My Christmas Presents to You

Last updated on: December 18, 2021 at 7:55 pm By Gene Veith

Readers, in gratitude for your coming to this blog over the past year, I’d like to give you some Christmas gifts. I did much of my shopping online, and these particular gifts will stay online, little things I’ve found that you might enjoy and find edifying.

First, here is my Christmas card. It’s a contemporary painting of Mary showing her Baby to the shepherds and wise men, a different take on the subject filled with joy and great expressions. The painting, entitled “Nativity” by Carol Aust, is accompanied by a discussion of the work by Laurel Gasque, who not only unpacks the painting but meditates on what it means.

(1) Coming across that work introduced me to the first present I want to give you. The site that the “Nativity” is on is called ArtWay. It’s run by some Dutch Christians associated with the late evangelical art critic Hans Rookmaaker. The scope of the site, though, is international and ecumenical, but, from what I can tell, orthodox. My gift, should you decide to accept it, is this: Every Sunday ArtWay will send you a free Visual Meditation much like the “Nativity” painting and its commentary, featuring the work of a Christian artist old or new. To sign up for this gift that will keep on giving throughout the year, click here.

(2) Also, I don’t know if you like to receive presents from your friends’ children to put up on your refrigerator but this is of a different order entirely. My daughter Mary Moerbe has a website called Meet, Write, and Salutary (get it?), which features Lutheran writers–conversations by and about them, lists of writers you may want to follow, and reviews of their books. She gives away a ton of free resources. She also has another website that some of you will find very helpful, Lutheran Homeschool Marketplace & Press, which also offers lots of resources for you homeschooling families, many of which are free and others of which are worth the price.

(3) A gift of a different kind is a movie: The Shootist. This was John Wayne’s last movie, made in 1976 when the Duke was 69 and in bad health, three years before he died. And it features a constellation of other megastars near their end–Lauren Bacall and Jimmy Stewart–as well as lesser-but-still-wonderful lights like Richard Boone, Hugh O’Brian, Harry Morgan, and John Carradine. And one up-and-comer, the young Ron Howard.

John Wayne plays an old gunfighter who is dying of cancer. We witness the country doctor, played by Stewart, breaking the news and see how the hero takes it. (Wayne would say that he had already had that conversation with his doctor in real life.) He checks into a boarding house, run by Bacall, for his last days. The problem is, other younger gunfighters want to fight him to put a prestigious notch on their guns. And the landlady’s son, played by Howard, wants to grow up to be a killer like him. Meanwhile, the John Wayne character is taking stock of his violent life and his imminent death.

I am in awe of this movie. The actors may be at the end of their careers, but they are at the top of their craft and their performances are stunning. And young Howard, between Opie and Richie Cunningham and long before his directing career, won himself a Golden Globe nomination for this part, which turns into far more than we expect. And despite the theme of aging, death, and farewell to the genre of the Western, the story, far from depressing, is gripping and exciting, with a brilliant double-twist at the end.

When we watched this a few months ago, it was streaming on a free channel via Amazon Prime, but I see that’s it not available now. The companies must have realized what they had. Now it’s free if you have Hulu, but you can rent it for $2.99. So I guess what I’m giving you is not a movie, as I wanted, but a suggestion for a movie.

(4) Social Media and search engines are having trouble distinguishing between a satirical story and actual news–I got an Onion story on my Google News feed a few days ago–but that’s OK because sometimes I can’t either, so absurd our times have become. At any rate, I give you the Gift of Satire: Lutheran Satire, Babylon Bee, The Onion.

(5) This is one you probably already have, but that’s traditional in Christmas gift giving too. But, if not, you should read, mark, and inwardly digest it : Bible Gateway. It has some 200 translations of the Bible in 70 languages, including the original Greek and Hebrew. You can easily search it by word, verse, chapter, topic, or just about any way you like. You can also compare how different translations render a text. And you can copy and paste passages, making this an ideal resource for pastors, teachers, writers, or other students of the Bible, as we all should be.

Finally, you can also have the presents I gave you in 2019, which are still available. Feel free to regift.

So have a happy Night Before Christmas and a joyous celebration of our Savior’s birth! He is the gift that all of our other gifts symbolize!

Image by anaterate via Pixabay

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The Mystery of Tom Bombadil

Last updated on: October 14, 2021 at 8:52 am By Gene Veith

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One of the puzzles in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings sagas is who–or what–is Tom Bombadil?

