Monday Morning Music Ministry

5-17-21

A disease of the 21^st century – frankly, a second pandemic – is what categorizes itself as Fact-Checking.

The name is really a pseudonym. False identity. Camouflage.

Going back to the Age of Legends, it does not represent Diogenes, who with his lantern forsook all earthly possessions and searched the land for an honest man. My friend Bridgette Ehly reminds me that Diogenes is regarded as an actual figure in history, not mythology; and more’s the pity, someone pursuing such a futile goal.

Rather, the practice of “Fact Checking” today resembles the Trojan Horse, something impressive in appearance, but hiding saboteurs and swarming with enemies. It started a few years ago when Important newspapers had “ombudsmen” who kept their staffs honest. You know, The New York Times had a little box on page 2 noting “corrections.” Like “In yesterday’s Travel Section, page C17, the height of Mont Blanc was stated as 15,407 feet. In fact that is its prominence; its height above sea level is 15,777 feet. We regret the error.”

(Whatever a “prominence” is.)

Readers even got the impression that the wayward reporter likely lost vacation privileges at Camp Nawakwa on Lake Sebago up in New York State that summer.

Today, of course, that paper, and the Washington Post, and the three network news departments, and TIME and Newsweek if they still exist, and cable news channels, offer regrets and apologies to readers if they happen to say something positive about President Trump or Christians.

I am exaggerating. But I think they do hand out demerits for mentioning same-sex couples and heterosexuals without describing them as haters.

I think we all have been victims of “Fact Checkers” who lurk on the internet, and watch us all closer than than our parents did when we got our first cell phones. I have a theory about why those spying tricks are called “Al-Gore-Rhythms,” because we know what Big Brother, Big Tech, and Big Pain do. In fact they know what we do, before we do things. Get on the web, mention a country in an e-mail, or do a Google search on the name of a tropical bird you once saw, and within five hours, you will be bombarded with pop-up ads for flights to that country, and recipes for roasting that bird.

It was once confusin’, then amusin.’ Then annoying. Then paranoia-inducing. Rightfully so.

And it was an easy step, especially in the Trump re-election and the plandemic, to be de-platformed, warned, censored, or – at Zuckberg’s kindest – have our posts and messages and blogs slapped with banners pasted over our words with the announcement that “independent” “fact-checkers” have “already” “reviewed” the content and “determined” that… fill in the blanks. We are judged guilty of discussing unproven facts; or spreading rumors; or – worst of all – “violating community standards.”

What “standards”? What “community”? Not a community we want to live in. Yet… here we are. From the guard towers, someone yells through a bullhorn: “You! In that blog post!!! Shut up, and get in line!” Achtung.

Headlines tell us enough. “Christian hate” and “Trump’s Lies” are never conditioned with words like “alleged” or “supposed” – just offered as “facts.” A journalistic crime.

All this is bad enough – very bad – as we surreptitiously are being fitted with ankle chains and GPS-location devices under our skin or by vaccines. But far worse is the censorship and cyber-persecution of Christians.

Almost overnight, sermons about Biblical views on marriage and sex have had pastors arrested and churches closed. A religious perspective on topics in the news is deemed as “hate speech.” Traditional hymns are condemned.

And all this is bad enough when the “community” and press and government and schools and the courts are the storm troopers. But organized religion, heads of denominations, and “mainstream” faith leaders are often the worst offenders. Goons in backward-collars and robes.

So “religion” itself imposes “facts” on those of us they hate. (Aha! Now we get to the real “hate speech”!) The New Puritans are on witch-hunts, and their exclusive possession of Facts are their deadly weapons.

Well, this all is a wake-up call to Christians and conservatives and patriots. Yes, we think we recognize the Truth, but we seek to persuade people, not cancel them. And in the largest sense – life is not about facts. The “keepers” and enforcers of Facts ignore the history of Facts, even “scientific facts,” which often have changed and been proven untrue and abandoned through the centuries.

More valuable is Truth.

We can believe facts, even knowing they sometimes will change. We should trust Truth; and when it seems unclear, we are elevated by seeking truth.

Compulsive fact-checkers, and weaponized fact-trusters, are the totalitarian-minded who have always plagued humanity. On the other hand, truth-seekers, and the hope-filled, have cared for humankind, and want to join the upward paths.

Memo to you brainiacs who invent facts to control the lives of the rest of us: God does not require that we know and accept all your facts. He does require more important things: that we trust and obey. They are the fastest pathways to Truth.

Check that fact, Jack. (And, if this helps, Jesus said, “I am the Truth.”)

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Click: Looking For a City

1-14-19

What impresses people these days? Rather, let us think about how we are impressed in contemporary society… how we measure success… how “success” conflates with validation… and how we let ourselves be seduced by twisted value-systems.

Ratings? Polls? Fads? The newest trends, dance moves, drinks, celebrities and their endorsements? “We like sheep have gone astray…” In contemporary life it seems like everybody salivates for the latest cultural marching orders.

We should not be surprised by a chintzy value system when the values being pursued are debased. In tragic synergy, we have lowered our standards; the core aspects of our civilization are cheapened; and they in turn inform the next generation. A downward spiral.

