Awhile back someone here at BC mentioned Francis Schaeffer which reminded me I’d been wanting for a long time to read him so I went and bought one of his books, How Should We Then Live? At one point Schaeffer mentions Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and its enumeration of “the five attributes that marked Rome at its end: first, a mounting love of show and luxury (that is, affluence); second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor (this could be among countries in the family of nations as well as in a single nation); third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality, and enthusiasms pretending to be creativity; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state.” That pretty much sums us up to a tee. One theme of Schaeffer’s book is how the old Judeo-Christian worldview provided us all with the wherewithal to live lives of freedom without chaos. Our postmodern world will give us either freedom with chaos or no freedom at all – which is to say, it will be the latter, because you can’t really have anarchy in any sustainable way.
With disaster looming on every front, how can any thinking person feel optimistic? If we do somehow manage to avoid catastrophe, the one thing you can be sure of is that you have witnessed a miracle.
As for my own course of action, I do what I can where I can and, for the rest, continue to stockpile food as I have done since last July (when I became convinced that the One would win), pray, and fill my mind with the beauty and harmony of music – like Bach’s for instance…
WHEN I LISTEN TO BACH
I go to another place. I don’t mean I go
to my room and shut the door,
to some quiet corner of the world.
I mean, rather, I go to
Another Place…
An angelic place not meant for mortals,
though they glimpse it now and then,
when strings begin to vibrate
and heaven’s window slightly opens.
Notes like slivers of brightest glass
seep through and twinkle in the light,
reflecting perfect order of the universe -
a structured pattern of cosmic tranquility.
War…sickness…hate…
technology and progress,
no structure, everything changes,
6 o’clock news – stop my ears.
And when I can hear no more,
the allegros, prestos and fugues
bear me away on celestial wings of song.
I float in heavenly realms,
sometimes rising and sometimes descending,
my flight suspended in whirling counterpoints,
and I know I can never fall.
I am cradled in the unchanging mathematics of music
where all is certain, like the rhythm of a mothers’s
heartbeat assures the infant in her womb.
And what shall I say of the adagios, the largos,
the incomparable chaconne?
A divine seed is sown in earth’s unholy ground;
beauty rains down from that pure place, and brings
forth its yield to nurture mere flesh and blood.
It cannot be that such things emanate from
catgut, tree resin and horsehair!
The bow is drawn gently across my heartstrings,
and in that moment, I know what it was like
before the Fall.
Pin numbers, 401K’s and the rat race of 9-to-5
dissolve into concertos BWV 1060, 1043, 1052.
A taste of the sublime is placed upon my tongue,
it spreads to soul and spirit, joint and marrow,
and when the last note has ended,
all I can do is be silent.
I fall to earth,
swirling, tumbling, plummeting
downward,
and chaos catches me in her net -
deadlines to meet, PTA meetings, household chores,
commutes on I40, and endless trips to market.
As life moves in a rushing whirl, the clock
strikes eleven, and the network news invades again.
Yet if there’s one saving grace in this base world, bridging
the gulf between here and there,
it’s the case of digital tunes I carry with me always,
the trademark of forbidden fruit etched upon its back.
– Karen Deatherage
I like that poem (written by another Karen) – its portrayal of a quite natural turning away
(to better things) of a displaced person in a postmodern world. Because I worry now that that’s just what we are: displaced persons. To get back to sanity, to be optimistic that we CAN get back to sanity, means reliance on the efforts of just these.
