Does this hauntingly beautiful melody sound familiar?
It’s called “My Love’s an Arbutus,” and it is used as theme music for Alice in the classic version of A Christmas Carol starring Alistair Sim. But it’s good any time of the year, and tonight I thought I’d like to share it with you. Relax and let it stroke your cheek.
I’m always happy to publish reader comments on this blog. After all, it suggests that people are reading it. But I received a couple last night that just couldn’t be allowed to see the light of day.
Just for future reference, here are some of the guidelines, again.
1. Look, I’m from New Jersey, where folks throw f-bombs around like confetti. But this is a Christian blog and there are no cuss-words allowed.
There are a lot of angry people out there, and there is a lot to be angry about. But anger must be kept under control. We really can’t have people jumping up and down, screaming, cursing, and making extravagant threats.
Come to think of it, I’m kind of prejudiced against that all-caps stuff, too.
2. A comment really must not include threats of physical violence. True, they can’t easily be carried out over the Internet. But they do indicate a state of mind not entirely appropriate to the occasion.
3. Do not pretend to be making a comment just so you can try to sell me something.
4. As much as I am against “hate speech” laws and pseudo-laws–that’s one of the things that cheese me off–I don’t permit terms of abuse. Use of those terms may indicate that you really, truly, do hate someone, and wish to do them harm, solely on the basic of some external characteristic (like skin color, for instance). I am not inclined to publish such language. This is a Christian blog, part of the Chalcedon Foundation’s ministry, and I have a responsibility to keep it that way. As it is, some readers think I go too far. But I do try not to.
So, by all means, let’s have comments–the more the merrier. All you gotta do is scroll down and click “Leave a reply.” I publish at least 90% of what I get.
I don’t like to watch videos of the events of this day, 14 years ago. The images make me angry. So do conspiracy theories and the “Let’s forget about it” crowd. Nevertheless, I remember those events and continue to seek their meaning.
Here are some of my reflections.
*God’s judgment can land right on our heads and we still wouldn’t believe in it. We learn nothing. We stop our ears to God’s warnings. We wouldn’t want anyone thinking we were un-hip.
*Who would have ever thought, 14 years after 9/11, that the governments of the West would be competing to see which of them could import the most Muslims?
*Meanwhile, our glorious leaders could find nothing better to do than radically redefine, or just plain overthrow, the definition of marriage, light up our public buildings to celebrate it, and criminalize Christian and other religious beliefs that have remained the same for thousands of years.
*Our government gave a medal to a man who had himself surgically and pharmacologically mutilated so he could say he was a woman. At least we know who our heroes are. Or must I say heroines?
*We have a president whose middle name is Husain, and whose amateurish, community-organizing, make-it-up-as-you-go-along dabbling in foreign policy has caused the Middle East to boil over into the biggest man-made humanitarian crisis since World War II.
*While ISIS is beheading Christians and burning them alive, all captured on videotape, our government obsesses about “Islamophobia.”
*Western Europe would rather be invaded by millions of Muslims all at once, than roll up its sleeves and exterminate ISIS. The West ignores calls from Egypt and Jordan to do that very thing. One cannot explain why they let ISIS continue what it’s doing.
*For as long as we are governed by career politicians advised by self-proclaimed intellectuals and self-promoting Scientific Experts, we will not even begin to find our way out of trouble.
I have to go to the dentist this morning and I have no idea what will happen to me there. So I thought I’d better post something now, in case I’m not able to, later.
Meanwhile, I have a burning question:
Where has my readership gone?
In the middle of the month, the readership of this blog took a radical nose-dive and has not come back. Where is everybody? Like, I’m sitting here listening to crickets.
Was it something I said?
So there I am, plugging away at my new book, The Throne (No. 9 in the Bell Mountain series), without the foggiest idea how the story’s going to end. I’m used to this by now.
For years I wrote very differently. I had detailed biographies for every character. I had color-coded index cards, each subplot assigned its own color, so I could lay them out on the table and move them around and around until I found the best arrangements. I would be months and months at these preparations before I wrote a single word of the manuscript.
I’ve been writing The Throne since April. Each day I sit down with my pen and paper and say a prayer, asking the Lord to give me the story He wishes me to tell, and to make my work fruitful in His service. And He always gives me the story. This has been my method for each and every one of these books.
I’ve also been asking Him, lately, to show me how to end The Throne.
I was going upstairs yesterday afterno0n when, in just the time it took to climb the last two steps–whoom! I had the ending. Like a whole picture being flashed into my head. The whole thing.
Now all I have to do is write my way to it.
Sometimes I start with the ending and have to wait for the beginning. Or I start with a few key scenes in the middle of the story. Maybe even just one scene.
It’s a cool way to write, and I enjoy it. Thank you, Father.
This is where we met, 38 years ago. No, not up in the sky. Down there, in the little town of Keyport, NJ. At the offices of The Bayshore Independent. Our marriage has outlived the newspaper.
Yes, 38 years ago today, Patty and I got hitched. Speaking for myself, my marriage is the greatest earthly gift God has given me. Without it I wouldn’t even be me. Without my marriage I doubt I would ever have wound up in God’s service or written my Bell Mountain novels. I don’t like to think I would have turned into an out-and-out pagan; thankfully, I’ll never know.
We had our anniversary feast the other day, exquisite seafood from The Keyport Fishery–which is about the only place we know that’s still as good as it was 38 years ago. We’ll have another nice supper today. Otherwise, we hope to celebrate in peace and quiet. Our scalp-dancing days are over. At least for now.
