Crossing the Border

            Living near the U.S.-Canadian border and having friends in a northern border town in Washington State, I often cross the border.  This usually involves waiting in long line-ups, which gives even people like me who have nothing to hide plenty of time to get nervous at the prospect of stern interrogation.  I don’t know why I am nervous.  Perhaps it is my reaction to armed people in uniform asking odd questions (“Do you have any tattoos?”); perhaps it is their authority to disassemble my vehicle on a whim.  Anyway, I always take care to remove my sunglasses, look them straight in the eye, and have my story prepared as to why I want to enter their country.  The long wait gives me lots of opportunity to read the rules they have prominently posted:  I am not allowed to bring fire-arms into their country, or $10,000 without declaring it.  (No problem; I do not own a fire-arm, nor do I have $10,000 in spare change.)  On my last trip, I took the opportunity to think of the final border crossing, the one that all of us must make, whether or not we ever leave our home-town.    

            I refer of course to the passage from this life to the next, passing through the border between life and death, and ushering us into what Shakespeare called “the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns”.  Concerning that final and compulsory border crossing, I would like to offer two brief thoughts.

            Firstly, like crossing the border into the U.S., there are certain things we are not allowed to take with us.  Money is the most famous one, as proverbial wisdom has always told us that “you can’t take it with you”, and that there are no pockets in a shroud.  (One Christian wag added that you can, however, send it on ahead through almsgiving, and store up treasures in heaven that way.)  But there are things besides money that we cannot take with us as we cross over.  Unforgiveness, for example.  The Lord was quite clear that unless we forgave our neighbour we would not be forgiven ourselves, and we are not allowed to drag our hatreds into the Kingdom with us and nurse them through all eternity.  Better to forgive now in this life and drop such wretched baggage before we reach the final border.   

Another item that will find no place in the age to come is the self-absorption that often dominates our life.  We often live as if we were the center of universe, and so will be unprepared to enjoy the age to come where we will find that God is actually the center of the universe.  If we do not retain and cultivate a hunger for Him, heaven will not be that heavenly for us.  Our eternal joy consists of transcending ourselves, and putting away once and for all our little obsessions with our rights, and looking to Him.  A self-absorption which refuses to re-direct our gaze from ourselves to Him has no place in that blessed undiscovered country.  None of this should come as any surprise to Christians.  Like the U.S. border at which I cross, the rules of the Kingdom are also prominently posted, and are read to us at every Sunday Liturgy in the form of the Epistle and Gospel.

            Secondly, we need not be nervous at the prospect of that final border crossing.  It is true that the quality of our life will then be revealed, so that we will hear our voices as they really sounded to others and find out a little more about what kind of people we really were (that is, I think, the point behind talk of heavenly toll-houses).  But if we have truly given our lives to God and have striven to repent of our sins as best we could, living as disciples of Jesus in His holy Church, we may face that final crossing in peace.  There will still be judgment, of course, so that we may learn the whole truth about ourselves and our actions, and “receive good or evil, according to what we have done” (2 Cor. 5:10).  But our repentant faith and God’s grace assure our entry.  That is why Christ’s message is called “good news”, for He has opened the Kingdom to all who truly love Him.  We have His word on it:  “He who hears My word and believes Him who sent Me has eternal life; he does not come into condemnation, but has passed from death to life” (Jn. 5:24).  When our time comes to wait in the line-up to cross over that final border (perhaps lying in a hospital bed), that will be a good word on which to dwell.  Our hope remains in the Cross of Christ, and the shining love of God.  It is the prospect of entering more fully into that shining love that makes even the final border crossing a good thing.

An Insignificant Sound

              When I was converted to Christ through the Jesus People movement, there were no praise bands.  (A "praise band", for those unfamiliar with the term, is a band with electric guitars and drums which plays "contemporary Christian music" at the front of evangelical churches.)  In those happy and innocent days, young Christians would meet together in a variety of venues such as the beach, a hall, or someone's home, and pray and sing to the Lord, often using musical compositions or choruses written by themselves.  It was all very informal and spontaneous.  There was then no "Christian music industry"; enthusiastic young believers just played the guitar out of joy and sang to God.  In those post-hippie days, such singing often resulted in a crowd gathering to listen, and the one singing would then share the Gospel with them.  The contemporary praise band evolved from such early and unsophisticated spontaneity.

