Back in November, I posted a brief narrative piece from the Moody Blues’ album Days of Future Passed, along with some thoughts on the album’s New Age underpinnings and its influence on me and on my novel The Ten Weeks.

A snatch of that narrative piece is a good way to note the sad passing of the album’s producer, Tony Clarke:

The record producer Tony Clarke was one of the architects of symphonic “prog rock” through his work with the Moody Blues. His production on the group’s album, Days of Future Passed (1967), and its hit single, Nights in White Satin, blended the sounds of an electric rock band with a symphony orchestra and came to be seen as a hugely influential landmark. He went on to work with the group on six more albums, helping them to become one of the most commercially successful bands of the era.

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Since this is the day we’re supposed to think about these things, I’m going to feature an album from The Ancient Star-Song that’s a favourite of mine: Choose Life, from the School Sisters of Notre Dame (in Mankato, MN.)

Since the album dates from 1976, I would think that, when they recorded the title track (which you can download here,) they were thinking about Roe v. Wade.

The thing that separates this album from a lot of the Catholic music of the era is the quality and complexity of the vocal arrangements.

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I was expecting an eventual response to my piece Why I Don’t Agree With the Concept of the “Sacrifice of the Mass” and received it from Fr. Greg.  You can find it here.

In his response, he’s shifted the discussion from the purely theological to the ecclesiological, and that brings up many issues.  But let me first start with the points of contact, and let me repeat something I said in the original post:

Tying the real presence of Our Lord in the Eucharist and the perpetuity of all things in God, the question remains: is the Mass a sacrifice in and of itself, or it is the re-enactment and/or extension of the original sacrifice?  The scripture makes that answer clear:

But, this priest, after he had offered one sacrifice for sins, which should serve for all time, ‘took his seat at the right hand of God,’ and has since then been waiting ‘for his enemies to be put as a stool for his feet.’ By a single offering he has made perfect for all time those who are being purified. (Hebrews 10:12-14, TCNT)

Given that there is only one sacrifice, and that the nature of this sacrifice is unique, the Mass must be an integral extension of the original sacrifice.

In this respect, there’s no way to avoid saying that the Eucharist (to set things a little broader than Roman Catholicism itself) is a sacrifice in this sense.  But that’s not the way it’s presented in Roman Catholicism, and that’s not the way that Fr. Greg presents it either.  Fr. Greg, to his credit, has clarified the issue by shifting it to the nature of the priesthood and, by extension, the nature of the church.

He begins by referencing the early Fathers on the subject.  (As an aside, I’m surprised that Abu Daoud didn’t come back on this first after his posts, specifically this and this.)  We have to ask ourselves this question: how did they mean this?  This isn’t an illegitimate question, because the Ante-Nicene Fathers could be very imprecise on key issues.  The best examples of this are the Christological ones.  Great teachers such as Tertullian and Origen could have saved those who came after a lot of trouble if they had more precisely defined what they meant.  (On the other hand, I’m not sure if they had the philosophical frame of reference to do the job completely, as I lay out in detail here.)   Did the Fathers really mean that Jesus’ sacrifice is repeated again and again in the Eucharist?  Did they think their ministers were full priests, standing as a formal mediator between man and God as Jesus himself did?  Or were they simply using concepts that were familiar to both their pagan and Jewish converts?

It is essential that the teaching of the church, patristic and otherwise, be in concord with the Scriptures.  The early fathers were aware of this, if their efforts don’t always pass muster today (or even a generation or two after their passing.)  So, in order to construct a proper understanding of what one means by “priest” and “sacrifice” we need to consider everything in light of the most authoritative revelation from God.

