Strange New Thoughts

Young Earth Atheism (YEA) – An Idea Whose Time Has Come

2010-10-19T00:22:00.000-07:00

I know a guy who claims to believe Young Earth Creationism (YEC) on purely scientific grounds. No theological bias, just good, solid science showing the universe to have been created sometime in the last 10,000 years. Intergalactic distances, Doppler shifts, the Big Bang – illusions at best, more likely lies from the pit of Hell, or chimeras put there by God to test our loyalty. Wait, scratch that last bit. Heaven and Hell don't even enter into our conversation – this is strictly science.

But now we're stuck with a dilemma: If a young universe (i.e., one between 6,000 – 10,000 years old, as per a literal reading of Genesis, chapters 1 & 2) is to be inferred purely from scientific data, then why is it only accepted by certain Christians (this includes marginals, such as a goodly percentage of Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses)? Since YEC science itself is so good, shouldn't any honest seekers, including atheists and agnostics, be able to rule out the existence of billions of years, billions of light years, and their attendant implications?

Well, I say yes, dagnabbit! Why should the fundamentalists have all the good science? Since their data is so pure, so objective, so untainted by amoral bias, then it ought to warrant wider acceptance within the scientific community, regardless of one's personal beliefs about religion, morality, and the supernatural. Therefore, I propose the establishment of Young Earth Atheism (YEA), a means by which one can independently conclude that the universe accidentally created itself in six literal days, mere thousands of years ago. No God, no messy moral implications, just the time-honored, trusted Scientific Method interpreting all the data available to us in a concrete, unbiased manner. Because the YEC camp is clearly right (just ask them), then their science should be our benchmark. How liberating to be able to admit the silliness of every scientific sacred cow from Carbon Dating to Natural Selection, all without that troublesome Creator intruding on the scene to make the admission itself seem theologically motivated. You see, the YECers, in order to maintain their scientific honor, should be able to say that their science isn't based on biblical interpretation at all. They can disprove any scientific convention, (provided it poses a threat to a particular reading of the book of Genesis) without having to refer to the latter itself. All the scientific accuracy and intellectual honesty of YEC, without the religiosity. The war will be over!

Wait, I heard that. Silly? How could it be silly? The scientists (mostly atheists and agnostics, remember), in their rush to eliminate God from their Brave New World, caved in to apparent realities such as light traveling to Earth from celestial bodies millions or billions of years away; illusions such as the existence of death before the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden (i.e., prehistoric predators that couldn't have lived on alfalfa and bean sprouts.) You see, they were driven to believe such crazy ideas by a desperate desire to keep that meddling God from demanding this and commanding that. Well, who can blame them? Remember, the question here isn't whether God exists, it's whether the scientific methods we employ are influenced by a desire that He should exist, or shouldn't.

I suddenly feel pressure to be serious for a paragraph or two. (And I was having so much fun!) I'm afraid that the real implication here is that religious people are the only ones capable of objectivity, that no atheist could honestly read the available scientific data without an underlying fear and loathing of something more, something supernatural, otherworldly. That religious faith is a prerequisite to honest inquiry. That Young Earth Creationists are the only intellectually honest (or even intellectual) people on earth. (A young Earth, remember.)

There's the shouting again. “How could any atheist, examining only the best and newest scientific data, conclude a young universe without also having to admit the existence of God?”

Well, I'm working on that, But if it ever happens, please let me know. A Beatles reunion can't be far behind.

How Low Should You Go?

2009-06-23T22:24:00.000-07:00

or,

Some Deep Thoughts for Us Bass Players

My first encounters with the electric bass were marked by ignorance and frustration. In the early 70's my older sister would listen to The Carpenters, anchored by session great Joe Osborne on a Fender Jazz bass, playing old, dirty flatwound strings with a pick. His relatively high, guitar-like lines on "Superstar" mesmerized me, but I couldn't reproduce them on guitar; it didn't go low enough. Somehow I'd failed to find out what an electric bass was. (Even though I'd seen Danny Partridge on The Partridge Family.) Still less did I understand how this powerful new instrument (barely on the market for 20 years at the time) had become even more crucial in some musical genres than the electric guitars that preceded it. Reggae, Latin, Gospel, Jazz - many of these gigs could succeed without a guitar player, but what if the bass player didn't show up? Time to panic.
　
The first time I got my hands on a bass, I immediately understood its appeal: Power. I was fourteen, and drunk with bass power. It was like trading a .22 for a 12 gauge. Boom! Those lines I couldn't emulate on a guitar were suddenly there for the playing. It would be a few years before I realized how critical and delicate the basssist's role is, but at least I could kick out those sub-guitar notes. I got the powerrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
　
Fast forward to 1980, when the bass player for the country band I was in got married and left on his honeymoon. Time to panic. But wait: I knew a good guitar player who also plays bass. But wait: He didn't know the songs, and we didn't use charts. I knew at once that even though I was far better versed in country guitar than my friend, that nonetheless I had to get out my Höfner Beatle bass and lay down the foundation while he tried to make his rock guitar lines sound a little bit country. To have given him the bass would have been a disservice to the rest of the band and to the audience, because he didn't know the songs the way a bass player should.
　
You see, we electric guitar players have it easy. In many contexts, we can just listen and respond, float around, sprinkling textures and fills and licks all over the place. If we need to lay out for a few measures, great. If we don't know the song, we can probably still make it sound good by staying close to the key center and waxing pentatonic. But just try that if you're a bass player. Actually, please don't.
　
Frank Zappa, indisputably one of the greatest musical minds of the 20th century, described the bass player's function as "(telling) me what key I'm in." What, not to shake the room, rattle the windows and impress everyone with those flying fingers? Uh, no. That note at the bottom of the mix is so much more crucial than most people could ever know. I once played guitar on a major country gig in which a carefully rehearsed harmonica solo ended up sounding idiotic because the bass player played a I instead of a IV, causing a jazzy 11th voicing to instead sound something like "Long Tall Texan" or "Sweet Adeline." (The harmonica player was duly miffed afterward.) And how many of us have suffered in silence as a band or a church worship team is dragged throught the sludge by a bass player who hasn't done his homework, or can't tell a right note from a wrong one?
　
Okay, we've established that the bass player isn't really allowed to make mistakes (or at least that those mistakes should be rare exceptions.) Now for the subjective part, the one that compelled me to write a blog entry about what register a bass player should play in.
　
"Why not write about which of the Jonas Brothers is the cutest?" Hmmm, good point. I guess, though, that there are several hundred of us for whom this is even more important. (The rest of you can move on to Stuff That Really Matters.)
　
Once I started playing electric bass, I, like many young guitarists, treated it like some sort of guitar on steroids. All those hot licks were so easy, since the fingering was the same as on a guitar . . . uh oh, what's this? They don't work? They don't make the band sound good? Aw, man, this wasn't supposed to be hard! You mean I need to listen to great bass players? Great what? Aren't bass players just failed guitar players?
　
Turn with me in your Bass Player History Textbook to Chapter 2. (Chapter 1 deals with Bach and Pachelbel and those other Dead Guys who gave us good basslines in the first place.) The early electric bassists were mostly converts from the upright bass, and brought with them a sensibility for what's best for the song. The upright only reluctantly lent itself to luxuries like soloing, so most of its techniques and lines remained intact through the early years of electric bass work in rock and R&B. In those days much music was listened to on small radios and phonographs, with limited bass response, and studio bassists quickly realized that their lowest notes sometimes didn't pop out of those tiny speakers nearly as well as higher ones. In fact, on dates where acoustic upright bass was still played, it was often doubled by a six-string 'tic-tac' bass guitar for that very reason. The standard four-string electric bass has the advantage of a relatively thick, rich timbre, even when played beyond the fifth fret, so when the first generation of influential rock bassists began to apply guitaristic techniques to the bass, it generally worked. The notes were audible even on a small transistor radio. And on the family hi-fi, look out! Woofers and tweeters and mids, oh my!
　
Any guitarist who doubles well on bass will very possibly find his bass skills more in demand than his guitar playing. That's because (sorry, my fellow guitar stranglers) bass is more important. In the nine years I spent in Venezuela, I estimate that up to 50% of my gigs (mainly church and jazz/salsa) were bass gigs. But the best bassists don't sound like defrocked guitar players. Sure, the guitarist may get to solo on every song, but that doesn't make the bass less challenging. When I listen to studio bass kingpins like Nathan East, John Pattitucci, Leland Sklar, or Abe Laboriel (the list could fill paragraphs), I'm intimidated (in a healthy way) by their ability to make everybody else sound good. The melodicism, the control, the deep pocket, the joy - it's enough to make you forget you even own a guitar.
　
When I started playing bass, there was nobody to tell me that there was such thing as taste, restraint, etc., so I felt my job was to produce the greatest quantity of notes possible. Then a pastor asked me to play on a slow, gentle song with only three chords: 'D', 'G' and 'A'. No problem - that's what I proceeded to play. But then he asked me to play 'F#' (the 3rd) instead of the 'D' (the tonal center, btw.) 'F#', 'G', and 'A'. Mi, Fa, Sol. "Dormez-vouz?" A little melody, underpinning a simple chord progression. Eureka! The congregation possibly asked themselves, 'What's that light bulb doing hovering over the bass player's head?" Answer: It was the cartoony-yet-appropriate visual manifestation of my realization that there's more to playing bass than, root-fifth, root-fifth (insert hot lick here), root-fifth. To this day, I'll sometimes start a new bass student by teaching them the intro to Josef Zawinul's Weather Report masterpiece, 'Birdland'. "Dor---mez---vouz..."
　
Anyway, time to force the issue. Somewhere along the way I concluded that bass players should generally choose the lowest octave possible in which to play a given note, if the line permitted. Then in the mid-80's came Jimmy Johnson and his five-string bass (suggested by his father, a symphonic contrabassist familiar with the low 'B' string sometimes added to the double bass), and NY bass virtuoso Anthony Jackson, with his new invention, the six-string contrabass guitar, tuned from low 'B' to 'C' below middle 'C'. Suddenly there was this craze for notes below the serviceable low 'E' that for decades had defined the nether regions of our humble-yet-heroic axe. Thousands of bass players abandoned their Fenders and Rickenbackers in favor of Ken Smiths or whatever five- or six-string flavor-of-the month presented itself. Fender and Rickenbacker noticed right away and started offering five- and even six-string versions of their old standbys. Some of us questioned the future of the venerable four-string bass.
　
We couldn't even begin to question its past, though. It has been suggested that the electric bass (the original recipe, four-string variety) was more responsible for the dawn of rock and roll than any other instrument, even the electric guitar. And you would be hard-pressed to name a classic rock song that doesn't feature it.
　
That must have occurred to a lot of those early five-string converts. I saw Marcos Witt's longtime bassist, Emmanuel Espinosa in Mexico City in '97 with his Ken Smith (five- or six-string, I don't remember), then met up with him a year later in Venezuela, joyfully wielding a four-string G&L he'd rescued from a pawnshop in Houston. What about all those really low notes you played on the last few CDs? I thought. He didn't care. That night's concert proved it didn't matter very much. Most of us who made the change from four to five strings suffered from years of retroactive tactile memory, especially when we tried to transfer our slap/funk technique to the five. (We repeatedly hit the 'B' string, when what we really wanted was the 'E'.) What a relief to recover our funk chops simply by going back to the old Fender we'd thought had been rendered obsolete!
　
My all-time bass hero (now there's a new video game wating to happen) was John 'The Ox' Entwistle of The Who. Besides the grinding maelstrom of his roaring roundwound strings (practically his invention, it turns out) filling the empty space that threatens to strand the guitarist in many power-trio formats, Entwistle's sinuous, intricately melodic lines raised the bar for bass players seeking to mine the territory between flash and foundation. I was so obsessed with his tone that I put Rotosound Swing Bass strings on my poor, delicate Beatle bass, which groaned under the tension but delivered a most un-Beatle-like growl until I sold it to a friend who restored it to its rightful flatwound glory. I guess I liked filling out the sonic spectrum with frequencies beyond the pure, fundamental note. I even began to adopt a snobbish attitude toward most any bass sound that didn't do homage to The Ox. (Those years were full of inexplicable snobberies and prejudices. Thank God for old age.)
　
But why, I wondered, didn't Entwistle play the hard rock section of "Behind Blue Eyes" an octave lower than he did? (The part, BTW, that Limp Bizkit left out of their cover version of that song, thereby cementing their reputation for terminal Limpness.) And why did other bass visionaries like Paul McCartney and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones venture so frequently into guitar register? Short answer: Basses don't sound like guitars, so they can get away with it, provided they do it at appropriate times. We can vary the intensity of the song structure by playing a part further up or lower down. We can use a pick (yes, real bass players often use picks) to add definition to the low end. We can use our fingers (yes, we need to be able to do that, too) to add body and warmth to those high register parts, thus making sure they still qualify as bass lines.
　
I hope I didn't step on the toes of those who favor the five- or six-string - I still own one, and I still compose music that goes down there, but I look forward to those Sundays when the songlist shows no songs in Eb or Ab, so I can leave it home and bring my trusty Jazz Bass to church. If you've actually read this far, you deserve a better conclusion to this diatribe than I'm giving it, but I hope you'll settle for my heartfelt gratitude for attending to a seemingly arcane issue that matters so much, yet is cared about (or even noticed) by so few. If we bassists suddenly stopped playing, then they'd notice.

