It was likely the first time I appreciated the power of story, and I was only a boy of about four-years-old.  Charlotte’s Web, which was written by E.B. White, illustrated by Garth Williams, and published in 1952 by Harper and Brothers, was not read to me before bedtime; rather, like many other kids who were born in the 70s, I experienced this classic work of children’s fiction via what my grandfather used to call the Boob tube.  The story of a barnyard pig who escapes the slaughterhouse thanks to an impressively literate spider remains loved by millions around the world.  When the farmer begins to eye up Wilbur, the pig, for what his butchered body might fetch at market, Charlotte, the spider springs into action by spinning messages into her webs, reasoning that the farmer would never dream of selling a famous pig.  Her efforts pay off, and Wilbur is even entered into a contest at the county fair.  While he does win a special prize from the judges, the joy is short-lived because Charlotte, who had accompanied him to the fairgrounds, is dying, and after she gives Wilbur her egg sac, trusting him to look after her offspring and confident that the farmer will continue to spare the life of her swine friend, she, at last, expires.  She dies, and in doing so, made one four-year-old boy cry hard enough to concern his mother. 

The 20th century American poet, Charles Bukowski once said that, for an artist, literary or otherwise, an early experience with death was not necessarily a bad thing.  I think about that from time to time, having lost my own father when I was nine; however, it is worth pausing here to consider how story, in this case Charlotte’s Web, is able pose difficult heart questions, even to the littlest among us, while also holding out the balm of a more mature, time-tested, and peace-giving perspective.  I did not understand why Charlotte had to die, but I did understand what her children meant to Wilbur, even as he said goodbye to all but three who decided to stay in the barn.  Life continued despite the absence of a dear friend.  Joy and pain somehow mingled with a single result: life.  This was life.  This is what it means to be sentient.  Victories and setbacks, happiness and despair – to be on this side of paradise is to experience it all. 

Charlotte, for her part, lived until she had nothing else to give.  Perhaps this is the ultimate lesson in this story.  When times are good, we are called to give.  When times are tough, we are still called to give.  This applies to our families, of course, but we should also not be lost on the fact that Charlotte is an arachnid, and Wilbur is a hog.  The mission extends outward just as much as it extends inward because we are all fighting against the slaughterhouse.  This is the great battle.  Self-sacrifice is the only answer.  There is, as Christ says, no greater love. 

Just like Wilbur’s human advocate, Fern Arable, the girl who first pleaded for his life, I, too, grew up and found other interests.  This is typically how it goes, after all.  But I would hard-pressed to deny what White’s story awakened in me even at such a tender age. 

Love and loss, it turns out, are hard to reconcile.  It seems impossible that they can exist together, yet they do, at least in the temporal sense. 

John, in his account of the gospel, gives us the words we need to navigate this conundrum.  He quotes the Messiah as saying “he who believes has eternal life.”  It is not “will have” but the present “has.”  Right now.  Upon giving your life to Christ.  As such, there is no real loss, just a suspension of relationship.  Hard, yes, and certainly nothing to be dismissive and callous about – Jesus wept after hearing of the loss of his friend, Lazarus, after all.  But only temporary.  Nonpermanent. 

Charlotte’s Web taught me an important lesson about love and loss, but it also put into motion a series of questions and conclusions that brought me to Christ.  It was not the sole factor, of course, but it was a significant one.  In the end, what does this all mean?  Story has the power to influence and change, but it also has the power to ask the right questions, and if we let it, if we are patient, point toward hopeful, more promising answers that in turn help us to trust.  The pig, the spider in the beginning.  The spider, the pig in the end.  Trust is the vessel on which love floats. 

The first version of Jack London’s classic short story, “To Build a Fire,” was published in 1902, but we are going to explore the most popular version: his 1908 revision that contains a native dog.  The unnamed protagonist is seeking his fortune in the Yukon territory where the temperature can drop well below zero.  The conditions can be brutal, but despite the warnings of an older man from Sulphur Creek, the younger man heads into the boreal forest, followed by a four-footed companion.  Sure enough, the elements get the better of the protagonist.  His saliva freezes on his face.  He begins to lose feeling in his extremities.  And the small fire he manages to build causes the snow on the tree limbs above it to come crashing down, extinguishing the flames immediately.  London’s dog is no Lassie.  Pulled by the warmth and the food he knows is back at the camp, the dog abandons the man, leaving him to freeze to death by himself in the unforgiving wild. 

