A song for everyone.

Here is a beautiful song for everyone. Everyone!


The soloist is Chris Rice.

The Murder of Dr. Tiller, Starhawk and morality

The Witherspoon Society has posted several articles on their site, some faulting all Pro-life groups for the murder of Dr. George Tiller, the abortionist who specialized in late term abortions. Via Elizabeth Sarfaty they have posted some of a short essay by the Wiccan teacher and theologian, Starhawk. Her column is in the Washington Post under "On Faith." The Article is entitled “Tiller’s Murder an Act of Terror Against Women.”Picture by Viola Larson

Starhawk writes:

“The murder of Dr. Tiller was an act of terror. Although its immediate victim was a man, it was aimed at women's hearts and minds, designed to shatter our oneness and assert control. And it is part of a larger campaign of terror--if we must throw that word around then let us use it where it truly applies. When the murderer squeezes the trigger, when Bill O'Reilly thunders on Fox News or Randall Terry pontificates, they are sending the same message to women, "Your bodies, your fertility, your sexuality must remain under our control, or you will die, along with anyone who helps you."

I found that some of the other ideas that Starhawk wrote about were more interesting and I want to write about them in light of her views on abortion and her references at the end of the essay to her book The Pagan Book of Living and Dying: Practical Rituals, Prayers, Blessings, and Meditations on Crossing Over.

Starhawk begins her essay with the work she and others were in the midst of when they heard the news about the murder. She states that she and some other wiccans were constructing a goddess bench. She writes of the work and the song they sing as they work, “My body is the body of the Goddess.”

Starhawk refers to the ground they scrape as “the greater body of the Goddess. She also writes, “Our minds, our hands, our creative bodies and the body of the earth are one.”

Later explaining her and other Wiccan’s beliefs she writes:

“Witches, Pagans, Goddess worshipers have no dogma, no central body that tells us what to believe or what decisions to make. But if there is one belief we all hold in common, it is this: that we are each our own moral and spiritual authority. From women’s power to conceive, profound and sometimes painful choices arise, and we must be free to make those choice [sic] for ourselves. To deny that right is to deny our most basic human agency.”

Additional information on what Wiccans believe about abortion can be found in Starhawk’s book.

She explains that each woman has her own sense of when life quickens in the womb, some sensing it even before conception, others long after conception. Moreover, some of the rituals found in this book infer that abortion happens to real persons. Other chants or prayers assume that the unborn are simply possibilities. In the first case one prayer is to the child, “How sorry I am/ to close my womb to you/ but now is not the time.”

The latter, the possibility prayer is directed to the goddess. The Chant in part is:

"You are the Goddess of
All possibilities.
Here is one that cannot come to be.
This is a holy act I perform:
to send back to you
this spark, this might have been.
I act as the gardener
that thins the seedlings;
I act as the wolf that culls the herd.
I act with sorrow."

In a longer ritual which includes a trance, the women are directed to the Place of the Mothers where they will speak with their grandmothers, mothers, all mothers of the past and possibly their aborted children. So for many Wiccans the aborted are more than tissue. They are people.

I have several thoughts on all of this coming from my Christian perspective.

First, Starhawk’s complaints about the death of Tiller has, within her belief system, no logical foundation. When she writes that each person is a moral authority unto themselves, then anyone’s decision must be morally right. So anything done both by Tiller or any late term abortionist who kills unborn children, who are actually viable, and the murderer of Tiller are on a level playing ground. In that kind of a moral philosophy there is no difference between Mother Teresa and a serial killer.

Second, the goddess of Wicca, which according to Starhawk is all of creation, offers no moral authority. And in fact if one looks at the prayer to the goddess one sees a picture of a broken creation. The child has been conceived, (or a possibility) by a mistaken deity. According to the prayer, it isn’t time to give birth but nature or the goddess plants the seed anyway.

Third, the women who conceive, or not, are the ones with power and their acts are thought to be holy whether they are acts of giving life or acts of killing life.

