The Waiting

This poem won first place in a national poetry contest this year.

When the Voice first spoke into the heart of Night;

And the first cold hues of chaos swept the sky.

When Time went tumbling out of the deepless dark

And the curtain of the blackness fell apart.

One moment was enough to see the dream

Something too calm and awful to be seen,

A wild, wordless whisper of a song

That bound the ages till the end should come.

The music entered all eternity

And broke its way into infinity

The newborn Light went out and lit the Sun

The Voice alone saw all that was to come.

And long before the making of the curse,

Before the first blood stained the firstborn earth,

It spoke in silence deep within the Night,

The End will come and all will be made right.

This age is ending - God calls home the stars,

The world is plagued with great and little wars

The dying sun is swollen, dim and red,

And things that once were good and green are dead.

We watch the evening twilight fade away,

The ancient earth is weary, old and gray.

The fire has spread across the earth’s dark plains,

The broken world will never be the same.

Now all the living things have shrunk and withered

The mountains tremble and the pale sky shivers

A wind has come from off the northern seas

A storm from hell to shake the shuddering trees.

The thunder of God’s wrath is drawing near

We close our eyes in hopes that we might hear,

In starry hollows long forgot and gone,

The music of that wild, wordless song.

But nothing rises from the deep abyss

No sound of music splinters this silence

We are too deep in blood and treachery

To hear the voiceless breath of ecstasy.

We are the only living ones that know

The curse - tremendous joy, tremendous woe.

Despair is rising like an evil mist

We never dreamed that it would come to this.

And all the summer stars are dim with tears

For all the shattered hearts through all the years

They fade like autumn flowers in the snow

That sink to sunless depths that no man knows.

The raging sea looks up beyond the sky

And lifting up his broken voice he cries,

‘Oh God of Stars, when will you make an end?

When will the judgment of the world begin?

‘Beyond all sundered seas made dark with sorrow

Beyond the sunken shadow of tomorrow

What mercy will we find beneath the sun,

When all is done and said, and said and done?’

And do you think that heaven ever hears

The wail of broken hearts and human tears?

The voices that are shrieking in the night

The stifled whispers of the murdered light.

Has God reversed the cycle of the world

And sent it hurling backwards to the void?

The anguish of existence does not end

We fail and hope and live to fail again.

And shall we somewhere find at close of day

A place to wash all memories away?

But there are things the world cannot forget

And there are things the heart cannot forgive.

The earth is plunging through the pathless void

The Dark is taking hold of the entire world.

And hearts that never wavered split and break

Still screaming that it should not be this way.

The sky above is sickening with fear,

The face of Time is stained with bloody tears

And everywhere we turn we look on Death -

We realize now that we have nothing left.

But deep beyond the barricade of fear

Within the thunder of the storm we hear,

The Voice that called us from the heart of Night

The End will come and all will be made right.

The God Who Is There – The Shift to Post-Modernism

Earlier this year I read a fascinating book called The God Who Is There by Francis Schaeffer. Schaeffer combines philosophy and theology in order to give a historical explanation of how we got where we are. Here is a very condensed summary of Schaeffer’s point.

Man has always been looking for a universal. The whole tragic history of mankind is based on man trying to find a universal outside of Christianity, with which to explain the world and give meaning to life. The unifying factor of non-Christians is rationalism. Until the 20th century men were rational optimists, working from their finite selves in hopes of finding a way to make sense of the Universe. They were humanists. They were able to do this because they were, without realizing it, working with the Christian presupposition of absolutes and anti-thesis, which they had no logical right to do, because without Christianity there can be no absolutes.

But with the arrival of the twentieth century a shift in non-Christian thinking began to take place. Exactly when it all started cannot be pinned down, but as a general rule, it was the year 1890 in Europe, and 1935 in America. The shift spread gradually, in three different ways. First, it spread geographically, beginning in Germany, spreading across the Continent, crossing the Channel to England, and then crossing the Atlantic to America. Second, it spread through society, working its way downward from the educated upper classes to the lower working classes. Third, it spread from one area of thought to another, beginning with philosophy, then art, music, general culture and theology.