My involvement in this movement centred on a meeting of young people in Toronto, the so-called "Toronto Catacombs", led by Merv and Merla Watson.  Like many in the Jesus Movement, some of the young people would bring their guitars to the meeting as well as their Bibles, and would play them as everyone sang choruses.  The group of players up front grew, and came to include some people playing the flute and the accordion.  And--this is important--one young man playing a single bell.  Yes, a bell.  At certain times he would strike the bell, producing a sweet note.  Of course with people playing guitars, flutes, and an accordion, to say nothing of the many voices singing loudly with spiritual gusto, he was utterly drowned out.  You could see him striking the occasional note, but could never hear him.  One time, someone asked him about this.  Why did he continue to strike the bell and sound notes that no one else could hear?  "I'm not playing for you," was his reply.  "I'm playing for the Lord.  He can hear me.  And that's all that matters."

I have never forgotten this reply, and it has become more and more important to me throughout the years, especially when I am tempted to become discouraged with my own poor attempts at prayer.  St. Seraphim praying with power on a rock for a thousand days, or St. Mary of Egypt levitating a foot off the ground in her communion with God are all very impressive, but at times these things leave me feeling very keenly the inadequacy and poverty of my own prayer life.  I cannot pray for a thousand days nonstop.  And never mind about levitating--most of the time it's all I can do to keep my mind from wandering.  Why bother?  What do I have to offer?  I can picture the angels looking down from heaven at me and saying to each other, "What does he think he's doing?  You call that praying?"  

           It is then that I remember the insignificant sound of the bell.  It might have been insignificant in the estimation of others, but not to God.  Let others play the guitar or the flute or sing as melodiously as they could.  My friend with the bell would offer what he had to offer, even if it were but the single sweet sound of an almost inaudible note.  He was playing for the Lord, and he refused to compare his contribution to that of others.  It is the same with us.  In heaven, a deafening thunder of praise, a continual cataract of doxology, pours forth from the angels, from the vast army of cherubim and seraphim, "the voice of a great multitude and the sound of many waters, and of mighty peals of thunder, saying, Alleluia!" (Rev. 19:6).  We are privileged to add our few and little notes to this vast chorus.  It might not sound impressive.  It might be as nothing to the prayers of the saints and the praises of the angelic powers.  It might be all but lost in that thunderous swell--an almost inaudible sound, a single note added to theirs.  But to the Lord our note is not lost among the others, nor is it insignificant.  God delights in our prayers, when we offer them to Him with a heart of love.  As my nameless brother said long ago, we are singing for the Lord.  He can hear us.  And that's all that matters.

Before Opening Your Bible

          Not too long ago I opened a Bible and was saddened by what I read.  For there, on the initial fly-leaf, were written in beautiful calligraphic script the words, “Presented to Cathy Ruth by Mom and Dad, April 18, 1993”. In the subsequent pages allowing space for the recording of marriages and deaths, I also found a number of names and dates, commemorating those events.  The reason I was sad to read the dedication to Cathy Ruth by Mom and Dad is that I found and purchased this Bible at the local Value Village for $1.99.   (I have altered the actual name, just in case “Cathy” is reading this.)

            Of course I have no idea of what might have led Cathy Ruth to junk her Bible, giving it to Value Village perhaps along with old Harlequin novels and tapes of (how’s your memory?) “Rhythm & News”.  Perhaps she is continuing in zealous service of her Lord and now has so many Bibles she needs to lighten the load on her library shelf, but given that this volume was given to her by her parents, I think this unlikely.  A more likely scenario is that Cathy Ruth has drifted away from her youthful faith and now values that Bible no more than she values old copies of Harlequin romances and tapes of the boys’ bands she once listened to.  How does this happen?  How does one go from opening one’s Bible and reading with compunction to throwing it into a box for donation to Value Village?

            It all depends upon how we read the Bible.  Do we read it like we are performing a chore?  Do we consider Scripture-reading a duty, something we do to please God, who for some inexplicable reason insists that we read religious literature we find boring as a kind of podvig?  If so, it is not surprising that we find persevering in that task difficult, and would be only too relieved to be done with it all.  If we read our Bible as a duty and nothing more, it is all but certain that it will soon acquire a coat of dust and end up at Value Village.  But there is another way to read the Scriptures.

            That way is to focus on love for Christ and not performance of duty as the central motivation of our life.  We then will not think in terms of duties (or “works”, to use Pauline terminology), or of things we must do to get on God’s good side.  Rather, we think only of Christ and of our relationship with Him.  The first question to be faced before ever thinking of opening a Bible is:  “Do you know and love Jesus?”  Is Jesus simply an historical figure, with whom you have no real relationship, and thus on par with other historical figures, such as Socrates or the Buddha?  Or do you really know Him, and find in His love for you the reason for your existence?  This latter is the only way for a Christian, and without this relationship with the living Christ our Orthodoxy is simply a sham.   This issue must be faced and resolved before beginning to seriously read the Bible, for the Bible is addressed only to those who have given their lives to God.  Reading Scripture seriously before we have given ourselves to Jesus is like reading someone else’s mail—it is no wonder that we can make little sense of it and quickly lose interest.

