Sabbath Thoughts: The Moral Power of Music

Green Bottom Wildlife Management Area, WV  ©A. Rutherford

Plato, the great Greek philosopher, gave much attention to the place of music in the moral education of the child:   “Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”   

“Music,” Plato says, “is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.”  And “Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul.”

In the poem “The Solitary Reaper,” the great English poet William Wordsworth tells a simple tale to express the power of music on the human soul.  The poet is out walking in a rural setting and comes across a young girl swinging her scythe as she reaps a field of grain.  And as she works, she sings.  He doesn’t understand her song, as she is a “Highland lass” no doubt singing in her brogue and her words are unintelligible to him. No matter . . . it is the expressive mood of her song and the emotions that it evokes in him that are of importance to the poet.  Its fluid beauty stirs a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” in him, which Wordsworth has said in another context is the heart of Poetry. . . this same spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that is at the heart of Music as well, and Art, and Beauty in all its forms for that matter.

THE SOLITARY REAPER

          BEHOLD her, single in the field,

          Yon solitary Highland Lass!

          Reaping and singing by herself;

          Stop here, or gently pass!

          Alone she cuts and binds the grain,

          And sings a melancholy strain;

          O listen! for the Vale profound

          Is overflowing with the sound.

          No Nightingale did ever chaunt

          More welcome notes to weary bands                           

          Of travellers in some shady haunt,

          Among Arabian sands:

          A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard

          In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,

          Breaking the silence of the seas

          Among the farthest Hebrides.

          Will no one tell me what she sings?--

          Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

          For old, unhappy, far-off things,

          And battles long ago:                                       

          Or is it some more humble lay,

          Familiar matter of to-day?

          Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,

          That has been, and may be again?

          Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang

          As if her song could have no ending;

          I saw her singing at her work,

          And o'er the sickle bending;--

          I listened, motionless and still;

          And, as I mounted up the hill                               

          The music in my heart I bore,

          Long after it was heard no more.

In the first stanza, he invites us to take note of the girl in the simplicity of her surroundings, in tune with her rustic setting, responding to it quite naturally in song.  “O, Listen,” he invites us.  And the way in which he issues the invitation causes us to understand that there is meaning and significance here, a lesson to take note of.   In the second stanza, he compares her singing to that of the nightingale and the cuckoo, as though her music comes as easily to her as their song does to the birds, part of her innate nature and her personal expression.  In the third stanza, he wishes he could understand her words, speculates what might be the content of her song, and yet it is clear that she is communicating with him, human being to human being.  He is deeply affected by her melody “whate’er the theme,” and pauses for a while to drink into his memory what he has seen and heard.  The last two lines are a comment on the power of beautiful memories to soothe and sustain the soul.

  The music in my heart I bore,

          Long after it was heard no more.

The poem is a meditation on Art and the power of Beauty.

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"Education is teaching our children to desire the right things." Plato

"The object of education is to teach us to love what is beautiful."  (Plato, The Republic)

Psalm 100:2   “Serve the LORD with gladness;
         Come before His presence with singing.”

Psalm 42:8   “ ... In the night His song shall be with me,
My prayer unto the God of my life.”

"Recalculating"

In the Gap of Dunloe, County Kerry, Ireland ©A. Rutherford

"Recalculating" was the incessant refrain from my GPS during a recent trip to Ireland.  

Ever take a wrong turn?  Ever think you knew where you were going, but somehow got distracted and got lost?

Ever think you knew what you wanted, but when you got it, it wasn’t what you thought it would be, or didn’t satisfy you in the way you longed to be fulfilled?

What do you do then?

As a culture and as individuals in that culture, we seem to be addicted to change . . . to the novel, the new and different . . . from the trendy gimmick or fashion to the artsy avant-garde,  and yet wise men have warned us that all change is not progress.  Not all roads we’re invited to take lead forward.  We’ve observed that happen in society and in our private lives again and again.  

C. S. Lewis, in discussing the concept of progress, once observed:

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When I have started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start over again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

If we have, indeed, come to such a pass that the concepts of beauty and purpose, goal and design are no longer seen as relevant, it is high time to go back.” [emphasis mine]

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it.  But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it.  I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it.  Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past.  It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

-- R. S. Thomas

Jeremiah 6:16 

This is what the LORD says:

   “Stand at the crossroads and look;
   ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
   and you will find rest for your souls.
   But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’

Sometimes you have to go a very long way around to come back a very short distance correctly.  But it doesn’t always have to be that circuitous.  However, you always have to start by admitting that you’ve gotten off track.

