Growing Old Ain't For Sissies

NUMBER 138
Faith In Contact With The Present Moment

Back in February, a young Turkish Jihadist gunman shouting “Allahu akbar” (Allah is great) shot and killed Father Andrea Santoro while he was praying in his little church in Trabzon, Turkey. The priest was an Italian missionary who had been in Trabzon ten years. In spite of the best fantasies of our State Department, Turkey remains a profoundly anti-western country where the homicidal Sons of Allah are busy at their trade.

Here is an excerpt from Fr. Santoro's last letter to his friends:

“Meanwhile, in Trabzon, the minute Christian community has met every Sunday morning to celebrate the Liturgy of the Word, and the church has been opened twice a week to Muslims, under the responsibility of a trustworthy person. I will let you know how it goes.

I greet you, commending these reflections to you and exhorting you to always put faith in contact with the present moment. It must not be an abstract and generic faith, but a faith like that of the first ‘beginnings,’ which has been transmitted to us from generation to generation. As the gospel says, leaven has a mysterious capacity to ferment the dough, if it comes into contact with it--the dough of all times, all places, all generations.

Moreover, Jesus said: ‘I am the light of the world, he who follows me will not walk in darkness.’ If His light illuminates us, not only will it illuminate every situation, even the most tragic, but in addition we too, as He always said, will be light. The tenuous light of a candle illuminates a house; an extinguished lamp leaves everything in darkness. May He shine in us with his Word, with his Spirit, with the sap of his saints. May our life be the wax that is consumed willingly. Affectionately, Father Andrea.”

“Put faith in contact with the present moment.” There is an echo of the Apostle Paul in this exhortation of an obscure parish priest in an obscure village in Turkey. Paul speaks of “the obedience of faith,” in the beginning (1.5) and the ending (16.26) of his Letter to the Romans. The writer of Hebrews refers to the same thing (Hebrews 5.9).

From beginning to end, the Scriptures make it clear that true faith, while it may be a gift of God, is also an act of the will. God speaks, I answer with an obedient act. You may remember this small poem (Blog #78 in December, 2004). It came to mind again as I read the exhortation of this parish priest.


CREED

Yesterday is a memory.

Tomorrow is a dream.

I will live today with full attention
To the reality God brings me,
Fitting myself to it
By doing what needs to be done.

6/84/3/06
038

Of course there were two gods in the chapel in Trabzon, Yahweh, and Allah. Which God you hear and obey makes a considerable difference. The One True God does not call his followers to murder innocent people.

NUMBER 137
Making A Quilt


QUILTING

Quilting engages
Head, heart and hand.

A quilt when, it's finished,
Is something quite grand.

8/92/3/06
081

NUMBER 136
Ministry?

I have been thinking again about the way marketing perverts faith. What brought it to mind was a recent experience. My California son, pulling my leg, suggested I check out a rock band my local grandkids might like. It is called “Lamb of God” and its first “groundbreaking,” best selling CD was “The New American Gospel.”

Amazon lets you listen to about 15 seconds of any track on any CD they offer. I checked out all ten tracks of the “New American Gospel.” They may vary somewhat but they all begin the same: each cut was like yanking the lid off the pit of hell—pure bedlam leapt out like a thousand demons turned loose. The words that come with the music are unprintable nihilistic obscenities.

An Official Press Release from their website tunes you in:

LAMB OF GOD joins forces with Slayer, a true unholy alliance. LAMB OF GOD, one of the biggest headlining metal acts in the US joins forces with Slayer with support from friends in Children of Bodom and Mastadon for their first US tour since The Sounds Of The Underground 2005 Festival almost one year ago. LAMB OF GOD are currently at home in Richmond Virginia recording their sophomore Epic Records recording (8/06) with Producer Machine (Clutch, King Crimson and LOG’s ground breaking Epic Records debut 'Ashes Of the Wake)(2004).'

Here is how they think of themselves:

Drummer Chris Adler states, “we are a heavy metal band – we’re not interested in trying to sell a record to everyone. We write “ugly” music for “ugly” people and we have no intentions of lightening things up for more appeal. If you know of us and don’t like us now, you never will and we aren’t missing you.

When discussions began with Slayer about a US run together, we knew this needed to happen. We've done shows together in the UK and let me tell you, it is one of the most intense and brutal nights of music I have ever witnessed both on and off the stage. This will not be a normal heavy metal tour, this is roaming devastation. As a life-long fan of heavy music, this is the show that I would want to see - this is the show that the fans deserve - this is the show that will raise the bar and this is the show that will not be forgotten."

I asked my favorite young musical expert about the group and here is his evaluation:

“Just the standard chainsaw-deathhead-blow-up-the-world metal band. From inspection of their site, I gather that their highest priorities in life boil down to only a few things:

1) Hanging GW Bush from the highest point in the state of Texas
2) Killing their enemies
3) Using creative expletives in front of their grandmothers
4) Hating the world and wanting to die
5) Not killing themselves (contrary to what priority number 4 dictates), because it has dawned on even these supremely unintelligent beings that death would mean a certain drop in record sales.”

