Leo Tolstoy - Christian Anarchist

Like the young, I too can learn something about history from the cinema. Ran into a movie about Leo Tolstoy's last days in the film The Last Station. Not high drama, a good soap opera though of everyday life in the life of a very famous man in his day. I am also a Helen Mirren fan.

The Last Station

Well anyway, I never heard of Tolstoy and his Christian Anarchy and non-violence advocacy. Tolstoy's socialist views were more than exceeded and abused after the Russian Revolution. But that is another story.

Christian anarchism

The Christian anarchy thing sounds areligionist. Tolstoy was no doubt repulsed by the state religion of Russia in those days. In a way his message is the message of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy's book The Kingdom of God is Within You (Luke 17:21) is the basis of a non-violent reaction to business as usual regarding wars, social injustice etc.

Another interesting tangent regarding this book I was wholfully ignorant about is that it inspired a young Mahatma Ghandi to form his own ideas about passive resistance against the British in India. Ghandhi wrote to Tolstoy for permission to translate and reprint Tolstoy's A Letter to a Hindu in which Tolstoy advocates love and non-violence to overthrow the British in India. Tolstoy's last letter was to Ghandhi.

I am a student of history and know that Martin Luther King Jr. based his passive resistance program and efforts on those of Ghandhi. I am not a very good student of history to not know that Ghandhi based much of his political strategy on ideas put forth by the Christan Anarchist Leo Tolstoy.

The ripple effects of the Sermon on the Mount have an energy that seem to go on forever no matter what any official or sanctioned vested religion does to cloud the message of Jesus.

The Kingdom of God can be truly said to be within each one of us!

Blessed are the Seekers of Truth - Whoever and Wherever You Are...

I recently called an old friend that I have known for decades. The conversation got around to her granddaughter who was going to grade school at a Greek Orthodox school. Her granddaughter was learning Greek at a very young age. “That’s great.” I said. I then added “that’s one of the things wrong with America these days. They don’t teach the classical languages, Latin or Greek anymore...”

Well the way I think, I remember that Jefferson, among others, knew at least a half dozen languages including Latin and Greek.

So when I hear a typical carnie evangelical talk about this being a christian nation and the founding fathers meant this or that and so on and so forth about the U.S. Constitution, I get a little bewildered.

This strange logic is in keeping with the Bible being the exact and unerring word of God, foregoing any explanations of translations from Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Greek into English (17th Century) to English (20th Century) to go on and on.

I find it annoying lately about these telly evangelicals living in their eighteen thousand square foot homes telling the audience that Jesus meant this when he said that and he meant that when he said this...etc.

Having been an elder in a small congregation, I understand the need to raise funds. Selling a New York Times best seller for seven or eight dollars above retail to the congregation is an acceptable means to me to get some chump change together to help pay the church's electricity bill.

There is one book that comes to mind that I never could read or understand. The title is The Purpose Driven Life. I am not totally knocking it. Success has many surprising parents. I think that there are a dozen or so concepts and the author pushed “word search” on his word processor using a biblical data base. The word search categorized the concepts with tithing at the top of the list as to what God and Jesus wants us to do to have a fulfilling life.

So I tell someone that I do not understand this book that is explaining the bible to me and that person says that I should buy the workbook and attend classes to understand what a purpose driven life is. So let me get this straight. I need a workbook to understand the book that explains what God and Jesus really meant about this phrase or concept or that.

Hey, I read my bible and if I don’t understand one particular passage or that, I do some research.

I will in no way tell any other Christian what they should believe or not believe and I will always use the subjunctive tense to say what I think something in the Bible might mean and within the framework of a lifetime’s exposure to a sacred and secular – Christian culture.

Getting away from my frustration of looking at a media circus and snake oil and former used car salesmen explaining what Jesus really really meant - I escape back to something quite simple to get into the flavor and nature of the Christ.

There is a line by the late comedian Milton Berle about how “laughter is an instant vacation”.

Many times a person such as myself wants an instant retreat from the world or reminder of the simplicity of, and want to touch (retouch), the true spirit of Jesus.

With that in mind I turn to the beginning of Matthew 5 and read the Sermon on the Mount which contains the Beatitudes.

I also prefer the King James Version to hear the sometime poetic flow of Shakespearian like English and the spirit of a great many scholars translating from many ancient and dead languages to keep the words of Jesus alive to this day:

And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him:

And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying,

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid.

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.

Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil...

( do you need another book or a workbook to understand the preceding ? I don’t think so. )

God Bless.

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Loose Change

The Pope is in Australia talking to young people about Moral Relativism and I am encouraged if he is asking these impressionable minds to study Sartre, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche and not to accept his Cliff Notes version of the subject matter. There is the old line about how if you can frame the perimeters of the argument then you can probably win the argument.

I doubt that Jesus ever studied Sartre, Hume, Spinoza or Nietzsche or ever had the need to.

This week a famous publication, The New Yorker, had a “satiric” cartoon in the minstrel style of the original mission statement of the magazine founding in the 1920’s. Ultra liberal types seem to be accommodating themselves to the fact that the next President of the United States is not going to pure bred, burb bred, or drug brain dead like themselves. Oh the insecurity of the ruling classes! Oh the cost of psycho-therapy these days!

I make reference to the fact that there was an American flag burning in the oval office fireplace of this “satiric” spoof illustration. Spoof illustration for The New Yorker would have had Christopher Hitchens being water boarded and seeing a vision of Mother Theresa (God rest her great soul!).

I got put in my place by someone and was told that the burning flag thing was a cartoon and therefore not a valid talking point. Whatever.

After almost two decades of non-stop radio hate-mongering and right wing fascist propaganda sputtering out of the burned out, thieving, lying, pension fund looting conservative movement, I think that maybe the boring monolithic Byzantine politically correct brain dead democrat club is about to return with a vengeance, to descend onto this country in the same horrific manner as the recent conservative non-thought movement, and like a plague on logic in the near future.

It is good to be the elite in the USA, to only have to deal with your politically correct neighbors in the local country club and only occasionally wonder who all the other people on the TV screen or outside your gated community or concierge-doorman serviced high-rise are all about. Then the percocet takes effect and all is well with your world.

The global economy and the global mindset is not going away. The idea of you living in peace and harmony in your global village (gated community) and communicating by telegraph with the rest of the world, to and from your mines and mine overseers, from out there somewhere, and people earning a quarter an hour or even better a quarter per day - That model, that monster is about to bite America in the ass. Is biting us in the ass right now.

Was the collapse of Christianity part of that half century old Ivy League model of perfection with the corporate spreadsheet model of the global village?

When our secular world invaded the other parts of the planet with fast food and disco - Was there a back up plan or an exit strategy for the impromptu corporatist non-moral system exported along with the cappuccino?

When we set out on the crusades were they to conquer Islam or to bypass the greedy christian middlemen of Byzantium? What did we get from the crusades? Diapers and Gothic cathedrals? Perhaps the real Holy Grail in Jerusalem was an old Greek mathematics book to make cathedrals possible.

In any case, the global conversion is on. Do the world’s montheistic religions merge (yuck!)? Do they learn the tolerance they all claim to have at the base of their philosophies? Does a little bit of Buddha get thrown into the formula? I don’t know.

This primitive Cultural Christian can see great things in our future as a planet and as the people of God. I know that the Sermon of the Mount will be reiterated in the centuries to come both here and beyond here and travel with the human race to the stars.