SELF-VINDICATION v. TRUST

Today, two sentences in (Oswald) Chambers’s meditation strike me with exceptional strength: first, “No [person] ever receives a word from God without instantly being put to the test over it.” If my spiritual journey is anything to go by, I can testify to that from both firsthand experience and — well, I’m not sure how ‘secondhand’ it might be, since I’ve seen both my late first wife and my current wife tested that way. In any case, I’ve been so tested myself and have seen both my wives so tested.
The second sentence is, “The Spirit of God unearths the spirit of self-vindication; he makes us sensitive to things we never thought of before.”
Ye who deride the sensitivities of others (usually while nursing remarkably snowflaky sensitivities of your own!), beware of this; know ye have chastising judgment in store for you! It is to you I say, if you’re trained to be obedient, here is One to Whom you must be obedient above all, and if Jesus renders us sensitive to things of which we never thought before, maybe an expansion of your snowflake sensitivities toward others who don’t necessarily look or speak or worship as you do is in order! Maybe even an extension of your sensitivities towards other creatures as well!
I have a stern word or two also for those who are prepared to have their sensitivities so expanded or who have had them expanded already: I think this is a time for compassion, not for triumphant mockery. Believe me when I say I know how sorely tempting such mockery is now; I confess I’m not immune to that temptation by any means except Deo Gratias. It is you who seem to better understand what Chambers means in the next and final paragraph: “When Jesus brings a thing home by His word, don’t shirk it. If you do, you will become a religious humbug. Watch the things over which you shrug your shoulders, and you will know why you do not go on spiritually.”
Oh, how tempting it is to gloat over those words! Am I not right about that?
This is why standing at least 90 degrees from some things in the culture with which we grew up is so important. It is important because we all need to draw a line between our culture and God’s commands: it is far too easy, as we see today, to conclude that “The code of [fill in the blank] holds everywhere!” to borrow a phrase from an old TV show. It’s also too easy to conclude that God wants us to take out some anxiety (usually involving worries about masculinity) on the rest of the world. Expansion of feelings for other breathing creatures, I suggest, especially those who are less ‘like us’, is an important key to whether it is God or his rebel working on us in this and other ways. That is also an important way that our faith and trust in God expands. Think about it.

BE LIBERAL — LOOK AT BEHAVIOR PATTERNS, NOT (REAL OR IMAGINED) SKIN TONES!!

Our Mr. Brooks (David Brooks) has caught me by a large thought today. He muses on how many of my fellow ‘white’ liberals and progressives now wear ‘lenses’ through which they see many more things in this country in racial terms. I also see many things in this country through those lenses; those lenses are often necessary in this country. But in terms of looking at other places around this slowly-cooking globe, their utility can be and often is quite limited. In some other places, such as Latin America and the Arab/Muslim world, they are also necessary, all the more so since too many people in both regions will tell you that such lenses are Completely Unnecessary Here! Istagfarallah, we are Far Too Enlightened for that — as you pass a market where African men are being sold. That’s right, sold. The slave trade liveth yet in Libya and in other very carefully out-of-the-way spots in North Africa and the rest of the Muslim world. That slave trade has been going on for fourteen centuries and has been, to date, between eight and twelve times as lethal as the transatlantic slave trade!