The jovial forest-dweller is a “merry fellow” who lives in a homey, cozy cabin similar to that of hobbits, but he has immense power. He makes short work of barrow-wrights and Old Man Willow, and, mysteriously, the Ring of Power has no power over him. Instead of hiding it as he usually does, Frodo feels like giving it to him. And when he slips it on, he doesn’t disappear!

Who is this guy? He isn’t an elf or a dwarf or a human or a hobbit or a wizard. He is too earthy to be an Ainur or a Valar or one of the other spiritual beings in the Silmarillion.

Tolkien wrote a poem about him, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but he doesn’t discuss him in the Silmarillion. Peter Jackson didn’t so much as include him in his movie versions of Tolkien’s tales.

My wife Jackie once went to a conference where she met Christopher Tolkien, the son of the great fantasy author who edited and published many of his father’s manuscripts. She asked him where Tom Bombadil fit into the Middle Earth universe. The younger Tolkien said that this is an excellent question, but that he didn’t really know. UPDATE: My wife informs that I got this wrong. She did meet Christopher Tolkien, but didn’t ask him this. She asked Clyde Kilby, who worked with both Tolkien and Lewis, and got this answer.

Some critics, picking up on a hint from Tolkien, said that he was some kind of spirit of a place. But that hardly explains his power. Some critics pick up on his wife Goldberry’s answer when Frodo asked her about him: “He is.” That sounds like how God identifies Himself to Moses–“I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14)– so they maintain that Tom represents God. But Tolkien dismissed that interpretation. After all, Tom is described as being basically indifferent to the intrigues of Middle Earth, and at the Council of Elrond when someone solving the problem of the Ring by giving it to Bombadil, Gandalf says that he would be so uninterested in the thing that he would probably just misplace it. That’s not how God would be.

But I just came across a post from a fan at GameRant that offers the best explanation that I have come across. From Melissa C., Who Is Tom Bombadil And What Is His Significance In LOTR?:

Tom Bombadil’s exact age is not known, but it is said he existed since sometime before the first Dark Lord (Melkor) rose to power. His exact race is not known, and he remains mysterious—although with some apparent magical and spiritual abilities. Tom Bombadil lived with his wife, Goldberry, just east of the Shire in the Old Forest. He has a few titles, like The First and Eldest. In the book, Tom even states that he “was here before the river and the trees” and he “remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn,” suggesting he may have been the very first creature to live in Middle Earth (along with Treebeard, though Tom was first). Being so old and in seemingly good health, Tom Bombadil is an enigma. In addition to being the first living creature to exist in Middle Earth, Tom may also be the first creature in all of Arda—or the world. . . .

Each race gave Tom Bombadil a different name, but the name given by the Elves—Iarwain Ben-adar, which meant Oldest and Fatherless in Elven—says a lot.

So Tom Bombadil would be the equivalent of Adam! Not the father of all living, since, unlike our world, Middle Earth has many kinds of intelligent beings. Imagine what an unfallen Adam would be like! If he hadn’t sinned, he would not die. His dominion over the natural order would be complete. As age after age passed away for him, he would be unlikely to care too much about the transitory affairs of the rest of us.

His literary creator did say one more thing about him that is important: “Even in a mythical Age,” he wrote in a letter, “there must be some enigmas, as there always are. Tom Bombadil is one (intentionally)”.

In his imaginary sub-creation, Tolkien does not make everything cut and dry, creating a closed rational system. Rather, he stimulates our imagination by deliberately building in enigmas–mysteries–which add to our sense of wonder.

And so it is in our real world.

Image from Amazon.com

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Black Americans Discover Classical Education (part I)

Last updated on: September 25, 2021 at 1:23 pm By Gene Veith

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Black Americans are the biggest casualties of today’s progressive education establishment. And it’s getting worse.

Progressive educators are now jettisoning honors programs, academic standards, and reading and math requirements, all of which are being said to promote “white supremacy.” As if black kids can’t be good students, can’t get good grades, can’t learn to read, and can’t do math.

It has gotten to the point that, as we blogged about (see this and this), new mathematics programs are saying that the goal of “getting the right answer” is white supremacist. Tell that to the black women featured in the true-life movie Hidden Figures who did the calculations for NASA in those pre-computer days that made the Mercury space program possible.

Many black parents are correctly recognizing these low expectations on the part of mostly white liberal educational theorists to be racist. They want their children to get a good education, but the public schools, having failed to provide it, are now saying that doing so is impossible. Black parents want an alternative. And they are finding it in classical education.