Jack London was an American Naturalist.  Naturalism was a curious biproduct of Realism and Darwinism.  The American Civil war, which took place between 1861 and 1865, dramatically altered how a certain class of thinkers and influencers viewed the world.  Once upon a time, they endeavored to beat their own drums in the manner of Henry David Thoreau and his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson.  The Transcendentalists were America’s version of the Romantics, after all, who likewise celebrated the eternal and, tellingly, internal Divine.  A common spark.  That which set human beings aside from the rest of creation.  We were wonderfully and fearfully made.  Until Fort Sumter and General P. G. T. Beauregard’s unstoppable canons.  And then there was an extended, interminable bloodbath that left everyone wondering how brother was able to do unspeakable acts toward brother.  The country was forced to take sober stock of itself.  Face the truth.  Accept what was real.  In literature, this birthed a new genre – Realism – but shortly thereafter came Naturalism.  As one of my former professors put it, Realism was walking down the street.  Naturalism was walking down that same street and stepping into a massive pile of dog waste.  Bad luck was inevitable, yes, but the genre shined a light on much more.  Despite what we say to ourselves, we do not have as much control as we think.  “To Build a Fire” is a classic man versus nature tale, and it would be useful to pause for a moment on the latter half of that dynamic.  Nature does not care about our ambitions.  Nature does not care about our good intentions.  As part of creation, we are also subject to its laws, and any departure from that reality, just like in the story, means certain destruction.  The dog knows this to be true.  That is why he simply made his way back to camp where his food dish and a warm fire awaited.  He was under no delusions.  The protagonist was simply a fool.  And perhaps that is the lesson London imparts.  It is the fool who ignores nature and holds up his ambitions and desires to be more consequential just because they are his. 

When I look around, I see this sort at every turn.  Natural law, they scream, does not apply to me.  I am the exception.  This is America, and I can be whatever I want to be, declare to be true whatever I deem to be so.  The older man at Sulphur Creek would call this way of thinking foolishness.  And so would the dog.  The Yukon exists in many forms all around us, and to say that it doesn’t is undeniably prideful.  We know what follows.  Just like in the story, there is a fall.  The only question that remains is how much snow do the limbs above us carry. 

Noelle Mering’s book, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology, details in gripping language how so many twisted ideas are currently running rampant throughout Western society.  Objective truth is under assault, and to reject woke orthodoxy is to invite vicious criticism from its militant disciples.  A spade can no longer be called a spade if doing so departs from the approved, politically correct narrative.  It is insanity in its purest form.  Orwellian in its design.  And on purpose.  The few who hold power want to preserve the status quo, and sowing confusion, distrust, and discord among the masses helps to do just that. 

Mering rightly roots this issue in Marxism.  She writes that “the Frankfurt School, a research center which began as the Institute for Social Research” aimed to develop and promulgate Marxism, first in Germany and then in New York City beginning in 1935.  This so-called school championed Marxist philosophy and Freudian psychology as ways to dismantle both Western culture and the nuclear family.  In their rejection of moral truth and intrinsic evil, no holds were barred.  Their compass was economic.  Our existence was purely physical.  There was no soul.  There was no God.  These were tools of the bourgeoise to subjugate the working class.  Religion was an opiate.  The mechanism to get the proletariat to accept their wretched conditions rather than rebel against them.  The nuclear family, as such, was a microcosm of this flavor of authoritarianism.  It was patriarchal, and by their logic, oppressive.  Worthy of destruction.  The true enemy of the people.  And once the nuclear family is neutralized, so will go the rest of Western culture, paving the way for the rise of a glorious and God-less state.  The architects of the Frankfurt School detested Western culture and, by extension, the Christian faith that is its bedrock, and they made it their mission to obliterate it. 