Finally, the very sad part here is that while the Wiccans are trying to find morality, even sacredness in abortion, they nonetheless have slipped over into a contradictory world of immorality. Yes, they have become like “the wolf that culls the herd.”

Many believe that the child is real and can be communicated with by one of the very persons who has caused the innocent child both pain and death and yet there is no redemption in their faith. That is, there is no mediator to redeem and reconcile the two people, mother and child.

There is a deeper story here in the very words of Starhawk, plus the words of Sarfaty, and the words of the Witherspoon Society that placed these names on their site. The deep story is not that all pro-life people are murderers. (Shall we insist that Mother Teresa and Dietrich Bonheoffer are also responsible for the murder of Tiller?)

If morality is based on human authority any act can be called holy. If abortion is a moral and holy act made by humans then any death caused by another can become holy.

The true story is that many are missing that grounding in truth that up-holds life and reconciles the wounded with the wounded. They, instead, are laying the ground for another round of some unholy darkness.

Awesome weather

Last night was truly awesome. First my husband and I sat on the front porch watching sheet lightning in the distance which went on for over an hour. We never have that kind of lightning in Sacramento. The weather news at eleven stated that there were almost 4000 lightning strikes in the valley during that time.

Then sometime after midnight when I was very asleep my daughter Jenny called to say that there was a terrific storm right over us. (We have this deal about alerting each other to unusual weather but its meant for snow which we never see.) There was lightning every second with thunder that rolled without stopping. You have to live in Sacramento to know that just doesn’t happen here. Later, sometime around three or four, more lightning and crashing thunder. What a wonderful night only now I am very sleepy.

Knowledge about God

"Reformed teaching is the renewal of the prophetic-apostolic knowledge of God as knowledge of the one and only God. Beside and apart from God there is indeed His creation but no other God. No one and nothing is the Lord in the sense in which He is the Lord. God is not alone, but God alone is God.

Therefore this knowledge signifies further the relativising of all human ideologies, mythologies, philosophies and religions. Whatever their validity within the created world may be, their objects can certainly not be understood as gods. In the last resort they cannot be considered worthy of belief and proper reverence cannot be paid to them."

This is a quote from Barth in his book The Knowledge of God and the Service of God According to the Teaching of the Reformation: Recalling the Scottish Confession of 1560. It is actually Barth's Gifford lectures given at the University of Aberdeen in 1937. Barth insisted his lectures, which were suppose to be about natural theology, were an example of what natural theology was not. In other words he was lecturing on revealed theology.

I often think the above quote about Reformed teaching should always follow the quote, "Reformed and always reforming." That is, Reformation teaching about God should always be returning to knowledge of God given in the prophetic and apostolc word.

In the devotional I use, The St. James Daily Devotional Guide, the author, Patrick Henry Reardon, wrote about the teaching of Jesus to his disciples during the forty days after the resurrection. He wrote:

"... the Church's proper interpretation of Holy Scripture down through the centuries is rooted in what the Lord Himself taught her during the forty days spoken of in Acts 1:3. The correct--that is to say, the orthodox--understanding of the Bible is based on what the Church learned directly from the risen Christ. Her interpretation of Holy Scripture is in separable from the hearing of the Lord's voice (John 20:16), the handling of His flesh (Luke 24:39-40; 1 John 1:1), the touching of His wounds (John 20:27). The Church's experience of the risen Christ is the source of all correct understanding of Holy Scripture."

And so the Church's knowledge of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is known because of Jesus Christ the living Word and the written Word of God.

A verse & song for the weekend

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time." (1 Peter 1:3-5)

For the weekend here is a beautiful old hymn of the Church, "My Hope is Built On Nothing Less." It was written by Edward Mote around 1836. It seems appropriate considering all that is happening around us. The song here is sung by Deborah Liv Johnson.

Eye problems, Karl Barth, and the proclamation of God's revelation

John Shuck has placed an interesting posting on his blog entitled, Religion without Revelation. That would of course catch my eye since I consider that the only true religion is that revealed through Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father. And Jesus Christ is revealed in the Bible, the word of God, which is the written revelation of God.

