Sunday morning music

This morning's article is an unusual combination.  I'm going to introduce you to a song, then talk at some length about its very profound meaning for me.  Call it an extended meditation on God, life, the universe and everything, if you will.

A couple of weeks ago I happened upon an album released in 1999 by country and bluegrass musician Ricky Skaggs, titled "Soldier of the Cross".

I'm not a big fan of either music genre, and I don't normally bother with "commercial" Christian music, but somehow I felt led to click through to a couple of the tracks and listen for a few moments.

One of them was titled "Seven Hillsides", composed by Texas native Walt Wilkins.  It describes the dilemma of a preacher who's to deliver memorial services at the graves of seven soldiers, killed in action overseas.  How is he to comfort their families, particularly their mothers?  How is he to make sense of their deaths in the context of the Christian message?  Since that's something I've had to do for myself, first from the perspective of my own faith, and then for others as a pastor and chaplain, you'll understand that this song struck me very powerfully indeed.

Walt Wilkins has recorded this song himself, on his 2001 album "Rivertown".

However, Mr. Wilkins has said he loves Ricky Skaggs' version of the song, and who am I to argue with the songwriter?  Before I go on, let's listen to it.

As a pastor, I can assure you that's a very good description of the moral and spiritual dilemma we face every time we have to do something like this.  How can we make sense of tragedy and loss in the context of our faith?  To me, it's blasphemous to suggest that everything that happens is God's will.  I refuse to believe that God points at someone and says, "I'm going to kill you now, to see how your family copes with your death, and test their faith!"  That's not the God I've come to know over the years.  Rather, I recall that God never once promised us a life of wine and roses, or milk and honey, or whatever.  Instead, he promised us grace to cope with life, whatever it throws at us.  In my experience, he keeps that promise - if we're prepared to accept his grace on his terms.

Regular readers will know the background to my faith, and how it's been formed and tested over the years.  I make no claim to be some sort of Christian hero - I'm anything but.  I've made more than my fair share of mistakes, and committed far more than my fair share of sins.  I fear God's justice when I face his judgment for my life - almost as much as I hope in his mercy, which is the only thing that will save any of us.  Nevertheless, as best I can, I try to live what I've come to believe through my experiences.

For those of you who aren't familiar with my background, here are a few blog articles I've written over the years, in chronological order.

Remembering Mike

The night Christmas became real

My heroes

For context on South Africa and events there during those years, see my articles "Remembering Inyati" and "Was apartheid South Africa really that bad?"

My faith grew out of those experiences, and remains formed by them to this day.  I try to express it in the pages of this blog, particularly when writing about modern tragedies such as terrorism and war.  However, a lot of people who haven't seen such destruction at first hand seem to approach such issues with a much simpler, black-and-white perspective that doesn't allow much in the way of "gray areas", where ethics, morality, attitudes and actions are less clear-cut and more complicated.  Far too many people seem to see the world - they prefer to see the world - in terms of "us" and "them":  and we're all right, and they're all wrong, because that's the way it is.

That attitude is the cause of so much death and destruction that it's almost impossible to tabulate.  I've seen it in more than one war zone in sub-Saharan Africa, and I'm seeing it now in these dis-United States.  I wrote about it at some length after the Paris terror attacks of 2015, in an article titled "Paris and the pain of being human".  I meant every word I wrote there;  but my words clearly didn't satisfy many readers, as the more than 60 comments the article attracted will make clear if you read them (I hope you do).

Here are the salient paragraphs from that article.

Those aren't the worst aspects of violent conflict. To me, the worst is what it does to the human psyche. You become dehumanized. Your enemies are no longer people - they're objects, things, targets. You aren't shooting at John, whose mother is ill, and who's missing his girlfriend terribly, and who wants to marry her as soon as he can get home to do so. You're shooting at that enemy over there, the one who'll surely 'do unto you' unless you 'do unto him' first. He's not a human being. He's a 'gook'. He's 'the enemy'. He's a thing rather than a person. It's easier to shoot a thing than it is a person.

. . .

And in the end, the bodies lying in the ruins, and the blood dripping onto our streets, and the weeping of those who've lost loved ones . . . they'll all be the same.  History is full of them.  When it comes to the crunch, there are no labels that can disguise human anguish.  People will suffer in every land, in every community, in every faith . . . and they'll turn to what they believe in to make sense of their suffering . . . and most of them will raise up the next generation to hate those whom they identify as the cause of their suffering . . . and the cycle will go on, for ever and ever, until the world ends.