It is somewhat out of the scope of this episode to go into the lives of the framers of the Frankfurt School, though it is worth mentioning that they were clear on wanting to intentionally “alter the psychology of the working class by controlling the narratives presented to them.”  And what narratives might be included?  According to Mering, narratives that make husbands and fathers more lecherous.  This, they argued, would “engender suspicion and distrust in wives and rebellion in children.”  Introduce more pornography into society and watch the nuclear family crumble from the inside out.  Frankfurter Wilhelm Reich, whose 1936 book The Sexual Revolution made it clear that there was a connection between sexual repression and political repression, cementing “his legacy as the father of the sexual revolution.  Reich, an early member of the Frankfurt School, saw sexual promiscuity as the key to overthrowing perceived authoritarian powers.  You can see, dear listeners, where this is going. 

The Frankfurt School effectively hijacked education in America.  Students attended school not so much to gain knowledge and wisdom but to advance the Leftist cause.  There are no longer unique individuals but groups or tribes designated as either oppressed or oppressors.  It is Conflict Theory – that the human experience is shaped by the struggle between the two.  This is how the Marxists make sense of the world.  A person is in either this camp or that, and the two are constantly vying for control.  It never ends.  It cannot end.  There always must be a ying to a yang.  If there wasn’t, the Marxist way of seeing the world would cease to exist. 

So what does this mean?  In my humble estimation, the answer is clear.  If the woke mob was given absolutely everything it wanted in an instant right now, it would demand something else, for not to do so would mean its own end.  Period.  This explains the twisted ideas.  As it makes progress – if that is how we want to characterize their efforts – it has to constantly reach for new ideas, no matter how objectively crazy they are.  They have to identify the new oppressor to their oppressed.  It must identify a new supposed “authority” to replace the one it just overthrew.  This is, in part, the lunacy of Marxism, and it is very much in our midst.  So the litmus test for recognizing Marxism amounts to this: 1. Does the ideology attack the traditional nuclear family?  2. Does the ideology attack Christianity?  3. Does the ideology insist that we ignore objectively perceived reality?  4.  Does the ideology divide people into groups on superficial grounds? 

For us to combat this insidious movement, we must be able and willing to point it out.  And brave.  An unchallenged lie tends to harden and become a steppingstone for other lies to come. 

https://www.amazon.com/Awake-Not-Woke-Christian-Progressive/dp/1505118425/ref=sr_1_1?crid=37LISM3MKRU7&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.dy4gGpu9KEBM__gdNB_s09QJxVNAFCVuL7JoqZFI2Epsyo0Qkhq2IkAtcxcBavoB0JZcCBSTjWZVfNXSyjXrchtymYH6A-NKG00p0O3YKSviMEmkaTVPelqhxMetWoeCK6qx2ObVzlK4npxyc5odPT_XjirBsBVmj0afg_4mJAYfeCL4z83Y-SUvpkFnHYKIfWdyUt9zFhJSl-5rzujbLwcYG7lKKB9b-c3kEVrhjLk.LRY2xFfzIjysGoq4DfR69xa0yyWVR2MCqziKU8DKSHQ&dib_tag=se&keywords=awake+not+woke&qid=1724285157&sprefix=awake+not+woke%2Caps%2C80&sr=8-1

The first line of Walt Whitman’s popular poem, “Song of Myself” reveals much about the current state of the American union.  He writes, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” -- a line as simple as it is direct.  The crescendo leading up to this statement, of course, is decades, even centuries long; however, for our purposes, we might simply say that the Age of Reason that largely took place in the 18th century eventually yielded to the Romantic period – that time when the focus turned from the purely intellectual to the purely emotional.  We went from head to heart, and in doing so, acknowledged that other facet to being human: we feel as much as we think.  Passion and expressiveness also had a place in society and should no longer to relegated, as it had been, to the unschooled, the non-European, and, yes, the fairer sex.  The Romantic Movement, having come of age, so to speak, in the early 19th century, helps to explain the subsequent rise of the desire to abolish slavery and women’s suffrage.  It was as if, quite suddenly, huge swaths of our fellow human beings were granted legitimacy.  It did not happen overnight, but at least the fuse was lit. 