Exhibit A, among myriad bellwethers: throughout history (until the Modern Age in Western civilization), virtually all artistic expression was expressed heavenward. Praising God, celebrating His works. Canvases, sculpture, music, architecture. I am ready for nit-pickers: music sometimes was social; art could also be purely decorative. Ancient sculptures to their small-g gods? – still religious in nature. Architecture from, say, public buildings in ancient Greece? – Plato commended artists to reflect the spiritual Perfection that he discerned in the world; Aristotle taught people to strive for the Golden Mean, less abstract, but as spiritual.

But since the Modern Age, coalescing during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, mankind has elevated Self instead of God. We have turned inward – all the while convincing ourselves we are turning outward, with broader visions, and universal sympathy.

Works of art now “explore” ourselves; “explain” our problems; depict our low estate; obsess over our contradictions, flaws, conflict, and doom. Social scientists can say – and artists say, when they process the situation – that confronting problems is the first step to solving them. That analysis is glib, not profound.

There is no way to traffic in humanity’s misery without making it attractive, or at least compelling. Movies, for instance, have to make evil and corruption glamorous, if not inevitable, in order to sell tickets.

At one time, men and women – who knew quite well the problems of the world and the flaws in human nature – dealt with such basic challenges not by depicting awful things in ever starker details, but by glorifying God, employing Biblical standards, discerning His answers for this troubled world.

In John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the man with the muck-rake was to be scorned – a man who forever focused on the mire and mud, never looking up.

It is sadly inevitable, absent superhuman enlightenment and discipline, that a civilization that empowered the Individual, encouraged literacy, and expanded democracy, would eventually replace God with Self. “Self” is human nature, which all but naive sociologists would agree is flawed. Our various communities cannot help but be flawed as a consequence. Art is debased, government is corrupted, tradition is discarded.

Again inevitably, when disaster impends, mankind in this “value” system tends not to reform but to justify. To double-down. To blame everything and everybody except… our selves. The fault, if we would stop and see it, is not in the stars, but in our selves, that we are underlings.

When Rome began its decline and fall, its leaders reacted to warning signs by distracting the populace with, famously, bread and circuses. And the Roman population, from nobles to citizens to slaves, were happy to be seduced.

The sad proof of our depravity – of the rotting core amid material glitz – is what we celebrate in art. The sensual; self-gratification; the banality of evil. These barometers reveal the reality of broken homes and broken lives; a multitude of addictions; abuse and oppression. Yet we look down, instead of Up.

A re-discovery God and His ways is not the best solution to mankind’s sorry state… but the only solution.

Revival will only come if it is sought. Salvation of the soul is still offered by God to hurting people, as always. But to understand the redemption of a society, we can advance, ironically, by looking backward. If we are not immediately impressed by God Himself as we behold the range of artistic expression, we are mightily impressed by men and women… who gave themselves over to God in profound ways.

A lost paradigm, but not irretrievable.

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Click: Bach: Air On the G String

6-18-18

Thinking back on family scenes on Father’s Day, I was reminded of my parents’ story about days of my childhood, when I was too young to have remembered myself. Among the first words I spoke (that is, “words” and “spoke,” with qualifications) was “Hobbo-loody.” It seems I uttered the phrase often and emphatically, and to much consternation. How could mom and dad show off my skills to visitors (I was the first-born) if the sound was gibberish?

Howdy Doody? “A baloney,” as in sandwich? They finally solved the mystery as I jumped for joy when my father exclaimed, in another context, “Absolutely!” It was his frequent, if hyperbolic, word of agreement, or affirmation. “Yes” would not do; “I agree” apparently was too weak – “Ab-so-LUTE-ly!” he boomed. My immature fealty was “Hobbo-LOOdy!”

People do that today, saying “Absolutely!” even substituting the word for “you’re welcome!” when they are thanked.

Hyperbole and exaggeration in our time betray a conversational laziness, because we can remain detached but switch in some camouflaged emotional investment. Many times I hear toddlers in shops and malls say “Oh my God!” Besides the blasphemy, it is ridiculous to think that young children can so regard, say, a soiled gumdrop on the floor. My late mother-in-law dropped the phrase at the slightest turns until one day I asked her what she was saving for a presidential assassination or world war.

An additional feature of the word “Absolutely,” beyond its frequently needless employment, is what it really means. Absolute things are the “max,” unable to be topped, extended, or multiplied. On the other hand, something that is “absolute” cannot be diminished and remain absolute. Nothing can be LESS absolute, or modified, or qualified – because then it is out of the realm of the absolute.

In today’s spiritual world – that is, reality; not passing fads and trends in society – the word “Absolute” needs to be re-asserted. This is not a mere word-game.

God’s Word contains ABSOLUTE truth; in fact it IS Absolute Truth.

His promises are ABSOLUTELY true and trustworthy. Not “mostly”; absolutely.

When Jesus spoke, He had the authority of ABSOLUTE Truth, not – as relativists and liberal Christianity and Post-Modernists and Emergent church leaders say – “relative truth.” Or “relational truth.” Truth is truth: it is inherently Absolute. Any adjective other than ABSOLUTE unplugs the essence of what Truth is. (In lexicography, “Absolute” here is emphatic, not qualifying. Lesson over!)

This world, as it always has been but seems more so then ever before, is relativistic. “What’s right for me is right.” “Believe what you want, if it doesn’t hurt anybody.” “What’s true for you is not true for me.” “There is no right or wrong” – which sums up all the equivocations.