Beauty, purpose, meaning . . . these to many today are old-fashioned words.  But my hope and prayer is that others can come to see these, and all the great virtues, as just as relevant to the 21st century as ever they were.  Whatever contribution I can make to that end, whatever pebble I can drop in the stream to make ripples spread out, I want to do my small part.

Taken on my early morning walk around a local park  ©A. Rutherford

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The Mission of Art

The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo, 1510

There seems to be a general recognition that something is amiss in modern culture, a dehumanization, a lack of unity or community, a repressed longing for something, anything, that can fill a void that most people cannot name.  The attempts to fill this void take a myriad of forms, from toys to technology, from the incessant need to be entertained to the use of drugs to kill the pain of meaninglessness resulting from lack of a higher purpose.  We shop, we party, we vacation, we increase our speed although the roads we are traveling on are often going nowhere in particular.

Philosopher Jacques Maritain offers this insight on what might lie at the root of our trouble:

          “We do not need a truth to serve us, 

                                            we need a truth that we can serve.”

Many consider that we as a society are poised on the brink of a precipice.  My purpose in this blog is to offer reflections concerning a Truth that we can serve, a Truth that offers a way back from this precipice.  I am not a mover.  I am not a shaker.  I am just an ordinary person who has life experience that seems to validate what I offer in these reflections.  And I am a person who has worked with young people all my life and who has watched time and time again the transformative effect on these young people when they have been introduced to Truth, Beauty, the great moral and spiritual Virtues, and what are generally recognized as the Great Ideas of Western Civilization.  When they have been shown a way to attach their lives to a transcendent purpose, they are then free to soar.  

My first approach in working with young people is to introduce them to forms of Beauty with which they have not yet been acquainted, the golden nuggets of beauty found in great literature, philosophy, art, music, Nature, etc., and then, released from the bonds of their own subjectivity and the tyranny of the culture, they begin to fall in love with Truth, which leads to the desire to attach their lives to Goodness and to some larger, unifying purpose for their lives.

As one student quoted in a good-bye “thank you” note she wrote to me:  “Teaching is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” -W.B. Yeats  

I believe that Beauty lights the fire on the altar of Truth.

However, Beauty as a virtue has been generally dismissed in modern society, especially in the arts, with its antipathy to anything that has standards of measurement, and the requirement to “measure up” to those standards.

Maritain, writing in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, argues that the loss of Beauty as a standard is a contributing factor to this dehumanizing, even if most people are unaware of the effects this loss creates.   The solution he offers for many of the ills that plague us as individuals and as a society is a return to the recognition and acknowledgement of the power of Beauty as a unifying force and an avenue of spiritual healing.

According to Maritain, “The dehumanizing process . . . can be overcome.  Art in this connection has an outstanding mission.  It is the most natural power of healing and agent of spiritualization needed by the human community. . . .  Art, as long as it remains art, cannot help being intent on beauty.” 

Therein lies the rub—”as long as it remains art” . . . All the modern “isms” have separated Art “from beauty, and from any transcendental end.  The final end and center, then, can only be man,”  which leaves us no way to get ourselves off our hands, so to speak.

This Beauty can take a myriad of forms, approaches, and modes of expression, enough diversity to satisfy anyone, yet there are common criteria or principles that must be recognized or else, to use an analogy, the powerful and life-giving river loses its banks and becomes a swamp.  The real “rub” for the modern culture is that these principles derive from the true source of the transcendent nature of Beauty, or its Divine source.   As stated by Thomas Aquinas, the "beauty of anything created is nothing else than a similarity of divine beauty participated in by things," . . . "the existence of all things derives from divine beauty."

Dostoevski said, “Beauty is the battlefield where God and the Devil contend with one another for the heart of man.” (The Brothers Karamazov)

the Lady's Slipper Orchid, a wild Beauty found in Nature
photo © Greg Ferrell
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Signs and Symbols

Shamrocks, watercolor © A.Rutherford

Last week as we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, I was reminded of a powerful icon or symbol in Celtic Christianity, the Shamrock, the “green flower” of Ireland.