After all, classical education is built around the “liberal arts,” a term that refers not to a political position but to the Latin word for “freedom,” the same root that gives us “liberty” and “liberating.” This approach to education goes back to the ancient world and its two different educational paths: “servile” education, consisting solely of occupational training, was provided for slaves. But free citizens of the Greek democracies and the Roman republic were given a “liberal” education designed to equip them for freedom, political participation, leadership, civic virtues, logical analysis, effective communication, and creativity.

That distinction is why the radical early Black leader W. E. B. Du Bois opposed plans to give the freed slaves merely occupational training. He insisted that they needed liberal education, as provided by classical schools and colleges. They needed an education that would be liberating.

I came across two articles on how black Americans are rediscovering the relevance for them of classical education and are taking advantage of the new classical schools and homeschools.

In fact, even some white liberals are rediscovering classical education. The left-leaning Catholic magazine America has published an excellent article by Jeremy Tate entitled In Defense of a Classical Education. Read it all, but here is a sample:

For many, the mention of classical education evokes images of elitist New England boarding schools where for decades all-white graduating classes would matriculate to the Ivy League and go from there to control the levers of political and economic power. This image—classical education as a fine veneer to cover racial snobbery and entrenched power—has frequently dampened people’s enthusiasm for a 21st-century revival in classical education, or even provoked opposition to it.

But there is another story to tell. Visitors to Frederick Douglass’s home in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C. discover a bust of Cicero in the parlor, and his autobiography includes a treatise on the influence of ancient philosophers. W. E. B. Du Bois casually drops allusions to Greek mythology and passages of medieval poetry into his discussion of the failures of Reconstruction. Anna Julia Cooper constructs her argument for Black women’s education with examples drawn from the history of classical Athens and the feminine luminaries of the Renaissance.

What is it that these bold activists saw in this tradition of culture and education to lay hold of? Were they wrong? I don’t believe they were.

It would be foolish to pretend that classical education has never been a pretext for arrogance and hypocrisy. But abandoning the tradition would still be a bad choice, even if there were nothing more to say about classical education than that. It is not just a coincidence that so many civil rights activists have had a classical background. This kind of education opens us up to the riches of our civilization, and inspires people to see both the higher values (including virtues like prudence and temperance) and possibilities of the world, and devote themselves to the hard, creative work of realizing those possibilities.

The elite boarding schools of both the United States and the United Kingdom, favored by those who could afford the very best education for their children that money could buy, employed a classical curriculum. If that is “elitist,” the solution is not to do away with it, but to extend this “elite” education to everybody else, to ordinary Americans of all races, economic levels, and walks of life.

The article goes on to show the impact of classical education on black activists and the civil rights movement, with in depth attention to Martin Luther King, Jr. I love this paragraph:

To dismiss classic literature as “dead white guys” does a great disservice not only to the books themselves (many of whose authors, like Dr. King or St. Augustine or Mary Shelley, were not white or guys), but to young people we are trying to educate. Everyone has a right to this material. The novelist Saul Bellow once asked “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” The journalist Ralph Wiley replied, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” Tolstoy is not the exclusive property of Russia: He is, in the old sense of the word, catholic.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.” He belongs to all humanity, and he expresses a reality that all human beings–despite any differences of culture, time, or race–can share and learn from.

In fact, the truth that we are all members of a common humanity is exactly what we need to recover in order to combat racism and national polarization.

Classical education conveys that truth, as opposed to the contrary ideologies that teach that racial division is inevitable and that all of our diverse groups, instead of enhancing our humanity, are simply trying to oppress each other.

Next time: Black parents and their children who have gone classical.

Photo: W. E. B. Du Bois by Cornelius Marion Battey – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs divisionunder the digital ID cph.3a53178. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1657440

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“The Church Must Keep Up with the Times”

Last updated on: July 24, 2021 at 3:23 pm By Gene Veith

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I came across this bit from a discussion of whether it was right for a conservative student group to ban a conservative porn star who wanted to participate:

There’s a scene in Mel Brooks’s 1970 movie The Twelve Chairs, which is set in the Soviet Union in 1927, in which a Russian Orthodox priest played by Dom DeLuise expresses sympathy for communism in a fight with another character. His interlocutor asks him how he, as a priest, could be a Communist Party member since atheism is a requirement for membership. DeLuise shrugs and replies, “The church must keep up with the times.”

