Tricky Thing, the Human Mind...

Seems as if we humans are adept at developing a rationale for doing whatever we wish to do. How else can you explain Hitler's extermination of six million innocent Jews or the terrorists who ruthlessly kill civilians for the sake of their religious views or making a perverse point?

Reading recently an Alan Jacobs' book entitled 'Original Sin', I came across a discussion of the "justification" for the American slavery of the 1860's and earlier. Sad machinations and twistings of slight phrases, removing the light and sense provided by context and in situ reading, all were utilized to provide a platform from which human prejudice and ignorance would be given voice. Within the church and without, evil persons found a way to perpetrate the illicit acts and deeds their darkened souls had conspired to conceive.

One minister of note in 1850 Charleston, South Carolina freely confessed that "the instinctive impulses of our nature, combined with the plainest declarations of the Word of God, lead us to recognize in [the African's] form and lineaments, in his moral and religious and intellectual nature, the same humanity in which we glory as the image of God. We are not ashamed to call him our brother" (p. 207). Still, this recognition of the full humanity of , nay, the inherent image of God residing in, the enslaved African was no deterent to his enslavement in the minister's view. One wonders why the evil of such a debasing and immoral practice could not be seen by one so intimately acquainted with his Bible?

The answer comes swiftly back, (Jeremiah 17:9): "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" and (Acts 28:27) "For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’"

The Muslim mystic, Jaladdin Rumi once said that those who opened their eyes could see. But the desire to open one's eyes must precede the seeing. Without the desire to see, we remain as blind men surrounded by light.

Can Nothing Be Done About This?!

Neglect!

Applied to the subject of children, the elderly, or the infirm, it may well constitute a criminal act.

But there is no category in law for remedying neglect of a blog. I, of all simians, should be most grateful for this oversight. Can you imagine the scene that might otherwise greet me some early morning? SWAT team scattered across the neighbor's yards . . . a rather natty sheriff with a commanding voice thundering from behind his shiny car with the bright lights: "The house is surrounded! Come out with your hands up!"

This to be followed inevitably by the sad spectacle of my monkeyboy frame draped over by a heavy overcoat with only legs and handcuffed wrists showing from beneath!

"I can't help it, your honor! I have better intentions but I seem to forget that I even have a blog . . . until something like this happens! I'm not evil . . . I just like to monkey around!"

I'll let you know how the trial comes out...

If they have computers in blog-neglect prison.

-The MonkeyBoy

It's About Time!

I know, I know...

"Slackness" defines me. I have been an absentee landlord as concerns this particular vine.

But, I'm back and at 'em!

Something has been stirring up in this tree. Actually, it has been stirring in "da Monkey Boy." It has to do with the fact of the insatiability of the longing of the human spirit. I recently re-discovered these words of C. S. Lewis and post them here to stimulate the thoughts of all who read them:

"In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."

-- from 'The Weight of Glory'

There's something to ponder. . .

A Swingin' Good Time...

It's been a while since I've been to this part of the jungle. Business with the hairless lowland apes has kept me occupied and distracted. But, then, this was always supposed to be just an occasional posting place, anyway.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the need for personal integrity and reliability. About what used to be called simple "faithfulness".

I was reading again, this past week, an account of an Indian raid on the Deerfield, MA. settlement in 1704. The raid took place in the early morning hours of February 29, at the conclusion of a heavy snow. There was, completely surrounding the settlement, a wooden stockade – built earlier the previous year when the first alarms were sounded about an impending raid. It had needed repairs and though some were made, winter had caught them unfinished.

In truth, the raid on Deerfield was one of the forerunner battles of what would eventually become known, after a few decades, as ‘The French and Indian War’. During that battle over a hundred captives were taken and marched, through the bitter cold and over frozen ground, into Quebec, Canada, there to be the slaves of various masters. It was a hard and indescribable journey.

The story especially affected my heart because it was written by one of my ancestors…the Puritan Pastor, John Williams. Over the course of their unbelievably inhumane treatment – a captivity lasting more than two and one-half years – Pastor Williams witnessed the butching of two of his children, a six-week old son and a six-year son. His wife was, likewise, murdered because she was not sufficiently recovered from her child-birth to endure the journey’s trial. One of his daughters, named Eunice, never was returned or permitted to be redeemed from her Indian captors.

