Growing Old Ain't For Sissies

NUMBER NINETY-SIX
Ichthus 2005

Those of you who were on the list in January will recall I promised an update. For context I will quote myself from Blog #82, Ichthus, 1.22.05:

In Lexington Ichthus is the name of our annual Contemporary Christian Music Festival. This year’s theme is “Let It Rain.” The promoters admit the theme is “darkly humorous” since last year’s event was preceded by three days of heavy rain that turned the site into a mud hole and traffic into a nightmare. Reading last year’s accounts, I was reminded of the passage in Dante’s Inferno where he arrives at the third circle of hell to find it “filled with cold, unending, heavy and accursèd rain; its measure and kind are never changed. Gross hailstones, water grey with filth, and snow come streaking down across the shadowed air; the earth, as it receives that shower, stinks.” (Canto VI. 7-10)

No doubt the promoters see their theme as a vote of confidence in God. They have followed the old Arab proverb, “Pray to Allah but tie your camel” by putting in many improvements including 1.5 miles of gravel roads since last year. I can’t imagine they are not praying daily for good weather proceeding and during the big show on April 21-23 this year.

My admittedly jaundiced eye sees a contest shaping up between the 450 prophets and priestesses of Oompah! (god of Christian Rock Music) and Jehovah, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, John, Peter and Paul (and incidentally, the God of thunder, lightning and rain). 20,000 CCM devotees will gather on the hillside southwest of Lexington to rock and roll with the cream of the Contemporary Christian Music crop. Jehovah God will be there in the lofty intentions and words of the songs, but Oompah! will reign supreme in the music. And in this venue, the music is everything.

This looks to me like an ideal time for Jehovah God to say what he thinks about rock and roll Christianity. Last year’s weather disaster could have been a fluke, two years in a row might be a real sign.

The 20,500 patrons of the 36th Annual Ichthus festival are all home now and before I comment on this year’s event, I will make several stipulations.

1. Although I believe that God does intervene in the affairs of men in response to the prayers of men (forgive my political incorrectness-I use “men” in the generic sense as the old preacher who explained in his sermon on Genesis 1, “Man, of course, embraces woman.”), I do not believe God normally responds to the prayers of one well-intentioned group against the affairs of another well-intentioned group. My prayer for Ichthus this year was that the weather disaster that was bound to come would not do any physical damage to the participants. I also prayed for good weather as a dear friend was getting married outdoors on Saturday. As praying goes, one out of two isn’t bad.

2. I am not a prophet or the son of a prophet, and certainly no Elijah—I realize that predicting bad weather in April in Kentucky does not take any particular divine insight or revelation. But it is also true that God sends His rain on one city and withholds it from another for his own reasons (Amos 4.7), and he sometimes does it through a prophet (James 5.17-18).

These things said let me give you a brief account of the affair at the 110 acre Ichthus Farm just southwest of Lexington at Wilmore, KY.

There was a big cold front moving across the country and the meteorologists were predicting thunderstorms, some severe, to begin early in the week. Each day they moved the storms back a day until the crowd began to arrive on Thursday. There was a little wet but not much and the forecast for strong thunderstorms on Friday was wrong too—it was in the mid-seventies and even sunny at times for the whole first day of the festival.

Then late Friday the cold front arrived. A huge line of thunderstorms carrying hail the size of 25 cent pieces, 60-80 mph winds, threats of tornados, and lots of water rolled through Louisville, blew cars off the road on its way east to Frankfort and arrived at Ichthus Farm about 7:30 PM. Channel 27 was playing uproar and the patrons were seeking shelter in or under their cars.

The storm shredded many tents, dumped an inch or so of water on the already soggy field and caused the cancellation of the rest of the day’s events. Right behind the storm came the cold. The temperature dropped to 40 degrees, the wind and the rain continued on an off through the night.

All day Saturday the temperature huddled below 45 degrees and the 20+ mph winds brought the chill factor down to slightly below miserable. The day almost exactly matched Dante’s description of hell in the excerpt from Blog #82 quoted above. People started packing up and leaving early. It was too much even for the hardy contingent from the Santa Claus Methodist Church. Many left their trashed tents and shelters in the clean-up dumpsters. The crowd was decidedly thin by 10:15 Saturday evening when Super-Super-Star Michael W. Smith came on for the big finale--at that point snow began to fall and the temperature started down again to a record low of 32 degrees.

