An Early Marriage. A Messy Divorce

I was married very young. In my teens, in fact.

She was pretty. Still is. But I never even liked her very much. She was and still is,  selfish, vain and demanding. What really swamped my own better judgement was that she  could really tart herself up to look absolutely ravishing in some lights; and she knew how to thrill me.

With my twenties looming I was terrified of being alone, so we tied the not.

There was no love on my part, only lust. And the ecstasy she could give really only addled my adolescent brain

It has been over forty years. And she is as gorgeous as ever.  . . . .

But then came the endless demands and the resulting endless guilt.

We cut a fine appearance as a couple. My dinner suit, which she soon demanded I wear every time we went out, set her off with an air or studied and refined elegance.

And she gave me the air of the young master. It looked to all and sundry as if the world were at our feet

We achieved the praise of many, but I soon learned that I was not respected for myself, only for being her husband. Of course I bitterly resented it. She  of course  regarded it as no more than her due, and I was churlish not to give it to her. As a matter of course.  Of course

The demands never ceased. She insisted on day and night attention. again as her due. Had I given her her  way on this I would never have had any friends other than those few in the same predicament as me, and would never have even gone out except that she required it. So, no, I did manage to stand up for myself to some extent. But the constant nagging and the endless guilt was never going to end.

It was all too much.

It was endless work, or should have been, with her as my goddess. But I was no longer a teen and worshiping such was no longer to my taste.

But still she could give me thrills, from time to time, however with ever decreasing frequency. It would be crass to call such sex but it was definitely analogous.

We separated just on eleven years ago.

But now I can only hate her all the more, for though separated we are not truly divorced for I am having difficulty letting  her go. I kept hovering around our mutual haunts, and kept seeing  those friends of us both. I even kept talking of returning to her. And these people were delighted to hear this for they only saw the appearance, what a fine couple we made, we belonged to each other. They only smiled indulgently when I spoke of the abuse the nagging and the guilt. We were too good together for this to be anything other than a talk of a depressed person. They thought, if they did not say, that I was mentally ill. Or they said that she was so stunning - were their marriages as bad as mine?  that any price was worth it. Anyone who appreciated her would put up and pay up . . .

But my heart was and still is in agony.

I gave up the token of my servitude some three years. ago. It got destroyed while in transit to the dealer who was to sell it. This was an exquisite irony, a blessing in fact. Even, I would go so far as to say, a sign.

The thing is the pain is not over. This is not because we belong together. There is enough objective evidence that this is not the case. But I am dogged by the conviction, nagging and guilt empowered, that we do belong together. After all we did make some wonderful music together. . . . . .

So my orbit, so to speak,  around her and her domain has not ceased even though it is now broader than it was and so much slower -  more like Pluto's orbit about the sun rather than Mercury's.

I need a true divorce, to let this go completely, and stop hanging around, to stop clinging to the empty husk of a dead relationship. . No it is not stalking. And I will tell you why.

Who is this woman who obsesses me so much?

It is no woman. I have more respect for women than that

This was the music profession, or music for short.

The token of my servitude was not a wedding ring but my musical instrument, my double bass, destroyed in transit to the dealer who was going to sell it some three years ago

For so it is, as I wrote here before, that if one is to serve music, which is no less than what being a professional demands  - to marry it so to speak - one is either crazy or adores her totally. Being neither, or rather recovering from the craziness that kept me a musician for so long after knowing it was all in vain. I know clearly that  I am not suited to being a musician of any kind.

Yet dogged by guilt engendered by the high praise of my former colleagues, some of whom still want me back even after all these years, the pain continues. But the objective evidence, namely  - not the performances they heard -  but the total lack of dedication to the trade as shown by my refusal to do any private practice, this speaks for itself, though they of course never saw this.

The Lord has granted me liberty to do my own heart on this matter, which is to reject the music trade, and that includes amateur playing for the very word amateur means a lover of something, something I never was, forever.

