The coach topped the pass and began snaking its way down the switchbacks. All the passengers tried to be conspicuous in their pretense of staring out the windows, but they glanced furtively at the hulking and unsociable Melkus. He only glowered more contemptuously. They pretended to show one another points of interest and they all nodded earnestly. Melkus laughed like a mountain and they became quiet again.

The late afternoon sun lit the destination below and reminded him of better days. These degenerate pilgrims were going there to celebrate Black Revels; he was going to visit a friend.

As the coach rounded one bend he looked up to see Upper Ashurston. In the past it had been a noble heap. It was both a fort and a monastery with a reputation reaching all the great capitals, now it looked rather less noble and rather more aloof. Lower Ashurston, like the rest of the valley, looked as though it had been sacked by goblins. If one had known the town at its height, he would not believe it today. All the way from Perthyr to Arnynlahd was a waste. It had been plundered, quarried and cannibalized, and the only clues to the glory of the valley were the immense footings of the great Houses. Everything was a shambles. Lord Mauntecroir's manor, a gift to his wife, was a muddy hole.

At one time the entire valley was a fugue of mansions and parks, cottages and vegetable gardens, pastures, ponds, flower beds, promenades, fountains and intimate footpaths. Now it was hopelessly overgrown, and in odd places the trees and brush had been cleared for no apparent purpose and the old wood just abandoned in large piles. It was hard to distinguish industry from vandalism.

The coach drove by what was once Academy Hall, now a ruin with nothing but witches and pickpockets squatting in rubble that looked to have been imported. The entire High Grove was a nasty thicket and High Street was now a snaggle-toothed pavement with weeds growing between the stones. It was obvious the gutters hadn't been working for years and large areas were stained with standing, smelly water.

The other travelers began to mumble and fidget and collect their bundles as the coach neared the Four Horses Inn. As darkness fell they were met by their friends, and the platform became a congregation of roaches and the close friends of roaches.

By the time Melkus stepped out of the coach whispers had reached certain ears and he was met with the sniveling greetings and obsequious giggles of people who fancied themselves town officials trying to head off some unpleasantness.

Melkus walked on.

He entered Four Horses to find that the grand rotunda had, since his last visit, been even further divided into a warren of spaces ideally suited for nefarious consultations. He found the room he wanted and his mere entrance displaced a gaggle of men in need of some soap. The room was dominated by a fireplace large enough to service the entire hall as originally conceived. Now it just looked comical. The thing looked like a grand fireplace with an attached cupboard.

Across this room he found her.

What once had been the face of twelve summers had become the face of eighty winters, and death had not shown her any mercy. When she saw him she smiled. It was a beautiful smile for such a battered face, and Melkus had always theorized that it was because she smiled only when she had a reason to smile. She never smiled to be ingratiating or hospitable or fawning. Her smiles always memorialized a real joy.

He bowed. "Your Highness."

"Melkus! I knew you would come. I wasn't sure the sun would rise, but I knew you would be here tonight. I'm sure your trip was quite unpleasant; have a sip." Her footman offered him a flute of something that might have been older than fire.

"It is harder to see this place every time I come," he said. "Debauchery is a bottomless pit."

"They that dwelt in Arnynlahd had much and yearned for little."

"Indeed," Melkus winced.

The two stared at one another like mother and son. The footman excused himself and left the two alone. The rowdy crowd had quit the bars and went out in the street to curse and laugh and to find someone to hang for sport. It was finally quiet.

"They built their scaffold on the site of the Ashurston Pavilion this year. It made me think of one of the last concerts."

"Yes, when Runneld played Last Sorrows," Melkus recollected. "I understand he had that vittebois made especially for that concert and he never played it again. Ever learn what happened to it?"

"I have it."

"I am comforted to hear it."

They sat and enjoyed one another's company silently. Outside there was a distant roar as the mob killed one of its own and then dispersed, going off in pairs to celebrate life in the only way they knew.

The two grieved as one.