I thought of this too in the controversy among Catholics, with Pope Francis essentially banning the traditional Latin mass. The big convocation in the 1960s known as Vatican II sought to make the church “keep up with the times.” So they jettisoned old identify-forming traditions like abstaining from meat on Fridays and installed a new mass that was not only in the vernacular–something we Reformation types would certainly support–but also made it possible to tone down the mystery by incorporating contemporary Christian music and a host of informalities. The post-Vatican II mass can still be reverent–there is even a Latin version–but in many parishes it comes across as far too casual, with 1960s-Peter-Paul-and-Mary style guitar music (not referring to the saints of those names but to the folk singers) and trying-too-hard attempts to be up to date.

(One problem with trying to “keep up with the times” is that, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, the times they are always changing. By the time one style of “contemporary” music gets incorporated into a church service, it will have gone out of fashion. There is nothing that seems more outdated than yesterday’s fashion, especially when older adults try to do it. This is why, when the church tries to be contemporary, it is generally a step or two behind and thus comes across as old-fashioned.)

So some Catholics pushed for a return to the old Tridentine Latin mass (named for the council that launched the counter-Reformation), with all of its genuflections, prostrations, incense, rituals, and symbolism, and Pope Benedict XVI gave them permission to do so. The return of the old mass, in parishes that chose to go that route–at least for some services–did attract die-hard traditionalists, including those who disapprove of Pope Francis, but it also attracted young people, who were captivated by how different it was from the pop culture they were used to and yearned to escape from. This kind of worship seemed to them to be mysterious, transcendent, and holy.

But now Pope Francis, who is interested in modernizing the church, has reversed his predecessor’s permission. In the name of church unity, he says, we need to go back to the vernacular, contemporized mass. We must keep up with the times even when the times want to go back to something better.

Lutheran that I am, I don’t mean to defend the mass, whether traditional or modern, which is shot through with theological errors. But we too have had our worship wars between those who want the traditional Lutheran liturgy–a form of the mass purged of its errors, but keeping the structure, the set-pieces, and the chanting–and those who want a more contemporary service, similar to those of evangelical megachurches. There are also those in between, who blend some contemporary elements and contemporary music into the liturgical structure. The debates were fierce a few decades ago, but my impression is that the worship wars among Lutherans have died down.

Our confessions actually allow for variations in “ceremony.” The main issue for Lutherans is doctrinal unity. And this is where the desire to “keep up with the times” is most caustic to Christianity.

The notion that the church should keep up with the times is perhaps the best definition of liberal theology. The idea is that for the church to be relevant, it must change its teachings to accord with the beliefs of the day. Thus, liberal theology has championed at various times, the social gospel of 19th century progressivism, New Deal liberalism, Marxist liberation theology, and now post-Marxist critical race-sex-gender theory; also, enlightenment rationalism, romantic emotionalism, civil religion, existentialism, feminism, queer theory, etc., etc. Also psychology, the self-esteem movement, encounter groups, New Age, and becoming “woke.” Paradoxically, just about every secularist idea can be found in churches; that is, among liberal theologians and the mainline Protestant–and liberal Catholic–churches they call home.

In fact, some liberal theologians have made a reality of what Mel Brooks intended as a joke, actually adopting what they call “Christian atheism”!

So in what sense should Christians “keep up with the times”? The Bible commends the men of the tribe of Issachar, “who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do” ( 1 Chronicles 12:32). I think that Christians should try to keep abreast of what is happening–the news, the new ideas, emerging worldviews, and contemporary issues. Not only because of their vocations of citizenship but because awareness of “the times” can help them from being unduly influenced and can identify areas that call for a Christian response. Orthodox theologians should follow the new trends in their field, not to adopt them, necessarily, but to answer them. And “the times” might also bring up trends, ideas, and technologies that Christians can put to good use.

How else might Christians keep up with the times without selling out to the times? Are there some lines that can be drawn between accommodations that are acceptable and those that aren’t?

Photo: The Tridentine Latin Mass by the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, available from http://fssp.org., Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons

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Cultural Suicide

Last updated on: July 30, 2020 at 3:26 pm By Gene Veith

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There have been lots of cultures and civilizations that no longer exist. The ancient Greeks. The ancient Romans. The Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians. The Egyptians and Kushites. The Ottoman, Mongol, and Maurya Empires. The Aztecs and Incas.