When I Googled “Lamb of God” I got 13,700,000 hits. In the first ten there were two Lutheran Churches and eight sites peddling goods from divine miracles to CD’s to explicit tee shirts. The term “Lamb of God” is apparently a very powerful marketing device. About this time I also Googled “Seraphim.” It got me 5,700,000 hits—amazing for a Biblical word that only appears briefly in the 6th chapter of Isaiah. It seems to be used primarily to peddle all kinds of angel ticky-tacky. I suspect there is a special corner reserved in hell for the blasphemous abusers of holy words.

Meanwhile, over in the Netherlands and the Flemish half of Belgium, a holy word is being officially downgraded. The name “Christ” will be written with a lower case “c” as stipulated by an orthography reform adopted in October 2005. The change will be mandatory in August 2006. “Orthography” is “the art of writing words with proper letters according to standard usage.” Perhaps Christ has entered into common usage as a swear word but is now offensive to other religions as a recognition that Jesus is the Messiah.

Here is a poem I wrote the last time I was thinking about this kind of thing.

MINISTRY

Born in fire
And pain
And loss
On bended knee
Beneath the cross
It rose to walk
The barren land.
And everywhere
Its light feet trod
Sprung up, in beauty,
Flowers of God.

Close behind
The merchants came
Cutting flowers,
Arranging same
Into bundles
Fit for sale
To those with money
Who would buy
Second hand
Their piece of sky.

So what is born
In heaven sweet
Is killed and laid
At Mammon's feet--
Gold intended
For a crown
Buys Mammon's dreams,
A pittance down.

8/86/3/06
047

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“The next day he saw Jesus coming to him and said, ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’”
John 1.29

“These will wage war against the Lamb, and the Lamb will overcome them, because He is Lord of lords and King of kings, and those who are with Him are the called and chosen and faithful.”
Revelation 17.1

NUMBER 135
Seasweep

Here is a bit of history that would bear remembering as the cries of “cut and run” from Iraq grow louder and more insistent. It may or may not have been a good idea to go to Iraq--it will be tragic if we leave before the job is done.


"There is a tide in the affairs of men..."

"Somewhere between Hong Kong and Singapore, among the hundreds of rocks and reefs named for ships wrecked on them, Jesus Christ is adrift in the South China Sea. He is on a thirty foot converted fishing boat with ninety-two other men, women and children. He is out of fuel, almost out of food and water, and out of sight of land. His name is Phuong Ngoc Huynh."

This is what Stan Mooneyham wanted to tell his Board of Directors and his staff when they questioned his sanity in the matter of buying a ship and setting out into three million square miles of shallow, dangerous water to find a few of the estimated two million refugees fleeing Viet Nam by sea. Instead, he told them how the world was ignoring this mass exodus, how these people needed someone to care, and how he intended to care whatever the cost/benefit analysis might be saying.

Meanwhile, Phuong sat in the stern of the fishing boat, rising and falling slowly on the groundswell, waiting for the angel of death--it hadn't begun this way.

It all began when the armies of North Viet Nam overran a base in the south where Phuong was an Air Force mechanic. The prisoners were sent into the rice fields to work. For three and a half years Phuong tried to feed his wife and two children on his meager pay of two bags of rice out of every ten he harvested. There was never enough--they were always hungry. He was not allowed to travel. There was no electricity or running water.

The vanquished southerners lived at the margin of an economy that was slowly disintegrating. Phuong and his wife finally decided to leave. Somehow they scraped together the going price for freedom in gold. With high hopes they crept aboard the creaking boat that was to carry them and two hundred eighty five others to a new life.

They hugged each other, laughed nervously, and whispered their dreams of reunion with a brother in San Diego, of English lessons and a good job as a mechanic. The boat moved down a branch of the Mekong. It slid silently past the sleeping fringes of Ho Chi Minh City and out into the rough coastal waters of the South China Sea. Turning south, they set a course for Singapore. From there on it was supposed to be easy--it wasn't that way at all.

On the second day another boat rammed them. Pirates came aboard, took everything of value, and left. Two days later the boat ran aground on Malaysian soil. The police rounded up the weary travelers and put them into a barbed wire compound with five hundred other refugees. They managed for eight days on the last of the food and water salvaged from their boat.

Ten days later they were given food and supplies, relieved of the valuables the pirates had missed, and towed back out to sea by a Malaysian navy vessel. Two days out Phuong’s boat and four others like it were cut lose and left to fend again for themselves. Soon the fuel tanks of all five boats were empty. The boats drifted apart. Phuong and others tried to rig sails, but the winds began to blow them north, back towards Viet Nam.

The sun beat down, cooking the vile soup of oil, urine and vomit sloshing heavily in the bilges. They drifted, their water and their food dwindled, their hopes faded -- and Phuong sat in the stern, his eyes almost closed against the hard sun, thinking of his children and sensing the angel of death just out of sight over the horizon.