And when I realize that I viewed the entire living of life as analogous to my being a musician, namely guilt driven brute force against my own heart - what they falsely call discipline - and when I  repudiate this, I shall be free

Free indeed, as the Son of God promises me

A Small Matter

This is a small matter, but to me it has ominous portents

My local city council now want to put tags on our rubbish bins. Because mine were not tagged as they were not out when the taggers  came round of foot to tag them , and this as I am very frugal in my production of trash, I got a note informing me of the necessity of said electronic tag - no tag no rubbish pickup.

Affronted by this I phoned the  number offered number on the flyer stuck in my mail box. The reason, as the appointed bureaucrat informed me on the phone, is to save money, and the excuse is the dislocation due to the earthquakes in my town whereby people have moved house and the council owned rubbish bins are being abandoned or taken with those shifting, thus doubling up their numbers in places people have moved to.  Or remaining unused.

This is all very plausible,  of course, for government infringement on liberty is always plausible and health safety security or fiscal responsibility are always the reasons.

 But to my knowledge none of us were told beforehand and it is heavy handed. Thus an electronic tag was attached to an appurtenance of my household without my consent, nor to that of my neighbours.

It smacks of surveillance to me. You see when surveillance is done this does not increase security.

It destroys trust. Those doing it do not trust the populace. And those surveilled if they know it, cease to trust the authorities. All in all it is an exercise in control simply because they can. Of course they regard their reasons as invincibly sound, for bureaucrats have destroyed their consciences in order to obey orders - the Nuremberg defence which, if their behaviour were valid  is  only ever specious when the other fellow invokes it.

Of course this is a small thing, tagging trash bins. I know this

But it is a step on the way to a total surveillance society and there is no good faith reason for it.

Needless to say there is no point in complaining, for there is nothing so invincibly arrogant as a petty bureaucrat, who thinks he is God in his or her own sphere

And when the time comes we will be expected to submit to being tagged with the mark of the Beast as meekly

Now that is what chills me to the bone.

At my age, 58 I have a reasonable hope of being dead before it happens. But one never knows

Free or Licentious Speech?

In response to a youtube video I wrote this:

When people insult certain prophets they then claim the high moral ground while crying "persecution" and other such bleatings when that prophet's followers seek revenge. I now understand that those who provoke such persons in the name of free speech simply do not know the difference between liberty and licentiousness. In this they are rather like the typical run of immature teenagers do not know the difference. So much for the wisdom and liberty of the West

I may likely develop this further

My Old Pastor Speaks

Years ago the pastor of my church  got up and told the congregation that they (I had long since left that church but was told of this by a witness I trust) did not love one another

What are the implications of we Christians not loving one another? They are so crystal clear and so unacceptable to the carnal mind that though I have been declaring them for years I have not really grasped them and have been accused, ignored etc for years, even to the extent of being kicked out of a house church attached to this very  church I speak about here.

I John spells out the implications of lack of love: "He who says he loves God and hates his brother is a liar" "How can you say you love God who you cannot see when you do not love your brother who you can see?" and the clincher "He who does not love (agape) does not know God for God is love."

There it is: if we do not love we do not know God. We are backslidden, walk in the flesh, and we have forsaken Him usually for the Law especially if we are devout and serious about our faith. Moreover all the resolves strategies and efforts to remedy this will not change it one iota. They are symptoms of the lovelessness not its remedies, just as legalism is the very sin it fights not the antithesis. For if we are in the flesh we cannot submit for our minds are set on the flesh. Oh, as believers we can be led to submit but this is by our seeking the Lord the Spirit for as long as it takes. The rest is dead work of the flesh we will love one another when and only when we have been convicted and cleansed of the sins of failing to do so ("He loves much who is forgiven much") and are in a relationship with the Spirit.

This relationship  is EVERYTHING ("Seek ye the kingdom - ie the personal rule of the King- and his righteousness, and all these will be added to you").

Of course my ex pastor showed his complete ignorance of the issue by offering what he did as the solution: "OK let's love, then."  As if we could simply turn it on like a tap and God would help us to do so. But because I have already pointed out what lacking love means this will never happen. That church was in the dark then and may very well still be so, And certainly I know I am in the dark, but am hearing a Voice in said darkness which is calling me to Himself.

