I am so fortunate.  I was recently listening to James Jordan while I work for profit, he was discussing the fact that the Bible was written to be heard and not read.  This based on the simple fact that literacy and mass publishing were not a thing until Gutenberg invented his press and even at that it took a wile to catch on.  He pointed out that reading is an event that is more inherently individualistic and private, where as listening requires a speaker and is communal even if only a tête-à-tête.  Listening requires surrender, and participation with someone else.  We can’t close our ears as we close our eyes, we must leave the area, or turn up our ear buds.  We get the idea of the contentions wife from Proverbs.  Her husband is happier on the roof, than in the house with her.  She is contending but she isn’t arm wrestling her husband, or challenging him to a game of chess, she is talking.  Her words, her speech are contending.  I was not able to find any verses about men being contentious in this way, because men generally fight with fists.  Interesting that male fighting, i.e. physical violence is all but anathema as a solution for anything in our world, yet female violence as speech is pretty standard, a right even.  But his point is that speech enters in, it affects us and we have less power than we think to resist.  I think of a study a friend of mine was doing.  He found that texting is actually less distracting to drivers than talking/listening on the phone.  While texting, reading/writing, you are participating, on your terms, when you have a free second between red lights.  But when you are talking on the phone, you must surrender to the other person, they talk on their terms which is less predictable, or controllable by you. They grab your attention when you need it most.

Of course not every woman is a shrew and no one ever thought that, despite what your women’s studies class taught you. But some are. And today more than ever. I think it’s fair to say that feminism is little more than codified shrewism. We no longer guard against it, so we have a lot more, plus some actively advocating for the shrew cause. Click the picture for some interesting history, keeping that in mind.

I am fortunate, because I don’t have a contentious wife, a boss, a supervisor, or anyone else really, in my ear ever.  But I do listen.  I listen to the greatest writers, historians and thinkers who ever were and currently are.  Here are some resources for when you have some fortunate moments too.  And don’t be afraid to create a life which makes more time for better listening.

• Librivox: Contains all the classics and some not so classic works, which are out of copyright, read by volunteers, for free.  It’s open source audio books.  https://librivox.org

Starter Politics:

https://librivox.org/reflections-on-the-revolution-in-france-by-edmund-burke/

https://librivox.org/bradfords-history-of-the-plymouth-settlement-by-william-bradford/

https://librivox.org/up-from-slavery-by-booker-t-washington/

Fun:

https://librivox.org/right-ho-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/

https://librivox.org/roughing-it/

Everything:

https://librivox.org/orthodoxy-by-g-k-chesterton/

https://librivox.org/the-everlasting-man-by-g-k-chesterton/

Novels:

https://librivox.org/the-brothers-karamazov-by-fyodor-dostoyevsky/

https://librivox.org/the-count-of-monte-cristo-version-3-by-alexandre-dumas/

https://librivox.org/tale-of-two-cities-by-charles-dickens-3/

History:

https://librivox.org/eusebius-history-of-the-christian-church-tr-by-mcgiffert/

Economics:

https://librivox.org/essays-on-political-economy-by-frederic-bastiat/

• Rush Limbaugh:  The great man passed away recently, but his wisdom is still being dispensed on radios every day.  Available streaming for free on iHeart Radio.  Besides evil men are booring and they just keep repeating the same lies, so reruns of Rush aren’t all that out of date.  https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-the-rush-limbaugh-show-57927691/

• Mark Steyn is always doing Western Civilization instead of just commenting on it.  He has regular variety shows for free. https://www.steynonline.com

• Victor Davis Hanson Podcast:  Well respected history, bestselling author and farmer, dispenses wisdom from the ages on the topics of today.  https://www.nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-victor-davis-hanson-podcast/

• Eric Metaxas:  Very funny and intelligent, interviews with some great Christian personalities, and thinkers from today.  https://metaxastalk.com  He also had an event based organization called Socrates in the City, also excellent. https://socratesinthecity.com

• The Theology Pugcast:  Some wise Christian philosophy, history and theology professors discussing random topics.  Orthodox and politcally incorrect. https://thetheologypugcast.com

• Cross Politic:  Younger Reformed Christians discussing the topics of the day.  Filtering the news through youthful sanity, is refreshing.   https://crosspolitic.com

• This incredible course on The Divine Comedy by Dante.  https://oyc.yale.edu/italian-language-and-literature/ital-310

• Reformed Theological Seminar has a lot of great classes, now available on their app.  https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reformed-theological-seminary/id476373303

• ISI has so many great resources.  Their current site is a bit of a mess.  Their youtube is better. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4PiYpkYag1oUGLshXZBsoQ/videos

It really is amazing that our country has survived the last 100 years of Democrat Presidents

First in 1913, you have Woodrow Wilson who passed the Federal Reserve Act and the Income Tax and bunch of other crazy unconstitutional BS. He was one of the first truly progressive presidents, which just means socialist.  They think they are smarter than everyone and can control everything better than the free choices of Americans.   He became physically unfit to be president but his power hungry wife conspired with doctors to hide this from the American people while she secretly acted as President. Because of this and Kennedy dying and Johnson having a heart attack, the 25th Amendment was passed.

Then you have FDR who is the most egomaniacal president since Lincoln.  His New Deal was little more than socialism.  He socialized everything from farming to interstate commerce, prolonged the Great Depression, tried to pack the Supreme Court and ran four a forth term.  Congress was so scared of this happening again they passed the 22nd Amendment to limit the presidency to two terms.  The Supreme Court was dismantling  the crazy legislation he invented for years.  It has become obvious that he knew about Pearl Harbor and he let it happen because he wanted to get into the war.

Truman nuked Japan which was probably the right thing to do.

