. . . For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe;
His craft and power are great, and, armed with cruel hate,
On earth is not his equal.Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing;
Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing . . .
Happy Halloween.
One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s early stories is called “The Hollow of the Three Hills,” in which a woman seeks counsel from a witch and receives nothing but bad news. That appears to be the witch’s point, to break the woman’s heart, and that is the reason I believe her revelations to be complete lies. The story doesn’t say the witch is lying, but I see no reason to believe she isn’t. After all, she is in the service of the father of lies.
Deception is my primary filter for viewing occultic things. On the one hand, trusting the stupid words of a horoscope is a great way to hamstring your life. On the other hand, hoping for special advice from a medium or psychic is like trusting your money to Bernie Madoff. Even if what you hear rings true to you, it’s very likely to be a lie.
So it troubled me hear a caller to a radio program about Halloween say that she understood there were witches in her area placing curses on Halloween costumes and she and her church were praying against them this weekend. I suppose prayer against the enemy for any reason is a good thing, but I don’t remember anything in the Bible and I can’t find anything online from trustworthy sources to support the idea that these curses mean anything.
Note the list of occult practices in Deuteronomy 18:9-12 (John Piper has a great sermon on this.)
“When you come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD. And because of these abominations the LORD your God is driving them out before you.
Most of these are ways someone would seek knowledge, and the rest don’t suggest to me the legitimacy of casting spells on objects in order to harm innocent people who use them. Perhaps the “charmer” is someone who places charms on things, but is there any real power behind this? Isn’t this just another deception? I think it is. Moreover, I don’t believe Christians have a reason to fear “cursed” costumes, but the Spirit of the Lord within them is far greater than anything the devil is able to do.
Such curses have no power. They are like the empty food of lifeless idols. And though other methods of the occult are dangerous lies for anyone who trusts them, I believe these curses are worthless.
I know what you’re wondering. You’re wondering, “Lars, what’s the appropriate way for a Christian to celebrate Halloween?”
I am happy to provide the authoritative answer to that question. You should become a Lutheran.
See, wasn’t that easy?
October 31 is Reformation Day, the anniversary of the date in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church (this was not an act of vandalism, by the way. The church door in those days was the regular place to post public notices, like your Facebook Wall).
Below is a short clip from the 1953 movie, Martin Luther. It depicts a dramatic moment in Luther’s story, when he stood before the Diet of Worms (“Diet” means “Council” and Worms is a city. Stifle that giggle) in 1521, and refused to recant his writings. The “Here I stand, I can do no other” line is now thought by scholars to be an addition made by a later writer with a gift for rhetoric, but the dramatic tension is accurate enough. Although he’d been given a safe conduct to the Diet, Luther was well aware of the fate of the proto-Reformer John Hus. Hus had attended the Council of Constance in 1415 under a similar promise of safety. Once he’d been condemned as a heretic, he was arrested and executed anyway, on the grounds that promises to heretics didn’t count. Luther was putting his head in the lion’s mouth, and he knew it.
There is no truth to the rumor that he wore a Batman mask and yelled, “Trick or Treat!”
Today is the last day of the Virtual Book Tour. The first blog listed is Ellis (though they don’t seem to have posted it yet) and the other is The Plot (again).
And that’s that.
Ivebeenreadinglately has a curious post on Nate Hawthorne (his friends call him Nate) and a ghost he may or may not have seen in a library. I say may not have seen to mean that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the great American author made it up. The great librarian Dave Lull manifests in the comments a link to Britannica list of haunted libraries throughout the country. I note that there are no such libraries in Georgia. I also note my disbelief of any of it. (via Books, Inq.)
Andrew Peterson has an author interview with the people for Excellence in Faith-Driven Literature. He talks about not having an agenda as an author and allowing the story to build naturally.
Today on the Virtual Book tour there are three stops (at least in theory). I’m interviewed at Broowaha (though they jumped the gun, date-wise). There’s a nice interview at As the Pages Turn, and a very short item at The Plot, where I’m scheduled to show up in more substantial form tomorrow.
Occasionally I blog about music here, on the strength of no expertise whatever. Although I was in a musical group for several years in my tragically well-spent youth, and am reputed to have a pretty nice voice, I never comprehended music theory, and have a lousy ear and very little sense of rhythm.
Nevertheless, sometimes a song hits me, mutates into an earworm, and won’t leave me alone until I blog about it. And so I’m going to meditate on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” I’ve poked around YouTube looking for a cover I really liked, and frankly none I’ve heard has entirely satisfied me. All in all, I’m least disappointed in Rufus Wainright’s version:
Bertie Wooster loves his Aunt Dahlia, even though she has an ugly habit of leveraging him into some kind of theft. It would be for a good cause, of course, but if you’ve ever read Wooster’s adventures in the world outside his London flat, you’ll know it won’t go well. In this book, however, he is spared such pressure from his beloved Aunt–who employs the best French chef in a hundred miles (no small benefit). Instead, she wants him to knock on doors for one of his old university friends who is running for the House of Commons. That doesn’t prevent him from being accused of being a theft by the Lord of Sidcup, that Baron of Black Shorts, Roderick Spode.
I have been reading the stories of Wooster and Jeeves in relatively the order of their writing, but this is the first one which referred to events I didn’t remember, despite the familiar characters. And the familiar story too. This one didn’t surprise me a few times, and while it was wonderfully fun, it didn’t have a few zany scenes like others I’ve read.
One thing I love is Wodehouse’s style of having a character comment on something that isn’t described in the text. For instance, Jeeves was telling Bertie how something surprising unfolded, then in the same paragraph without pausing for description, he says, “I wouldn’t jerk the wheel so sharply, sir. It could alarm the other drivers.”
Perhaps, you’d have to be there to get the feel of it.
Much Obliged, Jeeves is not a good place to start reading Wodehouse’s terrific stories about Wooster and Jeeves, but it is a recommended part of the series. I enjoyed it.
Sampsonia Way has a great interview with the new editor of The Paris Review, Lorin Stein. They talk about the many submissions The Paris Review people read and a little about the author interviews the journal is famous for. They actually had an author reject an interview request recently–someone you may have had on the radio.
No Virtual Book Tour stop today. That’s OK. I need a rest from this whirlwind virtual activity.
As many of you are aware (some of you, I’m sure, painfully), last night was a dark and stormy one. If I took any damage here at Blithering Heights, other than the state representative candidate’s campaign sign on my lawn that kept getting flattened, I’m not aware of it.
When I got to work, everything seemed fine there, too, although I soon noticed it was a little chilly. I thought nothing of that, though. The heating in our building is notoriously fickle, different sectors blowing too hot or too cold, for no apparent reason, on random days.
Later, at a staff meeting, I learned that one of the three power sectors on our campus had gone black, and the library was cold because our heat was in that sector. I was surprised at this, as it’s usually the sector that powers our library lights and computers that goes down. But this was remedied later in the afternoon, when we lost power too, for a while.
Phooey. I’ve got no kick coming. People are still waiting for their houses to get the juice back. Some people’s houses are gone.
I failed to mention (because I hadn’t put it together yet), when I did my review of the Masterpiece Theater/Mystery production of Sherlock, that the actor I praised in the role of Watson, Martin Freeman, has been cast as Bilbo Baggins in the upcoming The Hobbit movie.
Seems to me a great pick. He’s a veteran of the great, original British The Office series, so he can do comedy, and Sherlock demonstrates he can do the action stuff. And he certainly fits the established physical pattern of Peter Jackson hobbits.
Have you ever noticed what’s wrong with that pattern, in terms of the original material, by the way? Continue reading Of winds and hobbits