In the 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre presciently maintained (with approval) that in the coming age, “authenticity” would be all that mattered. This is a cruel philosophical version of the advertising industry’s saying, “Sincerity! Once you fake that, you’ve got it made!”

Around the same time, Dr Will Herberg beheld the vaunted “New Morality,” and seeing no trace of respect for Absolute Truth, said it should rather be called, “No Morality.”

When there are no Objective Standards in peoples’ lives – that it, no respect for absolute truths in their core beliefs – there are no standards at all. Humans are wired to worship SOME thing, and when we neither recognize nor seek Absolute Truths, or standards greater than ourselves… we fall back, virtually, on worshiping ourselves.

Not a recipe for spiritual health or societal wellness. As the world slid toward more self-worship and less God-awareness, in the 20th century… well, we cured polio and put footprints on the moon, but slaughtered more people than in all previous centuries combined.

“You shall be careful to do as the Lord your God has commanded you; you shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. You shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God has commanded you” (Deut 5:32,33a). Oh, the world will ask about other Old Testament verses that seem cruel or obsolete… we will be challenged about rules that seem not to apply to post-industrial societies… and so forth.

The Bible confirms itself, almost endlessly, and those who confront us with seeming contradictions (there are none) or ancient cultural contexts (there are some), would better spend their time absorbing truths than straining to find loopholes. From mighty saints of God to, say, humble cake decorators (possibly also mighty saints of God) who regard the Truths of the Almighty as Absolute – not in ancient times or distant places, but right where they are – are all good and faithful servants.

Sorry, Dad – and others who use words like “Absolutely” a little too freely. You gilded the lily. When paired with the word “Truth,” we must obey.

Absolutely.

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Click: There Is a Balm in Gilead

11-6-17

George Santayana famously said that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. A cartoon-meme popping up on the web these days has an old guy reflecting that those who DO know history are doomed to watch other people repeat the mistakes.

That IS a danger. Rather, it is a reality. We see it around us, every day.

Without delving into whether this is unprecedented or one of history’s tragic cycles is open to question, but ultimately the question is silly – in the face of reality. In this world, today, it surely seems that a large portion of humankind has gone mad. We have rejected in many ways the concept of Absolute Truth, the possibility of its existence, and the benefits of seeking to know it. History’s masses, let us say in the West, often suffered as a lot in life. However they usually believed in improvement; in advancement; in better things and better days. They believed in themselves, in leaders they respected… in God.

The world, in turning inward instead of outward, living for today without regard to an afterlife, abandoning standards that nurtured their ancestors, of course will reflect disharmony and chaos. Art imitates life, after all (what Plato called “Mimesis”). This should worry us very, very much about the state of things ‘round about us. This world is not one politician or one new fad or one hangover away from righting ourselves. We fool ourselves when we think so. And meanwhile we are diverted by bread-and-circus movies and sports and TV shows and celebrity orgies…

Never since the Flood has humankind, over the face of the earth and not in isolated pockets, rejected Truth and Purity in such determined ways.

So, we fight. We fight as individuals, we fight as nations – or, we give in as individuals and as nations. This truth reflects a crisis of the age, and the great challenge of our time. It has always been our portion to fight – “Life is real; life is earnest,” Longfellow wrote:

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each tomorrow Find us farther than today.

Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.

About these fights as individuals and as nations, Theodore Roosevelt reminded us that it is beyond our choosing to participate in our fate. Our only choice is whether we play our parts “well or ill.”

For more than a generation America has had a volunteer military. I cannot imagine American society, our country’s youth, ever returning to a military draft. To have to interrupt (or fulfill) your life’s path by having to serve in one of the military branches? Frankly, I wonder even if America were attacked whether the spirit of service and sacrifice, across the population, would exist again as in the past. I wonder, further, that even if there were universal social-work service for one, two, or four years whether American youth would comply.

We have compartmentalized military service. In an intellectual manner we have come to treat the military as slaves. We “thank them for their service,” yet keep our hands clean of their work; the sacrifices; the threats; the separation, injuries, deaths; the stress and trauma. At the same time, sadly, we also separate ourselves from the glory of service, the thrill of victories and fights well fought, and the pride of wearing those uniforms.

That is a tragedy. Unfair to the servicemen and women; robbing the rest of the population of necessary components of healthy souls.

In these days of “advanced warfare techniques” (a sanitized term for more efficient means of maiming and killing) it is almost beyond comprehension how men and women enlist – and often re-enlist, and volunteer for repeated tours – knowingly assuming the collateral “oncoming” of separated families, variable support from the System, oftentime insufficient medical and psychological care as veterans.

We cannot admire these servants enough. Even if we dissent from foreign policies, overseas involvements, controversial missions and nation-building… we must stand in awe and gratitude to the people who serve.

And. For those of us “at home,” we cannot forget that we serve too. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines do our bidding in faraway places. Which makes it easier to be seduced by the feeling that all our battles are being waged by others. But we, all of us, have battles too, every day.

We must fight for our souls, against evil. We fight for our families, against all manners of threats. We fight for our culture, against corruption. We fight for our civilization, against enemies seen and unseen. We fight for our God, against the devil and all his ways, and for the Kingdom that is to come.

Or… we should.

If we don’t fight these battles, we surely will be subsumed.

