This morning I witnessed a natural phenomenon that would melt the most callous of hearts, and strengthen the most skeptic’s faith in the divine. I had woken to my dog whimpering, as is her habit when she wishes to relieve herself. Usually, my wife takes her out of a morning; however, we had both been up late. She had not stirred at the dog’s pleas, which must have been continuing for some time as I have some hearing loss and am not easily awoken by noise. As I fumbled to clothe myself I was even more disgusted by the time illuminating from my cell phone: 06:10, on my day off. I grumbled, but my fondness of the chihuahua overrode my disdain for the morning and we went outside.

I was pleasantly surprised to be kissed by a cool air instead of a frigid slap as is common this time of year. As custom, the dog fanned right and squatted over a particular spot; as such, I glanced right. And there it was. The moon had not quite retreated yet. It hung with a distinguished air as it was concluding its nightly circuit. It seemed rounder than I could recall, robust, and with an ethereal, umber aura which complimented its own ephemeral splendor. I was struck dumb with child-like wonder at the nocturnal master’s vestments with which God chose to clothe him this particular morning. Ah yes: morning.

I turned to the left to see the other half of the celestial couple breaching the horizon. Before she unveiled her face, the splendor preceding her dominated the landscape with mellow illumination. Here they were, the celestial sovereigns juxtaposed at the apex of dawn—screaming the oblation creation deserves.

Yet, how can I worship the dawn? She is ever changing with the day. Nor can I worship the moon who changes his shape, size, and colour with the months. The sun, however, she is constant and provides for the life and vegetation of earth. Yet she is the same, cruel maiden that scorches the earth, sapping water and life. One thing is certain: the moment left an insufferable desire of gratitude and awe toward the author of the moment.

The current theory predominant in our education is that this moment was the product of chance—the ordered seasons, the balance of the universe, the harmony of ecology, the inspiration of nature, and the timeless dance of the dusk and dawn. How could anyone in that moment posit such audacious foolishness? Praise chance?! Hardly. Instead, I turned to the principle and sacred truth man has held from time immemorial until even the present.

I looked toward heaven and praised my Maker that creation, in this very moment, was attesting to the majesty, glory, goodness, and wonder of the Sovereign that decreed this spectacle’s moment of paralyzing awe. Ineffable majesty.

Life, at times, is like a cycle of night. As dusk wanes toward night, darkness’ veil thickens on the landscape. It is frightening, disparaging, and choking as the familiar venue surrounding you becomes merely a silhouette with shapeless specters of formerly familiar things. This phase mirrors that in life when things seem to slip slowly into madness. Not all slums in life come swiftly like a tornado, many slip in as painfully and quiet as the twilight. Slowly, but inevitably, all light fades away.

Then the night seems eternal.

A moonless night–thick–blanketed with miasmas of despair and dread, we all know the like. Things seem colder, further, more sinister as you struggle to remember where you just were, where you are, and how to get somewhere. Where? Anywhere, just away from the suffocating darkness.

Hour after hour–it gets darker as it goes. Everything waxes stranger, alien, and hostile. You struggle, you flounder around in the void, while people do what best they can to help you. And thank God for them. Embrace such people, for though they cannot dispel the night, they are candles. Candles flicker, candles fade, but they can provide enough light for long enough to avoid being swallowed by the tyranny of life’s midnight.

As you continue to wallow, at time’s almost helpless, in the abyss of life’s depravity, you reach the point where one of two things occurs: you are consumed or you wait. Both, by the way, require little to no option within your control. The terror of life’s circumstances, consequences, and just day-to-day will steal every shred of your sanity and will leave you a husk, or worse…or you can wait.

Why? Why on earth would you wait? How on earth could the circumstances and consequences and funk built up to this 4 am of life ever resolve to something acceptable? How do you…press on?

“The darkest hour always comes before the light”.

Night is cruel; it thickens, presses harder, grows more powerful as it gains momentum. Night is always the darkest right before the light. And then the dawn. The dawn pierces the night in a rescuing flood. The landscape begins to phase back into perception. The miasma of despondency is dissipated by the brilliant luster of hope.

But what brings the dawn? Life is set against us; it seeks to claim us all. This salvation that ushers in the dawn, then, cannot be found in this life itself. No solace can be found in something that originates from the domain that this darkness reigns from. I have found this solace. This beautiful dawn could only come from outside myself, outside my experience, outside this life. It came from Jesus, it comes from God, it comes from the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

It is all I have to hold onto through the cycles of night that plague my life. It is all you can hold to when the cycles of night oscillate into your life. In the darkest hour remember, His dawn is coming, He rises without fail in the lives of His children.

