Metronalysis – On Fairytales and Freedom

I like politics – the drama, the clash of ideas – not so much the score-keeping (I’m not a sports fan). One piece of the ever-interesting political puzzle has always eluded me – why is it that you can look at a political map and clearly see that the bastions of left-wing ideology are the giant cities.  What is there about City-ness that produces that frame of mind? This last trip to New York finally coughed up some answers. I’d like to know what you think – these are my thoughts:

·      Big cities are fairytale worlds. The ramparts are beautiful, sparkly, gold-tipped. Food just appears. Water is always hot. Transportation – I’m thinking subways here – is magic – hectic and uncomfortable, but fast and no one seems to be driving the thing. It just goes. Maggie and I, as we visited modeling agencies, kept finding ourselves in Narnian places – elevator doors in questionable looking buildings opening into splendiferous spaces with ornate red chandeliers and white leather furnishings. Enchanting. Under those circumstances it would be easy to go on imagining a completely utopian existence. Why not? Is this not already Neverland?

·      Go back to transportation; in big cities going anywhere distant independently requires the punishing expense and fuss-n-bother of owning a car – to say nothing of the nerves of steel it takes to drive through LA’s freeway tangles or the clogged capillaries of New York --- or you hail a cab and pay twelve prices for the thrill of hyper-aggressive driving by someone who’s only been in the country for 3 months. Your only other option is public transportation – cheap, available, but here’s the effect: you lose the idea of being in complete control of your own movement. You wait patiently for the vehicle to appear. You sit obediently in your seat (or stand and hold on for dear life) and you go where the thing takes you, which is rarely exactly where you want to end up. The idea of independence would get shaky after too many years of that. Some freedom gets sacrificed for the advantages of living in a phenomenal city, making it easier to give up a little more, and a little more, and a little more.

Home Wherever

I love New York. Every time I go there I learn something new and important – about myself, about our culture, about human nature. You can’t pack that many people into such a small space without some wisdom seeping out somewhere.

The first thing I learned about is hospitality. No one I know does a classier job of that than my brother and his wife. I took mental notes the whole time. You see, years ago I ran across an article about how to treat house guests – I thought it was funny. A true hostess, it said, should supply the guest room with stamps and stationary (ornamented with pictures of the hosting house), a variety of reading materials, fresh fruit, swim suits, mending kits and – this is the best – a thermometer mounted outside the window so the guest would know how to dress. I suppose all that is useful if you’re not going to let the poor folk out of their rooms, but it seemed obsessive to me.

from Mike & Gloria's terrace

Mike and Gloria do it right. They had metro passes waiting for us, gave us tour guide directions for all the spots we needed and wanted to visit. They came home from work each night and poured wine, laid out cheese and crackers. They gathered everyone from the east coast that we wanted to see. They fed us elegantly. Gloria, who I’m sure knows everyone in the city, even set Maggie up with an important modeling firm – just someone she knows. Amazing. Mostly they were just themselves and graciously gave us the run of their lovely apartment and their magnificent city. How blessed can we be?

I also learned about homeness. Mike and I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska, a beautiful city on the plains. Our father was a printer, our step-father a farmer, our mother a teacher in a country school. And yet I stood in Mike’s office just off Wall Street on the 33^rd floor of a building overlooking Battery Park, the Statue of Liberty, and Ellis Island. He’s at home there in that remarkable place so far from where we both started. He leaves there in the evening and rides the subway to the Upper East Side and thinks nothing of it. He has made the city his.

Gratitopia

I’d like to take you on an imaginary trip today. I think we all need to get out of here and imagine a life free of pettiness, disappointment and clawing selfishness.

Now, I’m not at all interested in utopia (from the Greek, eu=good, top=place); Sir Thomas More first coined the term in 1516 in his book by the same name. He wanted what we all want; a peaceful, secure society in which everything moves smoothly.

Unfortunately all attempts (fictional or actual) to create a utopia have ended in death and destruction – John the Savage hanging from the lighthouse at the end of Brave New World, or the horror that was the Soviet Union, which, for the “greater good,” starved 30 million people. Given man’s unending twistedness, utopias inevitably become dystopias (dys from the Greek – bad, ill).

The problem with More’s approach is that it depended on outside systems to arrange the copacetic conditions he dreamed of, and outside systems always depend on outside force which means that people die. What I propose is internal and dependent on no one but our selves. After all, that’s all we can really control. 

I’ve been reading an amazing book entitled Choosing Gratitude by Nancy Leigh DeMoss and it has me thinking – what would America look like if we were still a grateful nation – if a large percentage of us quit complaining and spent our thinking time in a state of praise and thanksgiving?  Let’s imagine…

           

We’d hear a lot less whining about anyone’s “fair share.” We’d be so glad that we live in a land where there’s an opportunity to get rich that we would begrudge no one his success.