But I know that I do not know Him.

So will the average run of church believer  acknowledge that they do not know God? I should not be surprised that they will not for my own constant resisting of conviction of sin from the Holy Spirit I now know to be nothing untypical. So though I am in the relationship  which will bring it to pass  not because I want it but know full well I need it they the average religionist is not, for all his talk to the contrary. We will not admit we do not know Him if our self definitions preclude this, if we think our sincerity is axiomatic, our faith genuine; not if we define being born again as one who does love God; and not if we ignore our fruit, our spontaneous and careless reactions and words; and certainly not if the Holy Spirit does not persuade us who are so self righteous as to think we are doing Him any favours  by our religious activities.

Love? For all our trying, because of it even, this is why the world thinks, rightly, that we are hypocrites

Russian Mysteries I

I have been a Russophile for over forty years now, and a Russian History buff. I have been friendly with the local Russian emigre community  and speak only in the past tense not because of any falling out, but because as is the way of things, I drifted away from my contacts therein. But one of them, name of Ilya, teaches Russian history at the small school attached to the local Orthodox Church, and he told me that my knowledge of the history of his homeland was "good."  I took this as an immense compliment.

Regarding the mysteries I am speaking of  I am only offering my opinion based on what little knowledge, compared perhaps to a trained historian and specialist, I have gathered over the years. This and any companions to it I might feel inclined to offer are opinion piece. The chances are that the truth is lost to history

The first I offer is this: Was Tsar Paul Petrovich the natural son of the one whose patronym he bore, namely Peter III the husband of Sophia of Anhalt Zerbst who later became grand duchess Catherine  Alexeyevna  and then Empress Catherine II?

Many have claimed that he was not as both Catherine and Peter hated each other and the one who became the mad Tsar Paul, so irksome to the Russian nobility that he was murdered in a place coup in 1801, was the son instead of Catherine's lover at the time, who was, if my memory serves correctly one Sergei Saltykov.

But if this is so then the House of Romanov ended in 1762 when Peter III died of Haemorrhoidal
Colic. Of course this cause of death is to me a hilarious irony. He was murdered when Catherine seized the throne, but this was put out as the official story, and a final amusing twist on this story was that when Catherine invited a French philosopher out to visit her in Russia, Diderot, I think, he declined on the grounds that as he himself suffered from piles it would not be safe for him out in Russia. A gracious but fierce rebuke if ever there was one!

Of course the murder of any lawfully ordained monarch is no laughing matter but the historical record can drop some grand ironies from time to time.

So here endeth House Romanov?

Pavel Petrovich resembled his putative father both in looks, unprepossessing, and in character traits, even more unprepossessing, being a military martinet obsessed with trivial detail like the alignment of buttons on a soldiers kit.

But his two parents loathed each other. Peter hated Russia. He regarded his native duchy of Schleswig Holstein as more important to him - he was only heir to the Russian throne as  it was Peter I , the Great\, who started the western practise of marrying off what we call princesses to foreign nobility, in this case one of his  daughters to the Duke of Holstein. Young Karl Peter Ulrich  favoured dolls to real people preferring them while even in bed with his wife. And he once put a mouse on trial for upsetting his toys and hanged it with all military ceremony. Catherine on the other hand made it a point to ingratiate herself with  her Russian surroundings at the court of Elizabeth Petrovna  and inhabitants therein. She embraced Russian culture, was highly intelligent, a patron of the arts, literate, all in  contrast to her boorish boy of a husband.

But I read either in the book Five Empresses by Eugene Anisimov or in a biography of Catherine II by the late  Isabel de Madariaga that a letter was found in archives whereby Catherine II admitted to hardening herself up to do what was repulsive to her and engaged in carnal intercourse with her husband as such was no less than her duty.