When we look at Israel and the local Arabs through an American racial lens, white liberals (along with too many people of color) tend to place those lenses upside down. They would do far better to ask themselves: from when Jews began returning to Eretz Israel in the 1880s (before modern Zionism was born), who has been more willing to share land and power — Jews or Arabs? The answer will always be, and still is, Jews.
Colonists do not want to share; they insist on all the power for themselves and crumbs for anyone else. This is the mindset of our unreconstructed peckerwoodies here (and probably in Australia) and it is also the mindset of the ‘Palestinians’ and their useful idiots. Who wants their state to be Judenrein? Israel is not, and never intends to be, Arab-rein. An indigenous population is, almost always, much readier to share than colonists ever have been, are, or ever will be.
Civil rights was, and still is, indicative of a desire to share power, not take it all away. It was, and still is, the White Power structure which insists on all for itself and virtually nothing for anyone else. Ditto for the ‘Pals’. Look at Israel’s situation through a lens of behavior patterns, my fellow libs and progs, and your outlook will change radically! And get rid of the preoccupation with your own Purity and Innocence! Our enemies on the Right share that obsession and, indeed, allow it to drive them mad! Thankfully, we’re not that far gone just yet, but, in seeking to do justice and right past and present wrongs, remember it’s what we do and its results that matters most, not some illusory Charlie-Brown’s-losing-baseball-team’s Sincerity, or Goodness, of ours! I don’t know about y’all but that is way down my list of what matters!
For people of color: read what brother Eldridge (Cleaver) had to say about Arab racism as opposed to any Israeli racism after living eight years in Algeria. Then think again in light of the above information. Also, remember that, before 1948, Jews were looked at by Arabs the way peckerwoodies, North and South, looked at those they called ‘common n***ers’. Then imagine how peckerwoodies feel when those ‘common n***ers’ prove themselves more than equal to to the ‘whites’! Need I write a jot or tittle more than that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjsLmv1N7i4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJhSejBDTPI&t=4s
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/opinion/white-liberal-democrats.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

OSWALD AND ME

Sixteen days ago, I recommenced reading Oswald Chambers’s book, My Utmost For His Highest. It seems to be one of those books that, while it may be tough reading the first time, improves considerably with subsequent ones. It’s one of those books you can have on the shelf for years and then, dipping back into it, discover many treasures in it which you didn’t see years before.
Today, the first sentence which really struck home with me was, “For instance, the Beatitudes seem merely mild and beautiful precepts for all unworldly and useless people, but of very little practical use in the stern workaday world in which we live.”
‘Unworldly and useless people’. Is there anyone reading this post who hasn’t, at least intermittently, felt that way about themselves? I know that’s how I feel about myself too often for comfort. How many of us feel like real worldly success stories, really? Then again, God seems to have a habit of picking up those who are seen and/or see themselves as worldly failures and teaching them to ‘aim’ for Him and His Heaven as opposed to earth. C.S. Lewis made the observation that, “Aim at Heaven and you’ll have Earth ‘thrown in’; aim at Earth and you will get neither.” He uses caring for one’s health as an analogy on page 104 of Mere Christianity, ISBN 0–02–086940–1.
Allow me to add a caveat here: we do need to stay focused on Heaven; there is always the danger of making the winning of Earth the end rather than a side matter.
Chambers’s devotion touches on this with the next sentences. “We soon find, however, that the Beatitudes contain the dynamite of the Holy Ghost. They explode….when the circumstances of our lives cause them to do so. When the Holy Spirit brings to our remembrance one of these Beatitudes…..we have to decide whether we will accept the tremendous spiritual upheaval that will be produced in our circumstances if we obey His words. That is how the Spirit of God works.”
For some reason, this passage reminds me that, for all of us, our spiritual lives — that is, what we believe in and act on — is both backdrop to, and the ultimate aspiration of, our lives. If anyone thinks otherwise, feel free to say so, but include the ‘why’ of your belief, always. According to St. John, Jesus said the same thing: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”
This is what God does, always. He takes the washouts, the failures, the smallest and the most peripheral among us and infuses them with the dynamite of His Holy Spirit. Does not the very Statue of Liberty have a poem identifying all of us, or our ancestors, as having been just that once on a time? When peoples and countries who begin in that way forget such beginnings, they forget who they really are and they also forget God. Nothing I can think of testifies to how many of us have forgotten both God and our abject startings with more eloquence than what we are doing right now on our southern border. There are other such testimonies, to be sure, but that particular one sounds loudest in my ears right now.
To shut a door against genocidal killers is not the same as to bar the door against abject refuge-seekers, so no comparison of this to Israel’s wall is warranted. In this country, the latter is what we now permit our government to do and which we’d better change right smartly if we want to avoid the fate of forgetful and declining empires. Before a people, or peoples, who we see as inconsequential prove themselves very much otherwise.