Jesus Christ is the only formal mediator between man and God.  That is the core message of the New Testament.  By “formal” I mean the “official” agent who is capable of the task at hand, i.e., mediation.  We can say there are other mediators.  For example, Evangelicals frequently say that we are the only Bible many ever read.  (And we are!)  But that doesn’t mean that we are a mediator in the same sense that Jesus Christ is.  It’s tempting to say that we are “secondary” mediators, but the term I plan to use is “analogical.”  By this I mean that, when we present the Gospel to others (and I don’t just mean exclusively in a specific outline, but also by the way we live) we are mediators by analogy.  Ultimately anyone who is led to God in this way must come to eternal life through Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately the Roman Catholic Church presents itself as not only a formal mediator between man and God, but the formal mediator, by positioning itself between man and Jesus Christ.  It claims that no one can come to Jesus Christ except through the church, and that the church has the authority to deny that access if it believes that it is necessary to do so.  Fortunately for everybody it has an elaborate set of rules and regulations to make application of that exclusion an exceptional event (although one longs to see it for the likes of Patrick Kennedy.)  But that doesn’t change the church’s view of itself or its role.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that the most scathing critique of this comes from the Orthodox world, namely the parable of Christ and the Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  Here Dostoevsky inverts the role of Christ and the Roman Catholic Church as personified in the Inquisitor.  It’s not a pretty picture, but unfortunately for many Roman Catholics it’s the deal.  (And, Fr. Greg, remember this: when I think of Orthodoxy, it always comes back to the Russians!)

Closely tied to that is its view of the priesthood.  As Fr. Greg confirmed for the Orthodox churches, in Roman Catholicism the priests are seen as the replacements for the priests of Judaism.  If that’s the case in a formal sense, then their sacrifices are no better than those of the Temple, because the purpose of the sacrifices in Judaism were principally if not exclusively for the sins of the people.  If that’s the case, why Calvary?

There’s no question that the Fathers saw the Jewish law and sacrificial system as a type of the work of Jesus Christ and the church.  Typology runs rampant in the interpretation of the Scriptures by the Fathers (Origen is especially associated with this.)  And perhaps a typological or analogical approach is what is called for here to solve this dilemma.

I think that, if we admit to any kind of priesthood in Christianity, we must admit to this in an analogical sense, especially relative to Judaism.  We simply do not need a priesthood to perform the most important function of same, i.e., obtaining the forgiveness of sins or other favour of God.  I think it is reasonable to posit that certain ones in the church be those to preside at the “sacred pledge of the Eucharist” (to use Bossuet’s wonderful phrase.)

I don’t think this is as far off from the early Fathers’ intent as one would think.  What sense does it make to have priests and bishops when the latter at least were elected by their flock, as was the case through most of the Roman Empire church?  Isn’t that the lesser choosing the greater?  Roman Catholicism, consistent if not correct, has eliminated this feature and many other “democratic” ones, as the Anglo-Catholics are about to find out.  If the ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth is a reflection of the celestial hierarchy in heaven, shouldn’t it have been a strictly top-down business?

The same idea can be applied to the church as well.  Only one formal mediator is necessary and sufficient between man and God.  But the church has been entrusted with the mission to be one in an analogical (if very important) sense.

I’ll end this part of the diatribe by quoting from Origen’s Commentary in John, the very start:

That people which was called of old the people of God was divided into twelve tribes, and over and above the other tribes it had the Levitical order, which itself again carried on the service of God in various priestly and Levitical suborders. In the same manner, it appears to me that the whole people of Christ, when we regard it in the aspect of the hidden man of the heart, (Rom. 2:29) that people which is called “Jew inwardly,” and is circumcised in the spirit, has in a more mystic way the characteristics of the tribes.

And a little later he adds, in a way that suggests the analogical treatment I propose:

But what is the bearing of all this for us? So you will ask when you read these words, Ambrosius, thou who art truly a man of God, a man in Christ, and who seekest to be not a man only, but a spiritual man. (1 Co 2:4) The bearing is this. Those of the tribes offer to God, through the Levites and priests, tithes and first fruits; not everything which they possess do they regard as tithe or first fruit. The Levites and priests, on the other hand, have no possessions but tithes and first fruits; yet they also in turn offer tithes to God through the high-priests, and, I believe, first fruits too. The same is the case with those who approach Christian studies. Most of us devote most of our time to the things of this life, and dedicate to God only a few special acts, thus resembling those members of the tribes who had but few transactions with the priest, and discharged their religious duties with no great expense of time. But those who devote themselves to the divine word and have no other employment but the service of God may not unnaturally, allowing for the difference of occupation in the two cases, be called our Levites and priests. And those who fulfil a more distinguished office than their kinsmen will perhaps be high-priests, according to the order of Aaron, not that of Melchisedek. Here some one may object that it is somewhat too bold to apply the name of high-priests to men, when Jesus Himself is spoken of in many a prophetic passage as the one great priest, as (Heb. 4:14) “We have a great high-priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God.” But to this we reply that the Apostle clearly defined his meaning, and declared the prophet to have said about the Christ, “Thou (Psa. 110:4; Heb. 5:6; Joh. 7:11) art a priest for ever, according to the order of Melchisedek,” and not according to the order of Aaron. We say accordingly that men can be high-priests according to the order of Aaron, but according to the order of Melchisedek only the Christ of God.

