Christian Salvation

"To little does any man love You, who loves something other than You, not on account of you"


“Love, and do what you like”


“In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.”

I wrote a nice academic post about accessibility in music, and how were doomed because the socialists killed Shostakovitch. I accidentally posted it at dooHicky, then promptly cut the text from there, hoping I could delete the post (which I can't) and put it up here. Well, it didn't work, so now all I have is this rather unsatisfying piece, a blank spot at dooHicky, and a dismal hope for American music. In less than a month I will have my "Liturgica Horarum" Vol. 2! Maybe I'll get over my frustration with the internet by then and tell you all about it. Because, of course, you care.

I wrote a dense post about love a few nights ago, but it was poorly written, so I ended up taking it down. In it's earlist forms I used a few facebook status' as evidence.

160 words of privacy destroying maddness

It seems that American's are all too willing to give away their rights these days, and the right to privacy is no difference. A British history teacher of mine said that privacy was one of his most privileged rights. Makes sense for Christians to say that: the saints give up "rights" all the time, but the one thing they cling to is privacy. The ability to silently pray and contemplate God are indispensable. The one thing Christian's can't deny themselves is God, but everything else is fair game.

Twitter has been popping up everywhere lately. I don't get it. Why would you embrace the idea of giving up your privacy? Of course it's normal to do that these days. I'm doing it right now, sharing thoughts that even 50 years ago wouldn't have the possibility to reach millions. Facebook and Myspace aren't much different than Twitter, but they do serve some beneficial purposes. But Twitter... what for? Why take the time to narrate your whole day to the world? Why would you want anybody knowing every thought that comes into your head? Even more, why does anybody care about everyone else? I don't doubt that they do, but it perplexes me.

More and more were entering an era where privacy is nearly impossible. Silence is on it's way out too. Even in mass it's something to be feared, as if simply the sounds of shuffling feet and "The body of Christ" would make praying the mass more difficult. The constant music doesn't facilitate praying the mass. People wake up to alarm radios, listen to music in the shower, watch the news while they eat breakfast, listen to the radio on the way to work, listen to the radio on the internet at work, listen to the radio on the way home, complain about their days at dinner, watch nightly news and go to bed. They can't even escape from the noise in a bathroom or elevator! Even when your in the middle of nowhere you have your ever convenient iPod to keep your ears filled.

Privacy is going to be no different. The masses will narrate every moment of their day on Twitter. You'll be able to update it on your phone. And when your not typing, you'll be reading what the rest of the world typed. It will be 160 characters of privacy destroying madness. People will forget how to be alone. They'll scare themselves. We already have self-check out lanes and online shopping. The man who lived on the top of a mountain who nobody ever saw was portrayed as frightning in movies, but now it's a reality, except we live in suburbs.

Supposing truth were a woman

"Supposing truth were a woman - what then?"
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Preface to "Beyond Good and Evil"

Before he even begins to discredit the last 2 or 3 centuries of philosophy as superstition he gives you an beautiful little maxim for pursuing truth. Court it like a woman! God's shameless. He inserts himself in every little thing. The devil's equally shameless, but not nearly as clever. God winks at you but the devil smiles.

Nietzsche was smart, whatever you say about him, unlike the stupid atheists out there who simply don't get it. You can either accept that there is a omniscient, omnipotent and eternal God who loves and desires his creation, or you can deny it. It's your prerogative, but once you make that choice you have to follow through with it. You have to realize that nothing temporal can make you eternally happy - atheists give up their ability to pursue eternal happiness. It's no different than geometry where if you deny Euclid's "superstitions" you get a whole different set of things. To say that one is better than the other you'd have to accept that all men desire happiness, and apparently that's a difficult jump for some cats. Well, he's German, so I'll have to get back to you after I read it twice more.

---

I feel bad for guys like St. Patrick and St. Valentine that have their feast days taken away from them. Happens to Jesus twice every year! It's not even Valentine's feast day anymore! Stupid world. Well, at least we know God really loves us: I can't think of any other reason he'd truly become man; the same man who strips him from everything they touch.