Whitman was a part of this vanguard, though he was distinctly American: a member of the storied Transcendental Movement.  In simple terms, this movement was a more hands-on, politically active version of Romanticism.  While Wordsworth, Blake, and Coleridge scribbled down their thoughts in country houses, poets like Whitman were more hardscrabble.  He was a volunteer nurse during the Civil War, and upon completion of his collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass, Whitman himself paid the printer to make a bunch of copies, believing that they would be gobbled up by parched readers, making his book, in his mind, comparable to the Bible in terms of importance.  Perhaps that conviction alone speaks volumes about how he regarded himself and his work. 

Astoundingly, Whitman was not entirely wrong.  While not everybody has heard of the 19th century American poet, his sentiments certainly did have an impact on American culture.  What do we do, after all, when we take a selfie?  Are we not celebrating ourselves?  Singing ourselves?  Our very culture seems to be built around the idea that we should be the center of our own universe.  I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say this.  We are self-consumed, and as such, we have come to believe – strongly, I hasten to add – that freedom really does mean being able to do whatever you want.  This is America, after all.  I can do anything.  I can be anything.  I can assert my own “truth,” and everybody must toe that line, even if I wake up and decide that the line should be in a different spot. 

This definition of freedom is certainly easy to swallow.  On the surface, it seems to make the most sense.  However, what this definition does not seem to take into account is the very nature of man.  Christians believe in the presence of sin.  Every single human being is tarnished by it, and, therefore, a savior is very much in need.  Sin, let me be clear, is a disposition.  An inclination.  A proclivity.  If you want, a constant tendency.  Because of sin, our hearts will, on occasion, stray.  What, then, is the common definition of freedom but a pronouncement to follow those sin impulses?  Put another way, is a person truly free if they are chained to their sin?  In my mind, the reality is exactly the opposite of freedom.  To celebrate oneself is to celebrate a bent heart.  To sing oneself is to amplify all configurations, the good and the bad.  All we have to do is take one glance at human history to quickly see what humans are prone to do when squeezed by lust, greed, anger, and fear.  Whitman’s proclamation was idealistic, naive, or both.  But, in the end, it was his words that set the tone for a century and counting of individuals operating on a definition of freedom that completely and, in my estimation, dangerously ignores the type of creature we really are.  Freedom is not doing whatever we want.  That would be a river without banks, a fire without an enclosure.  That would be a recipe for disaster and destruction.  True freedom is knowing the reality of ourselves and keeping the negative in check.  Defined and preserved banks.  Defined and preserved enclosures.  Dying unto the self.  Keeping a humble heart.  Singing the praises of the One who paid our ransom in blood. 

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost 

The poem is worth quoting in its entirety: 

Whose woods these are I think I know.    
 

His house is in the village though;    
 

He will not see me stopping here    
 

To watch his woods fill up with snow.    
 

My little horse must think it queer    

To stop without a farmhouse near    
 

Between the woods and frozen lake    
 

The darkest evening of the year.    
 

He gives his harness bells a shake    
 

To ask if there is some mistake.    
 

The only other sound’s the sweep    
 

Of easy wind and downy flake.    
 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,    
 

But I have promises to keep,    
 

And miles to go before I sleep,    
 

And miles to go before I sleep. 

// 

First published in 1923, the poem comes on the heels of the Great War – that supposed war to end all wars, which the world would soon find out was, sadly enough, wishful thinking.  That terrible and bloody conflict was fought between 1914 and 1918 by what was to be known as the Lost Generation, a term coined by influential Modernist thinker, Gertrude Stein, to describe those who came of age in the 20th century amidst a trial the likes of which was never before seen.  Soldiers on both sides did not so much kill each other as butcher each other while fighting for control of land oftentimes merely yards.  Upon the blow of a whistle, young men surged out of their water-logged trenches and into a hail of bullets.  Cut down.  Blown apart.  It was a madness borne out of the Industrial Revolution.  We mass produced means of death and destruction just was we mass produced widgets, and in the end, we left our once promising youth hollow-eyed, maimed, and bent.  Shell-shocked.  Once called Soldier’s Soul.  Lost.  Hopelessly lost.  It is no wonder why the 1920s roared; there was not enough jazz and booze to stave off the nightmares. 