On Veterans’ Day let us honor those who have served… and let us re-enlist, the rest of us, for the battles of life. Sooner or later, we too will be counted as veterans of those good fights.

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Click: Gone Home

10-16-17

You have heard the expression, “It all depends whose ox is gored,” or maybe you haven’t. It is the basis of a common-law precedent, and even a couple of Biblical references. Back when just about everybody had some beast of burden for a little farming or transport, or I suppose for eventual food, we kept oxen or cows or old horses.

If a horned ox injured another, or a person or property; or was injured somehow itself, the bedrock question of adjudication and responsibility – and an owner’s attitude – often boiled down to depending on whose ox was gored.

Outrage was relative; demands for justice were dependent on whether you were the aggrieved party – or owner – or, well, had no control over what a dumb beast did on its own…

The phrase in other words meant and means that our reactions often relate to how much we will suffer inconvenience or liability. Your ox? Get over it. My ox? I demand compensation!

The formal term for this attitude, most exercised in religion and philosophy, is “relativism.”

In broader terms today – taking it, as our culture does, to its logical extension – relativism is a moral disease that infects religion. The contemporary church, in many of its corners, defines Right and Wrong not by traditional biblical revelation, but by what is thought to be right and wrong in each situation – an ethical lapse also known as Pragmatism.

In the legal world, neither the 10 Commandments nor even English Common Law are called upon as they once were, by common consent. What seems right? What can be explained away? What is convenient? Who can say what’s “right” and “wrong”? These attitudes echo in our courtrooms.

When people reject standards and values, there are, by definitions, no standards by which they can live, or will be governed. It is what American society has slipped into: Soft Anarchy.

Relativism? Sex scandals in politics and the entertainment industry? The left howls when preachers and newsmen (for instance) are exposed; and the right drives the stories of political leaders and major entertainers committing atrocious acts.

Relativism? Political and financial corruption are decried by the right and left… selectively.

Relativism? The sanctity of life… attitudes toward war and military action… which Constitutional amendments or principles to champion or ignore… how God’s earth and Creation itself is to be respected… when protest is legitimate or crosses the line… all “depend on whose ox is gored.”

It is hard to remember that at once time the world – the West, the United States – had values and standards that nearly every person honored. If they did not believe them all, they were anyway observed in the breach. A priori ideas were first defined by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, but the idea of theoretical truths whose validity is independent of deduction or experiments, extended back in time past Kant, to Luther, to the Magna Carta, to Augustine, to the Gospels, to Plato, to the Old Testament – the Decalogue.

Once, despite all the other problems and challenges to humankind, societies operated on accepted truths, agreed-upon principles, “givens.” That is hardly the case in America, in the West, any more. Soft Anarchy. That we roll along, deluded that we advance, is more inertia than progress.

I mentioned Martin Luther, and have in recent essays, and will again until the 500th anniversary month of the Reformation has passed. His revolutionary life (I am ever more persuaded that he was a revolutionary, not simply a reformer) was more than the nexus of previous centuries’ growing contradictions and the world’s future vistas of faith, democracy, literacy, and liberty.

More? Yes – more, to us, than these possibly abstract principles. Luther’s imminent persecution and death; the challenges to his mind and his conscience; the affront to his relationship with Christ – the “free exercise thereof”; where have we heard that, since? – were on trial that fateful day 500 years ago.

He defended himself before the Holy Roman Emperor, to representatives of the Pope, to influential princes present in the court… and to us, 500 years in the future. Would he recant (deny) his writings? As legend tells us, he said:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted; and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.

I cannot, and will not, recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.

Here I stand. I can do no other. May God help me.

These words, properly, should thunder through centuries, down to us.

But how many Christians, say, think abortion is murder, but fail to do anything for fear of offending their neighbors? Or are outraged that the Bible has been taken from schoolrooms, instructions, and the courts, yet are too timid to act? Or are bothered when their churches stray from the Word of God, but label their own lack of response “not wanting to rock the boat”?

Our oxen are being gored every day, friends. What are we doing about it?

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Click: “I Can Do No Other”

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

6-6-16

There is a danger in being a historian. Even the amateur historian and those who love to read history benefit from the special aspect of what my lodestar Theodore Roosevelt called “History as literature” – the thrill of past glories, the tragedy of conflicts, sensing the real lives of real people long ago. We gain perspective as we confront our own challenges. Even better, we legitimately feel like a player in the world’s great events – a part of the contending ideas and possibly grand visions; a soldier in conflicts, if not military then intellectual and spiritual.

Well, you can tell I am enthusiastic about history. The study, the pursuit, the lessons. George Santayana famously said that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. A cartoon-meme popping up on the web these days has an old guy reflecting that those who DO know history are doomed to watch other people repeat the mistakes.

That IS a danger. But I began by saying that being a historian – having a historical perspective – can have its pitfalls. The broader the view, more seductive is the tendency to believe in cycles… pendulum swings… and what the writer of Ecclesiastes averred: “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Indeed. The awful aspects of human nature are unchanged. So too are the propensities in the human breast to hope. There are elemental virtues and common sins. I believe these are the things referred to in Ecclesiastes. But too many people think – when they think at all about such things – that our challenges and problems can’t be all that bad, because countless civilizations have experienced them before us.