Then JFK stole the Presidency with the help of his mob-boss-father and their bootlegging cash.  He almost got us into a nuclear war with Russia, slept with every woman he could, killed Marilyn Monroe and introduced the rest of his dirt-bag family to politics for the next 50 years. He militarized the IRS against his political enemies, and was on all sorts of drugs including amphetamines, and was probably the cause of the disaster in Vietnam.

But he was taken out by Lyndon Johnson.  Who managed to destroy Detroit, the wealthiest city in the world, and every other great American city with his crazy central planning, War on Poverty, Great Society and Model Cities programs.  Most of the problems we see in cities today began with him.  He was notoriously foul mouthed, hard handed and cruel.  Plus he killed his predecessor!

Then you have Jimmy Carter who even the Democrats all admit was the worst President ever.  He almost handed the country over to the Russians and handed random airplanes over to the terrorists, with his weak foreign policy.  He managed to create gas shortages and general economic malaise the nation over, because he was an idiot.  He has been trying to make up for this disaster ever since with Habitat for Humanity and assisting foreign governments is handling their elections.

Then you have Bill Clinton who made all sorts of deals with China giving them weapons technology in exchange for campaign cash.  He abused every woman he ever came in contact with, lowered the national sense of morality by at least a few notches and was disbarred  and impeached for lying.  He bombed an aspirin factory in Sudan to try to distract the American People. He also waged military action against US citizens in Waco and Ruby Ridge, which lead to the Oklahoma City bombing.  Despite having no morality and more bodies in his closet than anyone ever, most people liked him.  He also released the banshee that is Hillary Clinton on the world.  They were both involved in illegal real estate trading and cattle futures trading and managed to get rich by ‘serving the people’.

Barry Soetoro, the only person on the planet more corrupt than Hillary managed to use his Chicago mafia ties to take the Democrat nomination from Hillary.  He then sold his Senate seat, which he had gotten by unsealing previous opponent’s divorce records forcing them to exit the race.  He spent us into unprecedented debt, paying back his donors, and attempted to socialize our country with Obamacare. He was the first President to support infanticide.  He bowed down and apologized to the entire world for how evil we are,  creating ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood.  He sold guns to drug dealers in Mexico in a twisted attempt to pass gun control legislation.  He militarized the entire US government against his political enemies including sicking the IRS on the Tea Party and militarizing the FBI to spy on Donald Trump.  He orchestrated a bribe for Hillary Clinton and ran the fake Russia Hoax against Trump.  To this day no one is sure what his real name is or where he was born.

Now we are blessed with Joe Biden who seems to be about as competent as Jimmy Carter as healthy as Woodrow Wilson and managed by people as evil as Johnson and FDR.  He was clearly elected illegally and is clearly not mentally or physically fit to hold office.  In the short time he has held office he has done his preceding Democrats proud by destroying oil production, destabilizing the southern border, destabilizing foreign relations, attacking the sanctity of elections, attacking religious liberty,  attacking free speech, and radically expanding abortion and the mutilation of children based on the mental disorder of gender dysphoria.  His son may be the most evil man alive, who has done more drugs and made more tapes having sex with trafficked women than all the Kennedys put together.  He made illegal treasonous deals with Ukraine, and China which have made his entire family fabulously wealthy, and carried on an inappropriate relationship with his under age niece.  And Christians dare to suggest that you can be a Christian and vote Democrat.  May God have mercy on our souls.

No, I don’t have footnotes, but there is far more evidence for any of these than the theories the media has been peddling about Trump for the last 5 years.

So, the recent news about Ravi Zacharias is pretty sad.  I wasn’t really a big fan, but strangely most of the female Christians in my life were.  I read this whole report his ministry put out from their hired law firm.  It’s wonderful that his ministry is so forthcoming in trying to get to the truth.  Something not afforded the victims or the public from similar accusations against Joe Biden.  I find that public comments about this situation on Christianity Today and other places are more disturbing than his actions.  It is easy to attack someone you don’t know at all, it’s difficult to live lives and accomplish things above reproach. It’s even more difficult to build a culture that produces a lot of excellent men.  Ours does not, and we are all responsible for that.

I recently watched this movie The Dig.  It purported to be about an archaeological dig in western England on the eve of WWII.  It wasn’t.  Instead it was a thinly veiled polemic against the sexual repression and class distinctions of 1940’s England.  Only upon looking it up did I realize that this was supposed to be depicting the discovery of the Sutton Hoo site, with which I was familiar, having seen the artifacts in the British Museum.  The archaeological site was merely the stage for a drama about how unfair it is that no one get’s to have sex with the one they truly love.  Don’t get me wrong the writing was excellent, nearly every reference to the dig or ship became a metaphor for subtly relationship issues taking place with all the characters involved.  So as with most contemporary movies the execution is excellent while the message is not.  You can’t go five minutes without a seen of someone pining for someone they aren’t married to.  The few emotionally appropriate moments are spoiled by nudity and absurd scenes of people making out on the street.  Mrs. Piggott, is not fulfilled by her husband who in turn pines for another young male archaeologist.  So she takes the easy train to “being really happy” by jumping in bed with a soon-to-be-killed soldier boy.  And of course the two main protagonists Mrs. Edith Pretty and Mr. Basil Brown can’t  consummate their much ‘deserved’ love because of course Brown is shackled to his common wife and Mrs. Pretty is above his station.  The message is clear.  Those old Fuddy-duddys were boring and maintaining sexual purity was just a lie.  Also aristocracy is bad, because true love.