What happened to them? Some were defeated by other military powers, though other kinds of weakness often led to those defeats. Some of them fell due to what some historians call “social cannibalism.” That is, they turned against themselves. That is, they committed cultural suicide.

Victor Davis Hanson, who is not only a popular columnist but a professor of ancient history, fears something like that is happening to American culture and American civilization today. (Note: “Culture” refers to the organic values and customs of the people. “Civilization” refers to the accomplishments–the art, ideas, inventions, and government–of the culture.)

From Our Summer of Cultural Suicide:

Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why things suddenly just quit.

Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions, and cultures simply died off.

Their common explanation was that the arrogance of success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant, they feel exempt from their ancestors’ respect for moral and spiritual laws — such as the need for thrift, moderation, and transcendence.

Hanson then examines what has happened to three of our cultural and civilizational institutions: sports, film, and education.

Sports, he says, has been one of those interests that unite Americans, apart from their politics or ideologies. Now, the millionaire professional athletes will be allowed to stage national anthem protests and to include political statements on their helmets and jerseys. “They will virtue-signal their moral superiority to increasingly turned-off fans — as if to make sure that their sources of support flee.”

The great American art form of movies is in a state of creative decline and stagnation (something that could be said, I would add, of all of the arts). “Hollywood counts on bringing comic books to the big screen, or on making poor remakes of old classics. When directors try to make a serious new movie, the result is often the monotony and boredom of thinly veiled woke propaganda,” Hanson writes. “And will viewers seek out theaters for more lectures from beautiful multimillionaires on their racist, sexist, homophobic country?”

Most to blame for our cultural suicide, though, is our educational establishment. Instead of passing on our cultural and civilizational heritage, our schools and universities have been trashing that heritage, teaching students to despise it, while keeping them ignorant of what it is. A civilization that hates itself and a culture that thinks its own customs, values, and traditions are evil and not worth continuing has committed suicide.

Those are my thoughts. Hanson delves into the self-destructive corruption that is bringing on institutional suicide. Universities, he says, shot up in status, putting out the notion that every successful American needs a bachelor’s degree. “But soon, $1.6 trillion in aggregate student-loan debt, lightweight and trendy curricula, ideological hectoring, administrative bloat, reduced teaching loads, poor placement of graduates, and the suspension of the Bill of Rights on campus began turning off students as well as the public.”

Because the schools, for all of their self-congratulations, are doing such a poor job of educating students, they are graduating adults who don’t know what they need to conserve, being unable to tell the difference between racist and anti-racist monuments and destroying them both, remaining ignorant of and unable to respond to beauty, truth, and goodness, and having been made intellectually stunted so that they cannot think through the important issues of our time.

What a culture or civilization does not pass down to the next generation is lost. It ceases to exist. That is how a society commits cultural suicide.

Nathan Stone shows the depth of our cultural problem in his article Civilizational Confidence Is The Key To Preserving And Restoring America. The issue, he says, is not just the critics of American civilization. He cites evidence that ordinary Americans have lost confidence in the ideas, values, and symbols of their own civilization. The critics, though, have lots of confidence in theirs. Though they are a minority, their ideology is prevailing, since few people in the majority have the cultural confidence to stand up to them. The newly-found confidence of the hard left–which had been demoralized itself in the aftermath of the Cold War–heralds the emergence of a very different kind of society, one that is totalitarian, collectivist, and opposed to individual liberty, once our civilization has killed itself off.

Photo By: Gloria Hol via U.S. Army Reserve Photo Gallery, public domain

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My Christmas Gifts to You

Last updated on: December 24, 2019 at 8:24 am By Gene Veith

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I wanted to give all of you readers, who have brought this blog to such heights, a Christmas present. I could have ordered you something online, but there are thousands of you and my budget is already strained after buying presents for my numerous grandchildren. Also, I don’t know your size.

So, since blogs are part of our new information technology, I am giving you information by means of that technology, information that you probably will not know about otherwise, which will give you substantial, significant pleasure and satisfaction throughout the year.

These gifts are (1) works of art–which is what highly comical cartoons are–from a new website; (2) a highly comical television show that you can stream for free; (3) a highly non-comical forgotten literary masterpiece that you can download for $0.00.

I wrap them in explanations.

Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” Is Back, but Online

Everyone who remembers Gary Larson’s zany, faintly-disturbing universe has favorite “Far Side” cartoons. I think of the one showing the blessed dead going up an escalator to Heaven as an angel hands them a harp, while a devil hands those going down to the other place an accordion. Also the one about the farm that raises boneless chickens.