The main drawback to even using priesthood in an analogical sense–and in referring to the Eucharist as a sacrifice, albeit an integral extension of the original–is that people, especially those of the Roman world, will in time convert the analogical and the re-enactment into the formal.  The idea that we need to periodically propitiate the gods with sacrifices runs through paganism.  The confusion is understandable, but the theological drift that confusion created–a confusion complicated by the example of the Jewish system–has practical consequences that have dogged Roman Catholicism ever since.

Let me touch on a few of Fr. Greg’s other points.

Concerning his Old Testament citations: those in the Old Testament largely refer to the sacrificial system in effect at the time.  How one applies these to our own time depends upon the considerations above.  One thing that needs to be emphasised is the concept of the Eucharist as our sacrifice.  One must consider that there is nothing we can offer to God that can, in and of himself, please him, as whatever finite and defective we might bring cannot have real comparison to the infinite and perfect God.  Ultimately the objective sacrificial value of what we bring–which, in the Eucharist, is admittedly de minimis from our end–is the presence of God in it, which is another good reason to recognise the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

The fact that any sacrifice we make is not acceptable per se to God shouldn’t blind us to the fact that Jesus Christ calls us to a complete sacrifice of ourselves to him.  That, I think, is the most important thing we can bring to God.  And, as is the case with the Eucharist, only the presence of Christ in our lives (now that’s good Roman Catholic thinking) is acceptable to him.  One thing that bothers me about Roman Catholic Eucharistic theology is that it leads the casual recipients of the Body and Blood of Christ into the idea that all they need to attain eternal life is to receive the sacraments, when in fact the inward transformation by Jesus Christ is necessary, especially so in the case of the Eucharist.

Also: I was surprised to see the word “orthodoxy” interpreted as “right worship.”  A more common interpretation of that would be “right opinion” or “right teaching.”  It’s true that the word doxa appears in the Septuagint as a translation for the Hebrew kabod, or “glory,” so we perhaps have a double meaning.  The Russians refer to their Orthodox faith as “pravoslavie,” “right glory,” which leaves no doubt what they mean.

PS re the Russians: the testimony of the widow of Fr. Daniel Sysoyev, gunned down in Moscow by Islamic terrorists, is here.

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This is the last in the series of music videos from music alluded to in the novel The Ten Weeks. But it’s not a video: it’s a more prosaic “photo and sound clip” combo from a scene in the book combined with a brief excerpt from the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed.

This album is, IMHO, the best fusion of rock and symphonic music to come out of the 1960′s and 1970′s.  There were others that tried the same thing, and then there were those who performed classical music in a rock way (like Emerson, Lake and Palmer.)  But none of them quite pulled it off the way the Moodies did in on this album.

Below: the starry scene from the novel (with the planets conveniently annotated.)  You can click on the image for the audio clip, which comes from the first part of the album.

Thoughts on the Album, and the New Age Idea

Although released in 1967, I didn’t get this in my collection until 1974.  It’s always been an album that appealed the most in times when things weren’t going well (for a Christian album that serves a similar purpose, click here.)  That’s not an accident; Days of Future Passed is a very strong expression of what has come to be called “New Age philosophy,” more so than even the more explicit In Search of the Lost Chord.  That deserves an explanation.

