I have three fantastic children, which would not have been possible without a wife that I did not deserve.
These three, now in early middle age, are two lawyers and an erstwhile opera soprano, who now has a PhD in Sacred Music Conducting.
One of the lawyers has the president-elect as a client. Another has been Chief of Staff for a local mayor, and used to work for an Anchorage attorney who was regarded by conservatives as the best in the state. The soprano is teaching future priests how to sing.
If it sounds like I’m bragging, OK, but there is a larger view in this essay.
As they grew older, dinner conversations (which now include grandchildren) inevitably centered around the three things in life most worthy to discuss, analyze, argue and focus our lives around: religion, the arts and politics (We all agreed that sports are an artform).
Religion is the most important, of course. There are realities that we will all be facing, and your age might make you feel temporarily immune but as everyone knows, there is no guarantee. The reality is this: There is nothing more certain than death, nothing more strict than judgment, nothing more terrible than hell, and nothing more peaceful than heaven.
We have just emerged from a decades-long Dark Age, where both political parties have had a hand, where truth-tellers were ridiculed or called liars.
When you go into the deepest recesses of your heart, soul – maybe even in your stomach – and in the quiet of laying awake in bed in the middle of the night, when the cacophony of daytime is absent, and all philosophical and theological nuances aside, you know that those four things are true. And you need to do something about it.
I can guarantee that if you mention this at dinnertime, you will get quite a discussion going.
Then there are the arts. God gave Man a gift. If you have no artistic gifts, maybe you haven’t discovered them … yet. Maybe you haven’t tried. But if they are not there, you can still be someone who treasures and appreciates them. People do not give standings ovations, collect paintings and sculptures or books or discuss classic movies for nothing. They all touch our souls, and force us to look at things from a different angle.
These first two topics are far more important than the third, but politics must be part of our temporal existence or else the other two may be suppressed, persecuted, or what is even worse – warped.
Underground art and books still exist under suppression and persecution, and can provide hope, but when politics warps religion and the arts, it manifests something mad or ugly.
One need only look at the warped architecture of the Soviet Union, still in frightening evidence in the cities of Russia, to know this is true. Or communist and fascist propaganda posters. Tyrannical governments have tried to invent substitute religions, books, plays, murals, statues and the like, but they never satisfy the human thirst for Truth. Countless heroes have died and suffered for their faith, and their art. Whatever they had to say deserved consideration, for God gave man free will, and even errors must be allowed to have their say – so that Truth can triumph more fully.
We have just emerged from a decades-long Dark Age, where both political parties have had a hand, where truth-tellers were ridiculed or called liars. Every single institution of Man has lost the trust that centuries of patient suffering, trials and successes had carefully cultivated.
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Count them. Which ones have not been compromised? Education, medicine, military, religion, art, democracy, journalism, business, amateur and professional sports. The hold-outs who refused to drink the Kool-Aid now are standing taller in all these areas of human endeavor, and we must help them correct the social chaos we have emerged from.
Carl Sandburg, a midwestern poet of the early 20th century, compiled a work entitled, “The People, Yes.” In the end, the God-given gift of weeding out lies was done not by these institutions, but by the common sense He instills even in the hearts of the peasantry.
Evil never rests. Thrown down, it returns. We cannot change this Truth, for Man is fallen. But Man is also redeemed. Heavenly, or perfect peace cannot exist in this world, but real peace can. We must struggle to ensure that our free will is not suffocated. It has fallen to us to determine whether this is merely a temporary emergence from a Dark Age, or a more permanent one.
And remember, those who led us into the Dark Age are also redeemable, and often return to join in the struggle for the real peace, a struggle that will someday lead us to the Perfect one.
The views expressed here are those of the author.
10 Comments
Excellent article Bob. A perfect Thanksgivings epiphany.
You are wrong, Mr. Bird. The US is just heading into it’s darkest era.
Great post my friend. A good Advent Peace message.
Love you, Lady Bird and amazing offspring. Glad sports is a part of the arts culture.
Very good article. Enjoyed reading it and it made me feel better.
A gift to read, and a call to action.
Thank you, Mr. Bob Bird
Comforting words but incomplete. Missing is mention of the culprit of what Bird calls the Dark Ages. I’ll fill the blank. Our societal division is due to a lack of critical thinking and in its place is superstition, belief in the impossible and a lazy willingness to advocate for the most comfortable idea despite evidence of its deceit.
A foundation of disinformation has lead us to the very real possibility of the collapse of American democracy. Religion won’t help us when we suffer extraordinary corruption, in fact, it will hurt us because it will absorb energy that would be better directed to solutions that have a chance of success.
Jeff: Your critique of dissing of religion, which is always good because it sharpens the intellect, sure sounds like a Marxist: “Religion is the opiate of the people.” Or a materialist from the proto-communists of the French Revolution. Read again the four unmovable things. Maybe you only believe in the first one. And, as you know, there are those trying to even overcome THAT one. Good luck.
Bird. You’re right. Only the first of the four is true. My point has nothing to do with your historical references; nonetheless, here’s one for you: “Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.”
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
Reason is the first to die under supernatural belief. That’s a big deal and weirdly conflicting. We all use reason and the scientific method 99% of our day to navigate our community. Yet for the big questions about death, suffering, and injustice, religionists bail on reason and say that belief in the impossible is the answer.
Jeff: Let’s see … you apparently like Marx & Napoleon as guide-on’s in life. Marx is still acceptable in our cultural milieu, but it was Robespierre who tried to substitute “The god of Reason” in a grandiloquent parade as France’s new religion, complete with their now-discarded calendar. Both didn’t work. Robie is the true proto-dictator who instituted mass murder for “thought crimes”. It was Napoleon who admired the self-sacrifice of the counter-revolution in the Vendee, that one ought not to ignore Christ, for “there are millions who would die for him tomorrow if called upon.” He KNEW it was the Vendee’s spontaneous uprising that put the brakes on the mass murder of the French Revolution. He merely changed it into mass murder by war, begun merely for personal ambition, but perhaps that is not quite so bad as sending contemplative nuns, women and children to the guillotine or chained to sinking river barges by the hundreds of thousands.
My compliments for avoiding Hitler, who endorsed Darwin’s “survival of the fittest”, so since he has not (yet) been rehabilitated, it was politically correct to avoid quoting him.
Oh, Stalin didn’t like religion, either, and had both the Orthodox and Catholic churches infiltrated by homosexuals and free masons to bring about an internal destruction that we are witnessing right now.
Insofar as “Reason” is the first to die under supernatural belief, you perhaps never heard of Thomas Aquinas and “Faith & Reason” being the dovetail to human wisdom. It is a long read but you seem like the type of intellect who might dare to tackle it. You are a thinking man, so deserve compliments. Keep at it. He is a God of surprises.
Thanks for the history lesson.