Yet somehow, in the case of Zacharias, following your heart and carrying on emotional and actual affairs is bad.  And cries against someone with wealth and authority for being wealthy and in authority are shouted above all else.   So which is it America? I often think about the situation like a street fight where the Liberal/Atheist/Anti-God mob drags you down into the mud and then accuses you of being dirty.  While they still mock the 40’s-50’s ethic to this day in all forms of art, media, and their revisionist history classes at elite universities, they want to maintain the right to criticize people today by that ethic.  It wasn’t conservative Christians who started and still perpetuate the sexual revolution.  This is even evident as they destroy their own ranks in the meToo movement. The only people taken down by that movement were the patriarchs of the Liberal Democrats.  Think back to the last real impeachment trial.  It wasn’t conservative Christians redefining sex and cheering that infidelity and lying about it, were now acceptable behaviors for a President.  Yet now it’s our fault that some of our own were caught up in it. While they still mock Mike Pence for taking steps to avoid impropriety.  Hypocrite much?

And the same for aristocracy.  Class distinction is evil, until it comes to criticizing selective people at the top.  But where are the attacks on the women offering themselves up to him? Aren’t we all equal?  While infidelity clearly was always something Christians were against, I think the Christian position of those with more power or authority is more fuzzy for us.  But Christians have always held those with power and authority to a higher standard.  Western rules like those of England being mocked in The Dig, were common. They derive from medieval chivalric code.  Men have more strength they should use it for their lady, English gentlemen have more wealth/education/power they should use it to benefit their fellow men.  And so they stepped up, left their estates, and won two world wars.  They should be held to a higher standard, but they also deserve our respect.  While tribal rules like those of the Montagues and Capulets are ridiculous, being unequally yoked between different cultures is a very real problem.  And “you can take the ________ out of the trailer park but you can’t. . .” is a common phrase we all know well.  Every Christin knows that Bill Clinton was the problem and not Monica Lewinsky.  No Judeo-Christian has ever found fault with Bathsheba, but neither were they foolish enough to replace David with her because she was an abused women. Here again the Christian position is not the one creating this mess.

The solution here isn’t to double down on rejecting Christianity.  Especially by a worldling for successfully making a Christian act like a worldling.  It’s for Christians to act more like the men of the past despite pervasive cultural caricatures.  I wouldn’t recommend reading the report on Zacharias, basically he was getting massages, for back pain, and he often requested happy endings.  But I was shocked at how nude massages in private by one woman for one man became appropriate.  Where one woman said “it is not uncommon for men to become  aroused”.  Really?  What good does it do to get rid of your back pain, if it destroys your whole ministry world. How did this become acceptable or ‘professional’.  It’s even more ironic that I have had this debate with a girl who loved Zacharias more than anyone I know.  She seemed to be fine with nude saunas, and nude massages.  Apparently we were too busy teaching young women to hate the patriarchy to point out the importance of modesty.  Here again the solution is traditional Christianity.  The Puritans were right, modesty is good, and they had the most vibrant sex lives of anyone.  Who are all these women throwing themselves at fill-in-the-celebrity?  They are girls without fathers or without husbands.  We have created a fatherless culture in epidemic proportions.  And we certainly don’t encourage the protection of marriage.  Which leaves a lot of women out there listening to Zacharias, hating their fathers, hating traditional families, and hating the idea of getting married. They are the ones throwing themselves at those in power.   None of this is Zacharias’ fault, but it is a failing in the church, it is the fault of Christianity Today and other lukewarm Christians who perpetuate these lies daily.  They made Joe Biden the President, who has a far worse past and present than Zacharias’.  A search of their site reveals they haven’t had an honest Biblical conversation about modesty for almost ten years.  Current articles are about trying to get along with the world, championing the #metoo movement and other leftist anti-Christian causes.  Shame on you!

We should all take this as a cautionary tale.  We all need accountability, being an adult doesn’t mean anything really, we can’t do it alone.  The safest place for all of us is with our spouse.  We need to encourage marriage and strong marriages, because the days are evil.  We need to stop being jealous of those with power and authority and instead hold them to a higher standard, or just stop creating them.  Playing footsie with the world and it’s sin doesn’t end well and is not anything loving Christians who have been saved from their sins should get near.

This essay is from Belloc’s volume Silence of the Sea, which apparently isn’t as available as it should be .It is strange to find things that are not on the internet, but this wasn’t and it should be, especially now.    Take a step back from supposedly the worst year ever and realize, things will go on, and it’s not that bad.  Read some history get some perspective and take a walk in the country.

In times of grave public anxiety, after the tempest and destruction of universal war, after the expectation of further destruction and tempest, it is of hight value to consider permanence, or what may be called the “Permanency of Impermanence.”  It is not only a consolation but a strength; a strength through the contemplation of a great reality and a steadfast truth.  for though you may not affirm of any on thing in the mortal world that it is permanent, yet you may affirm of Permanency itself that it is permanent.  You may repeat to yourself with confidence that the principle of permanence underlies all vicissitude.

So when we say to ourselves “ When shall we see again the immemorial hills, the deep woods, and the quiet rivers undisturbed?  When shall we again know Europe?” we are not asking a question in vain.  There is a restoration, and lost things return.  the earth upon which these human changes pass with such consuming violence has in itself a rhythm which endures and thoroughly belittles the accidents of excess.  The sowing and the harvest, the new green and the fall of the leaves, the rising of a generation, its passing and its renewal, and out beyond all these the solemn circling of the Heavens—these are the foundation for the mind.  Not that even these are eternal, but that they are in tune with the Eternal and a promise thereof.

 •                   •                   •                   •                   •

Herein I for my part discover the principal value of history.  History has many high values. It has been called by wise men “the principal school of politics.” It shows clearly enough in its largest lines the limits to which the most generous enthusiasms must be confined, the term beyond which the most just of reforms may not venture, and the minimum at least of evil which human society must learn to endure. It adds a third dimension to experience; for as we garner a knowledge of reality from our daily contact with men and through observation along the course of life, we are still, as it were, only contemplating the surface. But when we call to our aid the record of centuries, depth is added to this mere surface: stuff: solidity. It becomes another and a greater thing.

