More to this blog than living and dying...

I'm old.  It brings aches and pains.  Pleasant smiles remembering days that seemed so recent and it turns out they were a LONG time ago.

Yesterday I bought tickets for Becky and I to go see Steven Curtis Chapman, Andrew Peterson, and Josh Wilson playing in the south suburbs of Cleveland.  This isn't my first time seeing SCC or AP.

Backstory.  Over 20 years ago I was a regular volunteer to setup Christian music concerts that rolled through Lancaster.  With a great springboard from station WJTL there are many concerts that hit that area.  At the time I was naive as to what a great opportunity this was.  To me it was just better than sitting bored at home.

This process generally went as follows:

• Show up around 11am - setup chairs, tables, etc.
• Unload a truck that rolled up around noon.
• Setup speakers, lights, soundboard, drumkits, guitars, etc.
• Soundcheck and we get to go eat.
• Take tickets, run spotlight, be security, etc. during the show.
• Tear it all down, pack it up, load it up.  Go home around midnight.

Now it was not expected, but about 50% of the time the artist or stage manager would gather the volunteers as the truck was almost loaded and hand out some swag.  This was t-shirts, stickers, cassettes or later in my volunteer career CDs.  It always felt like Christmas.


One of the regulars making stops there was Steven Curtis Chapman.  I was always a SCC fan.  I had a "More to this Life" t-shirt that was well worn through my late teens (thanks stage manager).  He put on a fun show with a nice variety in song pace and humor and heart.  I also had a side benefit.  I was a 13 y/o with a blonde mullet walking around with an official badge.  SCC would mention about his family and kids and I would shortly get asked "are you his son?".  I'm thinking it was about twenty times I have been asked that question.  Awesome everytime.

Also awesome because it was better to be asked if I was somehow related to fame rather than to be questioned on my gender.

For the record, this picture is embarrassing; but it is the best from the era (I was 15, my last year with a mullet), and the one when I was 13 was more embarrassing.

I'm now at the other end by strictly being a concert viewer.  I have a long history of seeing SCC live and am excited for the upcoming show too.  I get to see it with my wife.  Early in our college and dating time we went to downtown Pittsburgh to catch SCC playing. 

This time Steven is playing with my absolute favorite storysinger - Andrew Peterson.  I also saw him early in his career when he opened for Caedmon's Call at Grove City College ('97).  That was also a date with Becky.


It is good to look back on the magic moments and memories.  I can't think of a better evening enjoying two key musical elements from key times of my life and having my wife to share them with.

The Strange Music by G. K. Chesterton
Other loves may sink and settle, other loves may loose and slack,
But I wander like a minstrel with a harp upon his back,
Though the harp be on my bosom, though I finger and I fret,
Still, my hope is all before me: for I cannot play it yet.

In your strings is hid a music that no hand hath e'er let fall,
In your soul is sealed a pleasure that you have not known at all;
Pleasure subtle as your spirit, strange and slender as your frame,
Fiercer than the pain that folds you, softer than your sorrow's name.

Not as mine, my soul's annointed, not as mine the rude and light
Easy mirth of many faces, swaggering pride of song and fight;
Something stranger, something sweeter, something waiting you afar,
Secret as your stricken senses, magic as your sorrows are.

But on this, God's harp supernal, stretched but to be stricken once,
Hoary time is a beginner, Life a bungler, Death a dunce.
But I will not fear to match them-no, by God, I will not fear,
I will learn you, I will play you and the stars stand still to hear.

"Wait, is that your stage voice.."

After being so heavy in posts, I've decided to share something that has had me chuckling for a little bit now.

This (and the whole series of them) are hilarity in a jar to me.

Enjoy!

I authorized this message....

I've had a spell recently thinking about authority.  Doesn't everybody go through that?  It may have been topped off with managing a room full of kids briefly at Sunday school.  There was a general amount of goofing off and upityness that I can tolerate.  The class rose quickly to my threshold of misbehavior and after that it was quite a task to harness the cats.  Lots of repeating myself, isolating kids, and relocating troublemakers.  More than I wanted, more than there should have been.