One leitmotif in G.K. Chesterton’s work is his idea that Eastern religions are basically pessimistic at heart, a giant sigh of despair.  It’s too bad that this album wasn’t out at the time, because it’s as powerful of an illustration of that as one could want.  The choice of using a day as the framework for the album, although seemingly benign, only adds to the gloom.  It implies that life is a giant cycle, that we are trapped in an inescapable round that, instead of centuries or aeons, only lasts 24 hours per course.  Transferred to the daily life of the urban and suburban 1960′s UK, and one longs for a Chestertonian characterisation.  The lyrics only add to the impression, including those in the audio clip.

“New Age” philosophy, which was most in vogue in the 1960′s but still very much influences our culture, is derived from Eastern religions, and specifically those of India.  For all of the happy face that many of its practitioners put on, it’s still a message of despair, that we’re trapped in a cyclical round and round we can’t get out of, not any time soon at least (I’m thinking about the reincarnation cycle.)  Happiness needs to have a stronger basis in fact than just raw “belief” or “positive thinking.”  It needs an objective that is real and attainable.

I think that one reason why people in places where religion such as this have been predominant are turning to Jesus Christ is that he offers them a way out of the cycle of despair, and he can do the same for you.

As I said at the start, this ends the series of music alluded to (or perhaps shouted out) in The Ten Weeks. I trust that you have enjoyed it and hope you have a blessed Thanksgiving.

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I almost overlooked this musical gem alluded to in the novel The Ten Weeks.  It’s Cream’s “Pressed Rat and Warthog” which (as is obvious from the video) appeared as a single along with “Anyone for Tennis” (an appropriate subject for The Ten Weeks.)  So if you want to get to the “flip side” just fast forward the video.

“Pressed Rat and Warthog” also appeared as the first song of the second side of the first disc of Wheels of Fire, which was the first double album to go platinum and whose cover art won several awards.

I usually don’t run videos like this (I prefer live performances) but, although Cream recorded this in 1968, they first performed it live in 2005, so live performances are, to put it mildly, rare.

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One of the pleasures we enjoyed during our years in Palm Beach were our travels in our family yachts.  Our family has a long history of power boating going back to the latter years of the nineteenth century.  From South Florida our favourite destination were the Bahama Islands, at the time making their transition from a British colony to an independent nation.

In 1965 (the same year Thunderball was made, also in the Bahamas) we cruised from Palm Beach Inlet to West End on Grand Bahama Island and then proceeded through the Abaco Islands, as you can see in the video below.

Click here for a QuickTime/podcast version of this video. (An older, longer version is here.)

We finally left the Abacos at the Hole in the Wall and proceeded south towards North Eleuthera Island and our destination, Spanish Wells.

In reading the books on cruising the Bahamas and listening to my father, one theme emerged: the charts of the waters of the Bahamas were unreliable, both because the surveys weren’t very complete and because the coral reefs were complex with underwater rocks and outcroppings turning up in places you weren’t looking for them.  In such instances it was recommended to seek a native guide to help guide one through the waters, someone who had lived there all his or her life, knew all of the underwater dangers and could guide one to safe harbour.  Nevertheless, my father go the idea that he could pick his way through the reefs north of Spanish Wells.

Late afternoon we came up on Big Egg Island and started our way through the shallow waters (it was nearly low tide when we did this) when we heard an uninspiring thud in the hull of the ship.  We realized that we had hit a reef!  My father and the crew scrambled down to the bilge to see if we were taking water on; they discovered that we weren’t, but that we’d better get to port and get some repairs done soon.  So we radioed Spanish Wells and got a native guide out.  He led us through the reefs and safely into the harbour.  We spent the weekend there while the ship was being repaired, which was tricky because our yacht was nearly too big for the dry dock.

We eventually got back to Florida from this adventure, but there’s more to this than just an error in navigation.  Self-sufficiency in life is something many of us are raised to achieve.  We feel compelled to be our own master and make our own way.  We feel it beneath ourselves if we have to ask help for anything.  But, like on the Bahamian reefs, we all eventually get to the point where the demands of life — and the consequences of our own mistakes — are just too much for us to handle.  We can fake it for a while, but sooner or later things will catch up.  Our boats, so to speak, will fill up with water and we will find ourselves at the bottom, never able to recover.