Obama

This didn't actually happen. But it so could have! Horrible nonsense called music and the "cultured" Barack Obama looks on intelligently. I'm being unfair, but I can just see the scene unfolding. Oh Obama... please avoid socialism.

Facebook Messages

Facebook can become more philosophical than you may think. I exclaimed to a friend, "jazz is dead!" recently (I was the salsa band I felt for a year ago), and he (lets call him, at random, Peter, since it seems like a fitting name) sent me this facebook message:

Nice job @ the dance; don't get too put out by the sheeple who can't dig it; you said that Jazz was dead. I nodded at the time, but it's not true. Jazz is alive, but not because of the musicians. Jazz is a sort of rebellion, from the mainstream, to a talented and beautiful music form. It can never die; it's always there. Sometimes it gets covered up, but it comes from an instinct that can't be muted for long. [besides, you got some extra dough, which is bombdigity, you rugcutter, you.]

I was responding too him (not that it required a response, but facebook is designed for unnecessary fake interaction, so much so that it's almost expected). It would have been unfortionate for the boared passer by or crazed stocker to read that there (not for his sake, but mine. Simply employing proper punctuation draws suspician on facebook... coherent thoughts might really break the levies) so I figured this would be a better venue.

Peter, Music relies on other people. That's where the problem is. On the most basic level this musician/people relationship is really a musician/consumer relationship. But that can easily be gotten around, as many starving musicians of far less inteligence than Peter have done. Music is something that seemingly is better than money to many. I'd agree, but then again I'd rather have The Imitation of Christ than a million dollars, or know how to pray the rosary than know how to make a billion dollars. That is to say I might not be in the majority, but lets move on. Musicians commonly rely on the listener just to feel welcomed or needed. I don't know of many musicians who put in their 10,000 hours to continue playing in their own room. Coffee shops are filled with musicians who want to be listened to. But music even rises above the desire for the assurance of others in some individuals. But even these individuals commonly rely on other musicians to play with. It's much more yes (adjectives like fun, awsome, or even exhilirating don't nearly cut it... yes, though it lacks description for the unknowing should be the right word for the knowing) to play with a group than alone. But then when your piano and bass player show up high you realize that it's not all it's cracked up to be.

Some cats (musicians) come to the realization that music can't make them happy. Music in itself can't make anybody happy: they only way there are truely happy musicians are those who are called by God to be a musician. There are happy janitors: how could you not be a happy janitor if you were doing your work to fulfil God's plan! It takes grace to be a happy musician. Musicians who do it against God's will are miserable. That's why music, drugs, sex and all other sorts of false pleasures (sin) are so often related. Shouldn't suprise us: what do you do when your miserable? You either pray to God and put your happiness in him, or you try to do it all yourself by false means of happiness.

Musicians can't be too smart. I hope there aren't too many musicians reading this. There is another kid at our school, we'll call him Jack, since that is also a random yet fitting name for him. Jack wants to be a musician, and could (he'd have to take it all a bit more seriously, but he's one of those kids who naturally desires seriousness in anything he does) but he's too smart. One day he'll realize it's all fleeting and do something else. He's too smart to be a musician. He'll be able to pursue that path as long as it's benifitial to him, then God will make it miserable to him and he'll still push on thinking he has an obligation to music, but the moment he realizes his obligation is to God he will have to drop it all. He's only able to push out the miserableness because God isn't pouring it down on him (he'll learn discipline and other things from music) and all the happiness music gives him is hiding up what miserableness is inherent in the whole buisness. I'd be laughing at this if I was reading it, since I'm in no uncertain terms saying what God's will is. I speak out of experience, but I wanted to give you the example of Jack, whom you could relate the freshness of enamored musicians to much easier than you could dig through my cynical crustiness and find what once was Jack.

