Seniors & The Sorry Reality of Conflict

If you or someone you know is attached to the management of a senior home, assisted care facility, senior community, or senior anything, let them know about our great summer savings for Seniors at Riley's Farm. We've found that seniors don't like traversing the entire width and breadth of the farm, but they do enjoy a good meal and good, toe-tapping music, amidst the pastoral beauty of their rural youth. Just a few minutes ago, I stretched my right arm out a little too fast and I had a senior moment. I also found that some restaurants begin their senior discount program at age 55. (Six years away for your correspondent, now experiencing a scapular, scraping stream of senior pain.)

 

The Sorry Reality of Conflict

Those of you acquainted with my cranky style and my thoroughgoing embrace of the Calvinist take on man's utterly depraved nature may be surprised to know that I do have my weepy, group-hug moments. There's a ritual I go through after the Revolutionary War Adventure. I try to shake the hands of all the parents and teachers who visit the tour, and I know--of course--that we can't agree on everything, but there are moments of commonality among people that seem to presage the peace of heaven. Sometimes, you can feel it a ballpark, when people of every stripe stand for the national anthem. Sometimes you see even atheists and believers awe-struck by the way Judy Collins sang Amazing Grace. Sometimes friends or co-workers, on parting, after years of working together, forget all their squabbles. For a moment, all they feel is the glow of their common lives, their common share of a journey spent together in life. At the risk of descending into deep absurdity, I remember a news story about Cher weeping at the funeral of Sonny Bono. She had spent most of her post-marriage years ridiculing and mocking her ex-husband, but in the end, all the cheap shots got washed away by the sobbing. Now, to be clear: I can't stand Cher. She's the very picture of what happens when a shallow intellect is fused to a celebrity sense of self. She's a pitiful monument to worshiping whorish youth at all costs, but even in that weeping moment, even I can imagine putting a hand on her shoulder and saying, "there, there."

I'm quite certain God knew that we need these moments of respite from the troubles. You need to turn the speakers up and weep at the Celtic harmonies now and then; you need to picture in your mind's eye an old daddy singing "Danny Boy" to his parted son. You need to clap your hands, sway back and forth in the all gospel choir, and feel the spirit.

But when the music is over, you don't want Cher making public policy. You may be able to sing a hymn, on the gallows, with a remorse-ridden murderer, but you still need to trip the hatch. Simply put, you need the emotion to serve the intellect, and not the other way around. The tragedy of our age is that we have it upside down. Our political leaders are 90% pop-jamboree and 10% ideas--and most of those ideas bankrupt at that. My Marine friend, Steve Klein, reminded me of a time when Hollywood could make a movie where the actors actually sang "Onward Christian Soldiers" without a trace of irony, without the impulse to mock belief in a God whose surpassing love and strength existed to defeat evil. In the scene above, a congregation sings that very song in the middle of a cathedral whose roof has been shorn away by a Nazi air raid. As the chorus swells, the camera looks up to take in the sight of B-17s on their way to defeat the enemy.

The facts are simple, but they are routinely forgotten: both good and evil remain in the world. Those moments of commonality, the thunder of the chorus, shouldn't be there to make us forget our sins, but to proceed on a war footing against them. After you have come to Jesus, after the tears have dried, remember what He said: "I come not to bring peace, but a sword."