We cannot 'kill them all and let God sort them out' (and let it never be forgotten that those obscene, inhuman instructions were reportedly issued, not by a Muslim fundamentalist, but by an Abbot and Papal Legate of the Catholic Church).  There are too many of 'them' to kill them all, just as 'they' can never kill all of 'us'.  We cannot kill our way out of terrorism.  We cannot kill our way out of the dilemma of being human, with all the tragedy that entails.

May God have mercy on us all.

That article, looking at the pain of loss suffered by so many in those terror attacks, strikes very close to the heart of what I felt when I listened to "Seven Hillsides".  Right now, I'm seeing the same hardness of heart felt by Americans towards each other.  Those on the left demand their version of utopia, and regard all who stand in their way as "reactionaries" or "conservatives" or "rednecks" or "deplorables" or whatever the "label du jour" might be.  Those on the right regard their opponents as "progressives" or "socialists" or "terrorists" or "thugs" and the like.  However, neither side refers to their opponents as "human beings".  They objectify them as something to be rejected, perhaps feared, certainly destroyed in respect of their positions, if not their actual lives.  They won't accept them as fellow Americans who happen to hold different opinions.

The Christian faith that's supposed to animate this country, according to so many of the Founding Fathers, is conspicuous by its absence on both sides.  The right may complain about openly anti-Christian sentiments on the left, but their own attitudes display as much disregard of the Golden Rule as do their opponents'.  Pot, meet kettle.  Kettle, pot.

And so, pastors such as myself are again dumped straight into the old dilemma.  How can we make sense of suffering, pain and loss in the context of our faith, when both sides fail to recognize their opponents - political, electoral or otherwise - as fellow human beings for whom Christ died?  In war, it's common for allegedly "holy leaders" to claim that "God is on our side" or "God is with us".  It's always struck me as incongruous that both sides make that same claim.  It must be awfully schizophrenic for God to find himself divided like that, two halves of himself working against the middle!  Clearly, that sort of religious propaganda won't fly.  Mothers on either side mourn the loss of their loved ones . . . so how can we put that loss in the context of what it means to be Christian, and human, and real?  How can we preach God's truth, rather than our partisan, one-sided, limited perspectives?

I have no answers that will satisfy everybody.  All I can do is point out that we are called to judge ourselves by God's standards, not to judge him by our standards.  Sadly, most of us fall into the latter error;  and if pastors try to point that out, we're derided and rejected for not taking sides.  We can't win.

And that's the pain of being human.  We are called to be more than human;  not just natural, but supernatural - yet we insist on remaining in the mud and the mire, and refusing to "lift up [our] eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh [our] help".  We won't find God's answers by looking down at the human condition, but by looking up, to see what he intends human beings to become.

How should we behave towards each other?

The prophet Micah put it in a nutshell.

He has showed you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?

That, right there, is a pastor's calling;  to remind and help people to lift up their eyes, and their lives, and "walk humbly with our God".  That's not an optional instruction, to be observed only if others do the same to us.  The Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") and the eleventh commandment ("Love one another as I have loved you") are spiritually synonymous.  However, as pastors, we need not be surprised if reminding people of that reality leads to rejection by some.  After all . . . look at what they did to Christ, who embodied that teaching.

And, thus, today . . . we face our own "Seven Hillsides".


* Sigh *


Peter
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Saturday Snippet: what you believe is what you do, not what you say

I've said for years (to the discomfort of many of my listeners) that I'm not interested in hearing what you believe.  Words are cheap.  One can profess almost anything, but be lying.  No, I want to see what you believe:  and that means I want to see what you do, how you live, how you behave.  The old truism that "actions speak louder than words" remains as valid today as it ever was.

Rudyard Kipling wrote a long poem about that sort of thing.  It speaks volumes to our society today, where faith is honored far more in the breach than in the observance, but those breaching it will still argue hotly that they belong to this, or that, or the other faith, because they say they do.  The reality is, their actions (or, sometimes, the lack thereof) demonstrate clearly that they have no faith at all.

Here's "Tomlinson", from 1892.

Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost in his house in Berkeley Square,
And a Spirit came to his bedside and gripped him by the hair -
A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,
Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the Milky Way:
Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way die down and drone and cease,
And they came to the Gate within the Wall where Peter holds the keys.
"Stand up, stand up now, Tomlinson, and answer loud and high
The good that ye did for the sake of men or ever ye came to die -
The good that ye did for the sake of men in little earth so lone!"
And the naked soul of Tomlinson grew white as a rain-washed bone.
"O I have a friend on earth," he said, "that was my priest and guide,
And well would he answer all for me if he were by my side."
"For that ye strove in neighbour-love it shall be written fair,
But now ye wait at Heaven's Gate and not in Berkeley Square:
Though we called your friend from his bed this night, he could not speak for you,
For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two."
Then Tomlinson looked up and down, and little gain was there,
For the naked stars grinned overhead, and he saw that his soul was bare:
The Wind that blows between the worlds, it cut him like a knife,
And Tomlinson took up his tale and spoke of his good in life.
"This I have read in a book," he said, "and that was told to me,
And this I have thought that another man thought of a Prince in Muscovy."
The good souls flocked like homing doves and bade him clear the path,
And Peter twirled the jangling keys in weariness and wrath.
"Ye have read, ye have heard, ye have thought," he said, "and the tale is yet to run:
By the worth of the body that once ye had, give answer - what ha' ye done?"
Then Tomlinson looked back and forth, and little good it bore,
For the Darkness stayed at his shoulder-blade and Heaven's Gate before:
"O this I have felt, and this I have guessed, and this I have heard men say,
And this they wrote that another man wrote of a carl in Norroway."
- "Ye have read, ye have felt, ye have guessed, good lack! Ye have hampered Heaven's Gate;
There's little room between the stars in idleness to prate!
O none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin
Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within;
Get hence, get hence to the Lord of Wrong, for doom has yet to run,
And...the faith that ye share with Berkeley Square uphold you, Tomlinson!"