History also gives you the knowledge of character. It gives you (if you read it with wisdom) an increasing appreciation of accident in human affairs. It is certainly a breeder of humility which, in its most general aspect, is no more than a seeing of ourselves (and of things) as they are. But still the principal value of history is the certain lesson it teaches that the underlying substance, even of society, certainly of the living world as a whole, is a symbol of permanence.  It is a commonplace, but one of profound significance, that our minds find repose in the watching of the ancient ritual, and most of all in watching that most ancient of all rituals, the recurrent dealing of man with the earth which made him, to which he returns, and whence his posterity shall spring.

 •                   •                   •                   •                   •

I remember once in Barbary seeing a pleasing sight.  It was near sunset upon the last slopes of fruitful and with many trees, orchards and vineyards.  A man was ceasing from his labor of ploughing in his field.  He prostrated himself eastward for the evening prayer.  In that plain so slightly below me were certain ruins (scarcely visible) of a city deserted this thousand years and more.  There had passed over that landscape every kind of revolution.  Its Pagan gods had been forgotten long, long ago.  Its Christian shrines and the hight culture about them, the movement of the millions in its noisy towns, the march and the trumpet calls of armies, the sails of galleys approaching harbor (a harbor long since ruined and unused), all these had gone their way.  They had passed along their road, and had left not even shades remaining.  But the man who had ploughed his field still ploughed it as did his fathers, and, in due course, he would gather his harvest.  Soon the sun would set and the sudden darkness of land under Atlas would fall, the last light would linger upon the distant summits, and then in the little while leaving them also to look up towards silence the stars.  But the night would pass, and with the morning there would be a new prayer in gratitude for the sun’s rising and the life advancing from the east, and the ploughing of the field would begin anew.

 •                   •                   •                   •                   •

Even that recurrent ritual of man and the earth will go tis way at last, after we know not what aeons of time.  Yet there is about the aspect of such things, the fields and their fruits, the procession of the hours and the seasons, of the days and worst of the days, something which makes them not so much an example of mortality as a mirror of permanence; and I would have any man whom our times have overwrought seek his nourishment again among those peasants who have thus, since first men dwelt together under laws and worshipped the divine, formed one with the land the till. To such a scene would I come back when the return of peace itself permits the journey.  I now where to find the place again.  I know I shall find it the same, or if not I, those who come after me.  It is in visions such as this that there arises the hight verse of mankind, the chief expression of the soul, and itself, again, the most permanent, as the things of humanity go.  Even high verse is not for every, but its savor of perennial life, its timelessness, is consonant wit the all-enduring.

Nor does verse only spring from such roots, but wisdom also, though of a general kind and not particular or applied.  The wisest men, in the bulk, are the men who have tilled the earth and whose fathers have tilled it before them, and the least wise, without a doubt, are those who miss the meaning of that august sequence in human affairs.  Moreover, any civilization must be near its end when its cities outweigh its countrysides.  It must be on the very edge of dissolution when those cities have grown so huge that they have lost contact with, and remembrance of, the furrows.

The Heavens, which are so much more ancient and will outlast that which they roof, are not themselves for ever, but they have “forever” written large upon them, for all men to read, and, having read, to make seisin of their own dignity and of their immortal destinies.  We, part of their household, may on that account repeat without fear that the immemorial hills, the deep woods, and the quiet rivers shall return.

Fundamentalism is great as long as you realize it’s just the fundamentals. You don’t go out in the middle of a basketball game and start doing dribbling drills.  When you are in the game, that’s when that wise as serpents part kicks in.  You need to apply the fundamentals to every area of life, to every situation.  Far too many fundamentalists, Baptist, Bible Church people, beat up everyone else for daring to apply fundamentals to anything. This becomes a comparison of doctrinal statements, rather than a fruit bearing tree.  Going beyond the fundamentals is seen as adding to the Gospel, or becoming a liberal.  The problem is that this breeds militant ignorance.  It also takes for granted a lot of non-biblical, fads which it has absorbed from the time it was formed. In this respect it is a lot like the Book of Mormon.  The book claims that Native Americans are from the lost tribe of Israel, because that was the thinking at the time.  They put it down as timeless truth, but it is not.  DNA research by the  Mormons themselves is proving this not to be the case.  So now they just look stupid.  Fundamentalists clinging to fads from a bygone decade look very similar, and this ignorance does not glorify God, it just makes people think the church is stupid.  Far too many fundamentalists are clinging to modernism, which was never Biblical, and now not  even in style.

Billy Sunday preaches on March 15, 1915, in a temporary tabernacle erected on the site of the Central Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia. Illustration by George Bellows. Metropolitan Magazine, May 1915. Image courtesy of Boston Public Library/Creative Commons

There seems to be a whole body of recent tradition on this matter related to the David and Goliath myth.  It goes something like this: “The 12 disciples were the dumbest people on the planet at the time.  Of course Paul went to all the best schools, but he doesn’t use any of this in his work, because he said earthly wisdom was bad.  The fact that they were able to found the church and write the New Testament proves it was basically all the Holy Spirit treating them like robots.  Oh wait we are free will so it can’t be robots, well I don’t want to use high sounding reason so I will just believe this on faith.”  In this interview Dr. Tim Edwards, makes a great point that this is more like the myth of Muhammed.  Because Muham was illiterate it proves he was possessed by a demon who started the most evil destructive force on the planet ever.  Oh wait sorry, they say it proves the whole Mohammedan faith is true.  But this is not how the church works, or how the canon was formed.