A reporter was talking to a couple of young fans and suggested they ought to think of changing the date or the location to avoid what was becoming a regular pattern. The reporter wrote, “And given that Murphy’s Law seems to apply to Ichthus when it comes to meteorology, Proctor (the teenager) mused, ‘I don’t think Ichthus follows the bad weather. The bad weather follows Ichthus.’”

That pretty well sums it up—out of the mouths of babes—comes wisdom beyond their years.

I have gone on too long already. Here I will try to emulate Fox News—I have reported, now you decide whether this weekend suggests anything about the Creator’s attitude on the Contemporary Music Scene.

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“In the day of prosperity, be joyful. In the day of adversity, consider.”
Ecclesiastes 7.14

NUMBER NINETY-FIVE
Pro-choice in Paradise

Our first parents had it pretty good. They were brand new, factory fresh from the hands of and in the image of their Infinite-Personal Creator. They had all the equipment to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth and to subdue it. They lived in a garden full of food and their pleasant work was to tend it. They were in daily fellowship with their Creator.

There was only one string attached—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, in the center of their garden. They did not need it, it was only a small test to exercise the freedom their Creator had given them to obey or not obey Him. God was pro-choice from the beginning. His wish was that they choose to obey. The Creator was serious about this—the penalty for voluntary disobedience was death.

Pro-choice in Eden attracted a serpent, the tempter, Satan to be specific. He was a good talker and it didn’t take him long to suggest that the Creator had a selfish agenda, that this forbidden fruit, when eaten, would make them just like God himself, knowing good from evil, and certainly not dying in the process.

The woman took a long look. What she saw was something good for food, something pleasant to look upon, and something that would make her wise. She tried some and gave some to the man—and making a long story short, they died—first spiritually, then eventually physically—they were kicked out of paradise so they could not eat from the tree of life and live forever.

So you see, God is responsible for making us creatures that may choose. This is good. This is proper. This is far better than our being simply robots, like the Stepford wives for example--but the freedom to choose carries with it responsibilities and consequences. Our first parents had the choice: life or death, obedience or disobedience. They chose Man over God, death over life.

And so it has been down through the centuries—the biggest choice--who is God, man or God?--gets made over and over in millions of small ways every day. All of the uproar over who marries whom, what babies may be killed and when, does Terri Schaivo live or die, etc., etc is simply the political outworking of the choice between God as God and man as God. Every political conflict is a choice between two moral codes and all our moral codes relate back to that first big choice in Eden—will man look to a higher authority for the determination of good and evil or will man look to himself for the determination of good and evil.

Thirty-four hundred years ago Joshua put the question to the people of God not long before he died:

“Now, therefore, fear the Lord and serve Him in sincerity and truth; put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. If it is disagreeable in your sight to serve the Lord, choose for yourselves today whom you will serve: whether the gods which your fathers served beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me an my house, we will serve the Lord.” Joshua 24.14-15

Joshua was just restating the same challenge Moses had given earlier:

“I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, by loving the Lord your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to Him.” Deuteronomy 30.19-20

“The culture of life” and “the culture of death” are not just political buzzwords—they are a present reality that had its beginnings in that ancient first choice to disobey. The culture war is a real war that has been declared often through history but most recently in 1933 when a group of young Unitarian ministers and other “enlightened” movers and shakers produced the first Humanist Manifesto. Statement 13 said this:

“Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control, and direction of such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life is the purpose and program of humanism. Certainly religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, and communal activities must be reconstituted as rapidly as experience allows, in order to function effectively in the modern world.”

Since 1933, the purpose of humanism has been to take over and reform other people’s religions in order to conform those religions to humanist ideals and goals. The fundamental goal is the worship of their divine trinity: Me, Myself and I.

This effectively placed the Unitarians’ vision of a perfectible man at war with the Traditional Judeo-Christian vision of a sinful man. In1973, the Humanist Manifesto II stated:

“We believe…that traditional dogmatic or authoritarian religions that place revelation, God, ritual, or creed above human needs and experience do a disservice to the human species…[W]e can discover no divine purpose or providence for the human species. While there is much that we do not know, humans are responsible for what we are or become, No deity will save us, we must save ourselves.”

