Memento Mori

Matt and my son grew up in the same neighborhood. Until Matt and my son both completed grade school together, we saw Matt and his parents frequently at school functions or in the neighborhood. Then, about ten years ago, Matt's folks moved to a different neighborhood and put Matt and his siblings in a private school. We rarely saw Matt or his family again. But recently a mutual friend told us that Matt was seriously ill with spinal cancer. How ill I found out in last night's newspaper. His parents had taken out a half-page memorium. The picture was of a handsome, vigorous young man approaching the prime of his life. Matt died at the age of 21.

Memento mori, a reminder of our mortality. To have a young man die at 21 of cancer leaves me stunned, silent. Yet I must force myself to ask why. Why is death at 21 more shocking than death at, say, 91? You know, of course: the 21-year old has barely begun his journey. Ahead should be college graduation, career, marriage, children, a contribution to society, years of enjoyment and enrichment--all before death should be allowed to intrude. In other words, we should each of us be entitled to enjoy our lives. Then, when we are old and infirm, we should not object to death--we've had our run!

But I was struck forceably by a point that should be obvious to the Christian: God hates death. God hates death! Not just the death of the 21-year old, but also the death of the 91-year old. The age of the one who dies matters not to the Immortal One. God does not say that He hates the death of the young: He hates ALL death.

We have the wrong attitude. Why do the young die? In part to emphasize that it is death, not youth, that is God's focus. Memento mori--we are to remember death, not our lost youth. God intended all of us to be young, and to be young forever. All aging from the flowering of youth is simply prolonged dying. We were meant to be immortal. But immortal in God and not for ourselves alone. That is why death at 91 is as tragic to God as it is for Him if we pass at 21: He made us for Himself, and He made us to live forever. If we die, whenever we die, it is an eternal tragedy.

Time ... and again

Recently I mentioned my love for "moral" ghost stories, and said that I was reading Russell Kirk's "Ancestral Shadows." One story, "Saviourgate," has a unique twist that got me to thinking. Ultimately, however, I don't think the story worked, but it's interesting to consider why it didn't. It wasn't Kirk's fault, really. I just don't think anyone can make this type of story work. What is it? Well, it's a speculation as to what the life to come, the afterlife, heaven, is like.

Among the silliest movies I've ever seen was Robin Williams' What Dreams May Come, giving Hollywood's impression of what life after death may be like. Don't bother checking it out with Scripture--it ain't there. The biggest problems with such stories is that they lack dramatic resolution. The resolution has already occurred as a result of the deaths of the persons involved. Anything thereafter is, quite literally, anticlimactic. This is true in Kirk's story as well, and even Kirk's twist can't rescue it.

For those of you who hate spoilers, better not read the rest of this post (although I won't give away the ending). The story's protagonist begins his tale with a memory of walking through a street of an English city that he vaguely recalls visiting before WWII. He then meets a man whom he again recalls slightly, but who insists on taking him into the smoking room of a local hotel (despite the midnight bus that the protagonist must catch to London). Well, the protagonist finds that everyone in the room has died and that they have the power, after death, to revisit any time and place from their lifetimes and to re-experience any event in their lives as often as they wish. They cannot, however, visit any place or any time outside the experiences of their mortal lives.

But it's significant that nothing really "happens" in the story, because the event they are re-experiencing is simply conversation in a sitting room (and, of course, it's not the original conversation, or we'd never learn that all the characters are dead). No event "re-experienced" would ever be the same, for we'd have the knowledge of how it turned out before it happened, thus changing the experience entirely. For there to be drama, there must be a perceived contingency. But in Kirk's assumed afterworld, that's impossible.

So nice try, but no cigar, Dr. Kirk. Yet I suspect most of us have wondered about whether our mortal life will be "reviewable" in the life to come. Scripture really only hints at that. We shall give an account "for every idle word," But shall we see our lives again? Will others (besides the Lord) see them with us? Perhaps we aren't told because, in our present state, we could not understand. Christian common sense suggests that we ought not to dwell on this, but it would seem that an occasional pause to consider the possibilities is not forbidden us.

Apologetics

While Christian apologetics is one of my interests, I haven't posted a lot on that subject (at least not yet). But I've been having a lively discussion on the differences between Catholic and Protestant with one of my visitors, Underground Logician, at his new blogsite, Just Another Beggar. Drop on by!