It is in times like these that we need a native guide to help us along, to get us through the dangers and difficulties of life and bring us to safe harbour at the end.  That native guide is Jesus Christ, who as God commands the spiritual realms and as man endured and ultimately triumphed over the difficulties of this life and ultimately death itself.  He knows the way through the reefs and other dangers of life and can bring us to the safe harbour of eternal life with him at the end.

If you realize that it’s time to stop hitting the reefs of life and get the native guide for eternity, click here. It’s a decision that you will never regret.

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Palm Beach Day School

Right: A “tug of war” during Field Day. This wasn’t the only competition to be lost at Palm Beach Day School; the students were never shy about reminding me that I was on the bottom of the social scale as well. Few things belie the whole “compassionate” nature of liberalism more than their sloth in dealing with students persecuting their fellows whom they think are inferior, “anti-bullying” programs notwithstanding.  Being on either the receiving or the giving end of this kind of thing is a lifelong lesson that most in our society don’t want others to learn.

Postscript: evidently little has changed since our “tug of war.” Thirty years later, a friend coached a lacrosse team up the coast. The one school they would not allow their kids to eat lunch at was Palm Beach Day School, on account of the harassment by the “home team.” PBDS kids would even shout obscenities at the visitors as they got on the bus to leave.

Note also the closeness of the buildings behind the field. Palm Beach’s real estate is expensive and used very efficiently, more so now than when we lived there.

Below: “There’s a hole in my bucket…” Fourth graders at Palm Beach Day School perform a satire on “hillbillies” called “Appalachian Legend” during Stunt Night 1969. Attitudes from the “coasts” about “flyover country” in the U.S. have been deep seated for a long time; stage productions like this only reinforced that. It’s fair to say that, if the “Religious Right” had fully grasped the contempt they were held in when the movement first got going in the late 1970′s they would not have started the Moral Majority: they would have started a revolution.

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Right: Our home in Palm Beach. It was located on the old “Dodge Estate,” one of the last of the large estates to be broken up (Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is an example of one that is still intact.) Built in the late 1950′s, it survived the hurricanes that were reasonably frequent during the years we lived in Palm Beach (we experienced two the first summer we lived there.) All of the windows were fitted with shutters (as shown here) or had a metal shield that could be fitted for a blow. This obviated the need to strip forests for plywood every time a hurricane arrived.

Note also the ficus hedge running along the street. Using a hedge to both close in the yard and to obscure the view of the property (they’re generally higher now than they were then) is fairly common in Palm Beach. After living with this, being forced into the “open yard” mould so common in the U.S. (especially in the South) just doesn’t quite cut it.

Left: The back of the house. Note that the driveway actually slopes upwards. This is unexceptional in most places but in flat South Florida it is worthy of note. Our street sloped upward from the ocean end to the lake end. The reality is that most of the “barrier islands” in South Florida are on top of a coral ridge, as opposed to being just sand spits. Much of Palm Beach is at least five metres above sea level, and it is the closest point on the U.S. coast to the Continental Shelf, which helps to mitigate storm surge. All of these make parts of Palm Beach a reasonable place to ride out a storm if you can stand the loss of power (ours was out four days after the first hurricane we went through.)

The advertisement on the right for James Pike’s “If This Be Heresy” appeared in the Saturday, 2 March 1968 issue of the Palm Beach Daily News. It appeared directly below the ad for Bethesda-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, and would have effectively precluded attendance at their Evening Prayer service.

In holding his lecture in West Palm Beach, Pike was invading what was for him “enemy territory.” In an article in the July 2006 issue of Chronicles magazine, author Tom Landess reminded us of the following:

In 1966, a group led by Henry I. Louttit, bishop of the Central Archdeanery of South Florida, demanded that Pike be tried for heresy.

John Hines, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, met with Louttit and a small delegation in New York and told them he had polled key figures in the mass media, who had declared unanimously that a heresy trial would severely, disastrously damage the Church’s image.

Most of the bishops agreed. The Bishop of New York expressed the feelings of the majority: “Of all the methods of dealing with Bishop Pike’s views, the very worst is surely a heresy trial! Whatever the result, the good name of the church will be greatly injured.”