The reality is much different.  According to Luke 5 Peter James and John were in business together and owned at least two boats.  According to Mark 1, James and John had servants.  If Jesus was looking for the lowest, he should have picked these servants.  Sure Jesus was gracious and loving to former prostitutes, but he didn’t make them Apostles or have them write books of the NT.  Jesus doesn’t criticize the Pharisees for book learning, or for going to school, he criticizes them for not knowing the scriptures well enough. In Luke 2 we see Jesus in the Temple studying and learning from the teachers.  Paul says that one of the benefits of being a Jew was the preservation of the Scriptures.  The written word.  That word is full of all sorts of complex poetry, wisdom, law, history, and other types of literature which was written and preserved and studied by literate men.  This was all a good thing.  That tradition continued in the New Testament,  the Holy Spirit didn’t just make everything automatic.  While the Gospel message is simple, and can be applied to any heart, applying the Gospel to every area of life is complicated.  It requires much study, and much appreciation for the study of those going before us, as they worked these things out and passed them down to us.  As they translated those scriptures for the common people, and some of them like William Tyndale were killed for doing so.  We can’t take all this for granted, our Bible didn’t just appear in our hands in English on the other side of the world.  It is the worked of 2000 years of hard work, blood, sweat and tears.  You might as well join in the mobs tearing down statues as to believe all this just happened, seriously.

I think the problem with getting this story wrong is that it gives license to the random average person to reinvent the church.  While it is possible to rely too much on human knowledge or on one’s personal intelligence, it is also possible to rely too much on one’s ignorance.  Going to the right schools doesn’t make you right, but not going to them doesn’t make you right either.  The intelligent people may be wrong about this or that, but that doesn’t make your Biblical conspiracy theory true.  It doesn’t make your idyllic 50’s Christianity true.  It doesn’t make your childhood Christianity true.  But it does guarantee that you will make the same errors as they did in the 50’s or in your home. Which is a lot like religious BO.  And if all you have is a doctrinal statement, it doesn’t mean much for the hurting world around you.  You are just a stinking pile of words.  This is why we need to study everything especially history and literature.  We can’t just say “ all I need is my Bible.”

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?  Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!  -Jesus the Christ

Now it is right an appropriate to debate on the limits of physical blessing which this verse is promising, but it is certainly promising access to the person and wisdom of Christ.  We see this from the prayer of Solomon to the inquiring of the Apostles.  God is anxious and willing to share himself, his commandments and his wisdom with those who honestly inquire.  But those who come dishonestly will get nothing, even what they have will be taken.

Waiting for Gadot. David Fossaceca. c. 2012.

Solomon asked for wisdom (I Kings 3:5-15) and because he asked he was given far more than he could ask or think.  Then Solomon wrote books on wisdom, making the same offer to all those who would come. Proverbs 4 is the exhortation to the child to heed the wisdom of his parents.  For we are all children grasping for more than we ought, we are all Adam in the Garden.  All we must do is ask.  But that simple act of asking is an act of humility, which is just what makes it so difficult.  We don’t like to be told we are children, we like to pride ourselves in being adults.

God wants to give all wisdom to us, by his means, by his son.  And so he sent his son to the earth.  His son heeded the wisdom of his father, as a child he was found in his father’s house.  Then after he matured His son dispensed wisdom on the street corner including the above verse.  But his sermons were often pointers to him and to God.  We see a number of people coming to Jesus and asking him questions. That is what he loves, being sought. In public his teaching was often only part of the story, things were concealed.  But the rest of the story was always available to those who asked.  His disciples were always coming to him and asking him for the rest of the story, that’s what made them his disciples.  After his death things finally became more clear and he taught them all things that they might pass them on to us, their children.

And his disciples asked him, saying, What might this parable be?  And he said, Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God: but to others in parables; that seeing they might not see, and hearing they might not understand.

He answered those truly seeking but others he left in the dark. He is affirming them in their prejudice.  We see this time and again as the Pharisees come to Jesus to try and trap them.  He doesn’t offer them wisdom because they don’t want it.  They want to have an argument, so he wins the argument and leaves them to drift in their prejudices.  What they have will be taken as the following verses say.

This is the case with all great writers throughout history.  You can sit back and criticize the way they broke the rules of grammar or offended your pet peeves, or any of the other excuses of the fool detailed in C. S. Lewis’ characteristics of the unliterary.  Or you can put yourself aside and consider that there is more there than you thought.  There also is humility required.

Now to break the rules of blog posting and bring up another subject. How is wisdom to be applied to our current situation?  We don’t have because we don’t ask and then when the results of previous unbelief has left us with a deficit, we further retreat into our own crazy ways of doing things.  Do you really think that by worry you can add a single hour to your life? We lack faith, in the source of true wisdom, so we continually seek false sources.  We are idolators.  But it’s not hopeless, we can repent.

Is your faith really so small that you have never seen answered prayer?  Have you never seen God accomplish something in your life which you didn’t do yourself?  Have you never seen faithfulness rewarded despite everything against you?  Have you never seen a body of faithful Christians accomplish great things with prayer?  It seems not.  Even for the Church today, we are lost in ourselves.  That’s what postmodernism is, each seeking what is right in his own eyes.  Not just morally, we try to remake our bodies as well into another gender or another species, or another demon.  And we have invited the Demons in.  It is too late for this disaster, but let us seek wisdom for the next.