Melkus slumped down in a chair that clearly was not adequate to its calling, stretched out his legs, tilted his head back and closed his eyes.

"From the the Ambreine Manuscript, Book II," he finally announced.

She smiled and closed her eyes.

The recitation began with the events of the early morning, before sunrise. While the enemy massed, the men of the town used the darkness to lay traps, make feints, misinform spies, set ambushes and generally prepare the field of battle.

Melkus spoke of sunrise and the joining of battle: he told of boys becoming men and of men becoming legends, of Ladies dressing the wounds of ploughboys and virgins singing to dying captains. He traced the battle through wood and stream and recounted the good death of bad men and he celebrated the glorious death of good men.

He told the story of dusk as the last remnants of the enemy were dug from their hiding places like grubs from rotten wood. In a single day the enemy was routed and the great issues Heaven had joined were resolved with valor, honor and by acts of transcending duty.

There was a very long silence as the two measured their veneration. Finally the queen spoke.

"You have done me a service a queen cannot recompense."

"Then I've met with success and will be on my way."

The footman entered the room and resumed his post. Melkus rose, bowed, excused himself and began walking back toward Perthyr.

Here are some fatuous wishes from more "serious" people who have clearly lost touch with the Biblical message and the point of the Christian life. Shameless feelings of silliness and celebrations of imperfections do not sound like the hopes and dreams of any of the more recognized Apostles of the Church. Nor do they sound a great deal like the words of John the Baptist.

But they are the hopes and dreams of Evangelicalism, and here is the meticulous bafflegab they dare to offer us:

Soul Care offers practical wisdom on key spiritual practices that can become the platform for authentic spiritual growth--restoring life and health to your soul, releasing your God-given potential.

Of course they don't actually guarantee a release of your potential, but they do offer wisdom on practices that can become a platform for it. They can. It might happen.

"That I may know him and the wisdom on practices that can become a platform for growth...."

A World...

Where unhealthy shame is obsolete.
Where healthy shame has lost its sting.
Where we know we are of great worth when we accept the grace we do not deserve.
Where bad choices of the past do not determine our worth today or forfeit our hopes for tomorrow.
Where we dare to feel guilty where guilty we are, for we know our guilt can be forgiven.
Where we celebrate our imperfections.
Where we can feel silly without feeling shame.
Where grace gives us reason to be proud of ourselves.
Where the lightness of grace lifts the heaviness of shame.
Where joy is the whole point.

 http://www.mindycaliguire.net/?p=46

Of course our little excursion into the slums of blogactionday was not just for our amusement.

We all know there is poverty and we all know that poverty is bad. Go to any playground and sample the opinions of kids on the swing set.

Would you like to be poor, sonny?
No, sir!
And why not?
Because poverty is bad, you silly old coot!

"Raising awareness" of poverty is as productive as the CDC warning us that water is wet. This is nothing more than a pretense of outrage and an opportunity to excrete some ideology. It gives Eric a chance to fulminate against corporate fascists, just so we know where he stands. It gives Makeesha an opportunity to take the blame for poverty, when in fact we all know that if she meant what she said she would sell all that she has and give to the poor. (And then perhaps she would go to prison.) Barney Leith gets a golden opportunity to prooftext, and Tony Jones can once again show that a dirty mouth is evidence of purity of heart.

What, these people never read the Prophets? Plato? Karl Marx? Adam Smith? Milton Friedman?

I say all this because evangelicalism is engaged in somewhat the same heroic and useless pose. Now they get up and read academic papers about the loss of truth or the definition of culture!

Welcome to the dance, guys. Maybe you could help us stack the chairs, take down the streamers and sweep up?

The fact of the matter is, any truth claim you are now prepared to defend will be dismissed as a vestigial superstition, and any appeal to beauty will be laughed at because we've heard your kind of music.

