Manifest Demise: Family, Home & Children vs. Career, Government and the Marketplace

Why is this fight so easily lost?
Our modern age has seen more bloodshed,
but at least as crazy is the loss of common sense.
We have lost the obvious wisdom of
family, home and children

Fight the government
Fight Wall Street and the Academy.

All of mankind might just be saved through childbearing,
Let us all settle down and raise kids.

The American apocalypse,
Manifest Demise
It is upon us and our only
hope lies in marriage and childbearing.

Lust and power
Money and fame
They are all shifty
houses on lose gravel.

The Rock is for the orphans,
The Rock will build a household.
The Rock will crush those upon whom it falls.


OR as the mythopoet Bonnie Prince Billy says, we must pass on so that when we die we will continue to live.

"My body fades, your life goes on." We must build and look forward to "A singing dawn."

----There are probably lots of qualifiers for my statements above ... but that would be tedious (and I am on vacation). All I will offer you is my favorite Walker Percy quote:

"To bed we go for a long winter's nap, twined about each other as the ivy twineth, not under a bush or in a car or on the floor or any such humbug as marked the past peculiar years of Christendom, but at home in bed where all good folk belong." (Love in Ruins)

By the way, Luther married as a monk to re-establish the idea of priests as family men, Kierkegaard rejected Regine because he felt that family and society and status were meshed together and the gospel called him to leave it all behind (he didn't say no one should marry, but he thought he was doing the exact opposite of Luther because of the times). I think that we are at another hinge and must see marriage and family again as a fundamental self-sacrifice and a taking responsibility for something larger and outside of our tiny cracked self ... this is one of the few ways left to us to escape the dread clutches of selfishness and individualism.

One last thought: God called Abraham to be a father (of the people of God). God called Mary to be a mother (of Jesus Christ). Stanley Hauerwas writes: "Just as Abraham is the father of Israel, so Mary is the mother of the church." We must take great care of what we desecrate.

Spiritual Audacity

In a telegram to President John F. Kennedy, Abraham Heshel writes:

"I look forward to the privilege of being present at meeting tomorrow at 4 PM. Likelihood exists that the negro problem will be like the weather. Everybody talks about it but nobody does anything about it. Please demand of religious leaders personal involvement not just solemn declaration. We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negros. Church synagogues have failed. They must repent. Ask of religious to call for national repentance and personal sacrifice. Let religious leaders donate one month's salary toward fund for negro housing and education. I propose that you Mr. President declare a state of moral emergency. A marshal plan for aid to negros is becoming a necessity. The hour calls for high moral grandeur and spiritual audacity."

Do religious leaders still write such letters to the president? I would like to repeat these words from 1963 for today: THE HOUR CALLS FOR HIGH MORAL GRANDEUR AND SPIRITUAL AUDACITY.

Salome

My gospel text for mid-week service was Matthew 14:1-12, the intense story about the beheading of John the Baptist. It put me in mind of an old Bonnie Prince Billy song ... it works well as the voice of Herod.

there is grime on my face
there is crust in my eye
there is no one in this place
but no one said goodbye
this is how i start another day in my kingdom

there is hate in my heart
this is how my day starts
there is blood in my hands
from the murder of a man
this is how i start another day in my kingdom
this is how i start another day in my kingdom

This is from his ease on down the road album. Another good art reference is the short play by Oscar Wilde. It is pretty fantastic if my memory serves me. It is called Salome.