Lost Angeles

Los Angeles is home for me, and has been so for many years. Yet I'm aware that many people not only consider L.A. a bazaar, but simply as bizarre. It's a odd place in which the vast majority of its inhabitants are, for the most part, simply transplanted midwesterners (or its equivalent from other parts of the country and world). I still tend to see my city through non-native eyes, as I grew up in small towns in the West, but came to California for college and stayed. After four years in the San Francisco Bay area, I moved to Los Angeles, where I married and raised a family. But I've never been able to shake an Alice-in-Wonderland feeling for my adopted city, Los(t) Angeles.

When I was 18, moving to California sounded rather exciting and romantic. Well, it can be both, but on a daily basis most of Los Angeles is about as exciting as Mayberry, USA. The only real difference most residents usually note is the weather. Hollywood is nearly as remote to the average Southern Californian as it is to the resident of Kansas. Occasionally, however, unreality intrudes. Some years ago I was driving into the underground parking facility below my place of work. My office building is on Bunker Hill, a landmark of old Los Angeles, into which a subterranean street (called Lower Grand Avenue) was cut directly underneath Grand Avenue and from which you may enter the parking lots of the numerous Bunker Hill highrises. As I swept down into Lower Grand Avenue (very dark in the middle of the brightest day), I suddenly found myself in Gotham City, awaiting the arrival of the Batmobile. All of Lower Grand Avenue, including the entrace into my building, had been converted into one of Gotham's main drags. It was quite eerie. Street scenes for the movie were filmed a little more than 100 feet below my desk.

Over time I've grown used to seeing film crews around my office several times a year. I hardly notice them any longer. But as Dorothy might say, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!

Yet for the most part I don't think my childrens' upbringings have been dramatically different from my own. More interesting--yes. But too many people probably find the area itself to be a convenient excuse for failures in childrearing. No one should regard small, rural towns as free from any of the problems that plague large cities, even unreal cities such as Los Angeles. In fact, parents may be more lackadaisical in smaller towns, thinking that the worst influences are confined to the hellholes that are the major metropolises. But evil finds its true home in the human heart, not in the sunswept palmways of cities like L.A.

"The Silence of Angels"

I discovered this little book of essays by Prof. Dale Allison some years ago when browsing through my catalog from Eighth Day Books, one of the best bookstores for the Christian bibliophile. It appears to be out of print now, so you'll probably have to try a used-bookstore. I've read through it a number of times, and I always seem to find a new insight. Allison was a professor at Friends University in Wichita, then at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. I'm not sure where he is now.

The essays have different subjects, but one theme Allison returns to time and again is the effect of environmental factors on the Christian faith--sound and light, for instance. The title essay is a fascinating rumination on the effect of sound--or conversely, the effect of silence--on the faith of our ancestors:

"Anyone who pays heed to the Christian tradition, or to any religious tradition for that matter, would have to wager that a significant increase in noise will make religion increasingly exotic. One strongly suspects that the relatively unfrenzied atmosphere of most church services is partial cause for drops in attendance. How can those at ease in a world of the frightful clamor and rapidly passing, disjointed images of MTV not be bored during a church service?"

Indeed. This sheds new light on the "Lying in Church" posting, below, on the state of present-day worship in evangelical churches.

But Allison's point is not merely to rail at noise. Rather, he has something very interesting to say about its opposite:

"Silence, let me emphasize at this juncture, should not be thought of as a negation, as the absence of sound. It should instead be envisaged as a desirable presence. ... Silence is sacred. It cannot be made secular. ... Silence is not nothing. It is instead the divine liturgy leading to communion with God, the mute awe and reverence required by encounter with the holy."

And the whole book is this good!

"Lying in Church"

S.M. Hutchens has a wonderful post in Mere Comments today on a topic near and dear to my heart: the state of worship in the church today (particularly in evangelical churches). It really picks up from another thread he started earlier this year called "Amazing Worship." I had several comments to the earlier thread, and posted a couple to the current thread today. Essentially Hutchens argues that what passes for worship in most evangelical churches today (CCM--contemporary Christian music-- plus a sermon) will eventually lead to heterodoxy, since half the "worship" (the CCM) will no longer have any doctrinal guardrails. He's right of course.

The other, and more immediate issue is that CCM as "worship" is a narcissistic endeavor--its purpose is to entertain the audience (sorry, "congregation"), not to worship the Lord God of the universe. It elicits emotions, not thoughts. It is puerile, not adult.

