Scuttlebutt

#1761

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." - Henry Thomas Buckle

            Apparently, no one can be shocked anymore by anything. Our senses are bombarded everyday by things that the science fiction writer of my youth, could never have dreamed. From the talking head newscaster, politician, pastor, everyone talks "slivers" of solution... just chasing one thing until another comes up.

            This writer is always listening, everyone's talking... no secrets anymore. I am told that every living/breathing person, from the school child to the grandmother, either has a telephone in front of their face or they are looking down talking on their phone with their fingers (texting.) I have personally let several female employees go because they had their eyes and mind focused on a telephone rather than the dictation I was giving them for the computer. I went through eight years of university training, the most difficult courses of study in the world, working jobs at night so I could go to classes during the day. Never once during those eight years did I ever have a telephone call from home. I don't believe many students did at that time in our countries history. We knew the real joy of the mail man, "letters from home." During all my years of military service, there were very few telephone calls. The phone was for emergency-business, not visiting. One of my friends told me that his daughter, age 8, wanted a cell phone. I said, "You tell her that I was reared in a time where there was only one telephone for many miles." My cousin had a telephone at his country store. Everyone for miles used that telephone to call the doctor, the funeral home or to get an emergency message from somewhere.

            Scuttlebutt, where the happy hour at the pool haul, the golf links at the country club, women's mission circle at your church, was, is and will always be just scuttlebutt... talking-visiting. Human beings are the same, the world over, very social animals. This writer has traveled every continent, whether the desolate areas of India, crowded streets in Egypt, people talking-gesturing and body language. I was never one to waste my valuable time in idle conversation. I was always, perhaps, too brutally sharp on the phone. Professional people do not have time for the leisure of idle conversation. I can tell very quickly, the future of any professional man by his attitude on the telephone... friendly, fair, fast. I am told that every billionaire gets there because he is fast with a decision.

            There is two things that bother me the most about people engaged in idle conversation. If a person is sick enough to be in a hospital, the patient does not need visitors. People coming in, spreading their germs, talking and bothering a tired patient with unnecessary narrative.

            The other, a place of worship. The church house, the inter court is not a place for conversation. The worst, the Baptist. Their visiting-conversations should take place in the outer-court, the churchyard. I still like the denominations that have kneeling benches. You come into the sanctuary and get immediately and completely in the mode of worship. I often listen to the local Baptist church on the morning radio. Often, there is a interlude between the radio and the church house. The noise from the sanctuary is anything but worship. Talking, laughing, one is a place of worship... to honor god.  All attention to Christ, the cross. So many churches no longer have a cross and the Christian service is no different than that of a civic club, the same noise of a sports arena.

            I was on the staff of the Army hospital, fort McClellan, Alabama. A long desire of my life has been to worship at the Baptist tabernacle, peach tree St. Atlanta, Georgia. I drove the long distance one weekend to attend the service. The great tabernacle was everything I expected, the great choir singing without any hymn books. The great organ, grand piano, great preacher, the thing that ruined in all... before and after, the noise of the people come to worship. I do not know how or why this silly matter of running around shaking everyone's hands during the worship service. We are in the church to honor Christ, not to compliment one another.

           

            The history of the world started with conversation. From nothingness to something-ness, God spoke and the world was formed. God spoke and man was formed and the other animals, all life with its ability to participate.

            In other articles, I have described much of my world travel, many around the world trips... every continent... both the north and south pole. I want to bring two places to your attention, The Great Barrier Reef, near Australia. a 1300 mile coral reef made up of bodies of articulating animals. We are told that all around this great miracle of nature, marine animal life, can be heard to the educated ear. Like the great humpback whales, all marine life has a language and of course this is true with bird life near the great reef, rain island (known for its birds, their noises.) I was in the Indian ocean, bird island, another sanctuary. The place was alive with their communication skills. Life would be tragic indeed if not for the SHARING of tone sounds (music) whether in the great opera halls or in cheap radio. It is the universal language of mankind. The letters may be different on the type writer, in different countries, but the notes are always the same anywhere on a musical instrument.

            Talk radio has revolutionized the world of communication during the past 20 years. It is now an established fact that more people enjoy the different sounds-cadences of the human voice of people talking, than ever enjoyed music. The success of a talk show, radio-TV-platform, is completely dependent on a variety of speakers. Words mean something, words have a way of changing the mind, changing the world. 