Larson’s cartoons were on the comics pages of newspapers across the country between 1980 and 1995, when he retired. But now, as of last week, the 69-year-old humorist and artist is back. Not to newspapers–many of which have shut down–but to the internet, which, Larson says, now has the capacity of rendering high-quality visual images that can faithfully reproduce his drawings. On his new website, The Far Side, you can see some of his hilarious collections, take a look at his sketchbooks in which he has developed his ideas, and buy his books. It also has a feature known as the “Daily Dose,” which gives you a fresh cartoon every day, like we had when newspapers existed. These so far are taken from his 15-year body of work. But, what I am really excited about, in 2020, he will include new stuff!

Read this story about Larson and his comeback. To access your present, go here. Then bookmark the site and make it part of your daily internet regimen, along with the Cranach blog, of course.

Oh, and Gary Larson is listed as a Famous Lutheran, whatever that means.

Corner Gas, the Free Streamable Small Town Comedy

Some relatives put us onto Corner Gas, a half-hour Canadian comedy that we now watch at the end of our TV binges of British murder mysteries, historical dramas, and other heavy stuff, a way to cleanse our palates with something light and hilarious to put us in a good mood before going to bed.

Think Seinfeld, except instead of New York City, it’s set in fictional town of Dog River, Saskatchewan, population 500, on the flat empty prairie, as they say, 40 kilometers from nowhere. The main characters are the comic-book loving Brent, who runs the corner gas station; his elderly parents, the cantankerous Oscar and the formidable Emma; his employee, the over-educated Wanda; his goofball friend Hank; Lacey, who moved in from Toronto after inheriting the local diner; and the local police force, Davis and Karen, who don’t have much to do, since there is hardly any crime in Dog River.

Hilarity ensues. For example, there was the one about Lacey trying to bring the local food movement to Dog River through her diner. The customers were outraged, insisting that they wanted food made in a factory. She offers a chili special, featuring local, grass-fed beef. Whereupon everyone realizes that the beloved local cow isn’t there anymore. No one wants to eat the cow (I forget her name), except for Oscar ,who felt the cow had insulted him, so he eats all the chili he can to get revenge. Also, the cow, in the field just outside of town, had been a landmark for truck drivers, who learned to turn left at the cow to get to Dog River. Now the outside world can’t find the place.

Then there was the Christmas episode, in which Brent’s his parents threw out the shiny aluminum Christmas tree and got a real one. But Brent gets upset because he wants a “traditional Christmas.” “We had that artificial tree since 1974!” His mother gives him a taste of her homemade cranberry sauce, and that also sets him off. “Cranberry sauce is supposed to come out of a can! With a big plop!” This crystallized for me something that I had observed in the worship controversies, that for lots of young adults, contemporary worship styles is all they have ever been exposed to. Contemporary worship is their traditional worship. And when they experience liturgical worship, they are excited because it feels brand new!

Not that Corner Gas usually takes on religious themes. The closest it came was when Lacey tried to start a Pilates class, but no one would come because it was named after the man who killed Jesus. But there is hardly anything objectionable. The satire is gentle, the stories stay away from sex (except for an occasional mild innuendo), and there is little bad language (except for Oscar calling everybody “Jackass!”).

The series isn’t really making fun of small town rural life, as if city life were any better. It isn’t condescending or mocking. Rural small towns are celebrated, in a way. The key to the show is the theme song, which has these lines:

You think there’s not a lot going on.

Look closer, baby, you’re so wrong.

That’s why you can stay so long,

Where there’s not a lot going on.

I’m learning this every day where we now live, in small town Oklahoma. There is just as much human drama here as anywhere else. “Look closer.”

The other good thing about Corner Gas in the new era of streaming on-demand-TV is that it’s nearly inexhaustible. The show, which ran from 2004 to 2009, has 107 episodes! You can’t just binge-watch it in an evening and it’s over. You can watch as much as you want, and there is always more! After watching those 107 episodes, there is also now an animated version–which is even edgier (the locavore episode I told you about is from the animated show)–that is still going on! There is also a movie!

The show was extremely popular in Canada. There were some U.S. showings on WGN and Comedy Central, and yet I had never heard of it. Today you can watch it for free on Prime Video via the free streaming service IMBd TV. (On a smart TV, if you have Amazon Prime, go to that app, then search for Corner Gas. It will take you to the episodes on IMBd, which are shown with a few commercials. If you don’t have Prime, I think that you can still get the IMBd app.)