Years ago my brilliant son-in-law had a chance, through MIT where he was doing his graduate work, to go to Northern Pakistan, high in the Himalayas, to study insulation possibilities for the homes of people living in inaccessible mountain villages. The people there subsisted mostly on bad goat meat and dried apricots, sheltered by precarious mud and stone houses.

Actually Thinking it's True

 

“In our society we are free to believe anything we want to believe as long as we don’t actually think it’s true.” Ravi Zacharias, in his book Jesus Among other Gods, said that. He was talking about our skewed understanding of religious belief. (I’ll explain in a later post why I’ve put religious in italics). Now days we can hang Buddhist prayer flags, put up Festivus poles, don turbans, hold séances, and carve fertility goddesses and no one will bug us. But if we let anyone know that we take any of it seriously – especially if any of it is Christian – then we’re discounted and marked as peculiar and even dangerous – see Janet Napolitano’s description of a terrorist, or Chris Matthews’ mocking of those who “don’t believe in evolution.”

We need to get this straightened out. As Christians we’re standing around strumming guitars and singing I Can Only Imagine while secularists make mincemeat out of our beliefs and they’re doing so because we haven’t stood up for what we believe, let alone for why we believe it. Sometimes we try to support our reliance on scripture, but since we don’t know much about the historical accuracy of the Bible, that falls flat. We try to back up our moral firmness and we’re told we’re not “loving.” We attempt to present the gospel and no one can fathom that he even needs to be saved. Things are really off-kilter. Let’s get a grip, folks, and look at the assumptions and motivations that rumble about underneath this growing rift.

Truth, Fairness, and the American Way

Do you ever have allergic reactions to words? I do. The ones that usually make me itch are the pseudo-intellectual trendy expressions like “gravitas” or “meme,” but lately the word that’s been giving me hives is a simple old Anglo-Saxon word – “fair.”  In fact when it’s coupled with another old word, “share,” it makes my skin positively crawl. It’s an expression a 4-year-old would use and demonstrates about the same level of economic awareness. What’s worse, it’s our president who’s using it.

It’s true that fairness is a value buried in the hearts of all decent people; even small children are deeply aware of its importance. When my youngest granddaughter was little more than a year old she expressed her sense of outraged justice one day when she saw her older sister enjoying a lollypop. They’d both been given one the night before and wise Julia had saved some of hers for the next day. Little Violet hadn’t planned that well and had finished hers off before bed. When her mother told her no, she couldn’t have another one, her eyes filled with tears, her lower lip quivered and with great indignation she said her first sentence – “Julia lolly.” 

Angels and Politics: Behind the Scenes

Last week I wrote about the huge moral/ethical divide currently ripping this nation apart. This week I’d like to explore why that’s happening. Are there evil people behind it? – of course, but there’s a bigger issue afoot. We go about our daily business – we gas up the car, send our kids to school, pay the bills, go to work, watch a little TV and we think that’s what life is made of, but the mundane things that fill our earthly existence are just window dressing, for something profound and astounding is happening and we’re in the middle of it. Follow me….

He’s slouching up against a pillar in the Throne Room, picking at his teeth and looking bored. His crew stands back a ways, each of them attempting to show the same disdain for the rapturous singing that’s going on around the dais. He turns back and glares at his cohort, meeting each one’s gaze, gaining an unspoken commitment before moving on to the next. Then with a lift of his chin and a tilt of his handsome head he orders them to follow him. They all approach the Throne of God.

A multitude of other angels part to let him pass. You can hear the rustle of their wings and the whispers of tension in the air. He is, after all, the most beautiful of them all, and by far the smartest, and they all know he’s up to something.

Rules to Ruin the Country By

I find that it’s getting harder and harder to engage in rational discussion about the state of the nation and gradually I’ve begun to understand that we now have two entirely separate sets of rules going.

The Ten Commandments, originally given by God to Moses as a blueprint for a free and successful nation, once stabilized this country and acted as our foundation for both law and personal conduct. Now, however, as a result of evolutionary assumptions and radical indoctrination from both our schools and the media, these time-tested rules of engagement are being replaced by a new set of behavioral demands.

Knowing what those rules are helps to understand the brick wall of bizarre outrages, nonsensical economic proposals, and rampant ignorance that Christian conservatives run into trying to openly talk about our opinions and ideas. I’ve been keeping count and discovered that a Facebook political discussion lasts only 3 exchanges before the leftist contingent begins name-calling and/or un-friends me.