That seemingly has nothing to do with jazz being dead, but it really does. You can't be a happy jazz musician anymore. Firstly the drugs that kept Charlie Parker (whom I think would have been an academic genius) going are gone; you end up in jail much quicker now adays and drug life is far less glamorous or easy than it was. Secondly the crowds are gone. It's exhilirating and assuring to play infront of a huge crowd, or even to have people dance while you play, but that doesn't happen anymore, as we both saw, so the musicians are left without that fleeting desire for others aproval (which really stems from self-love). So what can make the jazz musician happy anymore? Only the grace of God makes them happy. They have to be playing jazz to fulfil God's will.

I've long had a fantasy about becoming a Dominican monk and then starting a jazz group with my fellow brothers and bringing it to the local clubs. We'd play in our friar garb and be the hippest, God centered jazz musicians ever. But God wouldn't allow this if it wasn't right. The jazz would distract me from prayer, or self-mortification or somehow hinder the tools that perfect my soul daily, and I would realize it. My soul would yearn for God and if I tried to fulfill it with jazz music, a jazz that isn't in God, I would continue to yearn. Yearning of the soul makes you miserable.

So, in a longwinded roundabout way, that is (at least in my head-up-in-the-clouds way of looking at it) why jazz really is dead, or at least to us thinking members of society it is. Rather than brood we should think of how good God is! That he only lets us fulfill his will. Jazz is dead was the wrong phrase to use, because that implies a universality. Jazz is dead to me because I can't be happy playing it, which was magnified when God cut off that self-satisfaction of other appreciating what I do (all GLORY be to Him!). To the high musicians you saw on Saturday night, jazz might not be dead, but it's only living on the fleeting happiness that comes from rejection of the Good.

Yes

How cool is Jesus!

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and Him Lord and God."

- C.S. Lewis "Mere Christianity"


A surprising number of authors in Lewis' time used their initials: G.K. Chesterton, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Elliot, H.G. Wells... humans are a weird bunch.

Music is Dead. Microsoft (and BMG) killed it.

Ick. How can we even consider that the future of music? I hope it's all a satire. Even after you get beyond the ridiculous styles, the music just sounds so removed. Well, I suppose "supermaning the hoes" has already made it big. If the general public buys Mr. Tell'Em's work, why wouldn't they buy that.

When did music lose it's humanity!

God's Love

Abecedarius Rex wrote a post about Emily Dicken's poem "I'm Nobody, Who Are You?", but something about what he said left me longing (here's why). Maybe I'm still a rosy eyed youth (i'm not too much farther along than those sophomores), but I think life can be beautiful. There is a God, and He loves us! But that's horribly difficult to say and be taken seriously. My early religious education consisted of "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know" and bewilderment at the shear number of Snickers and banana shaped runts that were in heaven, and I don't think I'm in the minority. You pull the "Jesus loves you" line and it all seems very childish, but that's because nobody bothers to tell you that Jesus loves a sinner!

That's when God's love start to mean things, and that's what Mr. Rex gets exactly right: Jesus loves a sinner. He describes our state as a "vast, abyssal darkness... a gulf so profound and terrifying that it is difficult to express it to anyone else lest they think of you as a freak". Makes sense then that we can't hope for any happiness to arise out of self-reflection, because we really are the nobodies that he articulates. Yet we can find happiness in God. Life isn't "an exile on the blasted plain which is cold, alone, and desperate", because we have God, who's infinite warmth and consolation never leaves us!

There is another step after realizing where it ain't at, and that is realizing where it is at.
Atheism allows man nothing more than Mr. Rex's description of man. What they really do is stop at their own worthlessness. The only reason they can gulp down that prospect is that most deny their own worthlessness. That's foolish, but we can't see through ourselves and stop either; the whole point of seeing through our own existence is to see God.

There are no miserable saints!

The Human Soul

I haven't had any original thoughts lately. I don't think anybody in the modern era can have an original and moral thought. But in my unoriginality, here is another perfect quote:

"How does he [God] manifest himself now?" asked the Savage.
"Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all." [replied Mustapha Mond].

- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

You can't get rid of God: he leaves a hole where he should be, where man wishes he was. People wonder why God doesn't give them concrete, physical reasons to believe, and they are right, he doesn't give that to most people. But he does give us a hole! God is Good, God is Great, God is Excellent!