Experienced, yes. Survived? Usually not – and especially not when we talk about moral decline, fiscal irresponsibility, decline in family values, sexual immorality, addictions, loss of patriotic fervor and appreciation of heritage and tradition, lessened charitable impulses, and turning away from God’s Word. Yes: review history. We are not the only culture to experience these things.

But, in your review, notice that few societies, precious few, have redeemed themselves and crawled back into the sunshine. Virtually all have withered and died. Some over long, painful gray periods of dissolution. Some quickly, as by invasions. But the law of civilization and decay is that when societies fall, it is usually from within.

I pivot from the panorama of history, behind us, to the current situation about which I will say as dispassionately as I can: The world has gone mad. To me, the only question is the tense: future-progressive (still occurring) (by the way, I am inclined to capitalize Progressive, but that is another essay…) or present tense. In either case, it is still a tense situation.

I employ benchmarks from history’s record of self-destructive societies. I have considered that the great march of personal freedom, intensifying in the West over the past 500 years, has allowed humankind to let human nature overtake the structure of governments, laws, arts, and science – and resulted in the previous century birthing more slaughter than any other century; and this century, so far, reviving (to take an example) slavery on a grander scale than ever before.

So it is not only a madness of the West, although we madly lead the mad parade to “the dawn of nothing – O make haste,” as Omar Khayyam wrote. Savagery, abuse, hatred: all alive and well around the world. Wars and rumors of wars.

We have rejected in many ways the concept of Absolute Truth, the possibility of its existence, and the benefits of seeking to know it. History’s masses often suffered, but often they believed in improvement; in advancement; in better things and better days. They believed in themselves, in leaders they respected… in God.

The world, in turning inward instead of outward, living for today without regard to an afterlife, abandoning standards that nurtured their ancestors, of course will reflect disharmony and chaos. Art imitates life, after all (what Plato called “Mimesis”). This should worry us very, very much about the state of things ’round about us. This world is not one politician, or one new fad, or one hangover, away from righting ourselves.

We have become lovers of our own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good; traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.

You might have heard these words before. They were predicted about our times – or, anyway, the End Times. Do they describe this age? If not revealed in our actions, and conflicts, and multiple crises… then in the writing on the walls of our art and culture. Our headlines.

Never since the Flood has humankind, over the face of the earth and not in isolated pockets, rejected Truth in such determined ways. II Timothy 3 continues: “In the last days, perilous times will come,” and names the attributes of our times we listed above.

It concludes: “From such, turn away.”

These were not merely warnings; not simple predictions. They were prophecies – the Bible’s “sure things” if we do not “turn away from such.” Will it be difficult, for each of us, and as a people? About that, the Bible does promise: Yes. Very difficult.

But our world depends on it.

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Click: Whispering Hope

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Real Clear Religion, on whose site many readers have followed Monday Music Ministry, has been for many people an indispensible part of their daily fare. It is going through changes right now after almost seven years.

For those who have followed us on RCR, please be sure to continue receiving our weekly essays by Subscribing to Monday Morning Music Ministry. (See link under “Pages” at right.)

5-16-16

I don’t know if this is proper horticultural protocol, but I have long defined weeds as flowers and plants that are ugly or inconvenient. After one springtime battle with pretty purple crownvetch that misbehaved – seeming to grow four feet along the garden every night as I slept, choking delicate and expensive plantings – I decided on this definition.

In the same way, there are things in life that have elusive dictionary definitions, but are commonly accepted by humankind. “Beauty” is one of these things. Classic episodes of “The Twilight Zone” aside, we humans all pretty much agree with what is beautiful. In appearance, music, art, sunsets, and buffet tables. (A Supreme Court justice made the same point in a very different way when he stated he could not define pornography “but I know it when I see it.”)

There is a popular saying that did not originate (as 90 per cent of popular sayings seem to) in the Bible or Shakespeare. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is from the novel “Molly Bawn” (1878) by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. There’s a trivia question, or answer, for you. We hear it all the time. It is not true; but it rings true.

I say this because there are certain innate perceptions and instincts, and an elemental sort of consensus about what constitutes beauty. Not without exception, but largely. Once upon a time, but… less and less it is the case.

People Magazine has an annual issue announcing its “Sexiest Man Alive” (Esquire claims the distaff honors) and it is revealing of our sorry age. First, we see that “Sexy” has replaced “Beautiful” in our estimation. And it is dismissive of almost anyone other than Hollywood stars. Where are the Africans, Asians, Semitics, Martians? Beauty has been debased. I usually disagree, actually, with their coronations… but who am I to argue with supermarket checkout-line pronouncements?

One of the first philosophers, Plato, had beauty, and other things, figured out when he celebrated harmony in music. Why chords and harmony please our ears he did not ascertain, and neither have we; but he theorized that harmony on earth – in music, poetry, debates, colors, fashion, relationships – is a reflection of heavenly harmony. Heaven? The pagan Plato? Yes, he believed that there is such a thing as abstract truth.

Abstract Truth might be unknowable, Plato thought, but humankind ennobles itself by striving for it; to try to know it; to manage to practice it. Unlike his rival Aristotle, he was on to something. In fact it is why the early Christian fathers considered themselves Neo-Platonists. The Bible, and the Person of Jesus Christ, embody Absolute Truth.