The Djembe: The Tambourine of the New Milennium

2009-01-31T20:35:00.000-08:00

My late friend and mentor Larry Hefty gave me my first opportunity to play contemporary Christian music, having himself toured the U.S. for seven years with his band Shekinah. I joined Shekinah just as they were winding down, so we didn't tour much, and they had already completed their first album, so I didn't get to play on that, either. (Larry later produced the first album I did play on, and many of the others I played on later.) But here I was, under the tutelage of a guy who had played perhaps thousands of concerts, mostly in churches, and it was my big chance to learn.

It soon came to my attention that, upon arriving at a church, Larry would discretely round up any tambourines that might be in the pews and squirrel them away somewhere until the concert was over. Most of you have already guessed why, but for both of you who are too innocent to guess, it's because the tambourine is in fact a musical instrument, same as a saxophone or a guitar, but most people don't treat it as a musical instrument. Since, like a baby's rattle or a car horn, it makes noise with minimal effort on the user's part, anyone can do it. And, since it's associated exclusively with musical settings (even if it's just a Hare Krishna gathering), it must therefore follow that here's a musical instrument that anyone can play!

Larry knew better. Having endured early Shekinah concerts accompanied by the jangling cacaphony of tambourine-brandishing church ladies, he simply defused the situation by insuring that the only instruments heard would be played by the band themselves. (Note: Men are more apt than women to shy away from tambourines,which have been associated with the latter ever since Miriam prophesied on the timbrel in Exodus 15:20, incidentally making her the first drummer mentioned by name in the Bible.)

Tambourine playing itself runs the gamut between crisp accents at the end of every other measure (as in The Who's "Bargain") to frenzied flailing with nominal regard to the song's actual tempo or structure. Indeed, some tambourine wielders seem equally dedicated to delivering a visually flamboyant performance, whether done expertly (as per Ray Cooper, British percussionist to the stars) or badly, as many of you have doubtless witnessed if you've ever been involved with the 'right' sort of church. Just for the record, a properly played tambourine can do wonders for a rhythm section, or wreak havoc. I'll wager that sources like YouTube can provide ample input for anyone who wishes to acknowledge the tambourine's status as a genuine musical instrument, and who has a heart to learn.

But what's this? No girly-man instrument, the djembe. Back in the early 90's, when men were groping back toward the masculinity we'd misplaced in the 80's, drum circles became a symbol of that search. (Anybody remember Hasbro's "My Buddy" doll, marketed back then in hopes that little boys would play with dolls if given the chance? Sheesh.) Having gotten in touch with our feminine side and found it to be a chimera, we now needed an outlet for our testosterone, and all-male drum circles seemed like a great way to reinstate the "No Girls Allowed" dynamic we'd enjoyed for centuries. The djembe became the de facto hand drum for the novice: it easily produced a manly thunder, and even made different sounds with minimal effort or skill. And it was so African. Congas and bongos beg for specific strokes and techniques if you want to sound Afro-Caribbean, but the djembe lent itself to free-form flailing, and shrewd hand-drum makers wordwide were quick to capitalize on this craze. Oh, and don't forget portability - you never see one bongo, and rarely one conga - you need two. The Djembe Stands Alone, so to speak.

As a drum teacher, my credentials are spotty at best, but I do stress discipline - practice and listening skills loom large in my lessons. If I were to find it necessary to teach djembe, I’d immediately find the best instructional sources possible. Better still: explore better-documented hand drums, such as congas (which posess a much longer New World tradition than most hand percussion), and discover what Stravinsky’s “structure = freedom” dictum really meant. Your djembe will either become a much more serious instrument for you, or it may vanish altogether from your arsenal as you instead explore the rich Afro-Latin musical tradition. I don’t care which of the two paths you djembe owner/operators may take, but please take one, and treat your djembe as you would a guitar or a sax - a seriously deep musical instrument, not a shortcut to musical participation. You, and your audience, deserve better.

A Christian Response to Kenny G., Revisited

2008-09-27T20:55:00.000-07:00

(Or, Kenny G. 1, Pat Metheny 1)

Hmph. After I deleted my Kenny G. bit, some anonymous post-er posted the following:

Aw dang, I liked the blog about Kenny G. but then of course I'm also a person who most Christians have made a habit of turning their noses up at while simultaneously looking down it at me for one reason or another, so who am I to judge, oh wait, we should leave judgment up to the Christians, they do a much better job.

Ouch. I hate it when people get that impression of us Christians. Having sort of soothed the "sensitive reader" cited in the previous entry, I'm putting this article back up, and we'll see where the chips fall this time... So! Poster-Guy (or Girl), do riposte, and please know that judgmental Christians are no indictment against the Christian faith, only against themselves. And if you join us one day, maybe you'll never make the mistake of judging someone, and we can all learn from you!

