Letter #39: A New Age Now Begins
Bring the Truth With You
Dearest Splotch
Wonderful to see you in Nashville — especially because you seem to have staked out all the best places to eat. And yes, also because to talk about God-stuff is to talk about the only stuff that matters.
In fact, the more I think about eternity, the less I think about the times. I know that history can sweep away everything I love: people, traditions, nations, all of it. More than that, I know it will sweep those things away because the towers of man are built to fall as the living are born to die. But even though I understand this suffering will come, the more I direct my mind toward heaven, the more the noise of history fades into the background until I sometimes feel like the sleeping centuries of Brigadoon, hearing the clashes of armies as if in a dream.
So this is my response to your letter.
A great people is steeped in a great tradition as a great poet is nurtured in the beauties of his mother tongue. Only the one who embodies the rule can break the rule with impunity. He instinctively balances what Edmund Burke called “the two principles of conservation and correction.” He changes tradition in line with tradition to bring tradition into the service of the new age.
To do that, we have to find the eternal in the things of time. Which takes time: time for a person or a people to marinate in the wisdom of the dead until they’re infused with it.
This is central to the story of the Bible.
In the books of Moses, there are chapters upon chapters describing the precise practice of sacrifice “which is most holy.” Slaughter the bull here. Splash his blood there. On and on. But even before Jesus comes, the prophets start telling us that this “most holy” sacrifice is not what God cares about at all. “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” (Hosea 6:6) “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the Lord… I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.” (Isaiah 1:11)
Did all those sacrificed animals die in vain? Were the old priests wasting their time? Or were the hearts of men being trained in a reality higher than the moment in which they lived?
I believe it was that last. That’s why I think revolutionaries are fools: they destroy traditions in the name of a morality their traditions taught them. And it’s why I think hidebound conservatives are fools: they sneer at the new age when traditions have to correct their own courses.
Well, this is a new age, and coming fast. But the truth remains true, whether it dies with an old man or is resurrected in a newborn babe.
Easter is only the beginning.
Love, Dad
The morning routine I have of reading the Bible, talking to God, then reading Klavan-Klavan is now the only way to begin the day
Sometimes I think of my great-grandfather, born amid the last height of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. He fought for it, was imprisoned by Russians for nearly a decade, came back to a vastly transformed society (and to meet his son - my grandfather- born while he was gone), lived quietly until WWII when his only son had to take his only grandson (my father) and hightail it out of Hungary because of those darn advancing Russians because FDR let Stalin have the Eastern bloc. My great-grandfather then died under communism. And, yet I perceive strongly that he persevered in his faith and that gives me great hope. Faith is the thread that remains and has sustained my family through all the crazy. While I'm not so close to eternity yet that this life becomes as background noise when I think of it, I do pray I do my part well enough that that thread continues with my children and helps guide us all safely there!