It was this first disobedience in Eden that gave man the knowledge of good and evil, and from this knowledge have the noxious weeds of contemporary bioethics sprouted. Recently, on TV, bioethicist Bill Allen was asked whether he thought Terri Schaivo was a person. His answer, “No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood.” In his eyes, Fetuses, babies, and Alzheimer’s patients are only minimally aware and might not fit this definition of personhood, and so would have no claim to our protections.

Other bioethicists draw the line even tighter, requiring rationality, the capacity to experience desire, or the ability to value one’s own existence. Allen further argued that Terri’s family could have removed Terri’s organs while she was alive, “just as we allow people to say what they want done with their assets.”

Welcome to the brave new world, friends. If you think the battle over judicial appointments is just another annoying political flap, think again. Already those judges have taken to themselves the ultimate power over life and death at the beginning and at the end. In America it is no longer God who decides when you will die, it is a man in a black robe that thinks he is God.


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“Woe unto those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight.”

Isaiah 5.20-21

NUMBER NINETY-FOUR
A Small Poem

SMALL TIMES
Dark Night of the Soul Lite

There are small times
When it is best to
Do nothing,
Be nowhere,
Feel not,
Think not,
Speak not,
Simply listen…

With the hearing,
These times
Pass.

JS/10.30.03

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"All the misfortunes of men derive from one single thing, their inability to remain at repose in a room."
Pascal, Pensees

NINETY-THREE
On Grumpiness

Observing people in retirement homes, one is tempted to conclude that aging does not change people much; it only intensifies who they have been all along. If you are critical at 40, you will likely be hypercritical at 70, and totally impossible to live with at 90. If you are sunny and optimistic at 40, you will be more so at 70 and even more so at 90.

But there are many exceptions to the general rule. Some people work on their grumpiness or cheerfulness to keep it somewhere close to the golden mean, like I work on my weight, always aiming for 160 lbs but never quite making it. And people do change drastically on occasion, in either direction. People with aches and pains and trials may go through a period of pessimism and grumpiness, and come out a better person for the experience—at least they may have learned that there is no real profit in being negative, critical, pessimistic, etc.

For those around these grumpies at their grumpy times, it would be well to recall the old Kenyan Proverb:

"Thunder is not yet rain."

With this in mind, it is OK to carry an umbrella when visiting a grumpy person, but it would be overreacting to begin building an ark.

For you who contemplate a grumpy phase, but are at sea about how to proceed, here is some advice from “The Pessimist’s Sourcebook:”

If you just must feel bad, here are some suggestions. Feel bad about:
1. All the things that should be done but haven’t.
2. All the things that have been done, but that should have been done differently.
3. All the things done over, but still not done right.
4. Everything not already included in 1-3 above.
The Pessimist’s Sourcebook

(A word of warning here: sometimes grumpiness may get to feeling good and natural—that is a dangerous sign. A person who is grumpy too long may end up being a grump, neither a pleasant sight nor a happy condition.)

When you are through your “feeling bad” period, resolve to give the same attention and energy to feeling good—the dividends are much more pleasing and healthy. Giving attention to feeling good is harder work than giving attention to feeling bad--and there is less time to do it as we get older. Joan’s Elderly Observation puts it this way:

"I used to be able to think about three things at once – now I sometimes have to think three times about one thing."

This is where life experience should be a benefit. As Eugene H. Peterson wrote in "A Long Obedience in the Same Direction,"

"A Christian who has David in his bones, Jeremiah in his bloodstream, Paul in his fingertips, and Christ in his heart will know how much and how little value to put on his own momentary feelings and experience of the last week."

Another old saint observed that anger and revenge burn up the holy furniture of the soul at a terrible rate. As long as we live, furnishing the soul with holy things should always be a high priority--and it is never too late to start, whether 20 or 40 or 70 or 90.

Here is a nice table to put over in the corner of your soul. You might stand the pictures of your grandchildren on it for visitors to admire.

The sheep speaking to the Great Shepherd:

"You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies."
Psalm 23.5