Category Archives: Religion

Religion

Concerning audacity

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Hard as it may be to believe, there are things I don’t understand. Tonight, purely on a whim, I shall ponder one of them. I rarely know what I think about anything, after all, until I’ve written it out.

When Elisha became sick with the illness of which he was to die, Joash the king of Israel came down to him and wept over him and said, “My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” Elisha said to him, “Take a bow and arrows.” So he took a bow and arrows. Then he said to the king of Israel, “Put your hand on the bow.” And he put his hand on it, then Elisha laid his hands on the king’s hands. He said, “Open the window toward the east,” and he opened it. Then Elisha said, “Shoot!” And he shot. And he said, “The LORD’S arrow of victory, even the arrow of victory over Aram; for you will defeat the Arameans at Aphek until you have destroyed them.” Then he said, “Take the arrows,” and he took them. And he said to the king of Israel, “Strike the ground,” and he struck it three times and stopped. So the man of God was angry with him and said, “You should have struck five or six times, then you would have struck Aram until you would have destroyed it. But now you shall strike Aram only three times.” (II Cor. 13:14-19, NASB 95)

A little background, as I understand it: When you read the Old Testament prophets (which you definitely should do), you get the impression that the Israelites, especially those of the northern kingdom of Israel, pretty much apostatized. Turned their backs on Yahweh. Because the prophets are always condemning them for doing just that.

But if you pay attention to the historical books, you get a little more nuance. Very few of the kings seem to have gone so far as to convert to the Canaanite religion. They recognized the Lord as the God of their people, but (like all their contemporaries) they assumed religion was an ethnic thing. We’ve got our God, they’ve got theirs. And of course, when you did business, political and mercantile, with the pagans, you had to accommodate them. Show up for the occasional feast. Authorize construction of a temple to Baal or Ashtaroth here and there. Diversity is our strength, right? And the people of Israel had old traditional ties to the golden calves set up by Jeroboam; you had to be sensitive to that sentiment.

So the prophet Elijah had raged at King Joash (reigned around 801–786 BC) , and Joash had tolerated it. Now the old man was dying, and, like a small boy summoned to the deathbed of an uncle with whom he’d never gotten along, he paid a visit out of a sense of obligation.

Then the dying prophet asks him to do a crazy thing. He tells him to open a window and shoot an arrow out. Then he tells him to strike the rest of the arrows on the ground. Joash sighs (probably), and to humor the old man he strikes the arrows down three times, then stops. And in one final act of nagging, Elijah tells him he did it wrong. He should have struck more times. Then he gets the last word by dying.

This is a story that’s always troubled me. I identify strongly with Joash here. I grew up in an environment where both disinterest and enthusiasm were likely to get you in trouble. I respond to challenges cautiously, in a measured way. But God so often wants all-out enthusiasm. Jesus says, in Matthew 11:12, “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force.” (There’s dispute on the meaning of that verse, but I take it as condemning weenies like me.) Jewish culture celebrates “chutzpah,” audacity, a quality I lack almost entirely.

Jordan Peterson has reminisced about his youth in a small town on the Alberta prairie. He said that there were only two groups of guys to hang around with there – the bad boys, who got into trouble and mostly had poor futures in store, and the church boys. But he didn’t like the church boys either. They were “good,” he says, not because they loved virtue, but because they were afraid of taking risks.

That hits home at my house.

I wish the world understood this. I wish they understood that “church boys” like me are not actually Jesus’ target market for disciples. I’d wager there wasn’t a guy like me among all the twelve disciples. Sentimental illustrations always depict the Apostle John (for instance) as a clean-shaven, long-haired, slightly effeminate figure. Yet Jesus called him and his brother James “the Sons of Thunder.” They got in trouble with their buddies for asking for the top spots in the coming Kingdom (Mark 10:37). Chutzpah on parade.

All my life I’ve gotten into trouble (ironically) because I have difficulty asking for anything. Were James and John even embarrassed by their audacious request? Maybe the other disciples were upset because they didn’t think of it first.

“For such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.” (John 4:23)

Music, Religion

‘God’s Word Is Our Great Heritage’

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I’m in the middle of reading a very interesting book whose review must wait till Monday. So, this being Friday, I have ferreted out another Scandinavian hymn for you.

“God’s Word Is Our Great Heritage,” I think, is not familiar to non-Lutherans, though the tune will be. (I find, to my chagrin, that most of the YouTube renditions feature the wrong tune – by which I mean a tune I didn’t grow up with. Almost the only version with the right tune is the one I’ve posted above, featuring a solo singer who does a pretty good job.)