At the lowest point, an angel came, but not the one of death. She was a ship named Seasweep. She carried extra fuel, food, water, navigational aids, medicine and tools. She also carried a crew of volunteers who, like Stan Mooneyham, really cared. Her appearance on the shimmering horizon set new fears of pirates loose among the refugees but as she approached they recognized her and welcomed her alongside with cheers of "our savior, our savior."

Drums of water mixed with dextrose were lowered to the dehydrated people. The sickest were hoisted onto the Seasweep for treatment by a doctor and two nurses. An engineer examined the refugee's engine and pronounced dead. The passengers were brought aboard the rescue vessel, and everything began to look better.

The next day Phuong was in the hold of Seasweep washing his children's clothes, smiling and humming to himself...he was thinking of a reunion to come with family in San Diego, of English lessons, and the feel of a good wrench in his hand.

+++++++

There appears to be no record of the actual number of persons saved by the Seasweep. But this ship caused the world to pay attention and Stan Mooneyham pursued his caring to all those nations who were able to help in some way. He successfully argued the case before princes and presidents.

According to the report of United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees, 1/3 of boat people died at sea by killing, storms, illness, and food shortage. In 1990, there were over 1.6 million boat people survivors spread all across the world: USA, Australia, Canada, France, England, Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Philippines.

NUMBER 134
THOC Update

The Habitually Offended Community (HOC) has been in full cry lately. The wringing of hands and the whining laments have been everywhere in evidence, many at a fever pitch.

THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS

"Congress is up in arms. The Democrats, in particular, are in full cry, gleeful to at last get to the right of George Bush on an issue of national security. Gleeful, and shamelessly hypocritical. If a citizen of the UAE walked into an airport in full burnoose and flowing robes, speaking only Arabic, Democrats would be deeply offended, and might even sue, if the security people were to give him any more scrutiny than they would to my sweet 84-year-old mother. Democrats loudly denounce any thought of racial profiling. But when that same Arab, attired in business suit and MBA, and with a good record running ports in 15 countries, buys P&O, Democrats howl at the very idea of allowing Arabs to run our ports. (Republicans are howling too, but they don't grandstand on the issue of racial profiling.) On this, the Democrats are rank hypocrites." Charles Krauthammer

THE DAUGHTERS OF MOLOCH

The South Dakota Legislature has just passed a law that bans abortion. Our local liberal rag this week has two stories on the subject of the States’ new enthusiasm for strangling unlimited abortion and the new shape of the Supreme Court. One is mostly about the Lexington Abortion Alternative Pregnancy Help Center (the one I managed for two years) and their experience with ultrasound. AAPHC has a $40,000 machine that doesn’t wonders. In Louisville, they have a $150,000 ultrasound that allows them to send home a 3-D picture of the baby in the womb. Nationwide, two-thirds of the abortion-minded women who view their babies on an ultrasound machine end up rejecting abortion. Jenny Copenhefer, former lobbyist for the Kentucky Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, whines about the use of the ultrasound, “It’s a manipulative tool… I don’t think it is fair to heap guilt on them because they feel that they have to terminate a pregnancy.” Right, Jenny, we certainly wouldn’t want a woman to realize there is a real baby in there! With dozens of States preparing legislation to ban or severely limit abortion and a Supreme Court that may look favorably on such legislation, there will be much weeping, wailing and whining to come.

THE HOMICIDAL SONS OF ALLAH

Responding to editorial cartoons in a Danish newspaper that depicted Allah in situations suggesting the violent nature of radical Islam, the “peaceful Muslims” took to the streets to burn, loot and kill the infidels. A recent newspaper article published in Spain pretty well says it all. This is a translation of an article from a Spanish newspaper written by a Catholic Spaniard before the "Danish Cartoon" exercise.

All European life died in Auschwitz
By Sebastian Vilar Rodrigez

I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth:

Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims.

In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, and talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime. Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts. And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for hoping for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

I wonder how long before this newspaper will be firebombed and this writer beheaded?

THE GENDER POLICE

There are no more freshmen at Amherst Regional High School in Massachusetts—They are now properly referred to as “ninth graders.” Marta M. Guevara, Assistant Principal for Student Support, explains that the term freshman is “misogynistic, oppressive, and non-inclusive.” It also has a sexual connotation—“As in men being fresh toward women.”

Meanwhile, the Southern Poverty Law Center would like to do away with the normal teacher’s greeting, “Good morning boys and girls.” Rebecca Bigler, a psychology professor writes in the SPLC’s flagship publication, Teaching Tolerance (Fall 2005)—“It happens every day across the nation: Teachers welcome their students to class by saying ‘Good morning, boys and girls’…imagine if a teacher used race labels in a similar fashion: ‘Good morning, whites and blacks.’” Bigler believes this “gender bigotry” is intolerable and must be stopped.

And there will be no shortage of lawyers and sympathetic judges to turn these products of wingnut vapors into the law of the land.


+++++++

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight!"
Isaiah 5.20-21