Christmas Time

The celebration of Christmas has changed completely during my lifetime (80 years). As a child, Christmas was centered around the white, clapboard church built by my great grandparents on both my mother and father's families in 1874 as they recovered from the Civil War and the destruction of every religious symbol in the community when the Yankees moved through on Sherman's march to the sea.

I personally object to Christmas decorations in a house of worship. Most of the decorations are symbols of the pagan activities of that season of the year which the Christians took over from the worshipers of heathenism. But, in the very isolated, rural communities, the poverty which was there when I was a child (remember there were no radios, television had not been invented, one telephone in the entire community, no electricity) gave the children in Sunday school a reason to look forward to this time of year, because it was a time that they participated in enjoyment not found at any other time.

I still remember there were children in the community, at the church, who had never seen an orange or banana. The only Santa Claus they knew anything about was the one they saw on the pages of the Sears Christmas catalog, which came to every home. They could wish for things but the chances of them getting any thing was slim to none. My mother related so many times about how she and her sister wanted a doll for Christmas. They each received a child's purse in which was a note which read, “Perhaps next year will be better and you will get a doll. Signed, Santa.”

Over my long and exciting life of traveling the world as a blind person, then, as now, having everything described to me by someone else, I was interviewed by a reporter from a large newspaper about my experiences around the world at Christmas time. It is very simple, only in those countries where Christ is known will you find the celebration of Christmas. Certainly not in the 48 Muslim countries. Perhaps the most exciting Christmas was celebrated at the South Pole, Antarctica. Next in excitement would be spending Christmas Eve at Bethlehem in the Holy Land. I fully described this experience in one of my blogs.

How, when I arrived at the hotel in Bethlehem from Jerusalem, the place was full and my driver and I were given rooms on the outside in rooms reserved during tourist season for bus drivers. I described how cold it was in Bethlehem that time of the year, emphasizing, again, the known fact that our blessed Lord was not born in the latter part of December because there were no shepherds in the fields with sheep at such a cold time of year in the Holy Land. But, on that Christmas Eve as all my senses reconciled my metabolism in the physical knowledge of that part of the world at any time of the year, I rejoice just to be there. On Christmas Day, I went into the Church of the Nativity, which is built over the cave where our blessed Lord was born. Even though being in the Holy Land at Christmas, celebrating the birth of the Light of the World, my guide told me he did not see one Christmas decoration, one Christmas light, EXCEPT in a small store just across from Absalom's Tomb (Absalom, son of King David).

I was in Athens, Greece at Christmas one year. The people at the hotel and others told me they had never seen one city so beautifully decorated as Athens. Of course, having been here several times, I knew the Acropolis, on which the Parthenon is located, is always illuminated at night. Crawling up the Acropolis to the Parthenon on Christmas day, reaching Mars Hill (where the Apostle Paul had much to say about the God's of the Athenians) I thrilled in the knowledge that all history, every calendar, every date on any document, all punctuated by the birth and life of one solitary man, God-man. When you move around the Mediterranean, you realize this one solitary figure of history never walked over 50 miles from where he was born, never owned anything except his robe for which His crucifiers gambled as he hung on a tree.

This Christmas, you do not have to travel the world as I have at Christmas time (South Pole, Holy Land, Majorca, Holland, Greece, Rio, Tokyo) to know the real meaning of Christmas. When you look at the Christmas tree, think of the tree on which our blessed Lord was crucified. When you see the thorns on the holly tree, think of the crown of thorns on His head. When you see the red berries, think of the drops of blood he shed for you, when you see the bright lights which the world has distributed up and down every street, a world which has denied Him over and over, think of the Light of the World and the fact that every day, in every way, the world prefers darkness to light.

Over spending, over eating, over activity, is the way pagans celebrate Christmas. To the world, it is not a holy day but a holiday. Keep pagan practices out of your house of worship; there is nothing more beautiful than Christian Church, Christmas music. The gifts of Santa Claus do not compare and should not be mixed with the incomparable gift of the Christian Christmas. Don't get confused, God is not mocked. For the believer, the believer in Christ, Christmas is a time to rejoice in children, even in seeing a pregnant woman. God chose to put a tent of human flesh on a small baby born of a virgin mother, to live among us, to die for us, and has told us only to remember Him at the communion table. Celebrating the Lord's supper is the only way we were instructed to remember him. The rest is just peripheral, to be done with sobriety, thoughtfulness, and an excellent time to show man's humanity to man.