I'm thinking of this as I recall Dalrymple explaining Why Shakespeare Is for All Time. And I am recalling the words of John Milton:

On Shakespear

What needs my Shakespear for his honour'd Bones,
The labour of an age in piled Stones,
Or that his hallow'd reliques should be hid
Under a Star-ypointing Pyramid?
Dear son of memory, great heir of Fame,
What need'st thou such weak witnes of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thy self a live-long Monument.
For whilst to th'shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easie numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalu'd Book,
Those Delphick lines with deep impression took,
Then thou our fancy of it self bereaving,
Dost make us Marble with too much conceaving;
And so Sepulcher'd in such pomp dost lie,
That Kings for such a Tomb would wish to die.

--- John Milton

We are bereft of fancy, incapable of wonder and astonishment and yet we seek the souls of men? Who should believe us?

I must apologize to our readers for failing to celebrate October 15^th properly. Last Wednesday a very large assortment of flakes, dupes, dolts and ADHD sufferers joined to voice their disapproval of poverty. It was a courageous position they took, and we at Remonstrans hope that they don't suffer social ostracism or political repercussions for their bold stand.

According to blogactionday.org (as of last night at 11:05), 12,800 bloggers and 13,498,280 readers have declared that poverty is not to their liking even a little bit. Their insights into the causes of poverty were most helpful.

Eric says of the poor:

These folks could use a bailout. Oh wait bailouts are only for rich corporate fascists

One vine-swinger said:

The first thing I have come to terms with is this - poverty is. It just is. People are poor and sometimes we have to get out of our heads long enough to stop asking the why's and figure out what we're going to do about it. The second thing I have concluded is that in the figuring out of what to do about it, the why's need to come back to me. In other words, it's easy to look at the person who is poor and say "she is poor because" with the intention of getting to the root of the "problem". it's a bit more difficult to look at MYSELF (not poor) and say "she's poor because of you."

One poor Baha'i lost track of the important date, cobbled together some last-minute deliberations cribbed from Bahá'u'lláh and then he rushed off to some important engagement.

Tony Jones brought his enviable wit and considerable vocabulary to bear on the problem with typical emergent flair.

These people didn't actually do anything. No one was less poor on Thursday than he was on Wednesday. But they all talked about it and made quite clear to all bystanders that they do not approve of poverty in the least. Some went so far as to suggest that poverty could be significantly mitigated if we all drank fewer lattes.

Overall, I think this was a big success. I think we should do it again next year. Some people might forget that poverty is bad. The more people who know that poverty is not good, the better, I say. We should spread the word. And in the meantime I think we should all monitor our latte intake.

And just for the record: not only am I averse to poverty, I also oppose sadness in all its forms.

Sir Ernst Gombrich, the art historian, tells of some friends of his in his native Vienna who, after the Anschluss, expected to be arrested immediately by the Gestapo. They spent what they thought would be their last hours of freedom together, and possibly their last hours alive, playing late Beethoven quartets. ^*

What is in your mind when you think about culture?

One reader recently mentioned Beethoven's Op. 132. It might help you to find a copy of the work and listen to the third movement: Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart: Molto adagio; Neue Kraft fühlend: Andante. Reflect on the noble creature God made as he faces death (or camp) at the hands of another creature of God. Ask yourself what sort of person grabs a fiddle at that moment.

Dr. Dalrymple served as a physician in Central America, North Korea, East Timor, Monrovia, Liberia, Peru, a British inner-city hospital and in a prison. For fourteen years he wrote a column for the London Spectator. He has given some informed and careful thought to the problem of unforced and spontaneous evil and its roots in "the unrealistic, self-indulgent, and often fatuous ideas of social critics". He has something to say about the place of culture, and you need a piece of his mind.

It is hard to summarize these 26 essays, but that's not entirely a bad thing. I'm going to suggest that you take advantage of that assortment by reading a few of them, setting the book aside, and listening to a few randomly chosen movements from Beethoven's Opp. 127, 130, 131, 132, 133 and 135. Work your way through these interpolated essays and quartet movements.

