Where Joy Never Enters

I was present at two christenings in the past three weeks, both happy events as christenings should be for very many reasons.  At the first one, in St. John's Church in Hudson, NH, I was close enough to see the little fellow smiling at Father Pierre as he approached to trace the Sign of the Cross on his forehead claiming him for Christ and welcome him into the church.  Father smiled back at him and told all of those in the church what was happening.  There was an audible reaction, joy filled laughter rose all around.  I laughed and smiled myself.  Who could resist?

At my own parish, St. Christopher's here in Nashua, a little girl was christened just last Sunday.  I was in the loft with the choir at that Mass, and didn't get to see things up close.  I did see the baby in her mother's arms, and saw her three little brothers standing close, curious and involved, trying to make sense of what was happening to their sister.  I knew both parents and godparents, and that made the event more of a joy for me.

It was especially pleasing to look down and see a number of other little ones I knew, and whose christenings I had seen from the same lofty perch; to say a prayer for them and their parents and families, and godparents, and to hope the best for them as they "grew in wisdom, age and grace before God and Man."

The christening at St. Christopher's was interrupted for a few minutes when an elderly congregant fainted and an ambulance had to be called to take her to the hospital.  As we waited I prayed she would be all right.  At one point I looked to my side and saw another choir member the mother of four little ones, three boys and a girl just like the family below us, with her head bowed in prayer, too.

The woman is fine, I learned.  The christening proceeded and Mass ended joyfully, the baby going home to her first party.

Since she is a church musician my wife and I are present at a lot of funerals where I help by singing with her.  We both find each of these occasions joyful.  Even in their sadness, I sense the presence of joy and gratitude among family and friends for the gift of the life of their loved one.  Certainly it is a different kind of joy; heavier, alloyed with the grief of parting, complicated by all of the memories of life lived with someone who has gone ahead and waits for us.  This is one of the legitimate reasons for the whole funeral rite, I suspect; to gather all of us who loved someone on the station platform, say goodbye, wish them well and, on the walk along the road we all travel to remember, console and be happy.

I joined Face Book a couple of months ago and after some few days of wondering what it is all about, I concluded that, after some minor complaints about the weather and "your team", it was about letting folks know what makes a person happy, what there is to celebrate in your life, your kid's lives, your school's...or your team's life.  I see a lot of pictures of brand new babies, and not so brand new ones, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, and I read the odd mention of someone remembering a dead relative or spouse. (I'm sorry, I prefer the old word to the knew one "passed".  I always think of gas or footballs when I hear it, and wonder whatever happened to dying.)

But that's probably the fault of the program.  How can one deal with deep sadness, great faults or all of those other minor key problems and emotions which are common to our lot in a mere 524 characters?  It can't be done.  And, there are some truths, some things which we cannot bring ourselves to tell and share, though they are part of the "face" we show to the world; the part in the shadows known only to ourselves, our confessors...and God.  Sometime we hope that God doesn't know and may even manage to convince ourselves He doesn't.

Don't get me wrong, here, I do like knowing all the good things about the people who tell me what is happening with them on my FB page.  It helps me when I come across something that is like a glimpse into a place where joy never enters, a deep blackness, a roaring, a gehenna, that valley where "Moloch made his grove".  There is a book recently published which is a journey through such a place by a young woman, Abby Johnson.  She used to work at a Planned Parenthood facility in Texas, I think.  One day she was asked to assist during an abortion, holding the ultra-sound device on the woman's while the doctor positioned his instrument on the baby to be aborted.

After that experience, she gradually came to the decision that she had to leave.  She concluded it was wrong to do what she did.  It was wrong to inflict pain on babies in the womb and to kill them.  Her book is called "Un-Planned".  It is too long a story for, and too hard a one, its darkness too deep, for a place like Face Book.  The excerpt from the book's first chapter that I read reminded me of something I had read years ago about Dr. Mengele's laboratory at Auschwitz, and his practices on young children.

After he had finished with them, the children he had destroyed were thrown out and burned.

Ms. Johnson's words describe that kind of place, a place where joy never enters, where

 
Who should have been born
Wasn't,
Who should be mourned
Isn't.

Apple Blackens Its Own Eye

They tell The Manhattan Declaration that Christian belief is "objectionable and potentially harmful".  That's why they won't approve an "app" for their stupid iPhone.  So, here's the deal, Christian belief is now on the same level with pornography. As they say in the town where I was born, "I own a Apple thing, I burn it. These jerks are jerks!"  Plus I rell everyone I can to drop apple like a hot potato, stocks, stores, and stuff.  Which I just did.