******************************************************************************

A quick Google of "A Christian Response to..." will find thoughtful Christians "responding" to nasty things like AIDS, 9/11, Divorce, Wicca, "The Da Vinci Code" - never, it seems, to perceived blessings as, say, Mother Teresa, the end of Apartheid, or chocolate. It is possible that someone reading this might even place mega-platinum-selling saxophonist Kenny G. in the latter category, rather than the former.

To fall into both categories is to be controversial. What, Kenny G., controversial? Unlike many other chart-topping recording artists, he doesn't even merit tabloid attention. He's still married to his first wife, plays a good game of golf, pilots his own plane, gives to charities, and is (as the old Jim Nabors' Greatest Hits commercial would say), "Loved By Millions". Okay, so he's not taken very seriously by the upper echelons of the jazz community. Well, neither are any number of excellent jazz musicians plying their trade in near-total obscurity.

Oops, I made my first point sooner than I intended to. Kenny G. may (or may not) be a lot of things, but he's not obscure. It wouldn't do for me to cite resentment of Kenny G.'s success on the part of his more talented detractors, at least until I point out that his detractors are, well, more talented. Even Mr. G.'s more knowledgeable fans would probably concede that, as a sax player, he's not as good as other "smooth jazz" purveyors such as Grover Washington, Jr., Tom Scott, or Dave Sanborn, and light years behind jazz legends like John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Charlie Parker, Wayne Shorter, Cannonball Adderly, or Michael Brecker. Of course, talent and record sales are notoriously lopsided - otherwise, how would "artists" such as Ashlee Simpson or the Spice Girls sell millions of units while groups like King's X are just getting by?

But there's a mystery here, at least to me, and I'm very curious to hear some plausible answers. In their heyday, jazz and pop music shared a harmonic and melodic sophistication that resulted in yesterday's pop songs becoming today's jazz standards. "Stardust", "All the Things You Are", "Body and Soul" - their authors never sat down and plotted to fill the future's jazz fake books with classy chords and urbane melodies. They just wanted to write good music that would pay the bills, give enjoyment to the audience, and (hopefully) stand the test of time. Thus "Over the Rainbow" becomes a classic, while "(I'm) Too Sexy" and "Kung Fu Fighting" elicit giggles and/or shudders when we remember them at all.

Meanwhile, the far-flung genre known collectively as "jazz", with its gamut running from erudite elegance and fragmented intellectualism to crass banality, continues to draw from the pop oeuvre for material. Here in Panama I'm daily assailed with questionable instrumental versions of well-known tunes, courtesy of the local smooth jazz station's playlist. I love Steely Dan's "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" (despite its wanton plundering of Horace Silver's "Song For My Father"), but it was never meant to be stripped of its lyrics, these being as important to the Steely Dan mystique as their music. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. Great pop songs like "Smooth Operator", "Evil Ways", "Do It Again" (another Steely Dan tune, violently wrenched from its original context), and "Fly Like an Eagle" are snapped up by earnest smooth jazz practitioners, eager to strike a nerve with an aging listener share. Smooth, yes. Jazz? Well, not in the sense that “Night and Day” blurred the jazz/pop distinction. Rock and Roll changed everything, for better or worse. Its powerful, danceable grooves and textures inevitably meshed with some of the more refined elements of jazz, generating controversy at first (as happens whenever distinct musical genres cross-pollinate), then steadily finding acceptance, even as the more daring elements of what was then known as “fusion” or “Jazz-rock” gave way to high-gloss sonic wallpaper.

Riding this wave of groove-heavy, swing-challenged surf came Kenny G., mesmerizing unsuspecting audiences with the upraised bell of his boyhood soprano sax spouting flurries of climactic, harmonically ambiguous notes, and his mop of corkscrew curls making for a flamboyant, non-threatening stage persona. His records were plenty accessible, with undemanding melodies and predictable two-and-three chord progressions, occasionally interrupted by some more interesting major 9th or 11th chords. Nothing inherently evil about exploiting the pedestrian tastes of millions of record buyers, is there? If they want to think that they’re listening to and enjoying jazz (which could make some of them think themselves sophisticated), well, it’s a free country.

The jazz community itself was and is divided over Kenny G. Musicians I respect and admire, such as Lee Ritenour, Harvey Mason, Nathan East, Arturo Sandoval, and Alex Acuña, have recorded with him. (Alex has also deigned to record with me, so he's clearly no snob.) More notably, though, jazz guitar icon Pat Metheny has led a vendetta against Mr. G, catalyzed by the latter’s decision to overdub himself on a remix of Louis Armstrong’s recording of “What A Wonderful World”. Admittedly, such an undertaking could at best be compared to Thomas Kinkade “improving” a Rembrandt by painting in one of his cozy cottages, or Tom Clancy attempting to enhance War and Peace with some techno-thriller additions. What Kenny G. (and his duet-happy producer, David Foster) intended as one of those posthumous tribute duets, Mr. Metheny instead construed as a brazen desecration of a work by The Most Important Jazz Musician Who Ever Lived. (You can read Pat’s diatribe here: http://www.jazzoasis.com/methenyonkennyg.htm). Such loathing and umbrage are atypical of jazz musicians, who are frequently stereotyped by either cool detachment or undercurrents of humanitarian social conscience.

But here, the gauntlet is at our feet. According to Mr. Metheny, the honor of jazz and its practitioners is at stake. The only response he can feel is righteous indignation, and he is outraged that more of us haven’t felt it. To read his invective is to feel his wrath, and to understand it. I wonder if, had Mr. G. know what an uproar this recording would incite, he might have quietly moved on to the next track. After all, few of us, especially gentle souls like Kenny G., wish to incur the public wrath of a jazz guitar virtuoso with a poison pen.

Personally, my quibble with Kenny G. is strictly aesthetic. The embarrassing thing is that, until Pat Metheny brought it to my attention, I’d never really noticed how out-of-tune Mr. G.’s playing can be. (Me, the Tuning Nazi himself, scourge of countless musicians unfortunate enough to have played in a band with me without tuning first.) But there it is - songs like "Silhouette" and "Songbird", the sax almost a quarter tone sharp, and millions of fans who can't be wrong, being wrong. The small bore of a soprano sax supposedly makes it hard to play in tune, but Kenny G. isn’t about to let a little thing like tuning stand between himself and superstardom. The producers and/or record executives are responsible for allowing this stuff to get released are as much to blame as Kenny G. himself, and his towering record sales in spite of such lapses in quality control are at least as scathing an indictment of the recording industry as they are of Mr. G. himself.

In my first discussion of Kenny G. with another musician, I opined that the former at least had some musical talent. My friend, a jazz guitar educator, disagreed. Well, I disagree. Mr. G. is certainly in league with acts from Kiss and Grand Funk Railroad to Michael Bolton and Air Supply. All of the above prove that a soupçon of musical ability, the capacity to connect with people of average taste, and shrewd marketing can succeed commercially. Even the members of the Spice Girls had to audition first.

So what would Jesus say?

Our Lord always looks at heart motives, which, in Mr. G.'s case, are probably innocuous enough. That’s not to say that sincerity equals righteousness, but it beats hypocrisy. Worse still, Jesus apparently likes good stewardship as much as, if not more than, artistic excellence. 'Master, you entrusted two talents to me. See, I have gained two more talents.' (Matthew 25:22, NASB). Well, if you can think of anybody who has parlayed limited ‘talents’ into more spectacular returns than has Kenny G. (with some of that income doing some real good through Mr. G.‘s charitable giving), then I bet Jesus would have something good to say about them, too.

So the next time Kenny comes on my car radio, I’ll either listen in fascinated horror to at least a few measures, wondering how such Velveeta got past the label execs, or, if it’s one of his songs that’s too in-tune to boggle my mind with its sheer badness, I’ll just ignore it or switch stations. Kenny G. has (as Jesus told His disciples to do), “made friends for himself through the wealth of this life, so that when it comes to an end, he may be taken into the eternal resting-places.” (Luke 16:9, paraphrased). I’m not quite sure what Jesus meant by that, but I bet that Kenny G.’s “friends” outnumber his enemies by a huge margin. Our Lord is more concerned with his eternal well-being than He is with his schmaltz factor. So Kenny, if you’re out there, please, please tune that thing before you play it (and maybe check your embouchure), don’t worry too much about your detractors, and don’t overlook the Messiah. That would be the biggest clam of all.

Kenny G. 1, Pat Metheny 0

2008-02-11T19:42:00.000-08:00

I just deleted an article I'd posted that tried to look (from a Christian perspective) at the jazz community's controversy over Kenny G.
A sensitive reader maintained that I was using scripture to bash Kenny. Well, I don't wholly agree (I did defend him, to a certain extent), but I was also somewhat critical of the G Man. What's more, my writing wasn't up to my personal standard (which should have been a clue to me in the first place.) So, in the interests of Christian love, I apologize to Kenny, my readers (those on both sides of the controversy), and to God, whose standard deserves preeminence.

Bodhisattva, Won't You Take Me By the Hand...