ANOTHER BAD TIME IN OUR HISTORY (WITH SOME PROLOGUE)

The 1890s were an awful time quite a lot like now.
The prologue to the 1890s can be said to begin in 1877. Three things happened in 1877 that cast a long shadow over the subsequent years, even unto this very day. First, an election commission declared Rutherford Hayes, the Republican, the presidential victor of the 1876 election--by a single electoral vote. And he was so declared with the understanding that the last Federal troops would be withdrawn from the remaining ex-Confederate states that allowed their votes to go for Hayes. And, indeed, shortly after Hayes's inauguration, those troops were withdrawn, leaving the freedmen to their own devices to fight their disenfranchisement, and the terror unleashed upon them by the white peckerwoods as best they could. In 1896, after nearly two decades of lynchings and other terroristic methods (and stout resistance from African-Americans and a few white allies), Plessy v. Ferguson allowed the states to make Jim Crow (and the disenfranchisement of people of color) law in all the old slave states, Union and Traitor (yes, including Delaware). I am ashamed to say such a noteworthy jurist as Oliver Wendell Holmes, a member of the G.A.R. himself, actually wrote, "If the majority of the population is determined to disenfranchise the Negroes among them, there is nothing this Court can do about it." There were three dissenters, led by John Harlan, himself a Southerner.
The third occurrence in 1877 was what became known as the Great Strikes, which began in Pittsburgh against the Pennsylvania Railroad when that company cut its workers' wages by 25 percent. When the Pittsburgh state militia refused to fire on the strikers, the bosses and their political slaves brought other militia in from Philadelphia to forcibly end that strike. The 1890s were to see both the 1892 Homestead steel strike against Carnegie Steel and another railroad strike, this time at Pullman, in 1894. That strike was the one which brought Eugene Debs, who was, according to contemporaries, as kind and generous a man as ever most of them had known, to the fore as a labor organizer. From 1877 through into the Thirties (with World War I as a sort-of interlude), much of the laboring population of the North was still trying to struggle out of semi-starvational conditions. And now a probable majority of working people are struggling not to return to that unhappy state.
An element present in the 1890s whose counterpart, if there is one, today, I cannot perceive, is the Farmers’ Alliance, Colored Farmers Alliance, and the Grange. These were small-farmer organizations which fought the railroads, banks and their boughten political slaves. Everywhere they struggled to make their voices heard against state-sponsored political terrorism and in the old slave states against state-sponsored racial terrorism as well. These organizations were the primary building block of the People’s, or Populist, party. By 1892, this party was strong enough to field a presidential ticket, which won 22 electoral votes. In 1896, they joined with the Democrats under William Jennings Bryan. Just how smart this was I’m still not sure, but the Midwestern Populists, who had made common cause with the out-of-power Midwestern Democrats, won out over the Southern Populists who had had to defend themselves against terrorism from in-power Southern Democrats.
Both the 1896 campaign and the Plessy decision fractured the biracial farmers’ coalition in the South.
This time we cannot afford to let anything fracture an all-races coalition of poor and working people, once such a coalition is fully built. And it neither can nor should be inextricably tied to any current political party! As for being the nucleus of a new progressive party….well, time will tell. In any case, we as a nation have been here before and it’s up to us to make as sure as we can that we never return to this!

A CERTAIN KIND OF LOVE (IS IT ALL WE NEED?)