Hines asked Louttit and his cohorts to allow an ad hoc committee to address the problem more informally, less visibly. Louttit reluctantly agreed. Members of the committee met, engaged in a great deal of hand-wringing, and came back with a report that said in part:

It is the opinion that this proposed trial would not solve the problem presented to the church by this minister, but in fact would be detrimental to the church’s mission and witness…This heresy trial would be widely viewed as a “throw back” to centuries when the law in church and state sought to repress and penalize unacceptable opinions…it would spread abroad a “repressive image” of the church and suggest to many that we were more concerned with traditional propositions about God than with the faith as the response of the whole man to God.

At Wheeling, West Virginia, the House of Bishops adopted this statement by an overwhelming vote, though they also agreed to “censure” Bishop Pike – a small, dry bone tossed to Christian orthodoxy. In the above passage, two phrases — “acceptable opinions” and “repressive image” – revealed what was really going on.

Henry Louttit was a frightful bore from the pulpit, but he was right: it was heresy, and frankly it still is. People such as Pike detonated the jerk to the left that caused the Episcopal Church to lose a third of its membership in the 1970′s. Once again the Pharaohs on the left are making their move and once again God’s children are forced into exodus.  But now there is a Promised Land.

Below: Ah, the good life: Palm Beacher Fred Tod Ketcham relaxes in style.  It’s an affectation for many, but Tod was the real article.  A scion of the du Ponts, he attended Palm Beach Day School and graduated from St. Andrew’s in Boca Raton with me.  I saw him once after gradation in Edinburgh, Scotland, while I was on the way to this experience.  He was a superb photographer (he took my photo which I used for my novel The Ten Weeks‘ web site.)  But alas, the good life was fleeting: Tod struggled with asthma, finally succumbing in death in 1981 at the age of 26.

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It was yet another hostage incident in 1997 when Rick McLaren took hostages in West Texas.  Living in Tennessee, I had not heard of the “Republic of Texas” movement to separate the State of Texas from the rest of the U.S..  The real shock came when the “President” of at least one of these “Republics” was named Archie Lowe.  I said to myself, “It couldn’t be…I remember him from Dallas.”  A little later NPR interviewed him; his voice was unmistakable.  Without the family I knew was his many years ago, Archie was facing some potentially tough times.  This is especially true in Texas, where the State has a high view of its own authority and of its need to exercise it when it feels it’s necessary (Karla Faye Tucker found this out the hard way.)   Well, at least the Texas Rangers knew how to end a tough situation without a mess.

But I digress…let me go back and tell you about the Archie Lowe I knew, and some other reflections on what has happened.

The Latter Rain

In late 1976 I graduated from Texas A&M University and moved to Dallas to take a job with Texas Instruments (which is a great company, by the way.)  Having been immensely blessed by a coffee-house ministry back in College Station, I cast about for another one in the Dallas.  Unfortunately finding such a ministry proved an elusive task. I attached myself (though never formally joined) the Catholic Charismatic “Community of God’s Delight.” They led me to the Baptism in the Holy Spirit but their Gothardian authoritarianism made me uneasy.

One night at the end of the Sunday night prayer meeting they announced that there was a coffee-house ministry in Garland called “The Latter Rain Christian Coffeehouse.”  I wasted no time looking it up.  It was located in a store front in downtown Garland.  Archie, his wife Sindy and another couple were running the coffee-house; there were two other couple who were regularly there.  They had a band and they played and either Archie or one of the others would deliver a message.  (You can click on Archie’s picture to hear a little of the music.)

None of the people at the Latter Rain were full time in ministry and Archie was no exception.  At the time he was a technician with E-Systems in Garland; we were both in defence work and both held security clearances.  Archie was very country, a quality I had come to like in my years in Texas.  He and Sindy had probably had more to do than any body else in getting my Southern accent up to speed after years in South Florida, something that has proven a plus in Tennessee.

I was a regular at the Latter Rain for all of the summer of 1977 and into the fall.  I enjoyed the Latter Rain; it filled a void at a time when nothing else did.  I also spent time socially with Archie and the rest of the people there.  It was good fellowship.  Probably the most unusual thing we did was to put flyers for the Latter Rain in the cars parked for a James Robison crusade in Garland.  This was before Robison received the Baptism in the Holy Spirit; we advertised that they could get the rest of the message at the Latter Rain.  The people at the Latter Rain were committed to the Full Gospel; they’re a part of why this page is the “Pentecostal Layman’s Page.”