Harmony: the goal of artists, composers, musicians, poets for millennia. Today, a lot of music employs dissonance. Literature dwells on chaos. Art depicts the sordid and degenerate. Drama and movies are obsessed with conflict and disaster. These tendencies do not vitiate our conception of Beauty and Harmony, or Plato’s postulation, no. They confirm the fact that people who love beauty and seek harmony are seeking, consciously or subconsciously, Absolute Truths in their lives. And a world turned ugly is reflected in the arts.

Where is Beauty? We have replaced the concept with many perverted versions. Where is Harmony? It has been drowned out by the cacophony of self-indulgence and hate in contemporary life. God planted these instincts in us! He programmed His children to love and seek Absolute Truth and the beautiful, harmonious things of God.

A lost generation cannot cherish beauty, harmony, and truth, when it believes those qualities do not beckon them in wonderful ways, abstract but attainable. They think, if there is no such thing as Absolute Truth in a Heaven that does not exist, how can it have relevance on earth? Hence, everything is polluted, from art to treatment of our fellow man.

If beauty and harmony are good things, there is a universe that is home to them.

If Abstract Truth exists, giving us all a conscience and a sense of justice, then something… some One… has placed them within us.

With history’s exceptions (let us call them people yielding to sin) like war and persecution, we all seek lives and hope for a world of beauty and harmony. We sense, and we know, that Creation, uncorrupted, is what once we collectively shared, and what innately we seek.

Beauty, harmony, and Truth must have authors. And so, if there is a Creation, there must be a Creator. Why people fight against this self-evidence is a mystery, but no more so than people who temporarily go mad and choose today’s things we listed above: dissonance, chaos, the sordid and degenerate, conflict and disaster. Hate. Sin.

The God of the Universe – the God of the Bible, author of Salvation – exists. And He grieves at our current course. Jesus was and is our substitutionary payment, suffering death that we deserve before a Holy God, so that we might be free to commune with the Author of Beauty, Harmony, and Truth, forever.

Like the man with the muck-rake in “Pilgrim’s Progress,” let us take our eyes from the slop we live in every day, somehow getting muddier and muddier. And look upward. “Abstract” does NOT mean “non-existent.” It means of a different substance. Manifested in different ways, through other ways. Like Truth, and in beauty and harmony.

Jesus, recorded in Mark 21, said that “our hearts incline toward evil.” A desperate condition. But our souls seek beauty, harmony, and Truth, and on that path with Him lies our redemption.

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Real Clear Religion, on whose site many readers have followed Monday Music Ministry, has been to many people an indispensible part of their daily fare. It is going through changes right now after almost seven years.

For those who have followed us on RCR, please be sure to continue receiving our weekly essays by Subscribing to Monday Morning Music Ministry. (See link under “Pages” at right.)

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Click: Beauty and Harmony: Grimaud plays Beethoven
The second movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. Helene Grimaud; The Hessicher Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester, Frankfurt; Paavo Jarvi, conducter.

4-1-15

I recently have quoted St Augustine, from more than 1500 years ago, to the effect
that “He who sings, prays twice.” In the early days of the church, it was music
that helped attract worshipers… and was, naturally and powerfully, an irresistible
means to praise God and express joy.

Before the church fathers (and mothers; St Cecilia becoming the Patron saint
of Music) Plato identified not only music but harmony as capturing – as best
humankind could – the abstract but Perfect Good that reigns over us. Plato did not
particularly ascribe it to the manufactured Greek gods, but he believed that there
existed an Absolute Truth; and that, even if we could never fully know it, humans
are ennobled by seeking it. Although he lived 300 years before Jesus, the early
church recognized his philosophy in some ways as proto-Christian; and many of
them were neo-Platonists.

So the musical impulse, in many ways, was concurrent to the institution of
worship, formal and informal. Plainsong and chants predominated, and in the
evolution of corporate worship, the trends moved from singing individuals to
ensembles and choirs. In the Gothic era, polyphony – “many sounds,” part-
singing, basic harmony – entered church music. There was actually a time when
the Roman church considered banning harmony as rebellion against tradition, but
the impulse of reformers from Luther to Bach opened the floodgates of glorious
harmonies, attractive melodies, the regal organ, full organs, and the resumption of
congregational singing.

This is a brief introduction, in Holy Week, to a brief introduction to the history of
church music. Linked here is a 90-minute BBC-TV documentary on sacred music,
using Easter themes as the touchstone.

It covers approximately a thousand years of Western church music, from Plainsong
to Polyphony, simple chants to the complex but captivating musical expression of
J. S. Bach. The setting is St Luke’s in London, staged as a reverent mixture of the
ancient and modern. There is tasteful narration between numbers. It ultimately is
a concert, not a church service, and I hope the occasional audience applause is not
disconcerting.

If you are a person who enjoys listening to the Messiah at Christmastide, or even
if you are not, sometime during Holy Week you should find this interesting.
The church’s heritage; musical history; the sweep of cultural changes; artistic
expression of another time, almost another world, are here. And, by the translation-
subtitles of chants, songs, choruses, and motets, the essence of the Easter story is
told.

… as, maybe, only music can bring it to our souls.

