Monday Morning Music Ministry

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