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Spirit gripped him by the hair, and sun by sun they fell
Till they came to the belt of Naughty Stars that rim the mouth of Hell:
The first are red with pride and wrath, the next are white with pain,
But the third are black with clinkered sin that cannot burn again:
They may hold their path, they may leave their path, with never a soul to mark,
They may burn or freeze, but they must not cease in the Scorn of the Outer Dark.
The Wind that blows between the worlds, it nipped him to the bone,
And he yearned to the flare of Hell-Gate there as the light of his own hearth-stone.
The Devil he sat behind the bars, where the desperate legions drew,
But he caught the hasting Tomlinson and would not let him through.
"Wot ye the price of good pit-coal that I must pay?" said he,
"That ye rank yoursel' so fit for Hell and ask no leave of me?
I am all o'er-sib to Adam's breed that ye should give me scorn,
For I strove with God for your First Father the day that he was born.
Sit down, sit down upon the slag, and answer loud and high
The harm that ye did to the Sons of Men or ever you came to die."
And Tomlinson looked up and up, and saw against the night
The belly of a tortured star blood-red in Hell-Mouth light;
And Tomlinson looked down and down, and saw beneath his feet
The frontlet of a tortured star milk-white in Hell-Mouth heat.
"O I had a love on earth," said he, "that kissed me to my fall,
And if ye would call my love to me I know she would answer all."
- "All that ye did in love forbid it shall be written fair,
But now ye wait at Hell-Mouth Gate and not in Berkeley Square:
Though we whistled your love from her bed to-night, I trow she would not run,
For the sin ye do by two and two ye must pay for one by one!"
The Wind that blows between the worlds, it cut him like a knife,
And Tomlinson took up the tale and spoke of his sin in life:
"Once I ha' laughed at the power of Love and twice at the grip of the Grave,
And thrice I ha' patted my God on the head that men might call me brave."
The Devil he blew on a brandered soul and set it aside to cool:
"Do ye think I would waste my good pit-coal on the hide of a brain-sick fool?
I see no worth in the hobnailed mirth or the jolthead jest ye did
That I should waken my gentlemen that are sleeping three on a grid."
Then Tomlinson looked back and forth, and there was little grace,
For Hell-Gate filled the houseless Soul with the Fear of Naked Space.
"Nay, this I ha' heard," quo' Tomlinson, "and this was noised abroad,
And this I ha' got from a Belgian book on the word of a dead French lord."
- "Ye ha' heard, ye ha' read, ye ha' got, good lack! and the tale begins afresh -
Have ye sinned one sin for the pride o' the eye or the sinful lust of the flesh?"
Then Tomlinson he gripped the bars and yammered, "Let me in -
For I mind that I borrowed my neighbour's wife to sin the deadly sin."
The Devil he grinned behind the bars, and banked the fires high:
"Did ye read of that sin in a book?" said he; and Tomlinson said, "Ay!"
The Devil he blew upon his nails, and the little devils ran,
And he said: "Go husk this whimpering thief that comes in the guise of a man:
Winnow him out 'twixt star and star, and sieve his proper worth:
There's sore decline in Adam's line if this be spawn of earth."
Empusa's crew, so naked-new they may not face the fire,
But weep that they bin too small to sin to the height of their desire,
Over the coal they chased the Soul, and racked it all abroad,
As children rifle a caddis-case or the raven's foolish hoard.
And back they came with the tattered Thing, as children after play,
And they said: "The soul that he got from God he has bartered clean away.
We have threshed a stook of print and book, and winnowed a chattering wind
And many a soul wherefrom he stole, but his we cannot find:
We have handled him, we have dandled him, we have seared him to the bone,
And sure if tooth and nail show truth he has no soul of his own."
The Devil he bowed his head on his breast and rumbled deep and low:
"I'm all o'er-sib to Adam's breed that I should bid him go.
Yet close we lie, and deep we lie, and if I gave him place,
My gentlemen that are so proud would flout me to my face;
They'd call my house a common stews and me a careless host,
And - I would not anger my gentlemen for the sake of a shiftless ghost."
The Devil he looked at the mangled Soul that prayed to feel the flame,
And he thought of Holy Charity, but he thought of his own good name:
"Now ye could haste my coal to waste, and sit ye down to fry:
Did ye think of that theft for yourself?" said he; and Tomlinson said, "Ay!"
The Devil he blew an outward breath, for his heart was free from care: -
"Ye have scarce the soul of a louse," he said, "but the roots of sin are there,
And for that sin should ye come in were I the lord alone.
But sinful pride has rule inside - and mightier than my own.
Honour and Wit, fore-damned they sit, to each his priest and whore:
Nay, scarce I dare myself go there, and you they'd torture sore.
Ye are neither spirit nor spirk," he said; "ye are neither book nor brute -
Go, get ye back to the flesh again for the sake of Man's repute.
I'm all o'er-sib to Adam's breed that I should mock your pain,
But look that ye win to worthier sin ere ye come back again.
Get hence, the hearse is at your door - the grim black stallions wait -
They bear your clay to place to-day. Speed, lest ye come too late!
Go back to Earth with a lip unsealed - go back with an open eye,
And carry my word to the Sons of Men or ever ye come to die:
That the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one -
And. . .the God that you took from a printed book be with you, Tomlinson!"

According to the Kipling Society:

On his arrival in England in October 1889 Kipling took an instant dislike to the followers of the so-called Aesthetic Movement, who tended to go in for long hair, affectation of speech and manner, and eccentricity of dress. In a poem ("In Partibus") which he sent to the Civil and Military Gazette in the following month he wrote -

"But I consort with long-haired things
In velvet collar-rolls
Who talk about the Aims of Art
And 'theories' and 'goals',
And moo and coo with womenfolk
About their blessed souls."

Tomlinson is one of these.

I'm obliged to the New Zealand blogger at Bright Darkness for reminding me of this poem.  Food for thought, isn't it?

Peter

Strip away the civilized veneer, and human beings are still capable of anything

I'm obliged to American Partisan for posting a video of the rebellion and civil war in the Congo in 1964, when white mercenaries and Belgian paratroopers had to restore order across thousands of square miles of equatorial forest and bush.  The video is explicit:  you'll see bodies and parts of bodies, all of them real, and most of them casually discarded or even used as decorations by the fighting men.  That's what such absolute disregard for human life does to those who encounter it.  Eventually, it grinds you down.  You become numb, inured to it, no matter how deep your faith or developed your conscience.

I'm not going to embed the video here, because it's very graphic in its depiction of brutality and horror.  Nevertheless, if you want to see what Africa can be like at its worst, I recommend you watch it.  You'll find it at this link.  When you've done so (or if you'd rather not watch it, for which I don't blame you), read on below.

