of the Czech Republic, of Hungary, for example) have framed the issue as a spiritual crisis more than economic or social, to their credit.

* We see photos, like the heartbreaking picture of the dead child washed up on shore… and then read allegations that the man holding her is a human trafficker, a profiteer, from whose overcrowded boat she fell. It is still heartbreaking!

* A real humanitarian crisis would not result in hordes that are 80 per cent healthy young men: in fact, it would be logical to see a majority of elderly, women, and children; but we don’t.

What is going on? A friend, Robert Chandler, recently wrote: “If you have any historical perspective, you would know that Islam invaded Western Europe in force and gravely threatened our civilization very recently. This when Vienna was under siege by Ottoman armies in the 16th and 17th centuries. … in historical terms, not long ago at all.

“It is not ‘ancient history.’ It is, in fact, at the beginning of modern history. The Balkans are an historic hell-hole because Islam did succeed in gaining a large foothold there, and civil war has transpired for all the centuries since. This is for real now. This is deadly serious.

“Your children, your grandchildren, not just in Europe, but in America, are threatened by this. The cruelty of ISIS is a foretaste of what could befall us. The cathedrals of Europe, blown up like [historic temples in] Palmyra. Our sons and men tortured and beheaded. Our daughters and wives raped and tortured and enslaved.”

For 1500 years, Islam has been trying to take over Europe, and defeat Christianity – an equal goal in its eyes, if not to contemporary Westerners and Christians. Vicious battles, “soft” invasions, from Bulgaria and the Balkans, to Greece and Italy (Sicily once was an Emirate), to Spain almost totally, and a significant part of southern France, to Hungary, and the “Gates of Vienna.” And of course by waves of migration, forced by their Mohammedan masters.

Many brave defenders of European culture and Christian tradition, some famous in history and lore, sacrificed for their values. The difference today is that many citizens and most leaders in the West do not care about their heritage. Mostly because they do not know about it. A shame and a crime.

One reason the West is losing this war, or has already lost it, is because once we believed in God, and we do not today; and the invaders believe in their god and are thereby motivated. I talk about God, but for a moment I am being secular. We no longer have foundational values; we are indifferent to guiding principles; we mock morality and a heritage worth defending; we have no will to resist.

People see the Muslim baby washed ashore in that photograph and are shocked into action. But we are the same people who read of abortionists in our own country, slicing babies for so many pennies per pound. And to that we are indifferent.

How can such a people – that which we have become – prevail?

Next. We still do have the situation of displaced people and war-caused refugees and migrants. As Grover Cleveland said in another context, “it is a condition, not a theory, that confronts us.”

The present “refugee” “crisis” exists in the first place because of the West’s longtime collectivist, statist, mindset. That is: governments must be all, do all. Answer all, provide all, solve all. The proposition, of course, is absurd; yet it has become the guiding principle of the West.

What? Governments should not respond to the humanitarian crisis? My answer is as revolutionary as it is hopeless in the Year of Our Lord 2015: Governments should respond minimally. Governments, by socialistic and collectivist paradigms, have usurped the roles of individuals, families, churches, guilds, unions, corporations, and associations in such cases.

From hurricane relief to famines to displaced persons and victims of war, governments sometimes help… but sometimes hinder. Corruption often creeps in. Monies are appropriated, against wishes of citizens, who seldom are provided much information. Usually coercion is involved; and, always, gargantuan bureaucracy.

Private agencies are more sincere, and usually more effective. Individual action often means just that – people involving themselves, volunteering, even travelling and serving. Peoples’ consciences are at work; and they invest their concern as well as their sweat or resources.

This is how God intended it. “Faith, hope, and charity,” Jesus said; “And the greatest of these is charity.” To be our brothers’ keeper never meant to let Rome, as it were, take our money and decide what “projects,” what people and causes, to pursue… often against our wishes. The Good Samaritan knelt down, did not send a text to the local relief agency, so to speak, instead.

To support “refugees,” even to sponsor some, perhaps to take some into households: governments should let citizens decide such things. Individually. Would things “work out” in crises such as the present one? I am absolutely certain, after inevitable adjustments, the migrants and the hosts, and our next generations, would be more at peace, and living in higher security.

But then let me tie this together like the end of a Seinfeld episode. If we recognize this current “crisis” as just one more chapter in a 1500-year-old war; if we protect our own heritage, values and traditions (first, by re-learning them!); if we deal with the causes of the swelling migrant tide – Islamic radicalism, which hates portions of its own people – and if we return to private initiative, love, and compassion…

Then we will have the chance to fulfill the Lord’s commands, as we operate with renewed hearts – something that Western governments would never allow – to witness to lost souls about the love of Jesus.