The author of the hymn, once again, is the problematic N.F.S. Grundtvig of Denmark. It’s rather odd that we have a hymn in praise of Scripture from his pen, as one of his eccentric doctrines, at least at one point in his career, was that the Apostle’s Creed was older than the Gospels. Nevertheless, there it is, and I think it’s to his credit. The translator, Ole C. Belsheim, a Norwegian immigrant, attended, among other schools, Luther College, Decorah, Ia. and Augsburg Seminary, Minneapolis (both of which I attended too, except that Augsburg was just a college by the time I got there. It calls itself a university now, probably on the strength of its association with me).

The hymn is also peculiar in having just one verse, as far as I can tell. C. S. Lewis, who hated long hymns, would have loved this one, if he ever heard of it, which I doubt.

Happy weekend.

Music, Religion

‘O Gladsome Light’

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I often post old hymns here, especially on Fridays. But I’ve never posted one this old — it’s “O Gladsome Light” (Phos Hylarion) a hymn still used in Orthodox churches, and first known from a manuscript around 300 AD. But it could be older.

I should mention that others promote a hymn called the Oxyrhynchus Hymn. You can decide for yourself.

Have a good weekend.

Authors, Non-fiction, Religion, Uncategorized

Surprised by A.I.

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I found this video on YouTube. It seems to me both wonderful and troubling.

First of all, Jack Lewis is using “my” microphone. It’s a Blue Yeti, and I have one exactly like it, even unto the color. (Or “colour,” as he would have spelled it.)

Secondly, it’s pretty well done, except for a couple glitches. The voice appears to be cloned from Lewis’ well-known The Four Loves recordings. (On the downside, I’ve read a statement from one of Lewis’s friends, who says that that was not his normal speaking style.)

The troubling aspect is – of course – just that this is A.I. I’m almost obligated to hate A.I., which took a much-needed job away from me.

The very idea of resurrecting actual humans through A.I. is just disturbing to many of us, whether it’s affected our bottom lines or not. It seems creepy, like necromancy. However, I’m not sure that creepy feeling is to be trusted. When radio was a new technology, there was a fair number of sincere Christians who denounced it as demonic – voices coming through the air; that has to come from the domain of the Prince of the Powers of the Air! (For our young readers, that’s a biblical reference to the devil (Ephesians 2:2 in the King James Version).

But the bottom line, for me, is that I found it kind of fun.

I’d like to see more of this sort of stuff, and no doubt I will. Maybe somebody can recreate Moody preaching, or Jonathan Edwards declaiming “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (contemporaries reported that he read it from a manuscript, in a very rote voice).

The best thing about A.I. might be that it could kill Hollywood. We can bring back the great actors of the past and cast them in new movies, bypassing Wokeness. I’d love to see a young Clint Eastwood playing Travis McGee, for instance. Authors could have total control of film adaptations. Who wants to do an A.I. production of The Year of the Warrior for 50 bucks? I might be able to spring for half of that.

Religion, Uncategorized

The quest for the saint

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Medieval altar to Saint Olaf preserved in Nidaros Cathedral.

Someone on Basefook brought this project to my attention. The idea is to locate the lost bones of St. Olaf (best remembered as a character in my Erling novels) for scientific and cultural purposes.

For a saint as problematic as he was in life, St. Olaf swung disproportionate weight in the religious life of the European Middle Ages. His shrine in Nidaros Cathedral was a rich and elaborate one, making the city of Trondheim a very popular pilgrimage destination (perhaps people calculated that the hard trip over Norwegian terrain would earn them extra penance points). Pilgrims streamed in from all over Europe, lifting up prayers, looking for miracles, and spending money. Sigrid Undset describes such pilgrimages in several of her novels.

During the Reformation, Olaf’s shrine was demolished and broken up, the proceeds going to the king. Yet it seems that the bones themselves were not destroyed. Instead, they seem to have been re-buried covertly. Anyone who knew the secret of their location did not pass it on. But now there’s this project to rediscover them using modern scientific techniques.

My Basefook friends have expressed mixed views on the project. Many of them are – reasonably – concerned that if the bones are recovered, they will once again become the object of pilgrimages and devotion. We Protestants don’t hold with that stuff, and I agree.

Yet, all things considered, I’m for it. I believe in freedom of religion, so let the Roman Catholics do what they like. If it serves as a counterweight to the advance of Islam in Europe, it’s the lesser of two evils, it seems to me. What I’d like is for Lutheran Norway to be preserved, but I’ll take a Catholic Norway over a Muslim one.

Also, I’ll be interested in what analysis of the bones will reveal.

I signed the petition. I’ll be watching the project’s progress with interest.

Goofing, Religion

Excerpt from the Chronicles

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Photo Credit: Alex Shuper. Unsplash License.