The thing is, nothing's changed in Africa.  Precisely that same brutality is going on right now in the east of the Congo.  The terrorist groups who oppose (and sometimes attack and kill) the medical teams trying to deal with Ebola?  They're the descendants of the same people who slaughtered so many thousands in the sixties.  It's not just the Congo, either.  The Rwanda genocide, the Burundi civil war, the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, the South Sudan civil war, the Sierra Leone conflict, the First and Second Liberian civil wars, the Rhodesian conflict, South Africa under apartheid . . . the list goes on and on.  Nor is it just Africa.  The Killing Fields of Cambodia, the East Timor genocide, the Nicaraguan Revolution, the Salvadoran Civil War . . . need I name more?  For another example of this sort of casual brutality in action, see the documentary "Cry Freetown" about the civil war in Sierra Leone.  You'll find it at this link.  The same warning applies to that video as to the earlier one - it's brutal.

This is the reality of more primitive societies when the thin veneer of civilization is removed from them.  Decades of colonial rule, followed by independence and decades of alleged "education" and "development", have not changed that basic reality.  I know.  I've been in many of those countries, and seen that at first hand for myself.  Nor is it only allegedly "primitive" societies.  Our First World nations are just as vulnerable to such savagery.  Consider the Holocaust, or the lynching of black people during the civil rights struggle in the American South.  It's just that we (usually, but not always) take longer to strip away our slightly thicker veneer of civilization.

Many people in the First World today have become so insulated from this sort of reality that they literally can't conceive of it.  Yet . . . it's not very far from us.  Consider cartel violence in Mexico, or the worst of the crime-ridden inner-city ghettoes in the United States.  Precisely the same savagery is evident there.  It's almost indescribable to a Western audience, because their educated, civilized minds just can't wrap themselves around such things.  Yet . . . it's true.

We may degenerate more slowly than others, revert to savagery more gradually than others:  but in all of us, civilization is only so deep.  Pushed far enough, some - too many - of us really are capable of reverting to the most primitive savagery.  I hate to acknowledge that, and I don't want to believe it, but I've seen too much to doubt it.

Peter

Saturday Snippet: Laughing with Jamie Buckingham

The late Jamie Buckingham was a Pentecostal/charismatic pastor in Florida.  He founded The Tabernacle Church in Orlando, Florida, and wrote many books and articles about the Christian faith.  What distinguished him from many others, IMHO, was his sense of humor and down-to-earth approach to his faith.  He didn't go into flights of rhetorical fancy, and always admitted he was as much a sinner as the next man.  He lived his faith with simplicity and directness, and made many friends in the process.

I never met Rev. Buckingham, but I read several of his books in South Africa.  They helped me "stay on the straight and narrow" (at least some of the time) during some very difficult years, and I've kept a few of them in my library ever since.  Along with other books and experiences, they taught me that faith isn't something you believe;  it's something you do.  Long before I became a pastor myself, I began to say, in so many words, "Don't tell me what you believe.  Show me.  Let me see your faith in action in the way you live, and I'll be able to tell you what - if anything - you really believe, without needing to hear you say it."  That remains a guiding principle in my life to this day, and Jamie Buckingham was one of those who helped to put it there.

Among his many works, he wrote "The Last Word" column for Charisma magazine for many years before his untimely death from cancer in 1992.  They were thought-provoking, entertaining, and often very funny.  Some were published in book form under the same title in 1978.

Forty-two years after its publication and twenty-eight years after his death, the book remains popular enough that it's still in print, in very inexpensive editions.  I recommend it.  Here's the opening story from that book, to illustrate the sort of man he was.

Things That Go Squish in the Night

One of the advantages of living in the country is the quietness.

One of the disadvantages is having to fool with the water system.

I used to complain, when we had our house in the subdivision, about the cost and taste of Florida water. But now, after having moved out into the country—and becoming an expert on wells, pumps, aerators, pressure tanks and water softeners—I’m not so sure I wasn’t better off when all I did was turn on the faucet and pay the bill.

Our particular system works from a deep, constantly flowing well. The same well serves the house, sprinkling system and air conditioning/heating units. After flowing through all the contraptions in a pump house in the back yard, the water finally arrives at where we live. The majority of this is drunk, flushed, spilled or used for washing. The rest is piped through the heating units and out through a drainpipe into a pond in the pasture.

To give the system a certain romance, the mad plumber installed a number of secret valves. If these are not opened and closed at critical times the water overflows into the yard, or backs up into the bathrooms, where it does exciting things.