Heal the sick that are therein, and say unto them, the Kingdom of God is come nigh unto you (Luke 10:9). In this way we minister in love. Instead of being victims ourselves of war, we can wage Peace.

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As an allegory, I offer a video of “Dido’s Lament” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1688). She commits suicide… needlessly, as America is doing. “When I am laid in earth, May my wrongs create no trouble in thy breast; Remember me! Remember me! Remember me! but ah! forget my fate,” we may sing to History, and begging God’s mercy. Dido played by the amazing Maria Ewing.

Click: When I Am Laid in Earth… Remember Me.

10-28-13

Deeds of faith are mightier – more consequential, more lasting, more essential to our living – than physical deeds are. To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, our souls and spirits must always squarely be in the Arena of Life, where a person’s “face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

And so with faith as well as deeds. I cannot imagine never being curious about new ideas, discovering new things, reading new (and old) books, attempting new projects, and (not to sound sappy) dreaming new dreams. I have said, and I hope we would all have this attitude, that I want my retirement party and my funeral to be on the same day. Life is more than about accumulating baubles.

But these sentiments are a cruel joke, worse than empty clichés, if not accompanied by the spiritual component. We can be “secure in our faith,” but that never means we should stop learning the Ways of God, or seeking after the Things of God, or obeying the Will of God. Just as other things in life attract us… except that the essentials of faith are more important. We can be, yes, secure in our faith, but it will be tested; in fact, over and over again. The tests are not what matters. What matters is our response to the tests.

To those people who continually seek the Truth, which I hope means all of us, there are many pitfalls and detours on the way to the destination. Read the classic book, second only to the Bible in terms of copies printed, but regrettably neglected today, “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” And to continue the metaphor of a pathway to Truth, there is an enormous gap between Belief and the next station, Faith.

It would seem a small step, but it is not. My wife used to say that all the possible “head knowledge” was nothing compared to even a portion of “heart knowledge”; that is, faith. Even Solomon, in all his wisdom, writing three books of the Bible, building the Temple, lord of a wealthy, united Israelite kingdom, ultimately displayed belief but not as much faith. He wrote well, but acted little as a man of faith… and then he failed. He became apostate, married hundreds of wives and was seduced by their diverse pagan religions, and earned the enmity of God. He died broken in spirit, and his kingdom was split irrevocably, broken into contending provinces.

“Faith without works is dead,” but works without faith is like “building a house on shifting sand.” God forbid that any of us are like Solomon, writing and speaking and appearing to be wiser than we really are.

Faith is something we can have, and we must regard it is a living thing, not a relic or prize: it must be nurtured and fed. But it is also something we can DO – in philological terms, a verb as well as a noun – in that we must exercise it. Share it. Live it. And not an abstract faith that the world has kidnapped as a term – a synonym for optimism or self-assurance or goodwill. “Have faith,” “keep the faith,” can be empty terms, baby-steps, or maybe backward-steps. Romans 10:17 says that real faith “comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.” This journey of ours is sometimes hard. Where could we be without the gift of Faith?

There is an even more precise definition of that Faith which we seek across the chasm. The Bible tells us, and wants us to learn through contemplation and experience: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

This is not a riddle for intellectuals. It is not a postulate for scientific measurements. It can be difficult to understand. But it is easy to accept. It is the wisdom of God.

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We can find biblical wisdom mirrored in secular works of art. The tragic tale of Dido and Aeneas, from Virgil’s epic poem, was written for the operatic stage; libretto by Nahum Tate, author of many hymns, music by Henry Purcell (1659-1695), the greatest of all English composers. Its excruciatingly sad ending is “Dido’s Lament,” sung as the Queen of Carthage commits suicide because she thinks her lover, the Trojan hero, has abandoned her:

“Thy hand, Belinda. Darkness shades me, On thy bosom let me rest,
More I would, but Death invades me; Death is now a welcome guest.

“When I am laid, am laid in earth, May my wrongs create No trouble, no trouble in thy breast. Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate. Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.”

As with the unrelated story of Romeo and Juliet, the death was useless – tragic – because of misunderstanding. In fact Aeneas was rushing to her side even as she sang her dying words of love. But the lesson of great art, indeed the lesson of life, is not how we scheme to avoid the hard choices facing us, but how we exercise faith, and faithfulness, even to what the world calls “tragic” ends, as overcomers who will never dwell with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

Please do not cheat yourself: Watch this brief vid, sung by the incomparable Norwegian soprano Sissel Kyrkjebo; graphics by animation student Ryan Woodwart. Goodnight, Nance.

Click: Dido’s Lament