In order to make the people understand the doctrine of the Trinity—that there are three beings who make up one divine God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—St. Patrick drew an analogy by picking a shamrock and showing that its three leaves were on only one stem.   The shamrock’s presence then served as a lovely reminder of the Presence of the Divine amongst the people. 

Goethe's quote under the header of my blog is providing a general theme as I write and reflect here on the nature and purpose of Beauty in our lives.  I include the second half of his quote below—

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

In times of tragedy, either personal or global such as the tsunami that has wreaked havoc in Japan and threatens to have far-reaching effects, human beings can be overwhelmed or even tempted to despair.  In those times it may be easy to forget the sacred nature of the human spirit, created as we are in the image of God.  Life may appear bleak and we begin to feel victims either of our circumstances or of the fragile nature of life in general.  But tragedy is not the final word of our existence.

Kathleen Raine, writing in Defending Ancient Springs, explains it thus:

Strangest of all is the ease with which the vision is lost, consciousness contracts, we forget over and over again, until recollection is stirred by some icon of that beauty. Then we remember and wonder why we ever forgot.

The "vision" Raine is writing about is that certain Truth about who we are and Whose we are in the final analysis.   Or to borrow a couple of lines from the poet John Keats,

                    'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

         Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

Raine reminds us that our recollection of the Truth we know and may have forgotten in our circumstances can be stirred by an icon of that Beauty, which is the wellspring of all life.  We are not to be given over to anxiety or despair.   

A psalm of joy and hope, a piece of beautiful music or art, a bit of poetry, the first daffodil coming up in our garden, and many other such icons can remind us that Beauty is an attribute of God and a sign of His presence in our situation.   Beauty can serve as reminders to us of the richness that is inherent in who we are as created beings and also of the transcendent nature of our lives.

When I was a very young girl, I remember reading a poem about a single blue flower blooming in a rather remote, dreary bog.  It bloomed for the most part unseen and unappreciated, but it was there, and it was blooming in spite of its environs.   It served as a symbol of hope for the persona of the poem, and it has served all my life too, vividly in my memory, as a sort of icon of the ability to transcend my circumstances through paying to attention to the God-gifts of Beauty offered around me.

Later in college I learned that the English Romantic poets used the blue flower as the symbol of the unfolding of the soul, and as an emblem of the desire of the human spirit for the Infinite.  C.S. Lewis, in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, also used the blue flower as a symbol for his longing for Beauty, which he later came to understand was in reality his longing for God.

But as I came to adulthood, I began to understand that it was my responsibility to tend that fire and keep it burning.   I must take the time and make the effort to look for the blue flowers God graciously places along my path not only for my enjoyment, but also for my spiritual enrichment and as signs of the Hope there is in our Faith.  I must not neglect this significant aspect of what God is and who I am created to be.  In this way, Joy is a discipline and is to be practiced in our daily lives.

An early Joy-note from my garden . . .

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How the Irish Saved Civilization

photo of Ross Castle, County Kerry, ©A.Rutherford

Of course, this week is “Holy Week” for the Irish so I will have to be indulged for a bit of Irish history and lore.

We know that heroes come in all sizes, and that surely applies to nations too.   Otherwise, how could a small, isolated island that even the Romans weren’t interested in, in their quest to conquer the known world, have earned the reputation of having saved Western civilization during a dark period of history when the lights of learning were going out all over that world.  When the Roman empire began collapsing, great hordes of barbarians who did not value all that classical civilization had achieved for human history began to roam freely pillaging and destroying what they did not understand.  Much of what was important for the further flowering of civilization was at risk of being lost.

However, the Romans had brought Christianity to Britain, and the great Christian monasteries became centers of learning because the monks valued knowledge and truth.  In his best selling book How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill tells us the engaging story of how Ireland became one of the last bastions of civilization because it was a tiny outpost on the edge of the world of that day, difficult to get to and viewed as not worth the trip.   

In adverse circumstances, the Irish monks, because they considered it their sacred duty to preserve Truth, diligently and sacrificially worked to copy the great literature of the Western world and preserve it for all time.    Moreover, not only did they protect it from destruction, they redeemed the monotonous work of tediously hand-copying the texts by hand by creating works of Art through their beautifully illuminated manuscripts.  They valued the work that they were doing, and so they took the time and made the effort to do that work lovingly and well.  Cahill makes the case that who knows what might have happened in subsequent human history had the Irish not been faithful to their task?