One of these secret valves is connected to the drainpipe going from the heating units to the pond. It is located in the back yard at the edge of the pasture under the barbed wire fence. In case I want to divert this ever-running stream, and use it to wash the car, I only have to turn the valve and open a spigot.

There is one major problem. The cut-off valve which diverts the water from pond to spigot is located in a concrete block which is sunk about ten inches in the ground. To turn the valve, you have to stick your hand down that hole.

The other night, after having told my fourteen-year-old daughter to hurry up and get her shower, I went to bed. Jackie was already asleep when I heard this strange gurgling in the heating unit at the end of the hall. I suddenly remembered I had forgotten to reopen the valve after I washed the car that afternoon. That meant the water was either getting ready to overflow out of the heating units into the house, or it was flooding the back yard. I jumped out of bed, grabbed my flashlight, and raced down the stairs to the back door.

The back yard was flooded. Sloshing through the icy water in my bare feet, getting my pajamas wet up to my knees, I dashed to the pump house where I cut off all water to the house. Then I headed out across the pitch black yard, feeling my way between the pines and palmetto patches, to the edge of the pasture where the underground valve is located.

Kneeling in the cold mud beside the sunken valve, I foolishly forgot to look down the hole with my flashlight before putting my hand in there. When I put my hand in the hole I felt something move. Something slimy.

I withdrew my hand at great speed and, at the same time, leaped high off the ground from my kneeling position. Unfortunately, I had forgotten I was directly beneath the barbed wire fence. The result was disastrous.

When I became a Christian, I lost most of my old vocabulary. This robs me of the necessary safety valve to handle such emergencies. So, instead of cursing, I threw my flashlight. Unfortunately, it landed in the middle of the pond—leaving me in total darkness.

Ripping myself loose from the barbed wire, I staggered backwards away from the fence. In the process, I stepped in doggie-do. Hopping around in the high grass, I ran a thorny briar between my big toe and the toe right next door—in a place where nothing harsher than a washcloth had been in thirty years.

That which I lost I suddenly found—and a torrent of expletives issued forth, waking everyone in the house. Lights were flashing on all over the place as I went crashing through the shrubs, my pajamas ripped half-off, my back and neck bleeding, roaring back to the house in order to blame someone.

I had stopped to wash my foot off in the flooded back yard when I heard my daughter shouting from upstairs, “Hey, I’m all soaped up and there’s no water in the shower.”

Although I was back in control with the choice of words, I didn’t seem to be able to control the volume. Thus I informed her, with a roar which could have been heard a mile away, that there was plenty of water down where I was and if she was unhappy she ought to join me.

Jackie finally came down the stairs in her bathrobe and we got the valve shut and the water turned back on. We never did find out what that slithery thing was in the hole.

For years I have been teaching that while the American church applauds accomplishment as the mark of success, God is more interested in what we become along the way than whether we arrive.

I am not sure what I became that night. But one thing is certain. I have not yet arrived.

Not only am I out a brand new three-battery flashlight, but I ruined a perfectly good pair of pajamas and had to undergo three weeks of laughing, humiliating ridicule from my children who couldn’t let me forget it was mom who had to come down and twist all the valves and then lead me back up the stairs to the safety of my bed.

Fortunately, no one else knows. You see, we live in the country where things are quiet.

Jamie Buckingham is remembered in a website dedicated to his life and work.  You'll find many more of his books listed there, as well as more of his "Last Word" columns, including a number of them not included in the book.  (One of them, titled "Deliver Us from Sock-Gobblers", describes his allegedly demon-possessed clothes drier that used to eat his socks.  It's great fun, and for those of us who possess a significant collection of odd socks, it rings all too true!)




Peter

Does marriage have value anymore, monetary or otherwise?

Aaron Clarey, a.k.a. Captain Capitalism, offers an intriguing look at whether dowries are something that may become part of the modern "marriage market" in the Western world, just as they were in the not too distant past (and still are in some other parts of the world).  I don't necessarily agree with his arguments, but I have to admit that he poses questions that require an answer.

If you don't know (or never knew) what a dowry was, it was a payment the father usually made to his would-be son in law to take his daughter off his hands and care for her into the future.  This was based on the premise that women did not work, would likely bear children, would stay home to rear said children, and would in a purely accounting sense be a financial liability to the family, earning no income.  And so, the would-be husband would be entitled, if not required, to some kind of financial recompense to take the financial liability of a woman off the hands of her father.