So I’ve been watching and thinking and I’ve codified my observations into:

The New World “Progressive” Ten Commandments

• Thou shalt have no other gods before the government. Thou shalt not make and display in public any crosses or tablets or other signs of a belief in Judeo-Christian ideas. Regardless, the iniquity of your government will be visited upon your children for at least 3 generations.

Perfect Lambs and an Empty Tomb

Let’s play time travel: Let’s zoom back 3,452 years, back past I-phones and cars, past the beginnings of Islam, past the Romans and the Greeks –back to springtime on the Nile delta in roughly 1440 B.C. when 2,000,000 Jews brushed the blood of lambs on the door posts of their houses and ate unleavened bread and the roasted lambs, and awaited the deliverance of the Lord. The lamb’s blood protected them from the worst of the curses – the death of the first-born in every household. Then they were delivered from Egypt, free at last to go home where they belonged.

Back to the time machine -- let’s speed forward again – past the Greeks, to Roman times, to a spring day in 30 A.D. in Jerusalem. The major players had been up all night. It was a Friday, the 14^th of Nisan, a day known as Passover, a day set aside to commemorate the day when the Angel of Death passed over their blood-marked doors, sparing everyone inside. Passover marked the beginning of Jewish freedom.

After nightfall that Thursday, which according to the Jewish method of counting time, was the beginning of Friday, of Passover, the Jewish Sanhedrin arrested a young man named Jesus of Nazareth. During the night they tried him, over and over, each trial a travesty of Jewish law. They hauled him before Pilate, the Roman governor, before Herod, the Jewish “king.” By 9:00 A.M. they had succeeded in beating him beyond recognition, slamming onto his bleeding head a mocking crown made of thorns, and scourging the skin and muscle off his back. They forced him to carry a heavy wooden cross through Jerusalem and up a hill named Golgotha. By 9:00 A.M. they had him nailed to that cross – staining the wood with blood in the same places the Jews in Egypt had marked their doors.

Just a Fluke?

These last couple of weeks we’ve listened to the constant beat of the poor-me victim drum. Miss Sandra Fluke (pronounced as if the “e” weren’t there, which is just too ironic to be real) complained about the burden of having to spend $1000 a year on contraception (when it’s available for $9 a month just a few blocks from campus and she’s dating a super-rich jet-setter – go figure).  Her testimony – besides being filled with unsubstantiated statistics -- is confusing.

Let me get this straight: A 30-year-old law student – a left-wing feminist activist – testified to Congress about how the evil Jesuit college she attends won’t provide insurance that covers her birth control expenses. I don’t understand why a college would be responsible for anyone’s condom needs; I can’t imagine why at Georgetown coed’s efforts at non-conception are so expensive; and I really can’t fathom what useful information Fluke could provide for Congress  – don’t they have more pressing matters in front of them than collegiate sex practices?

The press seemed to believe that she was testifying as to the dire need for the government to step in – 1^st Amendment be damned – and stop this awful sexual oppression. They used her to demonstrate that conservatives are more worried about the niceties of our founding documents than the cruel burdens born by sexually active women; Republicans are, according to the media, engaged in a War on Women.

There’s a war on women?! Here?? Now??     

Whatsoever You Ask -- Part 12 of The Twelve-Step Program to American Recovery

 

During this series we explored many ways we can each pitch in and help save this country we love from the looming darkness.  We talked about standing guard over our language and the 1984 changes being imposed on it. We discussed bridging the education gap left by our deteriorating public schools. We looked at necessary attitude changes – not expecting the government to play God’s role in our lives; we spent several posts on that issue. Last week we explored the need to think logically.

These are all things we can do ourselves; we don’t need to trick someone else into voting like we do. We don’t have to get into screaming arguments. We don’t need to walk around carrying posters – though I’ve done that and it’s fun. You see, a nation gets the government – and the prosperity – it deserves. If each of us becomes the person God designed him to be then our nation will continue to serve Him and reap the unimaginable rewards.

This week is the final post of the series and I’ve left the most important one for last --- prayer.

 Whatsoever You Ask       

It’s always been time to get down on our knees – this is true. Our nation has seen much more dangerous periods; I can’t imagine what it must have been like during World War II when we first realized that the bad guys were after us, too; or coping with the Civil War in our own back yard; or gearing up to fight the great power of George III.  But the thing that is so scary now is that the attacks are all behind the scenes, but they are life-and-death assaults nevertheless, in fact they are attacks right out of hell and we must fight them. To do that we have to pull out all the stops, recognize that we can, as mere humans, only do so much. We need God’s intervention; we have to pray.