I earnestly seek to keep more obscure references out of my posts, but I could not help but to ponder on this quip from The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug, and see a stricken conundrum facing the church today. In the aforementioned movie, Tauriel (an elf of little consequence to the main plot, or subsequent books) asks Legalos (of much greater significance), “When did we let evil become stronger than us?” Within the context, Tauriel is commenting on the fact that the elves must get involved with the Orcs pursuing Bilbo and company. The reason being that if they do nothing, darkness will descend on the earth. Legalos responds, “Why? This isn’t our fight”. To which Tauriel responds, “Do we not live in this world? When did we let evil become stronger than us?”

I audibly gasped when I came to a parallel quandary—when did the church let the world out man us? Seriously. Not as in an Orc v. Elf sort of way, but in regards to Academia? Theologians were the most respected scholars for centuries. Men like St. Thomas Aquinas set the framework for ontology and philosophy that was unparalleled or questioned for centuries. It is no secret that most Christians today are viewed as uneducated and superstitious without cause. I wish I could dismiss that notion, but the truth is most Christians don’t know why they believe what they believe.

We live in an era where empiricism rules, and absolutes are nigh absent. Ever since the “Enlightenment” with volatile, anti-religious philosophers like Voltaire—the church has been backsliding in its defense of the Gospel. “The Bible says it, and I believe it, so that settles it,” cannot and will not fly with the outside world. The church failed to sufficiently answer Voltaire, refute Kant, and reign in radical existentialism. Darwin provided the final blow in the church’s academic prowess, when the church failed to properly answer natural selection and On the Origin of Species. And now we sit here and ponder, “When did we let the world get the upper hand in academia?”

The answer: when we stopped believing it was our fight.

Because of the inefficient, and sometimes non-existent, attempts to counter Enlightenment, Transcendentalism, Existentialism, Darwinism, Nihilism, Dadaism, and Modernism, the church is up a creek in this postmodern era we now find ourselves in. Are we defeated? Do we have no chance of regaining our academic splendor that once gave such irrefutable support to the Gospel?

Thank God, the answer is no. During these trying times a few brave men stood, such as CS Lewis and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but too few. Now men such as Ravi Zacharias, Allister McGrath, and others are starting to reclaim, or at least rebut, the onslaught of anti-religious academia. In similitude to the scenario from The Hobbit 2, we can no longer sit idly by as academia attempts to put sound reason, empiricism, and philosophy at odds with God’s truth. Do we not live in this world? When did we let the world become more equipped in empiricism, philosophy, and literature than the church? It is time for the church to reclaim academia. Without the truth and light of the Gospel, man’s desire to explain reality will result in chaos and destruction as we saw Darwin’s principles used to justify the Nazi regime.

“but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,”—I Peter 3.15  (ESV)

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”–T.S. Eliot

I have worked retail the past eight years; over this period, I have noticed a surprising decline. It’s a decline that I never would have noticed where it not for and epiphany I had at work today. A customer was wandering around in the Christmas aisle I was stocking. Naturally, I asked if they need help finding anything. They inquired where our Thanksgiving stuff was. I answered we only had a single end cap at A9; she thanked me and scurried in that direction. I turned around and stepped back, overwhelmed by the fifteen aisles of Christmas in front of me. Then I came to a shocking realization.

We had only one END CAP of Thanksgiving–on November 10…at Target.

And it made me ponder, when did Thanksgiving become a minor holiday?

I went into the backroom and discovered that we already had five pallets dedicated to Black Friday merchandise. Really? That’s not even technically a holiday, but we had 8x’s the merchandise for it than Thanksgiving. We already had fifteen aisles of Christmas set by November 7! I began to think back at the trend I had unknowingly witnessed over my last eight years in retail. Each year, Christmas was set earlier, Black Friday sales opened sooner, and Thanksgiving merchandise, and hype, diminished.

No wonder Americans are considered ungrateful and greedy! Thanksgiving becomes an afterthought in the commercialism of Halloween, Black Friday, and Christmas.  What’s with having a “holiday” celebrating greed and materialism the day after (and usually starting the day of anymore) an official holiday celebrating contentment and gratitude?

It has been subtle, and years in the making. It isn’t like Congress has removed it as an official holiday, and it isn’t as though people have stopped holding meals or elementary school plays, but Thanksgiving is waning in importance and meaning. Much like Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men”, Thanksgiving seems to be dying, not with a sudden, extravagant exit, but gradually–unnoticed–not with a bang, but a whimper.

This world of dew

Is yes, a world of dew

And yet…

–Issa Kobayashi

I hear so often that we’re all an accident. It is officially taught in schools, media, etc. that we are a product of chance. Evolved from species over millions of years from a primordial soup that randomly sparked into this universe we now know. It is often emphasized that man is nothing more than a “sophisticated ape”, “glorified animal”, and “highly intelligent species”. The insinuated conclusion, therefore, that is often reached: your life is insignificant. It doesn’t matter what you do. Life is fleeting anyway. We are a blip and then gone. In the grand scheme of things, we supposedly would have come into existence at the equivalent of 11:55 pm on the eve of the universe’s destruction. No purpose, no meaning, no hope.