Fast forward 300 years later and I ask a very simple question;

How is it any different today?

If there was a time young women were not a financial liability, but an asset, it was the boomers and Gen X'ers.  These women were workers, they were employed, and they did take care of themselves.  But today's generation of young women (who are also at the age of marriage) do not present young male suitors a similar financial proposition or condition.  Matter of fact, most young women today are horrifically bad financial liabilities, and any young man who commits to them risks tanking his own finances.

This isn't primarily due to young women not working.  They most certainly do, and at labor force participation rates higher than any generation of women past.  But the financial liability nature of most young women today is due to student loans and the education scam that destroys their finances.  Young women ... are lured too easily to go $120,000 in debt for worthless liberal arts degrees that offer them no employability.  Worse, the indoctrination they receive in college weaponizes them against men, instead of making them partners and lovers in life to help one another.  And with the repeated indoctrination that women should NEVER rely on a man, the end result is not only often a girl who is a financial risk, but is a girl no man wants.  Indebted, talentless, unemployable, and ideologically programmed to be against men, marriage, family, and love. Even women trained in STEM, who are eminently employable, are often times indoctrinated to be antagonistic towards men, increasing the risk of divorce, adding a huge legal risk to a financial one as well.

Traditionally, logically, and "accountingly," such a proposition would require some kind of financial compensation for the legal and financial risks of committing to a modern day western woman.  And today, young men (or any man) is well within his rights to demand such a modern-day dowry.  But since most boomer and Gen X fathers have no money (and are likely financially compromised through matrimony as well), demanding a dowry today is moot.

. . .

Most men simply cannot afford to take on that risk, and even with a dowry the non-financial risks are just as costly and daunting as the financial ones.  Yes at the same time, men are biologically programmed, nay, compelled to want to get married and have kids. And so what is likely going to happen is what's been happening for quite some time now - men are balking.  They're going to punt.

The increase in cohabitation and the abandonment of marriage is a sign of men waking up and eschewing the legal and financial risks marriage presents to them ... And such marriage-avoidant behavior will continue as the internet educates men about the unacceptable legal and financial risks marriage presents to them (or, frankly, they just saw their dad get butchered in divorce court).

And so what we've seen this past 20 years, certainly the past 10 will continue. With no "theoretical dowries" and marriage being such a bad deal, more and more men will simply leave the marriage market because they can't afford it.

There's more at the link.

Modern marriage is weighted heavily against a man in our legal system.  I'm aware of one situation going down right now, where a divorced father, with legal custody of his children, has seen his former wife simply take them and refuse to return them.  She's gone so far as to interfere with his bank accounts, file false charges against him, and try to wreck his life, out of spite and vindictiveness.  I repeat - she has no legal right to custody of the children, but because she doesn't want him to have them, she's more than prepared to use them as a weapon against him (including lying to them that he doesn't want them any more), and destroy his reputation in the process.  What's more, law enforcement authorities appear powerless.  They've told him to get yet another court order for them to enforce, ignoring those he already has.  I don't understand that.

When men see that sort of thing happening, and realize that our legal system is predisposed to believe the mother rather than the father, is it any wonder that many men are afraid to commit themselves to a relationship that may have those consequences?

There's also the very real problem that a hyper-sexualized society, where a "hookup culture" has taken root, is anything but the ideal climate in which to foster traditional marriage.  When both partners in a marriage come into that relationship with a past history of dozens, if not scores of lovers, and probably having lived with several of those partners, how can they pretend that there's anything unique about their relationship?  There isn't.  They're just going through the motions they've been through many times before.  There's nothing "special" to bind them together, because they've done it all before.  When it comes to arguments, they can put each other down with comments like, "Oh, so-and-so was much better at that than you are!"  There's no foundation of "special" intimacy on which to build, because intimacy is no longer special.  It's been trivialized.

Perhaps, if a dowry was required prior to marriage, both sides of the equation would realize that it signifies the value of their relationship in monetary terms.  Perhaps they might then attach more intrinsic value to marriage, instead of seeing it as an arrangement that may, or may not, endure, depending on one or the other party's whims.  To me, of course, there's also a deeply spiritual element to marriage;  but that's not shared by many people, so I won't emphasize it here.  I'll simply note that I think it's essential.

Aaron Clarey poses some very good questions, that force us to confront unpleasant realities, and which deserve answers.

Peter