            When we have given our lives to Jesus we then find the Bible a different book than we first thought it was.  We now read the Old Testament to find Jesus there—hidden in typology and symbol, foreshadowed in Israel’s experiences, seen from afar by the prophets.  We read the New Testament to draw near to the Lord we have come to know—nourishing our hearts with His teaching in the Gospels, hearkening to the advice of His apostles in their letters which tell us how to serve Him better.  Once we have surrendered our lives to Him, our central aim will be to know Him more and more.  Reading the Scriptures will then be urgently relevant to our own needs and desires, for it addresses itself to our condition and tells us how to arrive at the destination we ourselves have chosen. 

            As we grow older and go through life’s stages, we of course undergo many changes.  Books we once read with interest now have little to say to us, and our taste in music and fashion changes.  (People of my vintage would not, I think, be happy to be seen wearing “bell-bottoms”.)  But not everything is subject to flux and change.  Some things abide and deepen with age—things such as appreciation of good music and literature, such as admiration for courage and self-sacrifice.   Our faith in Christ, if it is vital and real and if we nourish it so that it grows, will also abide—and with it, our joy in reading the Scriptures.  For those who truly know Jesus, it is unthinkable to turn away from Him and try to live without Him.  It is therefore equally unthinkable that we would discard as worthless something as important to our relationship with Him as our personal Bible—regardless of who gave it to us, and regardless of inscription on the fly-leaf.

           

           

The Times They Are A-Changin’

          Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up.  Recently I came across a news story that had everything:  patriarchal men facing off against earnest feminists who were protesting male oppression and church traditionalism.  The story had liberated sexuality, violence, and people screaming in frustration who couldn’t take it any more.  It had a conference of 17,000 who gathered at the annual the National Meeting of Women in San Juan, Argentina to discuss violence, gender issues and abortion rights.  It had a burning effigy of the Pope, surrounded by crowds chanting slogans.  It even had topless women.  A journalist’s dream.  Why then has it not been all over the news?  After all, you can blur the topless parts.  Who wouldn’t eat up a story about earnest feminists assembling to discuss and denounce male oppression who find themselves confronted by horrid patriarchal men from the church?

            Maybe because the horrid patriarchal men from the church weren’t the ones doing the confronting.  It was the women who were doing the confronting, going topless and storming the Roman Catholic cathedral in Podomos, Argentina, the city where the conference was held, to inflict damage upon it in the name of their cause.  Last year 500 tried to storm the cathedral.   This year it was 7000 feminist troops who tried to storm the building.  You can read all about it here, including watching a brief news video.  In anticipation of this year’s storming, 1500 turned up to defend their San Juan cathedral from damage.  The men linked arms in a ring outside to prevent entry.  The women responded by going topless, shouting obscenities, molesting them, spitting at them, and spray-painting the faces and bodies of the men.  Yep, spray-painting, mostly their faces and crotches, some with Nazi symbols.  Oh, and chanting too.  What would a feminist protest be without chanting?  In this case they chanted, “To the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, who wants to get between our sheets, we say that we want to be whores, transvestites and lesbians!  Legal abortion in every hospital!”  Wow.  Like I said, you can’t make this stuff up.  What were the men doing when all this physical abuse against their bodies was going on?  They were praying the Rosary.  Some were weeping.

To continue reading this article from The Sounding blog, click here….

Just Imagine, John Lennon

In the world’s hagiology, it seems that untimely demise bestows a scent of secular sanctity, that those who die before their time are endowed with the status of saints.  Take for example the untimely death of Princess Diana.  Despite some remarkably unfortunate life choices (such as Dodi Fayed), she was instantly hailed as “the people’s princess” after her death in a Paris tunnel and paired with Mother Teresa (since they died within days of each other), some speaking of them walking hand in hand in heaven like two saints.  Serious comparison of the lives and choices of both Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, of course, does nothing to lend support to the pairing, nor to the idea of Diana being the sort of saint that Mother Teresa was.  But untimely death brings with it an emotional response that often overwhelms moral discernment.   

            We see this in the case of John Lennon, who died at the age of 40 in 1980, gunned down as he and Yoko Ono were returning to their New York apartment.  He died of his wounds and was pronounced dead on arrival at a nearby hospital on December 8 at 11.07 p.m.  John Lennon was known for his advocacy of world peace, and became something of a poster boy for its cause.  As Wikipedia relates, “Lennon and Ono used their honeymoon as what they termed a ‘Bed-In for Peace’ at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel.  At a second Bed-In three months later at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal Lennon wrote and recorded ‘Give Peace a Chance’.  Released as a single, it was quickly taken up as an anti-war anthem.  In December, they paid for billboards in 10 cities around the world which declared, in the national language, ‘War Is Over! If You Want It’. ” 

