Bob Bird: Religion, the arts, and politics

By BOB BIRD

I have three fantastic children, which would not have been possible without a wife that I did not deserve.

These three, now in early middle age, are two lawyers and an erstwhile opera soprano, who now has a PhD in Sacred Music Conducting.

One of the lawyers has the president-elect as a client. Another has been chief of staff for a local mayor, and used to work for an Anchorage attorney who was regarded by conservatives as the best in the state. The soprano is teaching future priests how to sing.

If it sounds like I’m bragging, OK, but there is a larger view in this essay.

As they grew older, dinner conversations (which now include grandchildren) inevitably centered around the three things in life most worthy to discuss, analyze, argue and focus our lives around: religion, the arts and politics.

(We all agreed that sports are an artform).

Religion is the most important, of course. There are realities that we will all be facing, and your age might make you feel temporarily immune but as everyone knows, is no guarantee. The reality is this:

There is nothing more certain than death.

There is nothing more strict than Judgment.

There is nothing more terrible than hell.

There is nothing more peaceful than heaven

When you go into the deepest recesses of your heart, soul — maybe even in your stomach — and in the quiet of laying awake in bed in the middle of the night, when the cacophony of daytime is absent, and all philosophical and theological nuances aside, you know that those four things are true. And you need to do something about it.

I can guarantee that if you bring this up at dinnertime, you will get quite a discussion going.

Then there are the arts. God gave Man a gift. If you have no artistic gifts, maybe you haven’t discovered them … yet. Maybe you haven’t tried. But if they are not there, you can still be someone who treasures and appreciates them. People do not give standings ovations, collect paintings and sculptures or books or discuss classic movies for nothing. They all touch our souls, and force us to look at things from a different angle.

These first two topics are far more important than the third, but politics must be part of our temporal existence or else the other two may be suppressed, persecuted, or what is even worse — warped. Underground art and books still exist under suppression and persecution, and can provide hope, but when politics warps religion and the arts, it manifests something mad or ugly.

One need only look at the warped architecture of the Soviet Union, still in frightening evidence in the cities of Russia, to know this is true. Or communist and fascist propaganda posters. Tyrannical governments have tried to invent substitute religions, books, plays, murals, statues and the like, but they never satisfy the human thirst for Truth. Countless heroes have died and suffered for their faith, and their art. Whatever they had to say deserved consideration, for God gave man free will, and even errors must be allowed to have their say — so that Truth can triumph more fully.

We have just emerged from a decades-long Dark Age, where both political parties have had a hand, where truth-tellers were ridiculed or called liars. Every single institution of Man has lost the trust that centuries of patient suffering, trials and successes had taken root.

Count them. Which ones have not been compromised? Education, medicine, military, religion, art, democracy, journalism, business, amateur, and professional sports. The hold-outs who refused to drink the Kool-Aid now are standing taller in all these areas of human endeavor, and we must help them correct the social chaos we have emerged from. 

Carl Sandburg, a midwestern poet of the early 20^th century, compiled a work entitled, The People, Yes. In the end, the God-given gift of weeding out lies was done not by these institutions, but by the common sense He instills even in the hearts of the peasantry.

Evil never rests. Thrown down, it returns. We cannot change this Truth, for Man is fallen. But Man is also redeemed. Heavenly, or perfect peace cannot exist in this world, but real peace can. We must struggle to ensure that our free will is not suffocated. It has fallen to us to determine whether this is merely a temporary emergence from a Dark Age, or a more permanent one.

And remember, those who led us into the Dark Age are also redeemable, and often return to join in the struggle for the real peace, a struggle that will someday lead us to the Perfect one.

Bob Bird is former chair of the Alaskan Independence Party and the host of a talk show on KSRM radio, Kenai.

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