2008-02-09T18:24:00.001-08:00

(Or, One Clue to the New Age as a Royal Scam)

In their 1973 song "Bodhisattva", Steely Dan (the jazz-tinged pop group masterminded by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen) pokes fun at "the way western people look at Eastern religion -- sort of over-simplify it. We thought it was rather amusing -- most people don't get it," says Fagen.

I certainly didn't. At that time I was twelve years old, but my whole family was already steeped in a quasi-eastern "mysticism" that encompassed reincarnation, astrology, karmic principle, spirit guides, aura readings - anything we thought might enlighten us. (Fortunately, I didn't let these wildly anti-biblical deviations interfere with my duties as an altar boy at Holy Rosary Parish.) While affluent types such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys were able to go directly to India for their "enlightenment", I had to be content with the locally available brands. But that was fine - this was "The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius", remember. While many hippie types were discovering and proclaiming Jesus, many other people, including myself, were seeking spiritual understanding anywhere but there. Jesus was fine, but orthodox Christianity was too narrow. Mustn't exclude anything. As long as we're sincere, anything goes.

Reincarnation was a hot topic. Unlike astrology, there is no strictly scientific evidence against it. And since most religions agree on some sort of afterlife, why couldn't the soul have another go? (For those whose authority is the Bible, Hebrews 9:27-28 settles this debate conclusively, but I'm not assuming that all my readers recognize that authority.) My mother, lovingly indulging my interest in birds, introduced me to reincarnation through Richard Bach's novel, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, in which anthropomorphized seagulls explore their spirituality and aerodynamic capabilities in a reincarnational/afterlife setting. Since she was my mother, I never questioned her assertions, including the one that I personally was "a very old soul" - one that had already lived many lives. She was getting this stuff from Edgar Cayce and other proto-New Age teachings, so, unlike many New Agers, I didn't have to go out and find it - she spoon-fed it to me.

Looking back, I see that the only thing I knew for certain was myself. At 12 I was already finding ways to make a mess of my life. I was scrawny, unpopular, unathletic, eccentric, and not even good at academics (I'm pretty sure I was ADD, a condition little understood back then.) The thought of having to live dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of lives after this one terrified me. Karmic principle, the Yin and Yang dualism I faced, erased all hope I had of escaping the cycle. I couldn't even bring home a good report card - how could I get free from the wheel of karma?

Still, it was trendy to believe something esoteric, especially since nobody in the Catholic Church seemed to be able to point out to us the total incompatibility between our Sunday faith and our actual practice. I managed to suppress my fears about karma and reincarnation and to enjoy this vague, pantheistic smørgasbord of spirituality that promised so much and required so little responsibility. All is one, it will all work out in the end, all roads lead to the cosmic oneness, etc. Besides, it's time to go play guitar in Folk Mass! How spiritual is that?

I'm not here to single-handedly refute the New Age. (It often even refutes itself, since it's more of a movement than a cohesive way of thinking.) But Messrs. Becker and Fagen have (perhaps unwittingly) given me some ammo, so being a huge Steely Dan fan and a self-styled Christian apologist, I'd like to draw a bead on the sacred cow of reincarnation.

Sacred cow? That's my point. To Hindus, cows are sacred precisely because they are thought to be reincarnations of people. Now, we here in the West get our basic idea or reincarnation from them, don't we? (Trust me, we do.) Okay, then where do we get off thinking we were Napoleon in another life, or Cleopatra (or at least somebody interesting) instead of a cow, a rat or a bug? If we must borrow such a concept outright from another belief system, it seems we have to sanitize it first. I never met anybody here in the West who even claims to be open to the possibility of having been an animal in a previous incarnation. And if they do, I either don't believe them, or I figure they're so far out there that their opinion isn't something I'm interested in. A truly open mind must at times embrace narrow-mindedness.

Not only do Hindus revere cattle instead of eating them, they also allow rats (to them, other incarnations of loved ones) to eat a large percentage of India's grain stores, contributing significantly to malnutrition, particularly among the lower castes. I'm not trying to say that Hinduism is the blanket cause of India's woes, but where it differs from Christianity, it contrasts sharply with a worldview that treats the poor, the outcast and the downtrodden with compassion and dignity. And rats don't count.

In case my earlier reference to Hebrews 9:27-28 didn't make you reach for your Bible, I'll just give it to you: "Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him." This passage wasn’t intended to dispel some rampant Hebrew obsession with former lives, but it would require a quantum leap of reason to suppose that it allows George Patton to rightly think himself the reincarnation of Hannibal, or an impressionable altar boy to think he'd been a Viking in another life. Either reincarnation happens or it doesn't. They can't both be right.

It's not wishful thinking (i.e., the understandable desire to avoid "rebirth", common even among Hindus) that compels me to reject reincarnation as supernatural truth. It's sheer force of argument. Reason. Reincarnation simply doesn't hold up under scrutiny, despite circumstantial evidence to the contrary. Even the lowly beer commercial once proclaimed "you only go around once - you gotta go for all the gusto you can!" Even more ironically, Hare Krishna devotee George Harrison's Sgt. Pepper masterpiece "Within You Without You" states (against a backdrop of sitars and tabla drums) that "it's far too late/when they pass away." In fact, if you look at this neo-raga's lyrics, it states probably the most clearly Christian worldview of any Beatles song! If the Beatles must be blamed for leading western youth down a path of malignant mysticism, then this song at least should be removed from the list of perceived Fab foibles.

Meanwhile, few religions (or none) are in total conflict with Christianity, and Hinduism does in fact share much of Christianity's morality. Hinduism's karmic principal and the Judeo-Christian principal of sowing and reaping are more compatible than many Christians would care to admit (in which case we could tell a Hindu that Jesus "levels our karma"!) I don't think God's going to send anybody to hell for believing in reincarnation, but if we are in fact headed for Judgment, as described above, then we'd best try to get it right this time around, and trust God to take up the slack. And share this hope of eternal (and immediate) freedom with anyone we can.

How To Go Out With A Bang

2007-09-24T21:21:00.000-07:00

This was originally written by me as an essay assignment for Youth With A Mission's Staff and Leadership Training (SALT) School in Panama. I couldn't resist posting it.

(Old Testament Profile: Stephen)

"Hold on a minute," you may well say. "Stephen is in the New Testament!" Well, yes and no. If I recall correctly, a) this profile can be about a leader from either the Old or New Testament, and b) apart from Christ Jesus Himself and perhaps the author of Hebrews, nobody in the N.T. can be found to be more in the Old Testament (in the sense of being "in the word") than Stephen. Here's a guy who, in two chapters, demonstrates servant leadership, apostolic ministry, signs and wonders, O.T. scholarship, biblical exposition, public oration, apologetics, prophetic judgement, apocalyptic vision, glorious martyrdom and intercession on behalf of those who stoned him to death. Would that many of us could accomplish in a lifetime what he does in days, hours, even.

In his song commemorating the Columbine High School massacre, Michael W. Smith eulogizes martyr Cassie Bernall with the words, "It was a test we could all hope to pass / but none of us would want to take." Cassie declared her faith in God at gunpoint, and was rewarded with a bullet. Being now part of the "great cloud of witnesses" (Hebrews 12:1), Cassie joins Stephen in demonstrating what a true disciple under fire can accomplish.

Stephen's appointment to his ministry post is noble, if not glamorous: "It is not desirable for us to neglect the Word...to serve tables," the Apostles observe. "Therefore, select...seven men of good reputation, full of the Spirit and of wisdom..." (Acts 6:2). Here we see that Stephen already has a good reputation among the Twelve. That should be enough for anybody. But God doesn't select Stephen just to have an overqualified waiter on hand. Trouble's already brewing.

We already know from the Gospels that many religious leaders of the time felt explicitly threatened by anybody whose power and authority exceeded theirs. Enter Stephen, wearing whatever waiters wore in those days, performing signs and wonders (doubtless with an emphasis on healing the sick and infirm, a cornerstone of the Holy Spirit's manifestation.) Enter the bad guys, stage left: Cyrenians, Alexandrians, men from Cicilia and Asia, representing the "Synagogue of the Freedmen". Talk about ganging up on a guy.

This next part just curls my toes: "But they were unable to cope with the wisdom and the Spirit with which he was speaking" (6:10). How Christlike, to be so full of the Holy Spirit as to be unanswerable. It's great fun to imagine these guys stammering and turning purple as Stephen calmly refutes them from the Scriptures. Of course, the fun is deadly serious, and will soon give way to lies and false witness before the Council, before whom they have dragged this unassuming waiter, whose face has by now taken on an angelic quality calculated to drive the religious leaders into a frenzy of self-loathing .

"Are these things so?" asks the high priest at the beginning of chapter 7. Talk about a loaded question. God has been preparing Stephen for this moment for years, steeping him not only in the letter of the Law, but also in the Holy Spirit (a rare combination.) "Hear me, bretheren and fathers!" thunders Stephen. What follows is the best summary of the Law and the Prophets since our Lord boiled them down to two commandments. Beginning with Abraham, then working his way through Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David and Solomon, Stephen delivers the pithiest, most engaging synopsis of the Old Testament you could ever dream of. You can just see the Council and the attendant accusers hanging on his every word, jaws dropped in stupefied amazement.

