The Tsar of Heaven

https://youtu.be/6dc0l9tkQPU

Can a mighty and stern Emperor be a devoted family man? Alexander III whose coronation this march celebrates was very fierce in repressing dissent. But he was indeed a devoted husband and father. What is this to me? Can the God of Heaven, Tsar and Autocrat, Terrible Judge of All, be love itself? His Imperium, his monarchic rule and his judgements are non negotiable for me. Is love compatible with this? Yes, and this is how I first saw this: Alexander III, called the Peacemaker ( in Russian  the name is Mirodvoryets) is a picture of this, in his own small way, and believing this, that One can be a stern monarch and a loving father, is a goal of mine.

Why do I call God Almighty Tsar of Heaven? The Tsars of Russia were absolute monarchs. autocrats. They owned all the land and everyone and everything  in it. They were answerable to none but God Hinself.

God is all these things but answerable to none as there is of course no God above Hin that he should account to this one.

Of course there are differences. God's rule, like that of  the Tsars, is personal but in the hands of a madman like Ivan Grozni - Ivan the Terrible - this is corruption and disaster. But the difference is not the constitution of his rule but his character.

Ferocious in His judgements yet His word offers free amnesty to all who seek Him personally and His motication for doing so is something I have never been able to believe in the nearly 40 years of being a christian, whihc motivation is named in John 3:16.

But He gives images to aid, and this image of Alexander III is part of His personalized aid to me

A Working Holiday Weekend

If you will picture the scene. It was either 1979 or 1980  - I can't remember which - making me  an early twenties something. I was a music student at university studying composition back in the days when I wanted to compose symphonies. I was madly in love, my very first adult love, with a fellow music student. But of course the answer was no. It always has been  no.

One of our lecturers asked our class out to a holiday home of his, a bach in New Zealand parlance,  to do some gardening and help out around the place one weekend in return for some good company - i always liked this man -  one Graham Hollobon, and bed and board.

Heartbroken due to being love lorn I went and did some hard labour hoping to drown my sorrows in work. After all, and I am being ironical here," Arbeit" does "macht frei." But of course the slavery here was of my own imposition, not that of my friend and lecturer nor any staff member of student of Canterbury University in my salad days.

But the thing I remembered most from this distant working weekend was that in his lounge one day I opened a Time magazine and of course went to the religion section, and read some piece of heretical trash and of course was angry. What it was totally escapes me. It may have been about the papacy given that John Paul II,  who I, rejecting the imposture of bishops of Rome adopting what amounts to throne names,  still call Karol Woytila, was only recently elected. But it may not have been.

Mr H said something the essence of which I never forgot, and the point of my posting this here, namely that religious fanatics - but i don't recall his using such a hurtful word as fanatic though it was true -  will look forsomething to be angry at, and will go to, as in this instance,  religious articles in magazines with the intention of being angry at it.

He was absolutely right. I do not know if I ever thanked hin for this insight .  I don't even know if he is still alive, it being some 37 or 38 years ago whereby I could thank him for it now.

Biut I never forgot it.

Loving nothing in any truly spiritual fashion - my love for the young woman I mention here, given my maturity of lack thereof in christ,  was not spiritual - I could only signal my virtue, if only to myself, by finding something to hate. I could only fill the emptiness of a life already backslidden from Christ with in a year or two of my conversion, with ungodly anger at something to hate

And something to hate is to be found  in superabundance.

This I see time and time again among all manner of social justice activists and unfortunately among Christians. Secular haters may have no alternative, but we who profess Christ do and it shows our backsliding or immaturity that we Christians are no different for all our lies, and in telling lies about ourselves we are past masters, about our live for the lost