Robert Frost was not a member of the Lost Generation, yet it would be difficult to deny that he was not speaking to them in his poem about a man who, with his horse, pauses in the woods on a snowy evening.  The Modernist movement was, in many ways, a frenzy of new and, largely, unquestioned ideas.  The ideas passed muster because they were new and not for anything else.  They were avante garde and arguably reckless.  Morality was a hindrance.  The searching was panicked.  We know how Virginia Woolf handled it.  And Hemingway.  And Sylvia Plath.  Suicides, all.  But amidst the tailspin, there was a voice, offering a different way forward. 

Frost was also known to suffer from depression.  He was not off that hook.  However, in his poem, he seems to offer a different take on life a foot or two in the door of the 20th century.  It is cold and dark.  The speaker is alone but for his horse.  He is unsure of the identity of the person who owns the land on which he stands.  They are nowhere near a farmhouse.  And the snow is falling.  If it is not yet winter then the season is upon them.  He stops.  Just stops.  According to the world’s rubric, it makes no sense to do so.  But he does it anyway.  A pause.  Long enough to absorb the fact that he is alive and that there are still tasks to be completed, miles to walk before he can rest. 

In short, he takes stock of the present.  He neither seeks to obliterate the past nor frantically imagine the future.  He is decisively outside of that zeitgeist.  Instead, he allows a sabbath to, in effect, descend upon his life just like the snowflakes gently landing upon him and his surroundings.  That is the analogy. 

And the lesson? 

Robert Frost, to date, is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.  I have to wonder if the reason is that he was able, through his own struggles, no less, to put forth a remedy for an ailing world.  When the world screamed hustle, Frost uttered stop.  When the world turned up the volume, Frost hit mute.  The message is one of cessation.  We must halt from time to time to preserve our humanity.  The world, of course, says otherwise, but evidence abounds when we don’t.  The engine of progress breaks.  We break.  Any momentum dries up.  And we lose ourselves in a narrative we were never meant to worship.  That honor is for Him whose woods these are I think I know: the poem’s first nod.  The One everyone else seemed to have forgotten in all the sad revelry, in all the sad surrenders. 

Impressively, Mary Shelley started to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, when she was just eighteen years old.  She had been in Geneva, and to stave off boredom due to having to stay indoors as a result of inclement weather, Shelley, along with stepsister Claire Clairmont and other literary greats Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, decided to have a fiction writing contest.  The person who could compose the best ghost story wins.  Mary Shelley triumphed.  It was the beginning of a book-length work that would cement her place in the panoply of master wordsmiths. 

The story, having been told again and again, is common enough.  A mad scientist assembles the better parts of a selection of cadavers to form one whole – a man – horrific, unsightly, monstrous, but alive.  At first, the creature seeks affection, but when the scientist, Victor, and society at large reject him, the creature seeks revenge through terror and violence.  Victor dies.  The creature self-exiles to perish in the Artic ice. 

Scholars, naturally, have pored over this story, pointing out the creature’s symbolic connection to Adam, our first parent, in the Garden of Eden and how both never asked to be made – indeed, how both were forced to wander the world in hardship.  Others have highlighted the creature’s symbolic value as it pertained to technological advancement.  Frankenstein’s monster, they say, is the result of pride.  Humankind rejects God and assumes for himself the role of creator. The creature is a composite of dead things.  What happens when we attempt to take the place of God?  Death begets deaths.  It will not turn out well for us. 

But the lesson came with the book’s first publication in 1820.  World wars were still to come.  The A-bomb.  Genocides.  Technologies and activities from the bloated egos of those who beheld God then looked upon their own abilities and the world around them and concluded that they could do better.  

Mary Shelley, then, was not proclaiming anything new; rather, she was underscoring a tendency that had been there all along and continues to tempt individuals today, and it begins with the notion that salvation is something humankind can deliver on its own if only we can figure out how best to use our natural talents and technological advancements.  History time and time again asserts that this is an immensely fallacious worldview.  Ask anybody who has lived under communist rule, for example.  The beacon of that failed social experiment was always an illusion, and what was true of Soviet Russia and what continues to be true for North Korea and Communist China will still be true for anybody who dreams that proletariat rule will eventually dissolve on its own, leaving behind an idyllic worker utopia.  It did not happen.  It will not happen.  That creature continues to wreak havoc on untold numbers of souls.  