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Click: An Easter Celebration

3-16-15

I have begun reading “A Chronicle Of the Crusades,” a massive 15th-century illuminated manuscript – in translation, believe me – originally titled “Les Passages d’Outremer.” I am interested in history of all eras and all places, so this is not exactly required reading. However, I am also prompted by President Obama’s recent scolding of Christians to “get off their high horses” and realize that many awful acts were committed “in the name of Christ,” citing the crusades of a thousand years ago; and not mentioning atrocities committed by radical Moslems a thousand years ago or – famously – last week either.

It is not mere (and common) self-loathing of Christians and whites to assume that the Crusades were birthed and maintained in Christian brutality, blood lust, and racism. Aggressive educators and supine defenders of our faith have transformed this contention into a “fact of history” – despite its substance being very much in dispute. Rather, historical facts, if they shall become the subtext of our identity and rationale for today’s policies, must be dusted off and honestly viewed.

Christianity had “holy sites,” associated with the person and ministry of Jesus Christ. Islam, a religion founded centuries subsequent to Christianity, determined to seize lands and sites, sometimes desecrating them. Christians sought to restore ownership, if not management, of holy places in the “Holy Land.” Its center of gravity having shifted northward and westward, Christian expeditions were launched to that end. In succeeding campaigns, there were battles, sieges, pillaging, many deaths, and uncountable examples of bravery and brutality on both sides, on all sides.

It is rather useless, and perhaps intentionlly subversive toward a different agenda, to re-ignite those flames of passion. Yet it is being done, and not only by our president. Wars frequently are bad enough in their first incarnations, without declaring and waging them anew. Perhaps the huge book on my lap will teach me some new things, even though, yes, I realize that it was written by Europeans.

I want to pause for a moment, however, over a larger picture – the illuminated manuscript, as it were, of Western Civilization before and after the Crusades, and what once was rightly called Christendom.

People use the phrase “the barbarians are at the gates,” applying it to everything from video games to the corporate history of Nabisco to the threats posed by ISIS. Oddly, there is no consensus on the origin of the tocsin “at the gates!” but it seems that Barbarians, generally, were called such by the cultured civilizations of Athens and Rome based on the invading tribes’ purportedly unintelligible language: an approximation of “ba-ba-ba” morphed into “barbarian.” Today, alarmists use the phrase because they feel threatened by forces attacking the virtual gates of our culture.

Alarmists legitimately can be alarmed by legitimate threats, just as paranoiacs sometimes DO have people stalking them. Nevertheless the dominant thrust of Western Christianity’s contemporary cultural attitude is that the so-called challenges to our traditions and heritage are real… but are not threats.

Cultural rebels are in command. Anarchists and nihilists ironically are setting many of the rules in society. “The end of history” has happened: the postulation of Francis Fukuyama that millennia of the world’s cultural traditions have been up-ended, enabling disaster or, at best, an unknown new system. Just as with Nietzsche’s “God is dead” – when a culture no longer recognizes God, He is dead to that culture’s life. “How shall we then live?” was the question asked by Francis Schaeffer in a monumental study almost 40 years ago. It is a question posed by philosophers since Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle… but never losing its relevance. Or, today, its urgency.

The difference today is the exquisite and apocalyptic precipice upon which we teeter. A death-struggle in the twilight of a once-great civilization. Barbarians are past the gates; they have been welcomed, they live amongst us; they are A-list celebrities.

I am not singling out Hollywood, but our Barbarian culture. We have willingly celebrated barbarism. Sometimes this suicidal syndrome is called anti-intellectualism, but is far deeper, of far more serious consequences. It threatens destruction from which survival is impossible. The contemporary morals and mores of Western Christianity (often masquerading as the new sacraments of “tolerance” and “lifestyle choices”) are nothing more or less than the poisoning of our culture’s well.

Our society’s rejection of God, denial of Christ’s divinity and teachings, and demonization of our Western heritage, is not a minor and enlightened bend in the road of progress. It is a complete U-turn, back to… barbarism.

Hilaire Belloc wrote of the barbarian that he “hopes – and that is the mark of him – that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being.

“Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marveling that civilization should have offended him with priests and soldiers…. In a word, the barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this: that he cannot [build anything]; he can befog and destroy, but he cannot sustain; and of every barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization, exactly this has been true.

“We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh.

“But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.”

We will revisit this theme, because it has more aspects and should engage us in many ways. But for the moment – to return to those barbarians at the gates of Western Christianity, Western Civilization – the barbarians have overtaken our culture, either incorporating themselves or coldly obliterating us and what we hold precious.

The historian Arnold Toynbee observed that civilizations seldom die from invasions (gates and barbarians notwithstanding) but by suicide. In that sense the ghastly Clash of Civilizations is not so much prompted by Communist states or Islamic terrorists or extremists who work to do us harm. It is the clash of traditional Christianity versus the barbarism of modern Christianity and post-modernism. Western Civilization has lost that clash of values.

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The Litany of St. James, written in the 4th century, sung by Cynthia Clawson.

Click: Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

10-6-14

Some years ago I was a guest on a local program somewhere in New England on a National Public Radio station, “The Man and His Music.” Under today’s politically correct strictures, especially on NPR, I suppose the series would be called, “The Person and His/Her Predilections,” or some such nonsense. (Maybe even “His/Her/Its”) Anyway, the premise of the series was to explore a guest’s personality through discussions of musical taste and favorite pieces, in addition to the standard celebrity-interview fare.