Finally he delivers the coup-de-grâce: "However, the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands. 'HEAVEN IS MY THRONE, AND THE EARTH IS THE FOOTSTOOL OF MY FEET; WHAT KIND OF HOUSE WILL YOU BUILD FOR ME?' says the Lord. WAS IT NOT MY HAND THAT MADE THESE THINGS?' You men who are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears (touché, Stephen) are always resisting the Holy Spirit; you are doing just as your fathers did." If Stephen senses that the end is near, he sure doesn't seem to care. "Which one of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They killed those who had previously announced the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become; you who received the law as ordained by angels, and yet did not keep it." (Vss. 49 - 43.)

There's a grim kind of humor present when a captive hero delivers a well-aimed pie in der Führer's face. "Now when they heard this, they were cut to the quick, and they began gnashing their teeth at him." (V. 54.) (Oh, and exactly how do you gnash your teeth, anyway? Well, according to verse 57, it helps to cover your ears and mob the guy who's busy cutting your quick to ribbons.) Apparently, they couldn't handle his climax: "Behold, I see the heavens opened up and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God."

You know the rest. They stone him, he asks Jesus to receive his spirit, and puts in a good word for his murderers: "Lord, do not hold this sin against them!" God duly notes that final request, and at least one of those who put his seal of approval on Stephen's death (one Saul of Tarsus) is not only forgiven by God, but eventually joins Stephen in most or all of the good works I put into my first paragraph.

If I were on a desert island with only one chapter of the Bible available to me, I wouldn't need to think twice: Acts 7, please. Here's a man whose entrance, performance and exit are in turn humble, powerful and slam-bang glorious. His discourse alone is as scholarly as it is appropriate, as powerful as it is economical. Here is leadership by example, by service, and by influence. The multiplication if his ministry (i.e., Paul, the early Church, etc.) is staggering, especially in the face of his brief, meteoric appearance in Acts. I hope I never have to face what he did, but if I do, God grant me the grace to be half as ready for it as was Stephen .

St. Pinocchio

2007-04-08T20:42:00.000-07:00

I'll just come right out and admit it - I love challenging conventional wisdom, especially when such wisdom is more conventional than wise. Same goes for conventional morality - it's fine with me, as long as it's biblical. "Wait a minute!" you say. "Isn't the Bible where we get conventional morality?" Well, yes and no. Just because God and His Word are eternal doesn't make either of them conventional. Jesus routinely blindsided everyone from His adversaries to His followers by proclaiming such counterintuitive ideas as love for one's enemies, or the last being first (and vice versa.)

Some biblical morality is more intuitive than that, though. We automatically feel guilt (or "conviction", if we're born-again types) when we do something shady or unkind. Hopefully, anyway. And then there's lying. Inherently evil, right? "Stop lying to one another," Paul tells us in Colossians. 3:9. Okay, we won't do that. We'll never lie again, under any circumstance.

Any circumstance? We've been warned all our lives about white lies, half-truths and the like. One problem, though. The Bible, on closer examination, seems to rely on an even higher law than any rigid legalism. To make matters worse, God blesses people in the Bible for . . . lying?

Don't take my word for it. Check out, for starters, Exodus 1: 19 - Pharaoh commands the Hebrew midwives to kill any baby boys they deliver among their own people. The midwives disagree with this lousy idea and let the baby boys live. Pharaoh calls them on the carpet - "Why have you done this thing and let the boys live?" The midwives look sheepish and confess their crime.

Wait, I guess they don't. No, they lay it on thick: "Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife can get to them." Wow, not only do they lie to Pharaoh, but they even dare to suggest to him the superiority of Hebrew women over their Egyptian counterparts. Well, if you're going to lie, you might as well be as brazen as possible. And so what happens to these early ministers of disinformation? "So God was good to the midwives, and the people multiplied, and became very mighty." (Ex. 1:20)

But that's just the beginning. Joshua 2:4-6 relates the adventures of Rahab the harlot, and her creative approach to harbouring Hebrew spies: "Yes, the men came to me," she truthfully tells the king's minions, "but I did not know where they were from." So much for truth; now check this out: "It came about that when it was time to shut the gate at dark, that the men went out; I do not know where the men went. Pursue them quickly, for you will overtake them." Uh, sure, Rahab. Send the goon squad on a wild goose chase while the Hebrew spies hear the whole spiel from their hiding place on the roof. Don't you know what God does to liars?

Rahab didn't know, since she had never read the Bible, and there was no pagan scruple in Jericho about deception tactics. The real truth was that God was on the move, and Rahab knew that nothing would stop Him. Clarifying this principle during World War II, Sir Winston Churchill said (referring to the many counter-intelligence programs used to protect the D-Day invasion), "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." In keeping with this principle, the oft-maligned Pope Pius XII directed his bishops to issue fake baptismal certificates to Jews seeking to escape the death camps.

I'm not saying that we should look for ways to lie, or to justify lying. For a highly principled person (read: not Rahab), lying may be out of the question for any reason at all. In Corrie Ten Boom's wartime classic The Hiding Place, in which Corrie and her family are sent to a Nazi concentration camp for hiding Jews from the SS, Corrie's sister Nollie finds herself face to face with Nazis who demand to know the whereabouts of a young Jewish girl suspected to be hiding in the Ten Boom household. Nollie stands her moral ground and defiantly tells the Nazis yes, she is here, and God will protect her! "The truth shall set you free," Nollie believed wholeheartedly. The Nazis retreat, confused. Of course, later in the story, the Gestapo rounds up the Ten Boom family and some of the Jews they hid, and only Corrie ultimately lives to tell the story. Suffice it to say that God clearly honors Nollie's refusal to lie under any circumstances (the Nazis released her within days, and the Dutch Resistance freed the Jewish girl), and we are left to contemplate His unfathomable goodness and power.

My moral is simple: God is not limited by our theology of truth, nor is He honored by a pedantic death grip on factuality. I remember playing guitar in the pit orchestra in a production of Godspell, when "Jesus" accidentally skipped a verse of the song we were performing. The band caught on right away and followed him (oops, sorry, "Him"!) All, that is, except the bass player. A good reader, he stubbornly stuck to the written score, plowing grimly through to the end of the song, in glaring contrast to what the rest of us were playing. He chose to put technical "truth" (i.e., we're supposed to be on measure 64) over a higher truth (i.e., Love, which covers a multitude of sins and bears each other's burdens). And I can't even judge that bass player, since I myself would often rather be right than nice. Mea culpa maxima.

This is true freedom. Anybody who's listening to the Holy Spirit (or even his own conscience) will eventually find that a Pharisaical devotion to factual truth (i.e., "I 'm sorry, but I really can't stand you!") will lead eventually to the loss of one's own soul. The highly enlightened and principled bishop in Les Miserables who tells the police that he had himself given the silver to the wayward ex-con Jean Valjean (who had in fact stolen it from him) is used by God to bring Valjean to Himself. The unprincipled Tom Sawyer likewise saves Becky Thatcher, guilty of tearing a page of the teacher's favorite book, from a cruel thrashing with his heroic (albeit untruthful) outcry, "I done it!" And this at the time when she least deserved his sympathy. Tom puts his own tail on the line, literally, and scores innumerable points with Becky, and with the reader.

"I am the Way, the Truth (emphasis mine) and the Light", says the Savior, but His word also says that "God is love" (not "Love is God"). So let's tell the truth, as long as love lets us. I doubt whether many of us will ever really be able to justify doing otherwise during our lifetimes. Meanwhile, we'll leave such circumstances in His supremely capable hands.

How I Joined a Cult (Well, Not Quite, But...)

2007-04-08T20:37:00.000-07:00

Ever since I committed my life to Christ, I've wondered how so many people in my own culture could commit equally, with equal fervor and certainty, to false religions. (By false I mean belief systems that don't stand up to the test of biblical truth, and that contradict the central doctrines of the Christian faith.) Any Mormon or Jehovah's Witness could easily read and analyze the many scholarly exposés of their particular sect if they so choose. Of course, human nature habitually denies uncomfortable truth, or allows itself to sincerely believe the unbelievable.

Not me, of course. Didn't I have a critical mind with a scientific bent? Hadn't I, after four years of resistance, embraced Christ? I pored over books like Dr. Walter Martin's The Kingdom of the Cults, preparing myself for the weekly visits from the Mormon missionaries I had allowed through my door. And, for my intellectual duals with the irreligious, I had happily discovered the works of men like Dr. Duane T. Gish, whose Evolution: The Fossils Say No! and other books convinced me at once that not only was Darwinism wrong, but that the age of the Earth could not possibly be greater than 10,000 years.

