The final hymn, “Where Restless Crowds Are Thronging,” is being put on the disabled list.  Just for the record, I don’t pull these hymns out of thin air;  they are used to reinforce, or to work with, some other part of the liturgy.  I tried this at home on the piano and … well, it seemed okay.  In the sanctuary, not so much.

To paraphrase an old Broadway quip,

“I came out humming the paraments.”

On the other hand, the  kids were great.  Singing and rhythm.

Silence before the prayer of Confession and silence before the Pastoral Prayer was long and sweet.

Suggestions?  Comments?

Leaders at Davos (Switzerland) could do with some religious instruction.

Actually, this article was making a side argument, that capitalism is the de facto religion of the Western world.

Agreed.  (A-greed?)

Some of the money quotes:

The capitalist economy redefines the sacred in ways that destroy the sanctity of life and land. Capital, which is disembedded from social relations and civic bonds, sunders material objects from their moral meaning and symbolic significance. This also has the effect of separating responsibility from both risk-taking and reward. In the pursuit of wealth, capitalism disconnects getting rich from doing good.

(My italics.)

And:

Faiths enjoin their followers to impose ethical and civic limits on the activity of businesses. The prohibition of gambling and usurious interests rates are not merely matters of private choice but must be applied to global finance in the public interest.

The alternative is not automatically socialism, as any critique of capitalism is countered.  The alternative is limits.

“Limits” is a dirty word in current discourse.  But it seems to me self-evident:  left to its own devices, the pure capitalist/Ayn Rand/Tea Party form of capitalism is rapacious and Darwinian.

(Interesting that many of its proponents do not believe in Darwin.)

Maybe Calvin was on to something.

Whole article here:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2012/jan/26/leaders-at-davos-religious-instruction

Mark’s Jesus is a revolutionary, always hurrying, everything is “immediately” as if he knew he knew the clock was ticking.

Some consolation: the disciples never seem to get it. Identify there.

Some people have left this congregation when I have ventured to connect the political parts of the gospel with real life. It is the third rail.

——
“The Matrix”

Morpheus:
“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system … You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”

There is, the the zeitgeist now, a sense of history repeating itself.

1968 comes to mind:  the streets of Paris filled with student and workers.  Students taking turns sitting in the dean’s chair at Occupied Columbia University.  The August-heat chaos in the streets of Chicago.

And now, today.  Dictator in the Middle East is not a position with a lot of job security.  Students, of a sort — maybe it’s former students with current student loans — are assembling in cities all over the world with a host of accessory characters.  Even celebrities.  (Which is never a good sign for a protest movement.)

As someone said on a radio talk show yesterday:  what took them so long?

That’s something that has crossed my mind as well.  But the thought has always been blunted by this:  I am seeing this from a different perspective.  I am an old man now.

As an old man, I get to say things like this:  I don’t think history repeats itself.  Similarities between today and 1968?  Absolutely.

But differences as well.  The most obvious one is that money has much, much more power than it did forty years ago.

History is more like a boiling stew on the stove.  Eventually, the lid pops off and steam is released.

How much steam?

Who knows.  But it will not be the same reaction as before.  It’s a different stew.

Do I Contradict Myself?

Neil Gabler, in today’s New York Times:

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy.

Not the type of thing I want to think about on vacation.  But it is inescapable.  Sunday morning, on a rare Sunday off, the paper is an luxury I cannot afford to pass up.  And yet, the as the paper trails into the cottage, so does the world.  Or a little bit of it any way.

Very well then, I contradict myself.

Roger Cohen, also from the Times today:

August was once a time for dreaming, wandering the empty streets of this city, reading silly-season newspaper stories after a leisurely lunch washed down with Sancerre, gazing at squares where fountains plashed and the pregnant or the old chatted on benches at dusk. Then something happened.

This morning, the lake is again glass.  There is the random motorboat pulling a water skier.  There is the  occasional conversation that, through the vagaries of acoustics and water, gets transmitted through the dock and ends up on the porch — like a stray radio signal.

I came to the woods to get away from the world.  Is that even possible know?  Are there grooves already worn in our brains that lead us to the trough of information every morning?  We must graze.

London burns.  Fundamentalists are inching eastward, bringing their own brand of national Christianity with them.  Armageddon may be the plains of upstate New York — that already scorched region — as secularists and Christianists finally decide who owns the soul of the country.

I am multitudes.

Today is the still point of this year’s vacation.  It is the middle Saturday in the old-time American two-week vacation.

The lake, as if in harmony, is mirror-still, reflecting sky and shoreline.  There is neither ripple nor riffle.  If I were Peter, I would venture to walk on this surface.

The soundtrack is all natural.  A mother talking to her young child.  The cicadas alternating between crescendo and diminuendo.  Even the laugh of a loon off in the distance.

One day I will remember this moment as perfect.

Being human, I can only try to maintain the balance I know will eventually be lost.