We authors or actors or athletes were, naturally, asked to send our choices in advance of the studio interview, and to provide (ancient history, kiddies) cassette tapes of our favorite songs or snippets of music. The hostess was well-versed in music, and could discuss or at least intelligently explore any style of music from any period of history, from Renaissance to jazz.

True to my catholic tastes, as old friends of this column will know, my choices ranged from Baroque to Bluegrass. And at least half the choices, for the two-hour program, were church pieces. Movements from cantatas and masses; traditional hymns; contemporary gospel. The man and his music, right?

It developed that eclecticism was fine for the show, but only so much. Between discussions of my books and travels and hobbies were the musical cut-aways, followed by chats about them. The hostess was glad to discuss the fact I knew several jazzmen who had played with Bix Beiderbecke; and had heard Mozart performed in Salzburg; and that I had been backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. But when my choices were Christian pieces, the conversation turned cold. Invariably we rushed to a new topic.

Not only did those musical clips carry a gospel message, but my discussion – why these pieces were special to me, the putative theme of the series – perforce touched upon what made them special, too, to the composers, performers, and the intended audiences. The stories behind the songs; the messages in the music.

I don’t think it was a particular prejudice of the hostess. Clearly, it reflected the culture at (taxpayer-supported, we constantly are reminded) National Public Radio. But, more, it reflects the culture of contemporary America. The post-modern, post-Christian world.

There is a reason I tie my weekly messages to music. I believe music is the most imaginative language devised by mankind, and always a pulse-reading of the broader culture. My ideas about music are based on those of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They believed that harmony is a somewhat elusive quality that is yet irreducible when achieved: we know it when we hear it. Harmony is to be sought in life as well as in music. Harmony represented the Absolute Truth that Plato knew existed, and whose perfect possession might be impossible for mortals, but whose pursuit is essential for our worthwhile selves. (This philosophical summary three centuries before the birth of Jesus explains why early Christian theologians were called Neo-Platonists.)

Renaissance artists found a “new birth,” artistically, in the arts of the ancients, specifically the Greeks. Sculpture and architecture, principally. Literature followed, though awkwardly; and eventually dance and music, in ideals rather than forms (which were historically obscure until very recently). All through the church age, and finding its apogee in the Renaissance despite an interest in outward Athenian expression, art’s main function was to embody the meanings and purposes of God. Gradually, aided and abetted by political freedoms, the empowerment of the printing press, and a philosophical zeitgeist in the West that morphed from Humanism to Individualism to Selfishness, the rationale for all artistic expression, in all manifestations, changed.

Now, instead of artists striving to please God, they strive to please themselves.

Beginning in music (and speaking very generally) around Beethoven’s time, the artist became more important than his music; the music more important than the One it once served. Beethoven, however, was truly a transitional figure in this discussion; although something of a “tortured soul,” he was a fervent Christian, as were his immediate contemporaries among composers. Hummel, Field, Czerny, and especially Mendelssohn (ironically, a Jew, converted to Lutheran Christianity) were intensely personal in their compositions without rejecting traditional forms, or faith. But the next generation of composers felt it necessary to be rebels in morality as well as in their music. Composers were expected to have troubled personal lives, to bare their souls in their music, and to offer cathartic or excruciating exposures of their selves. Portraits of the artists. Listeners came to assume that artists were tormented. Artistic heroes are encouraged to wallow in personal revelations, the uglier the better.

True in music and painting, it became the norm in all of the arts, and in fact throughout all of society: that the world, our lives, our very civilization, is so rotten and contemptible that we must honor the artists who struggle to express their disdain and their doomed efforts to resist. Honored the most are those who can describe the best what stinks the worst. Of course, then, society honors leaders and politicians who base their programs on similar perceptions of a loathsome society. They can only address the evils (as they see them) of the Old Order with solutions and systems that reject any trace of traditional wisdom.

This explains where we are as a culture, and why we are doomed, I believe. (Really doomed; not the trendy ennui of parlor dyspeptics.) Beyond music, every expression from poetry to politics reflects the fact that we are a people who have cut ourselves off from God. We no longer make decisions – personal or civic, artistic or political – based on God’s Word, on praying for divine guidance, on trusting the faith of our fathers, on seeking to please Him. And – I hope this is obvious – this analysis pertains to all societies and their religions, not only the Christian West. But as a legatee of Western Civilization that crumbles around me, that is what I address today. So should we all.

And I am quite happy to debate which package of factors is the cart and which is the horse. “Art imitates life” is an ancient maxim. Its apposite response (called anti-mimesis) was provided by Oscar Wilde, who maintained that “life imitates art.” But most recently the real challenge – I should say a lucid perception of our world’s post-Christian dilemma – was voiced by the brilliant Russian émigré, the critic Alexander Boot: that among the ruins of Western Civilization that we have come to call home, Art imitates death.

Having ignored, banned, ridiculed, insulted, and rejected God for so long in the post-Christian West, how can we expect otherwise?

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I could choose a hundred thousand musical pieces, few from the past 150 years, to accompany this essay. I have chosen a video that is in itself a work of art, the DeutscheGrammophon production of the supernal Helene Grimaud playing the second movement of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concert Nr 23 in A, K. 488. Close-ups of her technique, her sensitive expressions, and nature scenes. God is glorified.

Click: Mozart Adagio