Part of my wondering about authority is around this - I'm digging into past theological writings and thinkings, and they are fresh water to me.  I've been hungry for this all my life and am only finding it now.  Some solid pounding out of points and why it is right; not wishy-washy trying to convince that this view is slightly better. 
I think it's obvious that there is an erosion of authority underway and there are many implications.  I don't know when the erosion began, it's easy to say the 60s; but it is probably a problem as old as human history.  Will you really die if you eat the apple?

Probably the most subtle shades of the recent authority erosion is that it is tied with being told and believing "everything is okay, you aren't that bad".  Lose original sin and you don't get repeated sinlessness in a spiral upward, you get repeated denial in the handbasket to hell.

Erosion of the Family -
TV, books and education seems to offer a very solid front of "your parents are dumb."  It is no longer Ward Beaver setting the Beave straight.  It moved to Al Bundy, Dan Conner, and Raymond.  While this truly more realistic, the pendulum has swung past reality (I make mistakes, I'm learning how to be a father) to the father being consistently stupid and wrong.

Erosion of the Church -
The church has been equally isolated.  And by isolating it to a weekly club of good advice it is immediately minimized.  There is constant media coverage of Westboro Baptist idiots and silence about the 99% of other churches that pray and love their enemies.  The churches that understand there is a difference between a call to holiness and a witch hunt.  It isn't that culture has "killed God" in society (and not for a lack of trying by some extremes); they have sought to make him manageable.  We have moved from "remember the sabbath and keep it holy" to "remember that Sunday is only one day of the week".

Implications -
I don't think the attackers of home & church authority had any idea where the tracks they laid would lead.  In saying our parents can't tell us what to do we get left with nobody know what to do.  It takes four years of bad education at the hands of the badly educated to realize we need to go out and learn to use our skills and truly find ourselves.  We find ourselves in

Without the bedrock of family or church there is a general search for where our worldview gets grounded.  I need some solid rock to stand upon and make this sense of the inner question of what is the point?  There was brief period where it could be filled by the big institutions - government, banks and big causes.  Propaganda easily paints these as a source of worldview.  Captain Planet to the rescue.  But these which should have been mistrusted from the first, have become the collection of much belief that has discovered they are bankrupt.  They should be mistrusted since they are merely a collection of men.  They are bankrupt because being bigger doesn't mean they are better; it means that the corruption is bigger and faster to affect everything.  The only efficient element of the government and large banks is how quickly they can help themselves.  They have even risen one level further in helping each other.



All of this has left the individual alone and finding his own way.  The biggest output of eliminating authority is that I rise to my own authority.  "Me" as my own authority results in poor guidance with no way of coming back to reality.  Without fertile ground for reason to take root we are swayed with the winds of fashion.

I am not a king on my own island.  The truth is I am not alone.  I do not know it all.  There is no span of emotion that David has not first expressed in the Psalms.  There is no high level of mental strained searching that Job and Solomon has not faced first.  There is a God who cares for the birds of the field and for his people.  I can rest in His hands.

"The authority of priests to absolve, the authority of popes to define, the authority even of inquisitors to terrify; these were only dark defences erected round one central authority, more undemonstrable, more supernatural than all the authority of a man to think.  We know now that this is so; we have no excuse for not knowing it.  For we can hear scepticism crashing through the old ring of authorities, and at the same moment we can see reason swaying upon her throne." GK Chesterton 'Orthodoxy'

The Heir of the Dogma

"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man."  -GK Chesterton

I love this quote for a few reasons.   

1. It says much for the founders of the US and their understanding for power, origins of power, and a greater power - God.  Not a king, not an elected official.  For they are not God.

2. I think most believers in evolution would be hesitant to say that Warren Buffett is rich because he is a better evolutionary product.  It can be said he was lucky or smart; but to even make the claim that he is living "the high life" (although I doubt he drinks Miller) is making a claim for a score keeping system of somekind.  An inherent sense of good; right and wrong.  It is the love of life that tells us that the cat won when it eats the mouse, it is the same love that misses the hamster when it loses to the vacuum cleaner.

3.  The basis for a pure democracy is the equal value of each man.  The image of God born by every human. 

Side note:  In a few places Chesterton expresses his frustration with the upside-down arguments against women's suffrage.  It is not that women were beneath the vote; the vote (taking part in a mob action) is something that a woman should not be asked to descend to take part in.  It was the same as them not taking part in clearing roadkill - the task is under the dignity of the holders of such beauty.