An extract from The Chronicles of the Last Days:

After the second Great War had been won, the victorious Americans went home to an undamaged country. They proceeded to build the freest and most prosperous society the world had ever seen. Vowing that their children would never suffer as they had, they lavished on them high-quality education, material comfort, and indulgent freedom.

This postwar generation was known as the Baby Boom. These “Boomers,” as they came to be called, took advantage of their opportunities, enjoying their freedom to the utmost, giving no thought to future generations – indeed, they made it a point to have few if any children of their own.

Yet this was not enough for them. They desired even more freedom. They identified Christian Puritanism as the one thing that was keeping them from total self-indulgence. “Let us destroy Christian Puritanism,” they said, “that there may be no limit to our license.” And so they did. Their contemporaries in Europe did the same. Together they plumbed the depths of depravity, squandered their nations’ wealth, and left the whole mess to the progressively smaller generations that followed them.

And when the Boomers finally aged and weakened, and realized that they must soon relinquish power and die, they said, “It is not right that the world should go on without us to enjoy it. Let us destroy the world – or let us at least destroy our civilization.”

And so they turned their civilization over to Islam, so that all liberty would be erased.

And this is why the name of Boomer remains a hissing and a byword among all the peoples of the earth, even unto this day.

Music, Religion

“Den Himmelske Lovsang”

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Tonight, as is so often my lazy wont, I share with you a Norwegian hymn, performed here by a volunteer pietist men’s choir. But this hymn is different, in a highly insignificant way.

The hymn is called “Den Himmelske Lovsang,” which translates, “The Heavenly Song of Praise.” (“Lovsang” does not mean “love song,” however much you might want it to. “Lov” is Norwegian for “praise.”)

I can’t find an English translation, and that’s kind of the point of this post. The gist of the lyrics is that it’s all about the joy of Heaven, embodied in music. The idea that all nature and the heavenly host are having a wonderful time singing God’s praise, and that through Christ we can hope to join in the fun ourselves someday.

Once a month I get together with a small clutch of old men, most of whom are retired pastors from my church body. At the last meeting, one of them mentioned this hymn, commenting that it’s the most popular hymn among the Lutherans of Madagascar.

(The reason for this goes back to the 19th Century, when international mission organizers “assigned” part of the Madagascar mission field to the Norwegians. These missionaries came not only from Norway, but from the Norwegian-American immigrant church.)

In our gathering, we noted that the hymn has never caught on in the US. Nobody was sure why. I thought it might be because no one had ever done a satisfactory English translation.

You can guess what came next. I decided to give it a go myself.

I’m not working at it full-time; I’ve got several other projects demanding my attention. But I’ve been noodling with it in odd moments, and I’m generally pleased with my progress.

Translating verse is a particular challenge. The only way I can figure out to do it is to first study the text closely, trying to figure out what the poet is attempting to convey, and how. Then I proceed to do my own original poem on the same theme, in the same meter, touching base with the original text whenever I can.

I have no idea where it’s all going.

Anyway, do you think this hymn would be interesting to American Christians?

Music, Religion

‘This Ole House’

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Tonight, for no particular reason, Stuart Hamblen’s “This Ole House.” Probably his biggest hit.

This clip comes from the long-running Country & Western comedy show, “Hee-Haw.” I think I actually saw this episode, which surprises me a little, because I wasn’t a regular viewer. I was too snobbish about “hillbilly” music.

As I recall, Hamblen introduced this performance by recounting how he’d come to write it. He was on a hunting trip with a friend in the mountains when they found an abandoned hunting lodge with a man’s body in it (dead, apparently, by natural causes). As they rode back down the mountain, he meditated on mortality and composed the lyrics.

“I hated, Rosemary Clooney’s performance,” he said (as I remember it), “because she speeded it up to a sort of a schottische rhythm. Then it sold a hundred-thousand copies… and I came to love Rosey’s version.”

I was reminded of this song tonight by association. My dad, when he was milking cows out in the barn, used to sing the first couple lines of another of Hamblen’s songs: “I Won’t Go Huntin’ With You, Jake (But I’ll Go Chasin’ Women).” This was a big hit of Hamblen’s before he was born again.

He had a crazy American Christian story. A preacher’s kid, son of the founder of the Evangelical Methodist Church denomination in Texas, he got into music and became a popular singer and recording artist, with his own radio program. He also acted – if you watch old B westerns, you’ll often see Hamblen – not as a hero, but as the bad guy who leads the outlaws or the evil posse. He dealt with the pressures of fame by drinking, and became an alcoholic. Whenever he got arrested for brawling or public intoxication, his radio sponsors would pay his bail and get it covered up.