The spirtual problem of radical Islam (part 2)

But I want to reiterate my main point--radical Islam is primarily a spiritual, not a political or military problem. Therefore it can ultimately have only a spiritual solution. And what would that be? Very simply--that Islam is confronted with Christianity: not Christianity as a political or military force, but simply Christianity as the Gospel. Now, in one sense this has barely happened in most Muslim lands. The strictures against the preaching of the Gospel greatly hinder its effectiveness. But it can happen in Western countries. That is, while many Westerners may fear the Muslim immigrant, in fact the openness of Western societies works against the closed spirit of Islam--as long as we do not lose our nerve. For in "competition" with the Gospel, all other faiths must finally fail. That is a divine promise. The Word is not our possession; it is the Lord's. His Word will not return to him void. What radical Muslims regard as our greatest weakness, our openness, in fact may yet be our most significant strength. But openness can only work if we can offer something in which we truly believe. If the only choices are the moral rigidity of the Muslim religion or the immoral dissolution of the modern West--guess which one will win? But a vivid and vibrant Christian faith is one against which the gates of Hell may not prevail, much less Islamic extremists.

The spirtual problem of radical Islam

Radical Islam is a short-term political/military issue, but a long-term spiritual one. It has dogged the world, particularly the Christian world, since the seventh century. Even if all of our military and political strategems works as planned, radical Islam is likely only to disappear underground for a period of years before emerging again in a new form. In college I had the opportunity to study Islamic history and law under scholars from the Hoover Institution at Stanford. One thing that struck me was how Islam, far more than any other faith, is built on military conquest. Today that military impulse takes the form of guerilla warfare. But the objectives remain the same: conquer the infidels; re-establish the caliphates.

You may think this is amusingly absurd. So did the Byzantine Empire before it fell to the Muslims. Yes, it took about eight hundred years, but fanatics who are suicidal are hardly deterred by the mere need for time to pass. Remember, in the seventh century, Islam was truly nothing more than a rag-tag group of bedouins, attacking the errant caravan in the Arabian desert. You think the Byzantine empire, the heir to mighty Rome, gave much thought to this? Hardly. But today New Rome, the glory of the East, Constantinople, is known as--Istanbul. The greatest cathedral of the early middle ages, Hagia Sophia, was disfigured into a mosque.

Islam is built on a base of resentment of the Western world. It roots, I believe, pre-date Muhammed in a sense. Muhammed grew up on the fringes of the Christian/Byzantine world; Christianity competed with paganism for the souls of a wild, nomadic people. Several hundred years before Muhammed, the rural peoples of North Africa formed the core of the Donatist movement, which plagued the Christian Church of North Africa, and specifically St. Augustine. They were the unforgiving moral purists in the aftermath of the persecutions undertaken in the early fourth century. The Roman emperors crushed the Donatists as a movement, although Donatism didn't finally disappear for two centuries after the death of Augustine--that is, the early seventh century, around the time of Muhammed's appearance. Coincidence? Perhaps not. Muslims swept across northern Africa and western Asia, utterly wiping out the Christian civilizations of north Africa and western Asia. Except for a brief period around the time of the Crusades, Muslims have held on to their gains.

So the next time you're inclined to disparage those who would take the Muslim challenge seriously, I have only two words to say to you--remember Constantinople!

Blogging: running through the town square naked

I'm still new to the world of blogging, so much of what others may take for granted still surprises me. As I skim the blogosphere, I've noted that in some respects blogging is a bit like running through the town square in your birthday suit: not much stays hidden for long. It creates something of a false sense of intimacy, for you believe you know the private side of someone who doesn't know you at all--asymmetrical friendships, perhaps. It's also a tough crowd. If you're thin-skinned or sensitive, well, you better get out of Dodge. It can be the Wild West in blog-land. I suspect many bloggers have semi-romantic notions of "sharing their thoughts with the world." That could disappoint you rather quickly! From what I've seen, most blogs shrivel and die for lack of an audience. But those that succeed often look like shark-tanks, rather frenzied and bloodied.

Yet when all's said and done, there is something undeniably interesting about a good blog. The relationship may be asymmetrical, but then, the same is true with a good biography. I've read a number of biographies of C.S. Lewis, and I really do think I know what Lewis was like. But of course he never knew me. Still, a blog reaches further. You can start up a kind of friendship on line that has a real life of its own. The problem, of course, is that people may come and go all too quickly, unlike the the "real world" where certain responsibilities attach to our in-the-flesh relationships.

Ten years ago, when bulletin boards were popular, I started an "Inklings" board on America Online, and the board was a lively place for several years. With the advent of the web, the board slowly died. Finally I had to turn out the lights and shut the door. It was profoundly sad, at least for me. But with the blogosphere, something like the old "Inklings" can live again, and in many different incarnations. And though people may come and go all too quickly, they may still leave the imprints of their souls, for the web, with its anonymity, gives a glipse of a person that even your family may rarely see. That's bracing. A bit like running through the town square naked . Brrrr!!!