It’s like the dew on the grass—here and gone, hardly an afterthought.

Issa Kobayashi, one of the four great haiku-ist, noted that too in the haiku above. The world is dew, yes…and yet…

This Haiku was written after the sudden death of his 1 yr old daughter. Issa was a Buddhist priest. He knew well and believed that all things were fleeting and passing, and that this existence had little meaning aside from the greater harmony of all things. Thus he pens, “…is yes, a world of dew…”; then the abysmal doubt, “and yet”.

Those two words that no one can escape. If all is meaningless, if none of this matters, if we’re all an accident waiting for another cataclysmic event to revert us back to a primordial soup—or nothingness—then why, “and yet”.

It plagues us. It haunts us. It haunts us like the Holocaust, like the Inquisition, like 9/11, like every war, genocide, natural disaster, and murder in history. Why? Because something inside us screams IT DOES MATTER! Your loved ones matter, you matter, your work matters, your leisure matters, your love matters, the good or evil matters!

This is what plagued Issa Kobayashi, it plagued all writers, and lyrists, and every man woman and child.

So don’t feed us that garbage. The overarching theme of literature, of religion, of lyric, of history says contrary. We even call it “the natural order”. Why? It’s chance, why is there order, why does suicide, murder, war, and genocide matter if evolution and Nihilism and fatalism are correct? It is because they are not!

Deny any religious forms you like, but here is where I have found the satisfying answer. The answer to ‘why’ and ‘why it is’ and ‘why the question is there’.

“What is man that you are mindful of him? And the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings; and crowned him with glory and honor.”—Psalm 8.4-5

Yes, life is but dew, and yet…

So quick are we to judge the sins around,

Yet planks jut forth from us like neon signs.

Alas! For us, we claim God’s grace abounds!

Our darkened hearts, abominable shrines.

Reliant on confession without change:

Citing, “Where sin abounds–grace doth much more!”

Who dares to make the Gospel so deranged?!

They tread darkness, not the Spirit’s blessed shore.

But I am elect! Tulip brothers cry.

My action don’t matter; I am a child.

“God’s grace for us is unto repentance!”

Tulip or free-will: sin’s practice—revile.

The Scriptures are plain, we have no excuse;

Do not claim the cross for damning abuse.

I was recently at the Mulvane Art Museum on Washburn University’s campus with my wife. We were viewing all the different pieces on display. I was taken back by an acrylic on canvas of a Magnolia tree in full bloom. I had never seen such a perfect shade of pink to capture the grace of a Magnolia blossom in summer. I was almost knocked backward when to my left I saw an oil on wood of a run down shack at late sunset. They artist had so perfectly captured the colors and shading that I closed my eyes and was transported to the scene. So perfectly they had captured the mood that I was overwhelmed.

I turned to my wife and said, “Can you believe how perfectly they captured this shack and these Magnolias? This artist is spectacular; only a photograph could do better. Because, of course, you can’t beat the original…” As I trailed off I was struck with an epiphany. The reason that these paintings were so inspiring is because they were an attempt to capture all the emotion of real art. 

And then it hit me.

What a fantastic artist is God?  

Sure, He had to make the universe functional for us, but the aesthetic paradigm? I then recall the Scriptures that say He has created all thing for His glory, and, since we are the caretakers of this creation, our enjoyment. All the beauty, all the majesty, all the splendor, the emotion, the awe, and rush–His glory manifested. And this, as we know, is the tainted version.

Tainted? This is tainted?! What was the original like?! And then I read that He will melt this earth away and created a new heaven and a new earth. Inexpressible. 

I have a friend who is a fantastic artist and good Christian. She often ponders how she can bring Christianity and her unique brand of art together. Those two are not as difficult to reconcile as most would posit. When we, as children of God, seek to use our talents to express concepts, and emotion, and stories through art–any art–we are doing a work for the kingdom. When I saw those paintings I felt the awe of the works of creation that inspired the works I was viewing. I began to thank the Lord that He made such beauty in this world. Beauty that makes me adulate and worship Him in a rush of awe.

When we strive to render those feeling in a piece of timeless art, we transfer those emotions to those years after us. I think of the music world; JS Bach once proclaimed, “I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.” His reverence and awe of God inspired works that are still paradigms hundreds of years later.

If you are artistic: in music, in art, in poetry, in prose, in song–however it may be, do it to the glory of God. As you are blown away by the original, perfect, passionate artist, channel that into a visage that may inspire like awe in others. When our testimony of inspiration is tied to the author of inspiration we are able to not only worship our creator, but view the creation in its proper sense. 

This is my Father’s world, and to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres.
This is my Father’s world: I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas;
His hand the wonders wrought.