I also wear the T-shirts we bought on our honeymoon.
We hope to be left in peace by the bloodsucking idiots in Washington, but that’s out of our hands. They have already redefined current and future marriage. When they try to redefine existing marriages, then I would say their time has come… and there is yet another scalp-dance left to dance.
[One of my hopeless competitors–T.S. Eliot]
I must admit to a poetical streak in my nature. I can hold it back no longer. As if struck by lightning, the following two poems occurred to me.
After decades of national trauma,
Brought on by two terms of Obama,
America rose
On the tips of her toes,
And canceled the liberal Drama.
Pretty cool, eh? Eat your heart out, T.S. Eliot. And then there’s this:
Progressives found some dynamite,
Couldn’t understand it quite.
Unbridled hubris never pays:
It rained libs for seven days.
Now if that doesn’t get you, what will? All I gotta do now is wait for that call from the Pulitzer Prize Committee.
Tomorrow I’ll go back to telling truths that will make the progs and lib’rals mad at me. To honor God, I do try to refrain from doing battle on the Sabbath Day. By obeying His commandment to rest on that day, we proclaim our God’s sovereign lordship over His creation.
Among the pleasant memories that lower my blood pressure are the quiet Sundays of my childhood and, whatever the weather, the Sunday color comics. Crack of the bat and clink of horseshoes in the summer; Sunday school and maybe an afternoon at the movies, if my father was willing, in the winter: but in all seasons, the funny papers.
My folks stuck to the local New Jersey papers, but my grandparents, both sets of them, got the New York Daily News, so they had New York comics. I read those, although a few of the strips in the New York papers, like Moon Mullins and Gasoline Alley, I couldn’t quite get, and one or two others, like Smilin’ Jack, struck me as vaguely sinister. But our local papers didn’t have The Teeny Weenies or Smoky Stover, so I couldn’t afford to ignore the comics in my grandma’s Sunday paper.
But here at home, every Sunday–aah! Prince Valiant: Hal Foster’s spectacular artwork made the Age of Arthur come alive for me–and it still is. Mark Trail midwifed my lifelong fascination with bugs and snakes and other critters. And does anyone out there remember The Little People? And not forgetting one of my all-time favorite lines on a Sunday afternoon: Mandrake gestures hypnotically… And then there was Peanuts.
Stretched out on the floor, quietly reading the comics–there was something to be said for that. Not that it did me any spiritual good, that I know of (although certainly Mark Trail was for me a gold mine of information about nature); but I have since learned that I belong to my Lord seven days a week, for every minute, and I don’t think He minds if I enjoy some undemanding fun on a Sunday.
But those old comics are gone, and the new ones are distasteful.
I am happy to say Peep never made a mess like this.
All right, so it ain’t penetrating analysis of current events. It’s just some blog stuff. But it makes a nice change, doesn’t it?
When the phone would ring, and I was unable to answer it, our cat Henry used to find me and meow at me impatiently to make me get up and answer the phone. How did he understand what a telephone was all about?
Our little friend Buster once dressed himself. I happened to look up from my work and there he was, sitting in the front window for everyone to see, having donned a pair of Patty’s undies. Stuck his head through the leg-hole and wore it as a cape.
Another time he was sitting at the window and I said, “Buster, do you see how fat your sister’s getting? She needs some exercise. Why don’t you chase her up the stairs?” Which was exactly what he did, as soon as I suggested it.
His sister, Missie, used to bring me whatever toy she felt like playing with, usually a pipe cleaner, so I could toss it and she could chase it and retrieve it for another throw.
Robbie has asthma, and I have to give her a shot from an inhaler every day. She hates that, and tries very hard to avoid it. And yet she has never held it against me, never cast me as a villain for spraying this stuff up her nose. How can she understand such a thing? I mean, medical treatment was the thing that totally spoiled the relationship I had with my monitor lizard.
Well, cats are smarter than lizards. Robbie’s sister, Peep, is fascinated by gadgets–water cooler (it occasionally burps), fax machine, printer, you name it. She probably knows more about them than I do.
A great champion of literacy and homeschooling has died.
Sam Blumenfeld (1927-June 1, 2015) worked tirelessly for decades to expose the fraud of public education and to pioneer home education. He labored to restore the practice of learning how to read by first learning phonics and the alphabet–a method vastly superior to the “word recognition” bushwa taught in many public schools.
I never had the privilege of meeting Sam, but I did help edit one of his books, Revolution via Education. Sam wrote many books on the history of education and on reading, including The Victims of Dick and Jane, Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers, The Alpha-Phonics Readers, and How to Tutor, just to name a few. All of his books are available from The Chalcedon Foundation ( http://www.chalcedon.edu–just click “Store” and “Books”). While I’m at it, I must also recommend R.J. Rushdoony’s The Messianic Character of American Education–in which the creators and developers of public education reveal and condemn themselves in their own published words.
When Sam began crusading for home education, it was virtually illegal in most states. Now homeschooling is the fastest-growing form of education in America, no small thanks to him.
As a member of the Chalcedon family, I share in its mission to reform education by taking it out of the hands of teacher unions and the government and restoring it to families and churches where it belongs. The shortcomings and abuses of public education are too numerous to mention here (see, for instance, yesterday’s post, http://leeduigon.com/2015/06/04/public-school-assignment-find-mom-and-dads-sex-toys/ ). But Sam set us all an example of undaunted perseverance.
We know, as he knew, that the single greatest boon to America would be the end of public education. The rest of us will carry on where Sam left off.