Unfortunately the Latter Rain had its problems.  Its location was a start; downtown Garland was a forlorn place in the late 1970′s, and we didn’t get a lot of people coming in.  The more serious problem was the long term direction of the ministry.  Some of those wanted to concentrate on making an album and moving into contemporary Christian music, and the hows and ifs of that decision made for some pretty serious divisions.  I was not privy to a lot of that.  Their last Christian “concert” I attended was on 22 September 1977 at the Christ Community Church in Wylie, TX; after that the Latter Rain was pretty much history.

Different Paths

In early 1978, they told me about a church they were going to over in a warehouse in Farmers Branch, so I went and visited it.  It was the Word of Faith Outreach Centre; its pastor was Robert Tilton, who was to get himself in trouble so many years later.  One thing about Archie and the other Latter Rain people is they always went “whole hog” in anything they did; Word of Faith was no exception.  It was a charismatic church, and this was no problem; the problem was in the single-minded emphasis on the accumulation of wealth as the ultimate goal of Christian life.  None of the “faith” or “prosperity” preachers were as focused on this as Tilton.  One Sunday he made his people commit to doubling their income in the coming year; I found this step of faith hard to take, but mine quadrupled.  That notwithstanding I found “name it and claim it” hard to swallow, not because I liked seeing my friends impoverished but because of my first-hand experience with the wealthy.

Archie and Sindy were enthusiastic about this; they reinforced this in the Bible studies they had at their house.  But my time in Dallas was ending; in late March 1978 I left for Tennessee.  The last time I saw them was just before I left, when those of us who had been involved in the Latter Rain had a picnic at the DeGoyler mansion on White Rock Lake.  I came back a couple of times to visit, but my contacts with Archie, Sindy and the others from the Latter Rain dwindled.  My last contact with Archie was in 1980; by that time they were living in a communal setting in Rice, TX.  (Click here to view the last letter from them to me.)  After that I didn’t hear from or about them until the news broke about McLaren.

Some Reflections

Organizations and movements such as the “Republic of Texas” and the other militia movements reflect the fact that in this country the values and interests of the ruling classes on the one hand and large segments of the population on the other have separated.  (The usual term these days for this is “disconnect;” it used to be called “alienation.”)  As long as this condition exists the government needs to be prepared to deal with uprisings such as this.  Efforts on both sides to wrap themselves in an ideal, Constitutional past only obscure the real problem, although such is a favourite device of political debate in the English speaking world.

The U.S. isn’t the only country to have experienced alienation of the population; the Roman Empire experienced this also.  Having incorporated many kinds of people while limiting their ability to actively participate in their government, many regarded their relationship with the state as an “arms length” proposition.  Such a relationship — especially when expressed religiously — is a dry business; it leaves an empty space waiting to be filled.  Into this void stepped the followers of Christ, proclaiming that God had walked amongst us and that He could set us free from sin and death, giving our lives new meaning and purpose.  Without starting a political revolution Christianity changed the Roman Empire and ultimately the history of the entire world.

It’s sad to think that Archie, having proclaimed the Gospel in the Latter Rain, the Gospel that sets people free in a way that a Republic of Texas could not, turned to a political solution of dubious worth (consider the uninspiring years of Texas as a Republic the first time.)  This ultimately is what darkens this whole scene, because changing peoples’ eternal destiny — yours included — is more important than any political goal.

Click here for more information on eternal destinies

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In view of the back and forth on the Guantanamo detainees and the legal status of same, an interesting audio document is Sen. Sam Ervin’s (D-NC, right) monlogue–and back and forth with Watergate witness John Erlichmann and his counsel–during the Watergate hearings.

The monologue is about 30 minutes into the audio clip.  The date was 26 July 1973.

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This is Maundy Thursday; our podcast is the institution of the Eucharist (along with the acclamation,) from Roger Smith’s album Who Shall Spread the Good News.

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