Another thing that caught my eye was the quote by Karl Barth I found in John’s posting. My respect for Karl Barth is tremendous as anyone who reads my blog knows. So I took the time to read the posting and then to look up Barth’s quote in his Church Dogmatics.

Now since I am forbidden to write comments on John’s blog I thought perhaps a posting of my own would suffice.

John writes about the historical/critical study of texts and how devastating that is to those who hold that the Bible is God’s revelation. Forgetting that Scripture is both the written words of men and the Holy Spirit inspired words of God, John believes that historical criticism destroys the God part. But instead Scripture is rather like the Lutheran view of communion. That is, as the bread & wine holds the actual body and blood of Christ, the Word of God contains what is both the humanity of its authors, (their personality, culture and knowledge) and yet all is the Word of God.

But the subject that most intrigued me was John’s use of Barth and the quote he took from an article “The Relationship of Biblical Studies to the History of Religions School, with Reference to the Scientific Study of Religion” by Gerd Luedemann. The Barth quote is:

“[The Church] will at least require of its servants, even if there are some who personally cannot understand this ordinance, that they treat their private road as a private road and do not make it an object of their proclamation, that if they personally cannot affirm it and so (unfortunately) withhold it from their congregations, they must at least pay the dogma the respect of keeping silence about it.”

John seems to believe that Barth, when writing this quote, which is in reference to the virgin birth, was advocating keeping silent on doctrines that could no longer be believed because of the work of historical criticism. He writes that Barth knew of this problem. John explains the problem with a question: “The effects of the historical-method on religious texts are far-reaching. Is it even meaningful to speak of "God" with any sense of realism when "God" becomes a literary character in a human drama?”

But a little addition of Barth’s words from his text is helpful. (I will divide up his paragraph for easier reading since they are always long.)

“In this connection we may reply briefly to the question of popular theology, whether in order to believe in a really Christian way ‘one’ would have to believe fully in the Virgin birth. We must answer that there is certainly nothing to prevent anyone, without affirming the doctrine of the Virgin birth, from recognizing the mystery of the person of Jesus Christ or from believing in a perfectly Christian way. It is within God’s counsel and will to make this possible, just as it cannot be at all impossible for Him to bring anyone to the knowledge of Himself even beyond the sphere of the Church visible to us.

But this does not imply that the Church is at liberty to convert the doctrine of the Virgin birth into an option for specially strong or for specially weak souls. The Church knew well what it was doing when it posted this doctrine on guard, as it were, at the door of the mystery of Christmas.

It can never be in favour of anyone thinking he can hurry past the guard. It will remind him that he is walking along a private road at his own cost and risk. It will warn him against doing so.

It will proclaim as a Church ordinance that to affirm the doctrine of the Virgin birth is a part of real Christian faith. It will at least require of its servants, even if there are some who personally cannot understand this ordinance, that they treat their private road as a private road and do not make it an object of their proclamation, that if they personally cannot affirm it and so (unfortunately) withhold it from their congregations, they must at least pay the dogma the respect of keeping silence about it.” (This is the Bromiley and Torrance translation.)

I believe that one of the great sins of leadership in the Church today is that too many elders, pastors and professors are making their own roads the main part of their proclamation. May God have mercy on their flocks and students.

Saving the San Francisco Bay: again

In December of 2008 I posted Be Thou My Vision, High King of Heaven and the San Francisco Bay. Part of that blog posting was about my friend Miles Saunders and the project he is working on called “Saving the Bay.”
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Miles is a producer and writer. At that time I highlighted a trailer for the series which will be on PBS. I just received an e-mail with a link to “a revised trailer with a promo clip from Robert Redford and a near final version of the open to Saving the Bay.” He adds, “We’re scheduled to run on KQED San Francisco with two hours on October 8 (8pm to 10pm) and two hours on October 15 (8pm to 10pm)."

Here is the newly revised trailer:


Be sure and watch for this when it is scheduled on your PBS.