Read about illuminated manuscripts at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts






From the author Thomas Cahill:

We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage--almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence.   And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance. In this series, The Hinges of History, I mean to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West. This is also the story of the evolution of Western sensibility, a narration of how we became the people that we are and why we think and feel the way we do. And it is, finally, a recounting of those essential moments when everything was at stake, when the mighty stream that became Western history was in ultimate danger and might have divided into a hundred useless tributaries or frozen in death or evaporated altogether. But the great gift-givers, arriving in the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for transfiguration, leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.

This quote by Niebuhr is placed at the beginning of How the Irish Saved Civilization as a thematic epigram.

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.  Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.  Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

                                                             -Reinhold Niebuhr

(click)

How the Irish Saved Civilization:
The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role 
from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

"Without the mission of the Irish monks . . . the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one-

a world without books."  (page 4) 

I highly recommend all the books in the series 

The Hinges of History, by Thomas Cahill, a rich and

engaging way to refresh your understanding of history.

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A Fire in my Head

How do those of us with a "fire in our head" and a hunger in our heart fit ourselves to the "regular world"? Or do we?

I think this question is asked and answered somewhat in Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus.”  When I first read this poem years ago, I loved it for its music and its fanciful, romantic quality.  It had lovely images and a magical aspect which was appealing.  I loved the way it sounded on my tongue when I read it aloud.  But now that I am older and just a bit wiser, I believe that I understand the poem in its fulness . . . what Yeats is saying through the medium of the poem is far more meaningful than the surface details which are fairy-tale like.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lads and hilly lands.

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

-William Butler Yeats

What could the glimmering girl represent in this poem . . . Yeats (or the persona of the poem) has grown older, yet he is still entranced with beauty and simplicity and rapture, and is still able to relate to what the girl symbolizes, the things of the spirit. Just because he has grown older, he doesn't feel he must give up enchantment.

Others may grow old in their heads (or spirits), but he still has a fire in his . . . and why not? Let the others settle, he will still pursue his dreams. He will be vibrantly spiritually alive until he dies physically.

If this "fire" is part of our very nature, what do we give up when we deny it or don't seek to assuage it with what we are longing for?

Where is your "hazel wood," that place apart where you can be yourself or even rediscover yourself whenever you are lost?   For me, it is usually out in nature that I find the harmony that is often lost in the "civilized" world . . . an elemental world filled with simple yet fanciful things . . . a place where goodness is possible . . . where beauty can restore and re-tune the spirit . . . where I only need a hazel wand and a berry to catch a silver trout.

Food for thought as to how the modern culture has it all wrong:

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards;  they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier.    The way it actually works is the reverse.   You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do in order to have what you want.               

                                                                          ~Margaret Young


After you have taken care of things of the spirit, you will find that what you want will have changed.  And your chance of fulfillment and contentment will be far greater but with less cost.  


A person who isn't spiritual doesn't accept the things of God's Spirit, for they are nonsense to him.  He can't understand them because they are spiritually evaluated.
-I Cor. 2:14 (ISV)


Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life.   -Proverbs 4:23

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The Great Lover

            © Greg Ferrell

Today is St.Valentine's Day, the day to celebrate Love.

Love expands the heart, as the poet Rupert Brooke knew full well:

I have been so great a lover: filled my days

So proudly with the splendour of Love's praise,

 . . ..

  

These I have loved:

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,

Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;

Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust

Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;

Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood;

And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers;

And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours,

Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon;

Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon

Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss

Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is

Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen

Unpassioned beauty of a great machine;

The benison of hot water; furs to touch;

The good smell of old clothes; and other such—

The comfortable smell of friendly fingers,

Hair's fragrance, and the musty reek that lingers

About dead leaves and last year's ferns.... 

                                    Dear names,

And thousand others throng to me! Royal flames;

Sweet water's dimpling laugh from tap or spring;

Holes in the ground; and voices that do sing:

Voices in laughter, too; and body's pain,

Soon turned to peace; and the deep-panting train;

Firm sands; the little dulling edge of foam

That browns and dwindles as the wave goes home;

And washen stones, gay for an hour; the cold

Graveness of iron; moist black earthen mould;

Sleep; and high places; footprints in the dew;

And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;

And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;—

                            All these have been my loves. 

A litany of little things that, if attended to and thus appreciated, provide daily blessings.