Of course this does not prove the issue but in my opinion is satisfactory. But there was on honour in any of it. The son of a father which father  was murdered by agents of his own wife was excluded from power, and he hated Catherine for it with a passion.So on becoming Emperor in 1801 he passed Salic Law forbidding women ever to sit on the Romanov throne. Thus though in the eighteenth century  there was Five Empresses, being four Empresses Regnant and one Empress Regent, Anna Leopoldovna, mother of the baby Ivan VI, the boy whose whose life was unmitigated tragedy. there were none thereafter.

One wonders if Russian history would have been different if Alexei Nikolayevich, son and heir of the Last Tsar of Russia, suffering from haemophilia, could have been passed over for one of his sisters, saving the throne and the nation from 70 years of Bolshevik  horror, if the Salic Law were not in force?

A Lesson in Civics

The waves of protests running through America because of the election of Trump is, though I must it seems spell it out that I am speaking in irony here, a good lesson in civics.

It is increasingly clear that   if they don't like the election result, even if the election was fair in terms of the existing system, they feel - and feeling is the operative word, not reasoned conviction and disciplined action - they feel entitled to shout and scream and carry on like school children and protest. In fact I have just seen a video in which school children were out protesting.

Of course the reason here is plain. They do this is because they, the protesters,  believe  not in democracy but in imposing their will by the ballot box and moreover they have no sense that these are two entirely different things. And this is shown by the outrage: thwarted self will

When we had class elections at primary school in order to teach us about voting and the like we were told  that democracy requires that the voter who did not have his candidate selected must  have sufficient respect for the fact as well as nature of opposing views to accept the result. I was taught this in primary school  more than 45 years ago.

We did not call this "Civics" for my homeland  is New Zealand, a country I have never left in my entire life, but that was the purpose and I for one never forgot it even if those who did pout when their best friend was not elected class captain ignored it at the time.

I do not know what they teach in classes they all "Civics" in the USA these days, but even if they try and instil this notion of  respecting, or at least acquiescing, to  the undesired result , the culture at large has become too selfish, too glutted with the self gratification  of endless entertainments and too narcissistic to pay attention.

They fail to see that this behaviour after an election where  their man, or in this instance, woman,   lost is an even bigger subversion of a democracy they profess to believe in than such things as electoral fraud, silencing  or marginalizing third party candidates, superdelegates, and a whole system so awash with the dirty money of corporations that only the business friendly  are likely to win

But of course real political engagement requires more effort than angry noise making, which is why democracies do not last. It is easier to make some noise, smash some windows, ignite some litter bins and show that we have nothing to express but blind outrage

So they who protest think that Trump is dangerous? This may be. But do you make noises the elites will ignore simply because they are ill mannered? Believe me I have seen the objects of protest deny what we were on about as we were ill mannered. Of course in their depravity they will ignore any protest we make if it is polite and peaceful

If they believe in the political system (and whether it is worth believing in is a separate question) they are to engage in it. Party machines will go corrupt if left alone. The truly committed and engaged must flood the party memberships and agitate from within the machine.  They need to see to it that the system does not select two candidates so noxious as Trump and Clinton again

Unless of course such effort  really is a waste of time and violence leading to frenzied blood letting is all that will come, proving that democracy was only ever an impossible and naïve ideal for man never could govern himself.

But crying like children? If they are that infantilized then the situation may very well the lost already

On Masses for Peace and the like

I was listening to a movement from Benjamin Britten's War Requiem just now, and I remembered that I played in a  concert performance of Karl Jenkins' "L'Homme Arme, a Mass for Peace".

The Title L'Homme Arme" is French and means the Armed Man. There are two applications of this  that I can see. Most certainly, in terms of musical history, early pieces of music, and I mean those of  the medieval and renaissance periods, regularly based works on pre existing compositions. This is the original sense of a parody in that they were all parodies but it  implied no sense of mockery at all. The Armed Man was a French popular song at the time and many composers built masses at time that around that tune. Mr Jenkins is merely adding to this ancient and venerable tradition.

But I suspect that his intention is to contrast the military cast of the tune the Armed Man with his impassioned cry for peace, hence his subtitle and my reason for writing this.