En garde! Everyone I met now had to listen to me rabbit on about how the theory of evolution was nothing more than a huge conspiracy, designed to keep people from accepting biblical truth. There were, after all, enormous difficulties with Darwinism. (To this day, I am patiently waiting to see fossil evidence of the evolution of bats. I've dubbed the yet-to-be unearthed, half-evolved version Semichiroptera.) But to me, evolutionary thought was the chief obstacle to global evangelization, since everybody except for fundamentalists believed in it, didn't they? After all, I'd been an evolutionist ever since the book my grandmother gave me when I was seven posed the rhetorical question, "Which came first, the bird or the egg? Answer: The reptile came first." A quick description of evolution followed, moving me to accept it immediately and uncritically. I knew nothing of the genetic, biomechanical and logical difficulties that Darwinism faced, and when I finally became aware of them as a young adult, I took them as immediate proof that I'd been had. Now armed with Young Earth Creationism, I set forth to lead people to Christ, convinced that the theory of evolution was all that stood in their way.

And guess what? NOBODY got saved! Some couldn't argue with my "science", but not even those people were convinced that they therefore needed Jesus. And those I did manage to lead to faith in Christ came to Him on His own merit, without my dogmatic assertions that a literal interpretation of Genesis was necessary for one to be in right relationship with God. And for years I continued, although I managed to shift my emphasis more toward our need for salvation, instead of some intellectual barrier to faith. But I persisted in my doctrinaire belief in a young earth creation model, which I just knew could be easily proved and accepted by any honest scientist.

Enter Dr. Paul Simms (http://www.iblministry.org/nbod.htm), then-Professor of Nuclear Physics at Purdue University. His daughter and my wife had been friends for many years, and he was quick to note my interest in his field of expertise. One day, as he took me on a private tour of the Purdue particle accelerator, Dr. Simms, a passionate believer in Jesus, gently began to bring to my attention recent scientific data that affirm the hot Big Bang model, accepted almost universally by scientists. He also introduced me to the works of astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross, whose analysis of the ongoing findings about the cosmos overwhelmingly support the declaration of Genesis 1:1 - "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." Rather than feel threatened by any scientific discovery that might be supposed to contradict scripture, I began to rest easy in the certainty that all truth is God's truth, including scientific data. The light arriving here from stars billions of light years away might in fact have taken billions of years to get here. (Those who assert that God just made it look that way could theoretically be right, but I've never yet been able to believe in such a deceitful, puerile Creator.)

I'm not here to slam those whose Christianity clings to a young earth model, or even those who claim to believe one on purely scientific grounds. I do disapprove of those Christians who tactlessly mock anybody whose beliefs on the subject do not mirror their own. Such people place treacherous stumbling blocks in the paths of many an honest seeker. (Conversely, the irreligious people who mock creationists have no moral basis for respecting others' beliefs, but sometimes they're right about us anyway.) In case anybody had forgotten, Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, is the center of our faith. He will judge us according to His grace and justice, not according to our take on the age of the universe.

So what's my point? Sorry if I hadn't made it clear, but it's simply that I personally had to change my position on something I used to rigidly assert just as unyieldingly as does an LDS missionary who knows that the Book of Mormon is true. I see no particular virtue in my having done an about-face once I decided I'd been intellectually dishonest (even though I'd never meant to be.) But I do see that I can fall prey to bad data (and therefore bad doctrine) just as easily as anybody. Whether we believe that we (and Christ) came from mud or from primordial soup (and when you think about it, there isn't much difference), it must be Him that we declare. It's Christ who changes hearts and lives, not "correct" beliefs about things that will one day pass away. And besides, truth will win out in the end anyway.

So, all you evolutionists out there, next time you make an impassioned plea for responsible ecological policies: Remember that, if you're just an evolutionary accident, then everything we do is completely natural. We're just animals, and mere animals can't ruin the ecology. Global warming, deforestation, greenhouse gases - no worse than flatulent buffalo herds! But if we're somehow more than animals, if we really have a moral responsibility to protect the environment, then let's go for it, knowing that no mere animal's moral compass can lead to the words should and shouldn't. Such words inevitably lead either to God or to hopeless contradiction.

And as for you Young Earth Creationists, you're entitled to your beliefs, but please don't leave them where any honest seeker of truth might trip over them. There's too much at stake.

The Art on God's Refrigerator

2006-08-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

I have in front of me a small scrap of plywood, 2”x4”, almost rectangular, except that it’s slightly skewed and therefore a bit of a parallelogram. On it my son Jeffrey (then seven) drew with colored markers a scene he called “A Playground at Night”. We were at the time in temporary exile from Latin America for the birth of my youngest daughter, and we lived in a ramshackle house in Kila, Montana. Kila doesn’t even have a gas station, but it does have a post office and a school, whose playground provided Jeffrey with artistic inspiration as well as a place to play.

This tiny work of art, with its deserted swings and slide, snowcapped peaks looming in the background, and black birds plying the night sky, really does something for me. It doesn’t dazzle you with its realism or detail, it simply evokes a time and place on a scrap of wood rescued from the kindling box. I think I’d enjoy it even if it weren’t drawn by my own kid. I myself could draw a much more realistic version of the same thing (as could Jeff, now twelve and blossoming as an artist), but it wouldn’t have the same poignant, mysterious charm.

As I get to know the Creator better, I begin to see how our own creative efforts can have value for Him, even though our attempts to artistically interpret His creation pale in comparison with His works. Because we are made in His image, we are creative, and our creativity is significant. Our power to create is the very essence of the divine spark (don’t forget that the first thing He does in Genesis 1:1 is to create.) And I wish to propose something I believe about God that may possibly count as a ‘strange new thought’: God’s capacity for enjoyment and appreciation are as limitless as His love, power and knowledge.

I’ll try to explain: When Michelangelo paints the ceiling fresco on the Sistine Chapel, when Queen and Led Zeppelin put the finishing touches on “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Stairway to Heaven”, when Sir Christopher Wren designs St Paul’s Cathedral, when Fred Astaire dances with such sophistication and elegance that he makes his partner look as good as he does, when Bill Cosby or Gary Larson make you laugh so hard that coffee comes out your nose, these are not necessarily the same for God as a baby’s first scribbles are to us. Rather, He has more ability than we do to appreciate and admire, to pick up on subtleties that we miss, to feel the artist’s intent, and to judge the work’s creative merit as well as the moral and spiritual state of the artist in question.

God will one day judge all mankind, including, say, Elvis Presley. That may or may not go well with the King (Elvis, not God), but meanwhile, God has heard every single song that Elvis ever recorded or performed live. He’s heard the alternate takes and unissued versions. He knows the song order of every album, including the imports. He knows who played guitar on “Mystery Train” as well as “Suspicious Minds”. He knows everything about Elvis, and even though He knows it by dint of His omniscience, I believe He also knows it the way a fan might. God could talk shop about anything with anyone, with perfect enthusiasm and unparalleled insight. We can’t even imagine how alive He is, how passionate, how cool. (Trumpeter Phil Driscoll once commented that one of Satan’s biggest lies is that God isn’t hip.) God is the biggest Elvis fan in the universe.

That doesn’t mean He’s an idolator, gushing over every half-baked movie Elvis made, or every mediocre song he recorded. A true fan can be critical of his favorite artists, and nobody’s standards are higher than God’s. That being said, artistic perfection or excellence aren’t the same as moral perfection. Jim Morrison or Charlie Parker (the list goes on forever) could be great artists and performers without serving God or even being ‘good’ people. Meanwhile, excellence within a given style of artistic endeavor may admit all kinds of individuality and imperfection. Picasso or Bob Dylan may take artistic chances that wouldn’t be appropriate for Rembrandt or Pavarotti. And here I diverge, at the risk of being, well, uh, divergent:

I was talking with my kids one day about what constitutes good art. Like many talented kids, they want to be professional artists - now. They see photorealism and wish they could draw that way. They’re frustrated with the artistic limitations common to most grade-schoolers. “Wait a minute,” I say to them, and show them a Peanuts comic strip by Charles Schulz. “Does that look like a photo?” Well, no. “Is it a good drawing?” Yes, they concede, it’s a good drawing. Then I show them Picasso’s famous gesture drawing of Don Quixote and Sancho. It can’t have taken 90 seconds to draw, and yet it captures the pair in a way I could never do if I took a year. There’s no room here for a discussion of what constitutes ‘good art’, but heart and soul combine with technique to reveal that characteristic we share with our Maker, creativity.

Since God is nicer than we are, in addition to being perfectly honest, we can embrace His perfect assessment of our artistic endeavors. Our paintings, our photography, our films and songs and novels and dances and poetry and plays and remixes and guitar solos can all occupy a spot on His refrigerator, somehow held in place with some sort of heavenly magnet, provided we’ve used as best we can that divine spark He’s invested in us. The Mona Lisa and Starry Night and Güernica hang alongside “A Playground at Night” (or did I mean A Playground at Night ?) He’s your biggest fan too, without being patronizing.

So maybe you ought to get out there and create. God, who exists eternally, outside of the time and space he created, is still somehow waiting to see what you’ll do next.

Dimitry, The Cuddly, Furry Porcupine

2006-06-05T17:03:00.000-07:00

Poor Dimitry! All the other porcupines had protective spines with which to defend themselves against predators. Dimitry, however, had thick, luxurious fur. All the other forest animals loved to cuddle him, except for the predators, who could only think how tasty he would be. The skunks and the other porcupines protected him, but he longed for the freedom and independence his protectors enjoyed.