I can't guarantee how effective a crash course in culture this might be—and I take a very dim view of crash courses in culture anyway—but I imagine you might begin to sense what it is like to confront a really serious person. There is some danger that you might think of the Beethoven as merely a soundtrack for some morbid reflections on humanity, but that's not my intention.

Culture is a sharing of our humanity. It is not, as we hear incessantly, a matter of style preference.

I'm hoping this might help one understand art as others have understood it.

* Our Culture, What's Left of It,  p. 123

______________________________
Our Culture, What's Left of It
Theodore Dalrymple
Ivan R. Dee
ISBN: 1-56663-721-X

We are sad to report that the prognosis for the emergent body is critical.  A combination of birth trauma and malnutrition has landed the young patient in intensive care. 

This issue of ChristianityTuesday provides a detailed medical history of the emergent church and prescribes a treatment regimen to get it back on its feet.

click here for larger image

A reader sent me this link, and I think it would be worth your time to listen to it. It may well be an irritant to those who object to "second books", but I think it will be a help to those who want an accurate depiction of our present circumstance.

David Wells is discussing his book The Courage to Be Protestant at the White Horse Inn, and he tells us that there has been a disintegration of God-centered, Christ-honoring, truth-loving piety and that foul waters have seeped into the church. He also laments the loss of classical preaching and the trivialization of the religious impulse.

I think this is profoundly true and naively overlooked.

We have heard fundamentalists repeatedly telling us that the crux of the problem was the threat of heterodoxy and the failure of separation. That turns out to have been one of those partial truths that, like rat poison—which is 98% corn meal—is far more harmful than the proportion of healthy food to active ingredient might suggest. As it turns out fundamentalists now sit around giggling at Oscar Wilde and worshiping out of Majesty Hymns, a dizzying monument to trivialization. Separation seems to be the first thing they lost sight of; factionalism never left their side.

(If the report we heard last week is true—and I see no reason to doubt it—some fundamentalists counsel parents not to have serious conversations with their own children. Can we imagine a corruption of Scripture more relevant to our problem?)

We have heard evangelicals incessantly jabbering about the church's responsibilities in the public square only to suffer the humiliations of Ted Haggard, Jan Crouch, Benny Hinn, Amy Grant, Joel Osteen, Camerin Courtney...and the long, hallowed evangelical tradition of commercialization and trivialization. Gravitas is not a word anyone associates with the Billy Graham, Christianity Today or the NAE. Evangelicalism and public scandal go together like cuff links.

I think this interview is worth your time because, first, you would be hard-pressed to find a mentally competent person who will argue that the church is healthy. No one says it is healthy, but everyone blames the disease on someone else and then smoothly transitions to his tribal spiel.

It is not just the things we have done but the things we have left undone. And an awareness of our degrading culture, a commitment to contending for the truth is not a thing that should ever have been left undone. No amount of posing as militant defenders of the sacred Scriptures and no conspicuous prancing about as zealous exponents of evangelization has spared American churches from the greatest blasphemy since Avignon.

You really must think about this.

Richard Weaver observed that a concern for the state of one's culture tends to start at the top and gradually work its way down to the lowest levels of society: its popular organs of discussion and—if I can join in his observation—its most frivolous men.

You know that when emergents and fundamentalists become interested in culture it is time to order a casket and book the gravedigger. Here is Doug Pagitt again, meandering through some incoherent guesses about culture and reprising his ignorance of Plato.

And Brian McCrorie reminds us that:

1. defining beauty is not an exact science,
2. defining beauty involves creation and culture which are tainted by the curse,
3. we are free to discern what is acceptable in the arts,
4. the church doesn't have to arrive at an aesthetic ethic, and
5. this is all largely a matter of opinion, preference, and taste.

With this collection of boors, bumpkins and buffoons, what are the chances we will ever see a useful culture? As I riffle my chips I place our chances at a nice round number.

Where might culture come from? Look at what has been produced by (post)modern cretins; to call it freakish and ugly would be to engage in cruel flattery.