It was a cry for peace, and impassioned one in a work that I found at times  beautiful and deeply moving. I will never forget the Benedictus with its cello solo of pure ecstasy underneath which I poured out all the passion I could at the time with a solid and rich bottom D pedal note.  But to whom was the cry being made?

"God," one might say. But which one? If a God really exists this makes all the difference imaginable; and if there is no God then the very exercise is futile. They are merely crying to the empty ether and no rational answer will ever come. It is or at least should be a truism that people do not become peace loving by hearing music, so serenading the violence is a total waste of effort.

When the religions are theist, by which I mean that the God in question actually involves himself or claim to involve himself in the creation by way of answering prayer requests, - in contrast with what I might call Deist religions - which God is supplicated is crucial. And to try and cover all bases by adulterating a catholic mass with prayers to another God is utter blasphemy.

I mean in this instance the second movement of this Mass for Peace in which a Muslim
Muzzein made his call to prayer, the ritual oration that issues from minarets and their modern equivalents five time a day. I was deeply discomforted and had I the zeal of my convictions I may have walked out. But I did not.

Not only that  but this Mass had no Credo. If Jenkins knew what a mass was he knew what a credo was. But he chose not to incorporate one.

So the Mass was a limp cry of the unbelieving to the empty ether, believing  nothing  it achieved  nothing real other than hoping desperately against hope that something might come of it. And something did, but nothing of real value. Secular modern men might shed a tear or tow and think they are thoroughly good people for being so moved. This was a piece of catharsis which lasted all of a few minutes and would have no bearing on how they lived their lives the next day.

I commented on this work as I know it rather well, having performed it as a musician. But this is what such performance arts "for peace" boil down to.

Some time ago I heard a peace on my concert programme. All I remember was that it had famous rock singers in it. It was some kind of classical rock crossover, not that I necessarily disapprove for the Jenkins was one also. But the only other thing I remember was that it cried to every god imaginable. This was utterly tragic and I dissolved in tears. This I all modern men can do when they seek to get spiritual. It was not a cry for or of hope but, being with no basis in hope at all, an expression of despair masquerading as the contrary

The Britten  Requiem mention of which I started this piece with also committed blasphemy by adding to the text as regards the story, which I am my brethren take to be literal history. When Abraham was told not to sacrifice his son the poet I think it was Wilfrid Owen, took over the narrative "But Abraham would not, and half the seed of Europe perished one by one.

And why are we Christians offended by this? Such antics as this are jeering at the only thing, or only One who will give anyone true peace. But at least we are not obliged to slaughter anyone who blasphemes in this way. Vengeance for that  and all other evil belongs to God and God only and He will repay after He has exhausted, due to the defiant unbelief of men refusing his amnesty, all other avenues.


Everyone wants peace and they pray for it, some even to the Christian God, Himself  but overall no one will acknowledge that not only is war sin but their own combatitive response to violence against them is sin as well. thus they will not repent.

As there is no peace for the wicked, as scripture says, and as righteousness in Christ is the only way to peace they will pray and sing and supplicate in vain.

Not because God has no answer to the thing but because we refuse this and seek peace on our terms, a magical intervention whereby the inner violence of men's hearts is not addressed at all.

If we want peace we seek the only God in Christ, and only through Christ  do we seek Him, and not only that but we seek to repent of our sins  genuinely rather than some token gesture or a dismissive ignoring of the whole business by lame appeals to the "love" of God. There is a love of God but it is through this that He would lead us to repent, and is not a substitute for repentance. Rather this repentance, which gift of grace  I discovered in my darkest extremity years ago and which is still outworking, is the  highest expression of God loving us there is.

But the tragedy of it is that the huge majority will not do so, nor even seek it, for it is written and demonstrably true that "strait - ie small- is the gate and narrow the way ands few there are who find it." And if Christians think they have found this way then let us all realize that few are called many are chosen.

He is rich in mercy to lead all who come to him to repentance but without repentance, which is not luxuriating in fear or guilt, far from it, there is nothing.

Nothing at all but the farce which will continue to play itself out to the bitter end