One aspect that drives this fear is the obsession with the short game.  We lose the forest for the trees.  Or the economy, for one sick person, as the case may be.  We are hyper individual.  Rather than realizing that God’s people are an army at war, more powerful than anything on earth, we focus on every man injured in a battle.  We do this in real wars too, which is why we have been losing those for the past 30 years as well.  It is insane to fix your eyes on a death count.  We all die mortality rate is 100%.  But we could be saved by child birth.  The ancients knew how this worked, they looked at the big picture in actual war, and in the war against the World. In the big picture, many men die in a winning war campaign. The church buried these men in their churches, that all might fellowship together, and then they had a bunch of kids.  Recently Patrick Stewart made a video reading Shakespeare’s second sonnet:

When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,
If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,’
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

If you are afraid of death, have kids, win the battle in the next generation.  Pour your life into the cultivation of eternal souls.  The promise to Eve was in a child of the promise, the promise to us is the same in the long game.  The future belongs to those who show up as Mark Steyn likes to say.  Christians have been handing their children over to the world for generations and then patting ourselves on the back for our freedom. Thinking ourselves good because we raised heathens and not hypocrites.  If your life isn’t something you want passed along, then get your act together.  Europe has stopped having kids with Italy leading the pack.  Japan has stopped having kids.  And the US is right on the verge.  But we seem to be exporting this hatred for children masquerading as prudence to the rest of the world.  The most Christian place in the world right now, South Korea seems to also disdain children.  Thanos Malthus is a fool, why do we make him a god?

We are called to increase and spread the Good News.  Why are we so afraid to admit that that means our children?  It is the first test of an elder that he manages his children well.  That should be the first step, reproducing the Gospel in our own homes.  When one child in the camp of Israel became a rebel, his father stoned him.  When most children in most homes become a rebel, you don’t write lame books excusing it, you question whether you have a camp at all.  That’s the point where you circumcise everyone and tear down the high places.

It is so obvious, that fruitfulness is a good thing, it’s incredible that is has to be sold these days.  But let’s insert some pragmatism since we are all so sure of our current pragmatism.  If your labor never bore fruit how would you eat?  If you planted fifty kernels of corn and all you got back were fifty kernels, how would you have any to plant for next year?  How would you eat?  We would all die.  The same with kids.  Who is going to care for you when you get old?  Either your children or someone else’s’.  In a few more generations Italy will look like Syria.   Don’t you care about Italy?  Don’t you care about your own nation?  Does a nation committing suicide seem like a healthy thing?  How much more the church?  Which is also why homosexuality is so ridiculous. Yet, it’s a joke even the Church is afraid to tell.

So what of our gathering together?  Currently known as cowering in a corner over our screens.  Which was the appropriate response of Adam and Even in the Garden, social distancing from God, because–fear.  I don’t think this is what Paul had in mind.  But we are so far beyond respecting Paul it doesn’t really matter.

It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father’s wife. And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you. For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed, In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? -St. Paul

What does gathering together even mean?  Paul seems to discount pure geography as a necessary factor. He is not with them in body, but he has the authority to act as if he were.  Yet there is a boundary that matters, and they have someone within it who should not be there.  And that someone is affecting the whole body in a negative way, they are all prideful.  How many churches in this country are willing to say what Paul does here, much less act upon it?  We are prideful. And so our church has no boundaries of any kind, we have torn them all down. Church means almost nothing, it is impossible to tell where the church begins and where the world ends.  We have no immune system to police this boundary, sin in going viral.  Addressing sin, that’s too judgy judgy. The leaven has worked its way through the whole.  As such we all reap the destruction of the flesh.  We no longer have any light to shine to the world.  We don’t even ask for wisdom from God, we are content with the world’s lies and their panic and fear.  Paul advocates a different type of social distancing “Therefore put away from among yourselves that wicked person.”  Let’s try things God’s way for a while and see how it goes.  But if not. . .

I would just like to come out in favor of Corona Virus.  How dare so many people be so bigoted.  Have you walked a mile in Corona’s shoes?  How dare you judge.  How dare you suggest that someone was given a virus outside of their choice and that they are not able to identify as healthy.  Who do you think you are, God?! Imposing your morality on someone like that.  You should know by now that reality is just social construct and that you are free at any time to construct your own, and impose it on others.  Or else.  Yet it seems like so many today are blind to this obvious evil in our midst.  I see countless people going over to the dark side suggesting that this virus is ‘bad’ or assigning those who have it with any  number of pejoratives like ‘infected’ or ‘sick’.  Get with the times this isn’t 1999.  We don’t do that sort of thing to people anymore, unless they are Christians.

Jacob van Oost the Younger. St. Macarius of Ghent Giving Aid to the Plague Victims. c. 1673.

And trying to fight something we have no control over makes us look bad.  Why don’t we just put down our medical tools, and step away slowly and admit, viruses happen.  There’s nothing we can do about it, so let’s just give people free needles and marijuana and opioids, so they can enjoy the virus with ease.  Maybe we even abort or euthanize those who have it? Just admit that the virus has won.  All this contention might remind people that humans are not as all powerful as they seem.  All our modern science that is better than all those old crusty racists who went before us, is helpless against a tiny little virus?  People might start to question global warming, or even the supremacy of humans to create their own God.  I mean we can’t have all the people in the world admitting their inadequacy at the expense of science, the most powerful force in the universe.  That would be un Modern.

And besides all this unity in banding together to fight a common enemy is so icky.  You want me to band together with people from the opposite political party?  Gross!  I would rather be subjected to online bullying.  Even the thought of all this unity just makes me break out in hives.  Hives of my own personal reality, the abuse is real—in my mind.  And to think I used to identify as healthy, only a few short days ago.  Enough with the collective gas-lighting already.

And then after I’ve embraced Corona Virus for the person she, he, it, vi, truly is I suppose you are going to tell me that I can’t marry the one I love?  That marriage is only between humans or groups or conglomerations or pastiches of humans and not between a man and his vi?  I expected more from a post Christian people wandering amilessly amongst their own arbitrary moral laws.