But while Pagitt and McCrorie are off "discerning what is acceptable", let us remind ourselves what we have lost.

This great yearning of man to be something in the imaginative sense, that is, to be something more than he is in the simple existential way or in the reductionist formula of materialism is both universal and proper to him. The latter may be asserted because he is the only creature who asks the question why he is here and who feels thwarted in his self-realization until some kind of answer is produced.  This urge to be representative of something higher is an active ingredient of his specific humanity; it has created everything from the necklace of animal teeth with which the primitive adorns his body to the elaborate constructions which the men of high cultures have made to interpret the meaning of life and their mission in it. This is the point at which he departs from the purely utilitarian course and makes of himself a being with significance. It is a refutation of all simplistic histories and psychologies, but it is one of the most verifiable facts about man. *

There was a time when worship and liturgy were the definitive ways man located the meaning of his life and determined his mission in it. It was also the proper way of sharing that meaning with his neighbor. He could commiserate in his sufferings and he could exult in his joys. Try doing that with the degenerates filing into the auditorium for the Contemporary Worship Service. We cannot even share our maudlin religious rites.

It is not insignificant that our contemporaries' boorish apprehension of permanent things spans the religious horizon. Each little band of philistines is smug in the knowledge that it is better than the little band of philistines camped on the other side of the hill, and it never occurs to any of them to question the meaning of "better". If they thought about it—and we can be sure they haven't—determining the meaning of better is just as tainted by the curse as everything else.

What is your image of culture? That is something your children had better know before they leave the house. In fact, three questions should be answered satisfactorily before they're encouraged to start a home of their own.

• What is in your mind when you think about God?
• What is in your mind when you think about culture?
• What is in your mind when you think about worship?

Suppose what you think about God is not consistent with his true nature? What if your ideas of culture are incompatible with Bach's? Imagine that your preferences are at odds with Abraham's and St. John's.

Would that trouble you at all?

______________________
* Richard M. Weaver, Visions of Order, p. 10.

Though we live in a dark world Christians are to be its light. Increasingly in an age of energy conservation, blackouts and brownouts are becoming commonplace.

This issue of ChristianityTuesday has helpful tips for going off-grid and using the Son-shine for all our energy needs.

click here for larger image

Following Dave's vertical departure we had some immediate technical help from a professional artist and a friend to all of us at Remonstrans. We are grateful for his efforts and his assistance in filling the gap.

In addition several others offered their help with the technical end of things, one of whom we are now pleased to announce as a new member of the team.

He wishes to be called Servo, so that is what we shall call him. It's been a pleasure to deal with him to this point, and I hope you will continue to hear from him from time to time in the course of our regular conversations. We all hope never to hear from him again in connection with technical problems, but what are the chances of that?

We must be nice to Servo because he now has all the keys.

So while the emergent gurus are off re-imagining emergence and redefining this ethos or vibe, and while the people in the couches converse freely about the relationship between their own personal journeys and the "reflections" of assorted spokesblokes, perhaps it is time to reflect on the state of popular Christianity.

It seems that man, except in periods of loss of confidence, when skepticism impugns the very possibility of knowledge, shows thus an incurable disposition to look upon the word as a means of insight into the noumenal world. The fact that language is suprapersonal, uniting countless minds which somehow stand in relationship to an overruling divinity, lies at the very root of this concept.

In the light of this crisis in meaning, it might not be a bad idea to go back and reread Weaver's entire chapter The Power of the Word.

We are at an odd moment in church history—if it's even possible for us to consider emergence as part of church history. We have fundamentalists redefining themselves as an idea (an idea that looks strangely like a pretext) rather than a religious movement with recognizable leaders and approved institutions and which has been a font of pontifications.

Evangelicalism broadly speaking is perpetually reasserting itself as orthodox and socially responsible when all that can be seen with the naked eye is doctrinal confusion and impotence in the "societal realm".

Now this.

How odd—and perhaps not a little ironic—that those in search of a definition for obvious things should be seeking to teach us about noumenal things.