This is my Father’s world, the birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white, declare their Maker’s praise.
This is my Father’s world: He shines in all that’s fair;
In the rustling grass I hear Him pass;
He speaks to me everywhere.

It occurred to me, although I have 20 or so posts, that I never explained why the description in the header for the blog, is ‘epiphany from cacophony’. They seem to be at odds, and certainly unable to work together:

Epiphany– a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

Cacophony–a discordant and meaningless mixture of sounds.

At first glance, it does appear these two concepts are at odds with each other; especially to gain an insight from chaos.

But this is how life works.

Life is chaotic. Religiously, the fall and sin is to blame. Non-religiously, life seems to have no rhyme or reason at times. We are pulled constantly from one thing to another in this techno-age, and randomness is valued like a Rembrandt.

My goal, is to tap the random string of things, religiously, in nature, and elsewhere, and connect them to us. For explanation, for demonstration, and for postulation.

The cacophony of life has an order to it, just as a surreal, 20th century atonal mess can turn into something…well, musical…I intend to occasionally pause the chaos, grab hold of that bad boy, and ride it into town wearing a tuxedo!

After all, Newton decided to nail down gravitational principles because an apple hit him in the head.  The microwave was invented because someone got their candy bar a little too close to a science experiment, and the infamous enigma machine of spy lore was cracked. Granted, the cracker cracked. I hope not to crack as I delve into the enigma of being; I instead hope to bring a poetic eye, a prose flair, and religious inquisition into the world around me. I hope to gain an epiphany from the cacophony around me.

As I sat in the secretary’s office at church Thursday morning preparing my sermon for Sunday, I looked out the window and saw two chickadees fighting. I watched them flutter and tumble and peck and claw, but I saw no apparent reason for the brawl. There was no food or female in sight, no nest, and no water. Chickadees aren’t exactly territorial or aggressive birds either. Captured by this unfounded fit I declared, out loud, with a sigh, ‘what a pity’. What a pity indeed.

I was then reminded of Romans 8.20-22,

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberate from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. (NIV)

We casually mention that the curse applies to creation, and that we ‘live in a fallen world’, but we think of this in spiritual terms almost exclusively. We forget that God cursed the very ground and the whole of creation physically, as well as spiritually. So, those two chickadees fighting over nothing is a result of my sin. Not that mine specifically is the cause…but we collectively is. Leroy Forlines spends a bit of time in his systematic The Quest for Truth discussing the four basic human relationships with the fourth being man to the created order. He notes:

We are designed for a relationship to the created order. Man was designed for the responsibility of exercising dominion over the earth, plats, and animals. This meant he had a management responsibility over the created order…When done for the glory of God, all that we do is a divine service…Work has always been a part of the original plan of God for man. It did not involve the undesirable aspects that it does now, but work has always been a part of the divine plan. This managerial responsibility must also involve a concern for ecology. We must be concerned about the condition of things as we pass them on to future generations.

This means not only is it our divine job to care for the creation, but looking at the Romans 8 passage, we kind of owe it to creation. We messed up and now creation is suffering as well. It’s like in the play Hamlet, when the ruling family is in chaos, the kingdom is as well.

I cannot break up the fight per se between the two chickadees, but I can do my part in keeping a right relationship with the created order. It’s a divine mandate and a Christian imperative. If the whole of creation is in labour pangs, then I need to help her ‘deliver’ the ‘baby’ that supports myself and our generations yet to be born.

They say that there is a first time for everything. Indeed, we look forward to all the ‘firsts’ in our lives. I have been overloaded with ‘firsts’:

-Married
-Graduated College
-Preached a revival
-Took a church pastorate
-Moved into an apartment
-Became a resident of Kansas
-Had literally no friends close by

Between all these things I went into panic mode. I have a blessing and curse of being detached from the emotional side of an issue when it occurs. This is a blessing because I can minister quite effectively in a crisis. This is bad because a few weeks later I will “randomly get depressed”. This has been my state the last week.

My wife is still unemployed, despite numerous attempts, and the pantry isn’t getting any fuller. I called my two closest friends for advise. One of them told me: “Phill, give it a few months. It is too much too quick. You’ve probably never had so many firsts in your life. Give it time, it’ll be fine”.

He’s right. I will be ok. Life sometimes blindsides all of us, and that’s when Satan moves like a (pun intended) bat out of hell. It is in these moments that faith is tested. And when we start to get on the right track, Satan throws us a curve ball. It is in those moments we must be deep in prayer and the Scriptures to see the situation as just that–a curve ball from Satan.

That’s when you pick up the Louisville Slugger of the Spirit and knock that bad boy right back to hell where it came from! God has given us the power to overcome the wiles of Satan; don’t fret because it’s “the bottom of the ninth and the bases are loaded” because that’s when God will give you the power and grace to strike Satan out!