One day his friend Ladislav the skunk looked up from his taxonomy textbook and stared hard at Dimitry. His gaze flickered between the book and the soft, cuddly porcupine. Finally, Ladislav found his voice:

“Dimitry! You’re not a porcupine - you’re a chinchilla!”

Dimitry didn’t wait for the rest. He knew in his heart, had known all along, that what Ladislav had said was true. After all, the name “porcupine” literally means “spiny pig”, and Dimitry was neither of these. Why, he had only escaped from the chinchilla farm two months before, thinking how much fun it would be to swat an attacking bobcat with his prickly tail. How foolish he had been! In his reverie he had never considered the huge chasm between daydream and reality. This went beyond mere stupidity. Porcupines are noted for their sharply limited intelligence, and Dimitry wasn’t even a porcupine to begin with.

Somehow Dimitry had to get back to where he once belonged. Abruptly excusing himself, he set off for the chinchilla farm, a mere quarter mile away. Fate smiled on him and he arrived safely, only to be made into a fur coat. Fate may have smiled on him, but there’s more than one way to smile.

Wings Like Beagles (and Other Myths)

2006-05-13T10:34:00.000-07:00

Salvation can be a dangerous thing. Secure in our knowledge of God’s love for us and His provision of eternal life, we too willingly dispense with essentials such as scientific truth. As long as it gives us spiritual warm fuzzies, it must be true. Recently I, a lifelong amateur ornithologist, have been assailed repeatedly by this little ‘treatise’ about eagles, well-circulated on the Internet:

“Eagles are the most long-lived birds in the world. By the time they reach 40 years old, their claws will start to age, losing their effectiveness and making it hard for them to catch preys (sic). The lifespan of an eagle is up to 70 years old. But in order to live this long, it must make the toughest decision at 40. At 40, its beak is too long and curvy that it reaches its chest (sic.). Its wings, full of long, thickened feathers, are too heavy for easy flying. The eagle is left with 2 choices - do nothing and await its death or go through a painful period of transformation and renewal.

“For 150 days, it first trains itself to fly beyond the high mountains, build and live in its nest and cease all flying activities. It then begins to knock its beak against granite rocks till the beak is completely removed. When a new beak is grown, the eagle will use it to remove all its old claws and await quietly for new ones to be fully grown. When the new claws are fully grown, the eagle will use them to remove all its feathers, one by one. Five months later, when its new feathers are fully grown, it will soar in the sky again with renewed strength and is able to live for the next 30 years…”

Wow. Everything the ornithologists know is wrong, wrong, wrong. After all, how could Christians be wrong about science?

Okay, see my opening paragraph for my answer. Meanwhile, I’m going to refute virtually everything in this made-up factoid just for the sake of setting the record straight. Just because we’re Christians doesn’t mean we need to be hoodwinked by every urban legend perpetrated in God’s name.

First off, eagles do in fact live a long time, but their lifespan is closer to 40 years in the wild, with some captive examples living longer. One version of this story maintains that eagles don’t even reach reproductive age until 40. Since most eagles don’t end up living this long, nesting pairs would be rare indeed. Real scientists include the Andean condor, the wandering albatross and the sulfur-crested cockatoo among the longest-lived birds (75, 80, and 80 years, respectively), but don’t confuse me with facts, okay?

As for their ‘aging claws’, this is a complete fabrication. No bird species is characterized by some physiological change in the structural integrity of its claws due to age. A parakeet’s claws will grow long if unchecked by some abrasive agent (i.e ., sandpaper on its perch), but this avian midlife crisis is nonexistent. (And ‘preys’ is the third person simple tense of the verb “to prey”, not a plural noun.) Catching ‘preys’ is akin to herding ‘sheeps’ or hunting ‘deers’.

On to the beak! “(T)oo long and curvy that it reaches its chest”, eh? Now, is it a) too long and curvy to reach the eagle’s chest, or b) so long and curvy that it actually does so? If I were fabricating such a tall tale, I’d at least try to apply some grammatical accuracy in hopes of fooling somebody. Unfortunately, we Christians don’t see atrocious grammar as a possible warning about the overall quality of the info that reaches us. Small wonder so many people outside the church take us for idiots. Meanwhile, no eagle has ever been documented as having such a ‘long, curvy beak’ (and if it had one, how did it survive long enough to grow it?) The author of this fable must have owned a parakeet, since its beak will indeed grow toward its chest unless kept in check with a cuttlebone (available at your local pet store, right next to the eagle-blend bird seed and eagle-sized cage toys.)

Now our eagle ponders a conscious choice, where all other animals are guided by God-given instinct: To be or not to be? To go on with those blunt, flabby claws and that spiral beak is obvious suicide. Not to mention those “wings, full of long, thickened feathers, are too heavy for easy flying”. Too bad eagles don’t moult like other birds! (If you’re not familiar with the terms “moult” and “moulting”, go grab a dictionary and make a shocking discovery.) I, for one, am dying to see one of those “long, thickened feathers”, hitherto undescribed by any real scientist. (Flight feathers are dead structures composed of keratin, and once they reach their full size they don’t grow any more.)

Not bizarre enough for you yet? Now our 40 year old eagle is going into ‘150 days of training‘ (tracked and observed, we are expected to believe, by some evangelical ornithologist with unlimited mobility and five months to spare) . It will learn to ‘fly beyond the high mountains’ (I guess it used to live somewhere else) and spend five months in its nest (built, if you follow the story sequentially, with those useless claws and beak, and useless feathers.) There must be a big ol’ piece of granite handy in its nest, since our soon-to-be-unfeathered friend will beat its brains out against it until its beak falls off. (Never mind that birds don’t shed their beaks , and if they lose it in an accident they generally die.) Now, having been somehow fed a bland hospital diet by someone (its mate?) long enough to grow a new one, those claws gotta go. Bite ‘em off, Sam! I occasionally bite my nails, too. These new talons will not only be good for hunting, but first we’ll test their dexterity by plucking out “all its feathers, one by one”. (Remember, eagles don’t moult like all the other birds, right?), Hey, just a few more months starving in this nest, freezing its tail off (except that its tail hasn’t grown back enough yet to be frozen off) and voilá! A renewed eagle, fit for the top of a flagpole.

Forgive my sarcasm, but I can’t stand it anymore. (I recently stopped a bible teacher in mid-lecture from sharing this with my students, much to the detriment of our relationship and to my already-strained credibility as a patient person.) Eagles were the first thing I was ever interested in as a child, and their honor deserves defense. How much more the Faith Once Given? When we allow such drivel to masquerade as spiritual nourishment, we do untold harm to our credibility and to our God-given intellect. God saw fit to use the eagle as a symbol of renewed strength in Isaiah 40; He doesn’t need us to fabricate folk ornithology to back up His word. There may be no stopping this doggerel from wafting about cyberspace like, well, as the prophet says…

“We gave birth, it seems, only to wind.” (Isaiah 26:18)

…but let us at least not teach it in Sunday school, or forward it (or its ilk) to the inboxes of unsuspecting Christians and non-Christians who need enlightenment far more than they need well-intended lies about God’s creation.

Imagine This

2006-05-09T23:05:00.000-07:00

(This was originally written in anticipation of the 25th anniversary of the muder of John Lennon, but unpublished until now. Thanks to Blogspot for the opportunity to get it out at all.)

In 1980, I had an ongoing ambition in life - to meet John Lennon. To me, Lennon was more than a great artist or a pop star - he was a kindred spirit. An old friend I’d not yet personally met. A living, breathing validation and vindication of my avant-garde soul.

On December 8, 1980, I found myself in need of a new life’s ambition.

To this day, John Lennon’s pointless murder is for me one of the great losses of the ages. Not because it was the antithesis of everything he apparently stood for. Certainly not because it forever silenced any serious ideas of a Beatles reunion. Not even for the far more grievous and personal reason (lost on most of us) of his family, bereft of a loving, committed husband and father.

Perhaps the death of John Lennon brought home for many of us the real nature of death: Its cold finality, its unsurpassable ugliness, its glib, businesslike cancellation of God’s image in human form. Who would have thought such a lively, imperfect rogue, fresh into a new burst of creativity after five years devoted to raising a child, should be the target of a madman’s revolver?

I would gladly have taken those bullets instead. Part of the tragedy of John Lennon’s death is one he would doubtless agree with: His elevation to sainthood, his increasingly unassailable image, his name (misspelled “Jhon”) painted on the back of buses in Venezuela, his statue unveiled in Liverpool, New York, Havana. And for those who love dirt, the sleazy unauthorized biographies and remembrances, mingling Lennon’s eccentricities and foibles with lies and conjecture. One need only read his actual interviews to see neither saintly humility nor monstrous ego. He was just a Liverpudlian musician, an artsy guy, a thinker, a member of a band that, in his own words, “happened to make it very big.”

Of all Lennon’s amazing songs, “Imagine” is the one that seems to get more attention than all the others combined. A well-intentioned piece of utopian naïveté, its vision of a world devoid of possessions, religion, countries, and almost anything else that could be considered bad by anyone, “Imagine” raises good questions but misses the point. A younger Lennon, paradoxically both more and less cynical than his later persona, probably knew better. His 1965 poem “The Fat Budgie” instead suggests we “Imagine all the people/laughing till they’re sick.”