The takeaway then?  How should we read a masterpiece penned by a 19th century teenage winner of a writing contest?  As a cautionary tale, to be sure.  But one that must be received with a hefty dose of humility.  Pride gets us twice: in choice and in consequence.  We can determine the former, but we cannot determine the latter.  That is a creature long freed from the operating table. 

The Marquis de Sade was born in 1740 to a French noble family.  Writer, political activist, and most notably libertine – or someone who questions or challenges most moral principles, especially those concerning sex – his influence on Western culture remains significant.  His major works – The120 Days of Sodom, Justine, Juliette and Philosophy in the Bedroom – combine disturbingly graphic descriptions of murder, rape, torture and sex acts with discourses on sexuality, religion, politics, and philosophy.  It was from his ideas that the word “sadist” or “sadism” emerged, after all.  To be a sadist is to enjoy inflicting pain on another human being.  The Marquis de Sade not only explored this in writing, but he also lived it out.  Toward the end of his sullied life, he was incarcerated at the Charenton insane asylum where, after being denied writing utensils and parchment, wrote on the walls of his cell using his own excrement.  The irony could not be more fitting.  Method and material matched content to a T. 

It is easy to see why the Marquis de Sade is so appealing to some.  In his world, there are no rules – no limits, no restrictions, no common decency.  There are only the passions: uncontrolled, savage, and free.  The feelings of others are not a concern.  Nor is any modicum of self-respect.  To be sure, it goes well beyond base animal proclivities.  These desires are dark, intentional, and imaginative.  Our four-legged friends could not come up with the kinds of ideas the Marquis de Sade came up with.  They are too innocent.  Perhaps we might even say that they are unblemished from original sin.  Their lot is to simply live in a world that is.  But I digress ... 

In a recent conversation with a student, I had the pleasure of discussing what is what is likely not literary.  We read literature to broaden our horizons, sharpen our minds, and learn how to articulate complex ideas.  The more we read, the more conditioned we become to enter into exchanges of ideas with greater worldly awareness and intellectual poise.  This is why literature classes remain on most curricula.  At least for now.  The squeeze is there, but the anchor is set.  As the Spanish say, vamos a ver.  But what happens when special interest groups attempt to foist upon the general public works with clearly questionable content?  Someone writes a book in defense of some ideology, and a corresponding special interest group immediately labels that book “literary.”  Should it be included on the required reading list?  Without question?  Without discussion?  Vladamir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita, is the story of a man sexually obsessed with what he calls nymphets or girls between the ages of 9 and 14.  Is this literary?  The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelenik explores masochism, sexual violence, and voyeurism.  Should this be taught in school? 

Of course, I can hear folks speedily reply that it all depends on the age of the students.  No for elementary school pupils.  Perhaps for high school students.  Why not for college-age students.  At least they would read to the end.  However, perhaps a deeper conversation needs to take place.  Story, after all, affects how we see the world.  Story is powerful.  Story is necessary.  We have a few short years to set the tone for our students, and the pickings are many.  There is a plethora of books, in other words, that do not explore the baser proclivities, the fringe ideologies.  So why the great push to adopt certain questionable titles?  It seems to me that the special interest groups know this about our students.  They know the clock is ticking, which makes their insistence that some books be adopted and summarily called literary more frenzied.  It is a battle over the minds of our young.  Indeed, it is a battle for control of the future. 

The Marquis de Sade spent his final years behind bars writing who knows what on the walls of his cell using his own waste.  It could hardly be called literary.  In fact, the very notion is ludicrous.  Perhaps shrewder minds should weigh in on the conversation about what is and what is not literary.  Does the book uplift, or does it push an agenda?  Does it speak to our shared humanity, or does it blindingly celebrate ideologies on the margin seeking to be mainstream?  To be sure, dear listener, does the book tell the truth, or does it dictate the truth?  There is a difference, for as George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984, writes, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command.”  It has never been about truth, you see.  It has always been about power. 