We draw to ourselves the goodness of all that we appreciate.

Luke 12:34— "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

Don't give your heart away to unworthy things.  

Colossians 3:1— "Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your hearts on things above."

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The Banishment of Beauty

The Lady of Shalott, by John William Waterhouse 

  More often than not it's very discouraging to visit our museums of art and our public places where art and sculpture are being displayed, or to go to an art show or gallery exhibition and feel so alienated, or even insulted, by what is being presented for our acceptance as art.  It's evident that one of two things is happening:  either there are no longer contemporary artists who understand and appreciate aesthetic principles and have the skill to create their work using these principles, or there has been a conspiracy to expunge Beauty from the major modern art museums or to exclude art that is based on aesthetic absolutes from the same type of public or private funding programs or media support that the more "progressive" art and the artists who perpetrate it receive.  

So it is heartening to me whenever I hear someone speaking up in a public forum and pointing out that the Emperor of Modern Art is not wearing any clothes.  

Scott Burdick, a contemporary traditional artist who himself is a disciple of Beauty, is one of those artists who are beginning to speak out against the monolithic art establishment, and we must take seriously our responsibility to listen and to respond with our support of their endeavors.  We must cheer them on!

Burdick has taken it upon himself to create an exposé of what has been happening in the contemporary art world, in fact,what has been happening for a very long time in the world of museums, art critics, university art departments, the media, and the NEA, etc.  Burdick rightly points out that when you control these things, it is relatively easy to advance your agenda:  

"Their power lies in their total domination of what will be seen and heard by the wider culture.

They do not stifle expression by having someone arrested, but merely by their lack of notice they banish an entire artistic movement to invisible irrelevance, literally written out of the books like the History of Modern Art [the most prevalent textbook in university art history programs.] 

The power to ignore is their weapon and it has been wielded with devastating effect."

What is the agenda of the art establishment?  He argues persuasively that it is the banishment of Beauty.  Modern art is all theory-based, he explains; it's all about isms. It's an anti-aesthetic movement whose rationale is that we have "progressed" beyond the need for aesthetically beautiful art.  Beautiful art is not to be taken seriously because it has nothing to say to the human condition of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Beauty is no longer valid.

But Burdick gives us hope when he reminds us that there is "an aesthetic underground that has kept alive the principles of beauty and technical excellence during the past century of artistic madness.”  But they must work “under the public radar, selling their work, pursuing the age-old craft of aesthetic excellence, and essentially ignored by the artistic establishment and critics, invisible to the larger society.”

In his presentation, he takes the viewer through the sad history of the past century in art by alternating between modern "masterpieces" and lovely works of art that have been created concurrently with those modern pieces but essentially have been ignored by the curators and critics.  But it is so heartening to see the wealth of beautiful art that has been being created all along.  However, it is sad that the general public doesn't have the access to these works that they should, or that we cannot take our children to see these beautiful works of art hanging in our public institutions.  It is as if after the Impressionists very little worthwhile beautiful art has been created.  

However Burdick encourages us:

Beauty and Truth have been driven out of the temple.  But despite the most ardent efforts of the art establishment, the flame of beauty has been kept alive by the members of an unofficial aesthetic underground who simply refuse to fall for the nonsensical theories of art that seek to degrade rather than elevate the human spirit.  

The change will come from the ground up, like all revolutions, with the general public demanding control back of the hijacked institutions their tax dollars support.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to those artists who have kept the classical skills of painting and aesthetic expression alive during the dark years of the anti-Beauty movement that has so dominated our century.  Most of them will not see the promised land, but it is their clear vision of the truth that has kept Art from dying out.  In the meantime, let me say, ‘Long live Beauty and Truth.’” 

Click HERE to enjoy Scott Burdick’s program on The Banishment of Beauty.  Yes, it’s an hour long, but it’s divided into four 15-minute segments, and there’s so much to learn about what has been happening right under our noses for the last 100 years.

The bonus is that you will see wonderful examples of beautiful art that you might never have access to otherwise.  I do not know if Mr. Burdick is a man of Faith, but he is certainly engaged on the side of Truth.

As people of Faith, we understand the world spirit that is behind and animating this banishment of Beauty.  Our contribution to this aesthetic underground movement is to stand for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in our own lives in the choices we make and also to diligently reclaim our heritage for our children so that they are not victims of the culture. 
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