Music’s power to bypass the head and go straight to the heart often results in an uncritical acceptance of its message, be it “The world will live as one” or “You and me baby, we ain’t nothing but mammals…” Anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with history can see that the human race is, barring a miracle, blundering its way toward self-annihilation, not some vague, quasi-Marxist “brotherhood of man”. Still, I would not belittle Lennon’s contributions to pop music’s quest for enlightenment: As early as 1965 he was advocating love (via his song “The Word”, on the Beatles’ Rubber Soul LP) as more than romance, rather as the meaning of life, a musical idea that would culminate in his 1967 anthem “All You Need is Love”.

Both of these statements were overshadowed in 1966 by Lennon’s infelicitous observation to a journalist that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus”, a statement that landed him in no end of hot water. In the largely ignored context of the interview from which it was taken, Lennon had kind words for Jesus but not for His disciples nor the church. The evangelical outcry that ensued forced him to issue an apology of sorts (so the final Beatles U.S. tour could go on as planned), but doubtless served to reinforce to Lennon what a “thick and ordinary” lot Christians must be. Still, Christ appeals to sinners, and after a couple of years of dabbling in eastern mysticism with the other Beatles, Lennon punctuated his 1969 appeal for world peace with the declaration, “We want Christ to win.” If Christ’s own declaration that “whoever is not against us is for us” is to be taken seriously (and in context), then it is better left for Him than for us to decide whether Lennon was “not far from the Kingdom”.

I would not paint John Lennon as a saintly pagan, worshiping the Creator as best he could according to his limited knowledge. Yoko Ono spoke of him being on a trip to Japan, stopping to worship at religious shrines she’d long ignored. On the other hand, she and John engaged in the biblical practice of tithing, giving 10% of their income to charity. And so those of us who contemplate a non-universalist eternity are left to speculate.

It’s widely bandied about in Christian circles that we will one day be astonished to find a) who’s in heaven, and b) who isn’t (provided of course we’re there to find out!) Those who will be, according to Calvinists, are the predestined; according to Armenians, those who persevere to the end; according to traditional denominations, the baptized (which would include John Lennon, Mother Teresa, yours truly, and Adolf Hitler).

God isn’t the slightest bit confused on this issue.

If I had written this twenty years ago, I’d have been lamenting Lennon’s eternal loss, his having died without having confessed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

I’m now far too wise to think I’m half so smart.

Yes, I believe that Jesus is the only Mediator between God and man. And if I were a Universalist, I’d never have bothered to become a missionary in South America, would I? And as a cradle Catholic who has since seriously examined Roman Catholic doctrine and apologetics, I have seen respectable, honest and biblically-based cases given both for and against the doctrine of purgatory. So where do I stand on the eternal fate of my erstwhile hero, John Lennon?

Nowhere. I can’t do that. Instead, I kneel before the Cross.

One of the most comforting passages of scripture for anybody who believes in God’s absolute goodness is found in Romans 3:6 (as well as other passsages) - "God is certainly fair! If he weren't, how could he judge the world?" Unless we are among those who think they’re nicer than God, we can lay a burden as heavy as this one at His feet, trusting that the One who created John Lennon also knows exactly how to handle this. Hell is for those who could never bow the knee to the Son of God. And Protestants don’t generally pray for the dead, but in this case I’ve asked the Father for His mercy to triumph over judgment and even justice.

In Christ my life has purpose and passion as never before, but I’m thinking of adding my old life’s ambition to my list of things to do.

A Word of Explanation

2006-05-09T22:45:00.000-07:00

A few years ago my friend Paul Baloche encouraged me to use my writings to challenge some of the crazier ideas espoused by those for whom morality and ethics are arbitrary or relativistic. So if you don't like my little diatribes, know that a) my views and expressions are in no way Paul's fault, and b) therefore you can direct any feedback, brickbats, etc., directly to me. I can take it.

Mein Kampf, Mein Foot

2006-05-09T22:13:00.000-07:00

A few years ago while browsing the video store I saw a title that intrigued me, as it would any WWII buff: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. I rented it and watched in fascinated horror as Adolf Hitler hypnotized and enslaved a nation, made that nation a weapon of mass destruction, and finally destroyed it and took the coward’s way out through suicide. As I surveyed the ruins of Germany and the grisly legacy of the Nazi death camps, I had to ask myself, “How could so many people have been so deceived?”

As a teenager I once tried to read a few pages of Hitler’s Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), but I found it surprisingly dry and ideological for having been written by a screaming lunatic. In fact, the only words I remember having read were “The Jew is not a human being”. Hmm, Groucho Marx, Albert Einstein, Steven Spielberg - not human? The apostle Paul, Moses, Jesus? Maybe he meant “not human” in the sense that Tiger Woods or Eddie Van Halen or Stephen Hawking are so good at what they do that the rest of us “mere mortals” can’t relate.

Yeah, right. Hitler standing in awestruck admiration of Einstein, forgetting for the moment the latter’s Jewishness. Sorry, just kidding. A being so consumed with hatred and bitterness as Hitler was doesn’t go around looking for the good in people. No, his meaning was all too clear for such a frivolous interpretation, and I apologize to my readers for being so silly.

Having seen the Third Reich video, I promptly went to the Internet, where I knew that, for whatever reason, Hitler’s book, boring and deadly, would be found. I downloaded a few chapters and forced myself to read them, finding much that had eluded me as a schoolboy.

Hitler could never have so captivated and controlled Germany if he’d been merely a bad person. No, he had amazing, God-given powers of communication that could have been as easily used for good as for evil; we all know which direction he chose. And he was intelligent, amazingly intelligent; I doubt whether many of us could have withstood him in a debate. (There is a pattern here; most of the Aryan supremacists I have known have been intellectual types who allowed their minds to descend into poisonous cunning.)

For those who dare to match wits with an evil genius, a few chapters of Mein Kampf will be a worthy opponent. It’s all so reasonable, so matter-of-fact, so well informed. Or so it seems. Hitler knew firsthand the downtrodden state of Europe between the wars, the depressed economy that paralleled America’s at the time. And because of the prominent Jewish role in European economy and culture, it was easy enough for Hitler to make the Jews a plausible scapegoat. He does it point by point, in black and white, without screaming or thrashing about or stomping his jackboot. (That would come later.)

History shows how Hitler’s arrogant disregard of strategic reality cost him countless victories, how his obsession with exterminating Europe’s Jews cost him incalculable resources whose proper allocation against the Allies might have given his war machine the upper hand. But if we look deeper into his appalling folly, we’ll see more than just poor military strategy, hardheaded overconfidence, and creeping insanity.

I wish to suggest that Hitler’s single biggest mistake was ideological, spiritual, even theological in nature: He didn’t know the Word of God.

Oh sure, we’re told that Jehovah’s Witnesses know the Bible better than we do. We find ourselves embroiled in arguments with marginals and fanatics who belch chapters and verses like machine gun fire. But the Word of God isn’t scripture wrenched from its context and twisted into whatever shape happens to suit the twister. “The Word of God is living and active…” (Hebrews 4:12) It’s alive. Jesus is the Word.

But Hitler didn’t even know the Bible the way many marginals do, brandishing verses calculated to prove a point that would never stand up to real scrutiny. He instead made statements about the Jews that fly in the face of Scripture. Statements that challenge the most basic morality. Statements that targeted the apple of God’s eye for systematic extermination.

To so flagrantly slam down the gauntlet at God’s feet is the most extreme folly. Especially when it affects millions upon millions of other people. You might as well try bringing down an F-14 with a flyswatter. Hitler could not possibly have made a worse mistake than to go after God’s chosen people, and his whole country paid the price of going along with his idea. To die for a noble cause is not folly; to die for the wildly mistaken notion that “We’re the Master Race” is not merely to die, it is to bring catastrophic ruin on your country and others’ countries for no good reason at all.

My experience as a missionary working in at least fifteen different countries gives me a perspective Hitler could never have had (not that he would have had the clarity to see it.) In Mein Kampf he declares the “inferiority” not only of Jews, but of Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, etc., Well, Adolf, you may be Superman, but wherever I go in the world, I find myself surrounded by my betters and superiors. I know Colombians and Nigerians and Indonesians and Mexicans and Egyptians who are smarter than I am, nicer, cooler, stronger, wiser, better educated, more talented, more fun, more technologically advanced, more creative, more generous, and better looking. (That last one wouldn’t be too hard. And I even have blond hair and blue eyes! Shouldn’t that count for something?)

By the way, if the way we look on the outside is of such importance as the Aryan supremacists say it is, then Hitler is already in trouble. (His astounding evil generally overshadows the fact that he was one of the most hilarious looking people of the last century.) Well relax, mein Führer - God doesn’t look at outside appearances, He looks at the heart!

Wait a minute. In that case, Adolf, maybe you’re better off with Him looking at your outside appearance. It’s the only smile you’re likely to get out of Him anytime in Eternity.