Then he attended a Billy Graham crusade in Los Angeles in 1949, and surrendered his life to Christ. He stopped doing beer advertisements on his radio show, and got fired for it. But by then he’d given his testimony on the air, and it boosted Billy’s public profile immensely (though Randolph Hearst’s instructions to his editors to “Puff Graham” certainly had plenty to do with it too).

He remained an outspoken Evangelical the rest of his life, composing such songs as “It Is No Secret What God Can Do” (title suggested by his friend John Wayne) and “Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sunshine In.” He also ran for office, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, on the Prohibition ticket.

The main thing I love about “This Old House” is the line, “Now it trembles in the darkness / When the lightning walks about.”

That’s genuine poetry.

Music, Religion

‘Built On a Rock, the Church Shall Stand’

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I thought to myself, “Hey! I haven’t posted “Built On the Rock the Church Shall Stand” yet. That’s an important Scandinavian hymn I haven’t done here before!”

Checked our search utility. No, I posted about it – and as recently as last year.

Chalk it up to old age. Old men tell the same stories over and over, and old bloggers blog the same material under and under.

I’ll post it anyway, because I’ve got nothing else.

The lyrics were composed by Nikolai F. S. Grundtvig, the eccentric Danish clergyman who made the first translation of Beowulf into a modern language and started the Folk High School movement.

My people (the Norwegian Haugeans) did not like Grundtvig much, but we sang his hymn. This rendition is done by the Luther College Cathedral Choir, Decorah, Iowa. My people didn’t like Luther College much either, and the one year I spent studying there didn’t leave me with a lot of good memories. The arrangement is by F. Melius Christiansen, who conducted the choir of St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota – which I never attended, but still dislike on principle.

The English translation is pretty faithful, but the opening line takes an interesting tack. The original Danish says, “The church, it is an ancient house,” but goes on to say that it keeps standing anyway, upheld by God. Our English version, as you’ll notice, kicks off in a more upbeat, defiant vein.

Danes, generally speaking, don’t do audacity.

Reading, Religion, Writing

Chronicle of a writer’s day

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“Daffodils and Glastonbury Tor.” Photo credit: Glastomichelle. Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license.

What’s on tonight? Hey, how about a pointless account of my day? What could be more fun than that?

Last night my men’s Bible study group re-convened after several weeks of preemptions. I continue to be astonished how much these meetings nourish and uplift me. I feel an actual physical easing. I’ve been a solitary for so many years, getting by without close Christian fellowship. I knew that was the wrong way to do it, but I was hemmed in by… well, fear, to be honest.

I don’t think these guys will ever realize what they’re doing for me.

This morning I drove to the gym, and while I was inside, beavering away at my Sysiphian labors, a freezing rain came down, which covered my car windows in a matrix of icy pearls and made the road treacherous going home.

I worried about driving this afternoon, as I had a doctor’s appointment. But by the time I had to pull out again, the moisture had all melted and (mostly) dried off. I was able to reassure a technician, who took samples of my blood, on that point.

(No big deal on the doctor’s appointment, by the way. I wanted him to check something out, and he ordered tests, but didn’t seem greatly concerned. This stuff is just S.O.P. when you achieve venerability.)

Right now I’m re-reading two different books I read as a teenager, both of which deal with medieval Glastonbury. Because I’m writing a book about King Haakon the Good, and he grew up in England, and there’s good reason to think he might have spent time at that ancient site of monasticism and pilgrimage.

The first book is The Hidden Treasure of Glaston, by Eleanore M. Jewett. This is a book aimed at teenagers, and I remember that it surprised me when I read it (as a teenager), since I had known nothing about Glastonbury or the grave of King Arthur up to then. So far, I think it stands up pretty well. Entirely credulous about the legends, but well done withal. I’ll review it when I finish it.

The other book is Avalon, by Anya Seton, which I’ll also review. I read this as a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book (remember those?) back when it was new. It was quite a thrill for me, back in 1965 or 66, to discover any novel involving Vikings. I’m enjoying this book too, though I detect some historical errors. It’s set slightly before my Erling books.

What do I envy most in other historical writers’ works? The ability to describe geography, plants, and wildlife. I struggle with that stuff. “What kind of flowers would be blooming in an English marsh in Somerset in April, 980 AD, and how would they smell?” Would it be the same varieties they have now? How much have things changed in a thousand years? How much guessing do the authors do? Sigrid Undset was great at that stuff, but she was an amateur expert in botany.

What comforts me most? Finding mistakes. If successful novelists can screw up on details, maybe I can get away with a few howlers too. Because I know they’re there, like Communists under the beds (who were also actually there, as it happened).