The French have a saying from the 15th Century: “Fleuris là où tu es plantée”, which means, “Bloom where you are planted”

It seems to me, it is an odd thing for something which does this by it’s nature, to criticize the soil it grows in.  That’s not it’s duty, or it’s penchant.  Can the pot say to the potter why have you made me like this?

Study of Tulips. Jacob Marrel.

And it seems to me the glory of woman is that she blooms where she is planted, even when she is they, the church or all men.  Chesterton said that women are more elemental than men.  They are fruitful and fill the earth like all the boundless energy from each wave of creation, on those first six days.  But that task is not all there is.  There is a seventh day made for man, or perhaps men.  Martha is blooming, while Mary seems to have gotten this male truth, at the feet of The Male.  The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks “What is the chief end of man.” and answers “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.”  I think also of John Piper’s Christian hedonism, very appropriate to a culture which often worships work.  But do you think a woman would come up with these concepts?  Certainly not, it’s the men lounging in the pub over a beer, or the same men as a committee of elders looking over their Bibles.

It seems to me that feminism is the rebellion of fertile soil, even clay soil become pottery.  I suppose if you break the end off of a pot you get a sort of megaphone for shrill rebellions.  No less so than other rebellions, but more apt for us.  We shouldn’t make our work too serious, and we shouldn’t pretend that broken pottery is fruit.  Chesterton also said that it is funny when a man falls because he is a man.  He walks about on two legs with a certain dignity, not possessed by the other animals.  You can’t mock something which is not serious and has no dignity.  And so it makes sense that men are the butt of ridicule and not women.  A man falling down is a joke, a woman falling down is pitiable.

And so what have our men made?  They have made these women around us, blooming where they were planted.  Exchanging natural relations for relations with one another. The obvious cosmic joke of two electrical outlets trying to get it on.  Exchanging natural relations for a task, a desk, a job, a doctorate of doctorates.  Or simply selling their bodies in various forms online and on the street, and calling it empowerment.  But the fruit is withering, sucked out by Planned Parenthood and sold to the highest bidder.  The soil really is bad.  They are in no position to criticize their own soil, it’s just silly, but we are. One potter may tell another potter that his work stinks.  I think in some ways this is being remedied.

Men are leaving academia, the source of much bad soil, and trying to build another world.  Most women haven’t gotten the memo yet.  It takes time.  They are still stuck in that soil from the last generation which said college and career are all that matters. There is nothing more heart breaking than watching a liberal, feminist transplant trying to survive in the new rich soil of full quivers.  That’s not where they were planted.  They are a bird of another feather, or a flower of a different petal.  Fathers can begin to break this trend, by encouraging daughters to be lovers of husbands and lovers of children, as Paul said, rather than lovers of graduate programs on graduate programs.  They can encourage them to be feminine, instead of living it up in hunting camp with the boys.  They have set this old agenda we now find ourselves in, and it is diseased soil.  We need to repent and purify it.

I don’t think enough children read George MacDonald, and I am certain not enough adults read him.  C. S. Lewis summed up his writing perfectly in his introduction to a collection of MacDonald’s stories.  His style isn’t that great but his stories are good. ‘Good’ in the real meaning of the term, morally good through and through.  They are the kind of stories that make better men.  Chesterton’s stories are all meant to accomplish this as well.  They give us a brief glimpse at  eternity poking into our world, for which Lewis borrowed a german word ‘sehnsucht’.

These men were not the sole creators of such work, this used to be the norm, but they are becoming more rare in the modern world.  Most of the old faerie tales were in this vein.  Including Pinocchio, which is why it is so maddening to see the bland soulless thing that Disney turned these wonderful, good stories into.

But this atrocity Knives Out is a whole other level of corruption.  From moral tale defanged of it’s morals to pure evil stealing the devices of it’s creator to push it’s twisted agenda.  Our culture is full on evil.  Tertullian said that the “devil was the ape of God”.  He is not creative, he can only steal and corrupt, twist.  Lewis picks up the theme with his character in The Last Battle, an ape, called Switch, who masquerades as Aslan.

And so this movie masquerades as a sleuthing tale, when in reality it’s just preaching left wing nonsense about the downfall of presumably ‘white’ civilization at the hand of superior immigrants.  The characters are ridiculous caricatures, which are merely the figments of leftist’s imaginations.  Or more accurately the vary evil the left personifies, directed at their opponents.  Because accusing the other side of what you are doing is really all you can do when you are the devil, the ape.  And of course the whole movie is based on the lie that Trump put kids in cages.  And it’s not artfully stated, it’s flashed on the screen like a satire of a Soviet propaganda film.  Of course the fact is that Obama started this program and exacerbated the situation by encouraging immigration.  Even Snopes, the left wing’s second level of lying to the media’s first, admits this. The lamest part is that while the host of rotten tomato lemmings think they are all part of an inside joke, every normal person who went to this movie and enjoyed it, proves them and the whole religious purpose of the movie wrong.  America is not a bunch of racists, we have no problem with immigrants, and our measure for right and wrong is based solely on character, not skin color as those liberals obsessed with skin color can only surmise.