Night-Thoughts and the Literature of Christian Melancholy

Lest you think those first two gifts are too frivolous, too humorous for these depressing times and your gloomy mood, my final present will strike a different chord. It’s a book–which you can get for free–that has been hailed as a literary masterpiece, which does something you almost never see today: delving into the depths of melancholy and finding the Christian faith.

In the course of just a few years, Edward Young (1683-1765) lost his wife, his daughter, and his son-in-law. After his wife’s death, Young was overwhelmed with sorrow. And, among his other torments, he couldn’t sleep. He began writing a series of poems about the night in which he explored the darkness not only in the world but in his heart.

Night-Thoughts, published between 1742 and 1745, are meditations on death, life, love, suffering, time, injustice, society, nature, the soul. And God. Young plunged into the depths of darkness, but he was a Christian. Strangely, by what we are used to, his suffering and the suffering he chronicles in the world do not make him question God’s existence; nor is he writing a Job-like lament, asking God why He is doing all of this to him. All of this darkness does not cause him to doubt God. Rather, it causes him to doubt the world.

Yes, your dreams are going to be dashed. Yes, the ones you love will die. Everything changes. Life is beautiful, but it doesn’t last. The world will disappoint you. But this is because this world is not your home. You cannot be satisfied here because your soul is immortal. The only light in the darkness is the light of Christ. I suspect that one of the imaginative sources for C. S. Lewis’s Great Divorce was Young–whose work Lewis certainly would have known–when he wrote,

All, all on earth, is shadow, all beyond

Is substance; the reverse is Folly’s creed:

How solid all, where change shall be no more! (Night I, lines 20-22)

But none of this is just an intellectual exercise. Young’s poem is known for its evocative descriptions and melancholy musings. But it is also known for its passages of rapturous communion with God.

This is a daunting poem, especially for modern readers. It is long, consisting of some 10,000 of lines of blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), divided into nine separate “nights.” The language is elevated. The poem employs personifications of abstract qualities (such as night coming from her ebon throne), pseudo-classical names for actual people (such as the “infidel” Lorenzo, based apparently on his wastrel son), and a high-flown rhetoric that often seems over the top to those of us in this informal age. The poem is uneven, with passages of tedium relieved by utter brilliance.

Young’s style is basically that of Milton, whom he is constantly referencing (“fast by the throne of God”). The effect on Milton fans like me is to be reminded of the subject of “Paradise Lost”–the Fall–on Young’s every page. But instead of writing epic verse about great events, such as Biblical history, Young is pioneering the “subjective epic,” writing epic verse about a journey into himself and the combat of the soul.

As alien as Young’s poem seems today, it was enormously popular and enormously influential in both the 1700s and the 1800s. Enlightenment-era rationalists and neo-classicists loved it, having a big impact on Sir Edmund Burke and with Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell calling Night-Thoughts “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced.” But the Romantics of the next century, who you would think would have a quite different sensibility, also loved it greatly. It was especially influential in Germany, especially with Goethe. And it was an important book for J. G. Hamann, whom I’m studying right now.

And yet today, Night-Thoughts has been virtually–if not completely–forgotten. I have a Ph.D. in English literature and I had never read it, except for some brief excerpts in an 18th century class. It has taken my work on Hamann to make me seek it out. And just as he has perspectives that can help us post-moderns recover Christianity, the same might be said of Young. Our approach to suffering is to medicalize it, seeing melancholy feelings a disease we need to cure or a pain that we need to find a remedy for. (“Stop feeling like that!” “Cheer up!”) And as we have blogged about, some people today are saying that any kind of suffering makes life not worth living. Our recent ancestors would find that attitude absurd, if not contemptible. My impression, not just based on Edward Young but on many other writers from earlier times, is that people back then–who, as a whole, probably suffered more than we do–did not flee from their sorrow, but rather drank it to the dregs, often learning something from the process.

At any rate, Night-Thoughts is available as a Kindle download at Amazon for free. Go here. You can also read it online here.

Feel free to regift these presents to your friends and family. If you don’t like them, you can exchange them for other free websites, streaming videos, and e-books. But these may give you jolts of pleasure and satisfaction all through the year and beyond. They may be some of the best presents you are going to get!

So, Merry Christmas, everybody!

Image by monicore from Pixabay

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