"Pride is the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins. Ask the Lord to humble you."
So say some clerics and others among the wise.
Now let's pause and ask, what do we generally associate with being humbled? Some great loss or series of losses that puts our pride in the dust? Tell the truth, y'all. How many of us think that's what humbling means?
Personally, my greatest humbling comes with the realization, sinking in below the neck, that I really am LOVED. My dear wife actually believes I really rock and acts accordingly. And when someone 'with skin', to use a four-year-old's expression, loves you and yet knows your imperfections--when this is truly a love between equals--I know of nothing more humbling than that to anyone with half a conscience. And God's love for us becomes all the plainer thereby as well. For many of us who are Christians, realizing the depths of God's Love in Jesus brings forth such a humbled mindset. At least I think it ought to. And this is what the breaking of patriarchy can lead to more of: love between equals.
Love between us and animals and/or children is a great and good thing too, but it's not between equals. And no reader of mine who is a parent cannot know how quickly the worshipful expression in a small child's eyes becomes the skeptical look of a pre-teen and then the mixed looks of teenagers. There's a lot to go through before THAT'S between adults more or less, not so? That is, for those who can reach that point.
I have to wonder: is this something of which patriarchy's defenders are deathly afraid? Do they disbelieve in such love to the extent that they'll die with their false prides (and likely take most of us with them) rather than open themselves to such love? Maybe this is really the heart of the question, but anyone with different ideas is more than welcome to say otherwise. Just argue civilly and to the point; that's all I ask.

NO LONGER A JOKE

A dialogue from Hamlet:

It was that very day that young Hamlet was born, he that is mad, and sent into England.

Ay, marry, why was he sent into England?

Why, because he was mad, a' shall recover his wits there, or, if a' do not, 'tis no great matter there.

Why?

'Twill not be seen in him there; there the [people] are as mad as he.

These lines used to elicit roars of laughter from English audiences. I both hope and fear that might not be the case right now.
On my dad's side of the family, I am largely of English descent. And when I say English, that is exactly what I mean. I do not use 'British' and 'English' interchangeably and if I hear any of y'all doing so, I'll put you right about that right quick.
I used to be very happy to be of English descent. I revel in our language that is, for me, both native and ancestral. I am very proud to be one of the people that taught much of the world that transitions of power need not be bloody (except perhaps verbally) and who insisted through centuries that all are under the law, even the king. Rex non debit sub homini esse, sed sub deo et lege. The king is below no one, but below God and the law. And I confess to a certain amount of guilty pride in being one of a people of empire-builders, even while I know 1) native and Celtic auxiliaries did a good chunk of that building, 2) we English have acted in ways contradicting our ideals often enough as to be a byword for hypocrisy among our Scots, French and, sometimes, our German neighbors (big whup, right?) and 3) the whole notion of empire-building is under severe, hostile, and at least partially justified scrutiny these days. But I invite the scrutinizers to ask themselves: how sincere are you? Some of you may be doing no more than virtue-signalling, or you might be Noble Savage freaks (and I have less use only for open or covert racists and other bigots than for both of you)--or you might just be sore losers or their descendants. Japan still calls itself an 'empire'; not so? Just an example to make the point.
Being a lifelong student of history has left me with, among other things, an interesting array of pictures which certain songs bring up. Images brought up by two songs in particular seem relevant here: when I hear Bennie And The Jets, my mind dredges up pictures of the 1897 Diamond Jubilee of Victoria's reign. That was in large part a celebration of Empire with which most of our newspapers heartily concurred at the time. And the long version of Light My Fire gives me a taste of how being 'part of the action' in pre-war London a little more than a century ago must have felt, when it was the center of an Empire and, at least, debatably, the center of the globe!
But I'm afraid I also need to tell at least half my cousins back across the Pond that this is 2019, not 1913. The Empire is not about to reassemble itself; even the Commonwealth shows no sign of becoming more cohesive around you. The 'good' kids (we, and maybe Ireland, might be seen as the 'bad' kids here)--Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and, debatably, South Africa and India--are all grown up with lives very much of their own. You have done your part in shrinking the globe and making it one; it is too late to repeal the history of the last seventy years or so.
Right now a serious donnybrook appears to be happening over your way over Brexit. If an heir of those onetime ragtag rebels can suggest something, please have a do-over of that--and this time, please vote to reverse it! A hard Brexit will put you at the mercy of the madman currently usurping the White House by occupying it and too many of you seem determined to bring about exactly that! Many of you who think you lost your jobs because of Brussels probably lost them because of the reeking greed of your bosses in fact but which was labelled 'Market Forces'. That is, the owners concluded they could fatten their pockets more by building elsewhere! If you're surprised, then shame on you for all the labor-struggle history many of you seem to have forgotten.
Is the EU not democratic enough for you? OK, I get that, but work within it in order to democratize it further! Put the 'exceptionalism' aside awhile and link up with French, Germans, Italians, Beneluxers and others who feel the whole thing is too top-down as opposed to bottom-up and start working to CHANGE that!! Can't that be done more effectively from within than from outside? Seems to make sense to this Sassenach, anyhow!
If you carry Brexit through, you are most likely to wind up a sorry satrap to us here. Not something I want to see anymore than you do. Rethink, re-vote--and return. If you do, the above lines might produce rollicking laughter among you again.
London was, debatably at least, once the world's effective capital. Inside the EU, it can and will still be a great European center and maybe a world center. Outside, its destiny will be a certain Jethro Tull album. Guess which one I mean. And the above lines will be a bitter joke for at least the rest of our days.