            It is hard to escape Lennon’s perennial message:  every year at the Christmas season we are treated to his rendition of  “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” on the radio airwaves.  It always makes me think of his other perennial favourite, “Imagine”, which opens with the lyric:  “Imagine there’s no heaven.  It’s easy if you try.  No hell below us; above us only sky.  Imagine all the people living for today.  Imagine there’s no countries.  It isn’t hard to do.  Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.  Imagine all the people living life in peace.”  Lennon’s disdain for religion is here combined with his generation’s enthusiasm for peace, and the combination has found great resonance in the minds and hearts of many.  Lennon’s untimely demise has served to place his life and views beyond the pale of cultural criticism.  “Saint John” may not be easily contradicted.

            The question may be asked however:  what did John Lennon actually know about the true causes of peace and war, and about why nations wage war on one another?  More importantly, why are nations sometimes dissuaded from going to war?  It is unlikely that anyone was ever dissuaded from their own war-like impulses because John and Yoko famously allowed themselves to be photographed in bed together, or by reading their billboards announcing “War Is Over!  If You Want It”.  It is also unlikely that abolishing religion and countries would do the trick, for people sharing the same country and possessing no discernible religion still engage in war against others.  Of course when this occurs within the same country, it is called not “war”, but “crime”, but the interior war-like impulse is the same nonetheless.  War exists in the human heart, and neither bed-ins nor slogans can eliminate it from there.  Is there anything that can?

            If John Lennon had been able to truly imagine and think outside the politically correct box of his generation (or perhaps if he had read some Christian theology), he would’ve found that there is something which can remove war from the human heart and allow all the people to live in peace.  It is mentioned by St. Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho.  In this work St. Justin writes, “We who were filled with war and mutual slaughter and every wickedness have each throughout the whole earth changed our weapons of war—our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks—and we cultivate piety, righteousness, philanthropy, faith and hope, which we have from the Father Himself through Him who was crucified.”  In other words, the religious impulse which Lennon disdained as the cause of war was actually the only thing capable of overcoming it.  The secularized scenario that John Lennon bids us “imagine” has never produced the longed for peace, however much some people may have wanted it.

            It is, of course, a bit much to expect that Lennon would have been familiar with the writings of St. Justin Martyr, which is admittedly a bit out of his field.  Closer to home for him however is the song “Snoopy’s Christmas” by the Royal Guardsmen, which they performed in 1967 as a follow up hit to their previous popular song “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron”.  In this Christmas song, the Red Baron is about to shoot down Snoopy in a World War I aerial dogfight when he hears the bells ringing from the churches below announcing Christmas Eve.  Touched by this and its implications for peace on earth, the Red Baron decides not to shoot down his adversary, but instead forces him to land behind enemy lines.  Though Snoopy expected that this was the end, he finds instead the Red Baron wishing him a merry Christmas and offering a holiday toast.  The song ends with them both flying off in opposite directions, refusing to fight on Christmas Eve.

            The song is not entirely fanciful.  It is based on the historical 1914 Christmas Eve truce.  On that evening, German soldiers began to sing Christmas carols and were joined by the “enemy” soldiers singing a few hundred yards away across No Man’s Land.  Soon they left their respective trenches and met in the middle, conversing, sharing drinks and cigarettes and personal tokens, and showing each other photos of loved ones left behind.  Some even played a game of soccer together.  The generals of both sides were emphatically not amused, and several soldiers were later court-marshalled for their part in the camaraderie.  You can see why:  it is difficult to persuade men to shoot others with whom moments before they were sharing a cigarette and swapping personal tokens.  It is difficult to persuade soldiers in the trenches to make other soldiers’ wives into widows and their children fatherless when moments before they had seen pictures of those wives and children.  Now, thanks to their common celebration of the birth of Christ, the other soldiers across No Man’s Land were not simply “the enemy” or dehumanized monsters, but simply men like themselves.  War had broken out in 1914 when healthy patriotism degenerated into unhealthy and fevered nationalism.  Peace broke out all along the front lines shortly afterward in 1914, when men remembered the origin of their Christian Faith and their common love for Christ.   Devotion to peace as a political abstraction played no part in this.  Devotion to the newborn Saviour did.

            Here is the only real hope for peace and for war being over.  True and lasting peace can never come from politics, from bed-ins and slogans, from plans and policies, for man is not fundamentally a political animal, and politics cannot heal the human heart.  Man is a spiritual animal, and healing for the human heart can only come from spiritual causes.  Only Christ can heal the human heart, and the birth of Christ announces the only hope for all the people living together in peace.  St. Justin Martyr knew that.  Even the Royal Guardsmen and Snoopy and the Red Baron knew that.  John Lennon did not know that.  Just imagine if he did.