I don't need to call Steve Jobs, or send him and e-mail. I just need to walk by an Apple store and remember what happened to Jerusalem 2k years ago.

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Pressing-on--Apple-now-calls-Christian-belief--objectionable-and-potentially-harmful-.html?soid=1103431944823&aid=octp_QxRoKM

Happy New Year! Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

It seems....   And that is the mistake we often make, that it merely seems and we believe it to be fact.  Because the truth is completely different, and, as Will Rogers once said, "All we know is what we read in the newspapers."

I hear it said often, and know it is believed by many, that "Islamists" and Jihadists" are only a tiny fraction of the many numbered adherents of the faith founded 1400 or so years ago by the Prophet Muhammed; peace be upon him as the saying goes.  I hear it said further, and know it is believed by many, that the root of all of the Islamic acts of terror across the world is economic and cultural discrimination and exploitation by the West against the East, the North against the South, which really has nothing at all to do with religion.  I hear it said and I wonder about it.  I really do.

Then I read something like this and all of sudden the clarity of truth breaks through my wondering fog.

There is a woman in Pakistan under sentence of death by stoning for doing or saying something she is accused of doing or saying by some other women who would not even drink water from a bowl she had put to her lips; simply because she is not a co-religionist.  She is condemned for the same crime which caused the death of Christ.  She dares to call herself the child of God, and dares to say that God loves us all as His children.  She seems to be the proximate cause of the current roiling, though with things in that part of the world one ever wonders if any cause is needed for their insanities.  Let the Pope pray for her.

You will read that in Pakistan no one has yet been executed for saying or doing such a thing as blaspheming Islam.  Some have been jailed, scores have been lynched, hundreds beaten, thousands bullied, intimidated, made to live in fear.  But none have been executed.  I suppose that is merely a matter of timing and the diligence of the competent authorities; neighbors being more alert to pro-active measures there; ordinary folks saving the government the trouble and expense of trial and execution.  At the least their sense of civic duty is to be commended.

But, Pakistan is a special case, you may argue.  This is true.  It has a "Blasphemy Law" on the books, and while I write there are minorities, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, who are agitating for its repeal.  What is also true is that the law itself was simply a device to keep a dictator in power, a crumb thrown to the few "islamists" who held the balance some years ago.  The point is a valid one, but the question which needs asking is why were the fundamentalists in such a position then?  What has happened since?

But do not bother yourself with Pakistan.  Think rather of Turkey, long a "secular" nation, though more than 99 percent of its population is Muslim.  It is slowly being turned into a state which will be almost indistinguishable from Iran.  The persecution of religious minorities, and they are almost exclusively Christian in Turkey, though they number almost nothing, is becoming a commonplace.  Murders and beatings are common.  Curtailment of religious activity and intimidation are allowed by the police.

Of course such things do not make headlines here.  We long ago grew tired of hearing about them.  It takes a cartoon in a Danish newspaper, the assassination of a film maker in Holland to make us get up and go to the window to pay attention to the noise in the street.  And then?  And then we have the weather to pay attention to, and what we are to do about traffic.  Those people, it seems, will always do those things to each other.  Haven't they been for centuries about the same business?

Of what interest are the lives of a few hundred, a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand people half a world a way to us?  That churches are burned and blown up, people machine gunned at Mass, taken from their homes and beaten to death, torched in the street by their neighbors, that ministers and priests, nuns and children are gunned down while the police stand by, that authorities sit on folded hands cannot persuade us that what we have been told is, is not.  Besides, there is the Super Bowl.  In Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Bangla Desh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and so many other places, if these things happen it has nothing to do with religion.  It is merely a matter of centuries of Western exploitation, and excusable for that very reason.  Let the Pope pray for them.

The distance between the minds that produce that "explanation" and what often happens here is short and straight.  Consider this:  an ad which would get you killed in Pakistan if it was about Islam, or this, another ad from the same producers, whose ignorance of and contempt for Christianity is staggering.  Many are hurt and angry at such things.  None seek the death of the makers.  Some will sputter, some will pray, some will promise never to use what they are promoting in their ads.  How does this happen?

I am led to stop wondering, even, about that. Finally, what I no longer wonder too much about is the gradual decline into the shadows of the one thing which has been responsible for the freedoms under which such contempt is allowable, the very Christianity which is mocked.  Millions have orphaned themselves, here, laughing in their comfortable ignorance.  Well, they might say mockingly, "Let the pope pray for us."  For it seems that such things matter no more, if ever they did to the agile minds producing Super Bowl ads, and ignoring the deaths of thosands.

The blood of the murdered, the martyred thousands, waters the fields, their bodies the fertile ground in which the seed grows.  Let the people pray.  Amen.