IN FAVOR OF STRIVING WITH GOD

For some time, these thoughts have been taking shape, helped by this memory, this quotation, this idea and that notion.
Within the bounds of those who are, or claim to be, 'spiritual' people there's a division which cuts across traditional religious lines. On one side are those for whom, like myself, faith is a process which works through doubt and is thereby deepened and strengthened. This is sometimes a quiet, but always a robust, faith as measured by these criteria: such a robust, living faith welcomes questions, can answer criticisms cogently, gives mockery a pitying smile and spurns any state's efforts to 'strengthen' it.
On the other side are those whose 'faith' seems to be chiefly based on the denigration of others on any basis handy, be it 'race', ethnicity, recited creed, sex or sexual orientation, not to mention economic class. This in and of itself is enough to mark such a 'faith' as dry, brittle and moribund. It seeks with desperation to squelch questions, criticisms and mockeries even to the point of begging the state to help shore up its shell. Their adherents seem to associate bliss with not having to think a whole lot--or at least are told to believe this by their clerics, whether imams or priests. This by itself flies in God's Face--the God which we are commanded to love with all our mind as well as heart, soul and strength. Switching off one's mind is the opposite of this and leads in turn to walling off one's heart to be shared only within Our Group, by whatever other name it may be called.
As a Christian myself, I am instructed to use the life of Jesus as a 'lens' through which to read Scripture. I don't know what 'lenses' Jews or Muslims may so use for theirs although I can't help reflecting that Spinoza was a lens-grinder. Maybe for them it's on more of an individual basis, but this much I do know: such lenses have to be crafted for growth of each of us with and towards God. No one ever did Islam a greater injury than the fool who said some eight centuries ago that 'The gates of ijtihad are now closed.' 'Lenses' built with the intention of blinding or bullying people into submission cannot be of God but are of the Enemy!
Those with a living faith eagerly grasp at the idea of being able to become children of, and eventually co-creators of, God's Realm. Those without such a faith usually have difficulty with this notion and wind up committing one of two mistakes. Either they conclude only We are God's True Children OR they say, 'God does not need children. We are his slaves.' Can such a God be all that Merciful and Compassionate? Seriously, Worst of all, sometimes they can say one and act out the other.
Well, it IS true that God does not need children. But with God, His needs (He has none) are not the point. But God wants us to be able to become His children and help Him create His Realm here on Earth! Is this not what a God Who is Love would want for all of us? We all need to do some serious re-examinations of our various faiths and practices and see what helps us grow in heart, mind and soul in our faiths--and what does the opposite! Get rid of what stunts such growth and nourish that which encourages it, wherever we find each item.
This is deep matter, so don't be afraid to dive into it as often as each of y'all needs to. Blessings to all of my readers!