We do not have enough time to recount all the horrors of their way or the gross persecutions they were made to bear. To tell the stories of the women-with-child who were slaughtered or the infants and wee ones who were murdered in cold blood would be tedious and heart-rending to both tell and hear.

But, as I turned that story over in my mind, the saddest words it contains are those to be found in the opening lines. There Pastor Williams writes: “On the twenty-ninth of February 1704, not long before break of day, the enemy came in like a flood upon us, our watch[men] being unfaithful.”

There it is…the cause of the whole sad account. The twenty soldiers hired by Deerfield and sent by the colony were unfaithful to their duty and on account of this…many tender and innocent lives were lost.

The importance of faithfulness has, therefore, been powerfully brought to my mind and, I hope now, to yours also.

The Apostle once said it this way: "Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful." (1 Corinthians 4:2 NIV)

The Master offers the following promise: "Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you the crown of life." (Revelation 2:10b NIV)

Let us, then, be faithful.

Da Vine Life...

Da Monkey Boy is, (as you might by now have guessed), a subscriber to a certain code of honor, behavior, and belief. As such, he will --from time to time-- ricochet off the walls of the suburban biosphere in minor diatribes of psuedo-philosophic drivel. Like this...

Anyone who's awake, aware, and alert will have noticed the fact that alot has been written in recent years about "Vine Life"...connectedness to Christ as the Author and Sustainer of all life, particularly the life of the soul.

Da Monkey Boy knows vines! And, since "vine life" is the raison d'etre* of Da Monkey Boy's nom de plume**, allow me to "hold forth" on the subject for a moment or two.

Two extremes seem to have emerged from the literary meanderings of the authors of the various books and articles on "vine life":

1) The first suggests that since the Vine (i.e. Christ) is the initiator of life, nothing else much matters. You did not decide to blossom from the Vine; you cannot decide to drop from the Vine. Christ, the Vine, holds you in a grip so deliberate and so powerful that even you --endowed as you are with free will-- cannot choose to break from Him.

2) The other view (just as extreme and injurious) holds that we --the individual branches-- hold all the power of determination over our destiny. The sovereignty of God is dispatched with a few, terse words on the (alleged) supremacy of individual free will and we are left with the distinct (but hauntingly alarming) impression that "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul".

View One leaves us believing that we are so secure we may live as we will. Temporal consequences may ensue, but no eternal repercussions need be feared. Far too many subscribe to this view as is evidenced by the swelling numbers of those who use the "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven" pig-headedness as their moral compass.

View Two promises great freedom but delivers intense angst; for how, if all depends upon us can we ever be certain of our supply of the necessary resolution and fortitude to carry us through to a happy ending? After all, we can't even keep our New Year's resolutions past 1 o'clock AM of January 1!

To these extremes there answers a third way...a central way. St. Augustine is credited with giving us 'The Little Rule': "We must work as if all depends upon us; we must pray as if all depends upon God." That is very nearly what I want to say. Yet, allow me to attempt to One-Up Augstine.

I am secure. The branches come forth as a result of the natural work of the Vine. The branches are sustained by the flow of life from the Vine into them. The branches are secure.

BUT... These branches have moral power...they have been endowed with an ability to largely choose the outcome and result their gift from the Vine.

Should the branch become infected and threaten the life of the other branches or the pre-emergent branches, the Vine-dresser is free to prune or sever that branch...dependent upon whether that branch responds to the initial minor treatment or proves to be so obdurate as to require the ultimate work...removal from the Vine by the Vine-dresser.

Here is where Da Monkey Boy lands. I am secure from all external threats. But I am not secure against the work of the Vine-Dresser.

And, as Abraham once said, "shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" (Genesis 18:25) And, of course, He will..."for we shall all appear before the judgment seat of Christ...So then every one of us shall give accounts of himself to God. " (Romans 14:10b, 12)

DMB

*reason for being
**pen name or pseudonym

Climb a Vine and Chat with Da Monkey Boy!

Welcome to the Jungle of Da Monkey Boy!

Pull up a vine, peel your banana and let the chatter begin!

Here we will dissect the sacred and the profane. Here good humor and sober reflection may both meet without fear.

DaMonkeyBoy is a light-weight spirit who may or may not respond sensibly to your comments and queries. But he will unquestionably respond!

He's ordered a brain from the off-site warehouse which should immeasureably help the conversation along when it arrives.

-DaMonkeyBoy