But this is a second or third degree lie built on a foundation of the lies of Howard Zinn, which masquerades as history in every institution masquerading as a University, across this nation.  The real story is the one written before 1968.  Christians took over the Roman Empire with love.  That empire was assailed by various northern Barbarians, who won and then became Christians themselves.  This is where ‘whitey’ comes in for you liberal nut jobs.  Then the Medieval world, dreaming of the old glory days of Rome, built the most rich civilization the earth has ever known.  Catholicism became corrupt was Reformed, and the fruit of that Reformation sailed around the world spreading the Gospel, not perfectly but they did it. Encountering any number of cannibals and other pagans, they laid down their lives and the world was changed.   They gave birth to a new Nation based even more firmly on the Law of God, which spread the Gospel even farther and wider.  That gave birth to another new Nation which was defeated, and now all we talk about is slavery.  Then in 1968 the hippies decided that that old history was a little too Christian, so they fixed it for us.  And that brings us to today, a bunch of ignorant fools blaming race, and accusing ‘whitey’ of confiscating the world’s wealth.  When nearly the opposite is true.  It was reported recently that only ten percent of the world now lives in true poverty. It was almost forty percent only twenty five short years ago.  The story of the Gospel is incredible from the first day when a man rose from the dead to reverse the curse, to today when the world is becoming free from sin.  But evil is not dead.  The evil of Hollywood, Knives Out, Broadway, Hamilton, and all those who lie about the great things done on this earth by the Body of Christ, the Church, is real.  We must keep fighting, tell better stories, sing of His greatness, remember, and put down these lies when we can.  Middle Fingers up to Knives Out!

Further Reading:

Phantastes, George MacDonald

anything else by George MacDonald

Pinocchio, Original and Unabridged by Carlo Collodi

So civilized man moves into an area.  He builds houses which he owns,  in keeping with God’s law.  Do not steal implies that property ownership is good.  He forms a government to peacefully handle relationships between people in public spaces, again a good thing.  He grows tired of walking in the mud and so puts a boardwalk in front of his property.  But the streets are still a mess so the community gets together and paves them.  But who owns the streets?  The community does, they put in the effort, of time or money.  Yet they share the streets with outsiders because, we are an hospitable people.  But then addicts want to live on the streets.  Streets they didn’t build, or put any effort into, streets they show no respect for.  They spread garbage and drug needles all over the street. Is it inhospitable for those who put the effort into them, and those who maintain them, and those who respect the system handed to them, to ask the homeless to leave?

Self Portrait as a Beggar. Rembrandt. c.1630.

What are some other options?  Maybe these people can’t afford to meet the high standard of living required in the US today. Either by choice, laziness, or physical/mental incapacity.  But we don’t really know which is which anymore.  There are so many safety nets, again provided by the people, by their sweat, that it makes it hard to tell what is real.  But let’s consider the real cases, those who honestly can’t.  Who should take care of them?  Again God’s Law is pretty clear, their immediate families, then extended families, then the church(Ruth, I Tim. 5:8).  But there is a lot of breakdown here, families are broken down.  Whose fault is that?  Do we create communities legally or culturally that encourage families to cohere?  I think it’s pretty clear we don’t.  We are all mostly fine with divorce, including most in the church.  And government policies attacking families at every turn are also widely accepted. So the first line of defense is a failure.  What about the second?  In a further burden on these people the responsibility, which should be part of church ministry has been pawned off onto the government.  And the government doesn’t have a stash of money like most people think.  Those are resources deducted from every paycheck everyone earns.  Which means it’s a further burden to going to work every day.  Which creates more homeless. Because you not only have to earn enough to make your employer money, you have to make enough to pay the government to attack the family and handle the poor—poorly.  It’s no wonder some people just throw up their hands and live on the street, especially in California, where it’s warm.

So, what about people who really can’t contribute enough to afford living in the high standard created by our culture?  Well let’s say they can contribute some, they could work or do a task which would cover some percentage of their expenses.   Unfortunately they are not allowed to.  Welfare programs discourage work.  It’s all or nothing.  In addition minimum wage laws make it illegal for people who are not capable of producing the minimum wage to work.  So instead of encouraging people to be productive, to contribute even what they can, we tell them to stay home or on the street and that we will pay them a pittance to do nothing.  This seems really dumb.

Also, who decided that everyone needs to live in a gold plated society? Most cities have rules about minimum housing size/quality supposedly to prevent slum lords and help the poor.  But again they are pricing the poor out of the market.  If you can only afford 200 square feet, you are not allowed to make a private contract with someone for that space, because it’s illegal.  Again, it’s all or nothing.  And what about forcing landlords to charge the 200 square foot price for 500 square feet? Why isn’t that slavery?  Why should he put in the effort or money into building something of value and then be forced to give away free value?  Or you might say the government could subsidize it.  It’s really the same thing, only now you just got the government to go take money from person A the taxpayer, to give to person B.  You have made A a slave of B.  Of course people can freely give their money to help people in need.  That’s charity, the duty of the church, not the business of government.  And because no one connects these things anymore, they vote in more and more luxury items like parks, pools, bike lanes, running paths, walking paths, biking paths, open space and more parks.  Because they think it’s free.  But all of these things  drive up the cost of housing, in two ways, by decreasing the supply of land available for houseing and by raising taxes on existing property to pay to build and maintain them.  Maybe some people could form communities and actually afford all these things, but most can’t.  Forcing a gold plated society is generally immoral, when not based on charity, especially when you can’t afford it.    Making an affordable society illegal is also immoral.

People today want to talk about social justice.  Well slavery, destroying marriage and the family, and attacking what the poor can afford all seem pretty unjust to me.  You want to rewrite the definition of the family to suite your lust, this mess is the result.  You want the conveneince of leaving your marrige when it gets hard, this mess is the result.  You want to let the government do your dirty work, and handle hard people so you don’t have to, this mess is the result.  The problem with society out there is the problem with us in here.  And it’s pretty clear from history that if we stop this immoral behavior (I mean really stop it), social problems will work themselves out.  Those who can contribute, will have the meaning in their lives that comes from hard work.  Those who can only contribute a little will share the same blessings.  And those who can’t contribute can be cared for by their families and in those rare cases, by the church.