Gratitude: a soul "curved out" toward God

I think that gratitude is the key to happiness. Gratitude is not, strictly speaking, one of the fruits of the Spirit enumerated in Galatians 5:22-23 (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control), but it is perhaps a meta-fruit, that is, it embraces and gives rise to all of the fruits. All of the denominated fruits seem to flow from a heartfelt gratitude.

Gratitude is a type of theological virtue, or again, a meta-virtue. (The theological virtues are faith, hope, and love--or charity. I Cor. 13:13.) For gratitude is essentially an orientation of the soul. Pace St. Augustine, instead of being curved in upon oneself, the grateful soul is curved out toward God. From this position, faith, hope, and love may enter in. Gratitude, in other words, is the pre-condition of the receipt of the theological virtues. It too is a gift.

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"

Chesterton once said that original sin is the one Christian doctrine that is scientifically verifiable, that is, that the evidence of sin in the race of man is observable always, at all times, and everywhere. Nowhere was this more evident than in London this day. Too often Christians think that horrific sin is beyond their ken--we are, after all, nice people! A few flaws, after all (venial sins?), but deep down--not evil the way those terrorists are. Are we? To which we must respond: there, but for the grace of God, go I.

Terrorists are in the grip of an ideology, to be sure. So were the Nazis; so were the Soviets. But does ideology cause men to sin? Or does it merely give them an excuse? And if the latter, what does this say about us? Perhaps that we are restrained from evil only by our circumstances, which are often largely outside our control.
(AP Photo)

Ich bin ein Londoner!

Comrades in arms; faithful friends.

God bless the U.K.!

Ghost stories

Do you like scary stories? Most people probably do, in one form or another. Today's stories (usually movies), however, are often silly or worse. The hero is obliged to kill the evil spirit--which of course (hello? any body home?) is, um, already dead. (Yawn...)

But the true ghost story is an art, indeed an art of the moral imagination. My treat these days is Russell Kirk's Ancestral Shadows, subtitled: "An Anthology of Ghostly Tales." It is champagne compared to the Thunderbird that is the modern ghost movie. Kirk understood the need for the ghost story to be primarily a moral tale, not just a scary story.

And if you really, really want to be scared? I have the book for you: The Awakening by Friedrich Zuendel. It's now a free download from Plough Books. It is the true story of a Lutheran pastor in Germany in the 19th century who did not believe in the world of evil spirits. Which only made it harder on him when he found that this world believed in him. Quite seriously I think it would be hard for any Christian to read this book and not be thoroughly convinced that evil spirits pervade our world today and that we are protected only by God's mercy.

So what's the practical point? The classic ghost story, or the historical stories of ghostly presences or demonic possession, are, if you will, preachings of the law, after hearing such you are quite likely to flee to the Gospel. They are, for some, God's megaphone (as Lewis would say). Try these suggestions (but only with the lights on!)

Patience, please!

I know my blog limps along with mere words--no links or pictures yet. This is largely because I'm a poor linear creature: photos and hyperlinks are not generally part of my thinking. But I'll try, as time permits. In the meantime, you'll pardon me if I'm limited to my rather modest little thoughts.

Wandering among the masks

Can you be a Christian and be bored? Not for long, I think. Boredom is the fate of pagans and postmoderns. A Christian, on the other hand, must see all creation as masking God. Behind every human endeavor we may find a glimpse of God and his purposes. Could any adventure be more interesting? In this blog I hope to wander through the mansion of the Christian faith. C.S. Lewis called the hallway of this mansion "mere Christianity." But he firmly advised against staying in the hallway too long. Warmth and food are to be found only in its rooms. I desire to wander through these rooms, but to bed down in one only. I firmly believe that some of these rooms are better than others, and one or more may be the best of all, even if imperfect. But I desire to see this from a practical point of view. Theology is interesting, even critical, but above all I desire to see its effect on how I (and others) will live, if we take this theology seriously. Some masks, in other words, are more transparent than others, or are more easily removed.

We are the masks of God

C.S. Lewis ends his greatest essay, "The Weight of Glory," majestically:

"Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat--the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden."

The name of this blog, and its strapline, come from the great Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, as quoted in Dr. Gene Veith's The Spirituality of the Cross. The mask of God is a reference to the imago dei, the image of God, in a way that emphasizes that this image is hidden. Yet even when hidden, the image will leave its mark. Obscure it as we may, the image of God will press upon us, and we shall, whether we realize it or not, still appear to our fellows as the masks of our Lord God.