It all started with philosophy. Men began to realize the contradiction of supporting rationalism with absolutes and they tried to do away with absolutes all together. Philosophers Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Satre, Jasper, and Hegel began it. They were no longer rational optimists. They reached what Schaeffer calls, ‘the line of despair,’ and they went beyond it. They gave up hope of trying to find a rational universal that would contain all thought. Logic had failed to come up with a meaning for life, so they forsook reason and tried to find something, anything that would give life meaning. Thus Nihilism came into being. Nihilism, the belief that everything is chaotic and meaningless, is the simplest form of despair. But in the struggle to get out of despair, and find an answer to nihilism, one is led even deeper into it. The next level of despair is the acceptance of a blind optimistic hope of meaning, based on a non-rational ‘leap of faith.’

The ensuing dichotomy is that the rational and logical, result in lack of purpose and meaning, and the non-rational and non-logical result in some kind of an incommunicable, unexplainable, unaccountable existentialist ‘experience’ that can give meaning to life. This ‘experience’ is usually achieved by means of drugs and other forms of Eastern mysticism. But they could not reconcile the rational with the non-rational so they gave up the traditional idea of thesis and antithesis and replaced it with the concept of synthesis – the combination of partial truths to obtain a higher truth. But men cannot live with the conclusions of this system. In practice, one simply cannot entirely reject the methodology of antithesis, without a total alienation of man from himself, by some form of mental breakdown.

The result of inability to actually practice the conclusions of either of these worldviews, has led modern thought to the third level of despair, a level of mysticism, of ultimate Nothing. The artists followed step soon afterward. The pillars of modern art - Picasso, Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh. They introduced impressionism. They tried to abandon the particulars, and instead strove to capture the universal on canvas. Their pictures and the tragic stories of their lives reflect their failure. Then Duchamp and others introduced the element of chance into Art. It lost all its meaning. Pierre Schaeffer did the same thing with Music, producing senseless cacophony that reflected the message of Modern man. There is no meaning. When it comes to the fourth category, the general culture, we find pop music that combines the concept of drug use, the psychedelic, and vague pantheism, heavily reflecting the decline of humanity. In the cinema, Nihilistic and Existentialistic films follow suit.

Karl Barth and the liberal German theologians opened the door of theology to the new mentality. In order to reconcile Reformation Christianity to the post modernist philosophy, they tried to do away with all the supernatural elements of Jesus, and recover the ‘historical Jesus.’ But they failed dreadfully. They discovered that if you remove the supernatural that is so intricately intertwined with the ‘historical,’ then there is no Jesus left. Then they could have either gone back to the original Reformation theology or gone ahead to nihilism. But they did neither. They created a new theology, a neo-orthodoxy, a religious existentialism that no longer held all the answers, and was in fact, an anti-theology.

Neo-orthodoxy seems to have an advantage over secular existentialism, in that it can use certain religious terms to provide an illusion of communication of the incommunicable ‘final experience,’ whereas secular existentialism cannot. Every word has two parts - the dictionary definition and the connotation. The new theology therefore uses words, such as ‘pantheism’ that can have no actual relation to the subject, but their connotation makes the hearer thinks that he knows what is meant. The secret to the strength of neo-orthodoxy is that it uses symbols, such as ‘god’ with a connotation of personality that provide an illusion of meaning. Its philosophy is ‘Do not ask, just believe.’ Men fall for this because it sounds spiritual and vibrant, and because they want a ‘greater reality’ and are sick of cliched religious phrases and forms. They do not realize the danger of using undefined words. They are taking a leap of faith into an irrational, semantic mysticism.

All these factors have worked together to make this monster called Post-Modernism. Humanity has stepped off the cliff, and fallen into madness. Today, every non-Christian is somewhere on a line between two points. On the one hand is the external reality about man, God, and the Universe. On the other hand is the logical conclusion of his false presuppositions, which are not compatible with reality. He is torn between these two consistencies. In order to rescue him from this dilemma, one must identify a man’s presuppositions, find the point of tension he is currently at, and then lead him farther and farther away from reality, to the logical conclusion of those presuppositions, until he recognizes the contradiction and realizes that his worldview simply doesn’t work. Then and only then can we bring in the solution, the thing that does work, God’s answer to man’s dilemma.