Built in 1882, Struthers Library Theatre, located in Warren, Pennsylvania, stood as the cultural epicenter to the many denizens of this forested community.  The Victorian-styled venue once featured, to name a handful of entertainment dignitaries, Harry Houdini, John Philip Sousa, and Cecil B. DeMille, and it was also squarely in the Vaudeville circuit.  This grand stage, nestled in the rolling hills of the Allegheny mountains, was nothing to scoff at.  Though the region was typically known for logging, oil, and manufacturing, it nevertheless housed a magnificent locale where folks could experience acts they would otherwise only read about.  The theatre continues to marvel despite the rust that corrupts neighboring buildings. 

I grew up in Warren County and only heard of the Struthers Library Theatre, never bothering to investigate its cultural significance.  I suppose this might be typical of any young local: the inability to see worth and value in your own backyard, as it were.  Only as an adult have I come to see my old stomping grounds with so-called tourist eyes, identifying and appreciating the rich history of the people from whom I came.   

There are other places of rich cultural and historical significance, of course.  The National Forge in Irvine was where the Saint Louis Arch was made, and the State Hospital for the criminally insane remains a stunning if not creepy example of architecture that fell in line with the Kirkbride plan – that folks could get better by working outdoors under the sun.  It was at one point a self-contained community.  The residents put on plays.  It had its own electric plant.  The entire campus is connected by a system of underground tunnels. 

But most recently, it is Struthers Library Theatre that has captured my imagination.  Because of its intricate design.  Its mission in a far-flung town.  And its ghosts.  The place is haunted. 

Mrs. Struthers, for example, died young.  She was the wife of the venue’s wealthy benefactor.  The actual library is located on the third floor and, itself, is comprised of three levels of row upon row of bookshelves.  To any bibliophile, it is a dream come true.  A person could spend hours browsing through the many old, enticing selections.  But, hopefully, not too long.  If a person takes too long in the stacks, that person might hear a disgruntled snort.  Mrs. Struthers, apparently, was not known for humoring the undecided. 

Down on the stage, a little girl wearing 19th century mourning garb might be seen flitting here and there.  Once upon a time, when the family member of a prominent citizen would pass away, the casket would be placed center stage as mourners looked on from the house.  The only place in town that could contain its citizens was the theatre, so, in a practical way, it made sense to hold the wake there.  As it was, the Struthers children died young, too.  Even they continue to want to speak. 

Struthers Library Theatre is old, but it is still relevant.  It has a voice.  This is peculiar in a day and age when, to some, old means irrelevant, dated.  We might even say that those firmly in that camp are guilty of what is called chronological bias.  It is preferring the opinions, trends, ideas, and values of the right now in lieu of the same at any given time in the past precisely because they occur at the moment.  It is, in other words, to dismiss the hard-won conclusions of our ancestors because they happened “back in the day” in order to champion the cutting edge, not because it is better but because it is new.  Period.  Many do this without question, without critical thinking, without even so much as a thought to how the opinion, trend, idea, or value would affect society at large.  They are biased.  Posterity has nothing to say. 

Perhaps there is a parallel between this sort and those who fail to see the worth and value of places, to repeat, in your own backyard.  While it is true that the windshield is much bigger than the rearview mirror – that our sights should be set on what is ahead and not behind – it would be tragically dismissive to forget the rearview mirror altogether.  And why?  Because, I submit, this is how we are grounded.  To be sure, this is how we remain unshackled from what can be the dictatorship of our whims and understand that the universe did not begin with our very birth.  I was not a part of the community that made Struthers Library Theatre what it is today, but I would never assert that any Youtube video I can pull up on my device is better merely because it is a relatively new medium.  What might this mean?  Those who have chronological biases miss out on a treasure trove of content: ideas, values, convictions, points of view, craftmanship, artistry, ways to look at the world around us.  In my teenage years, I missed it.  Later in life, I gained it.  Should we hold out hope that this could happen for others?  Of course.  But history is also filled with those who choose not to, opting instead to embrace their bias and trudge forward .... to where?  They have no idea.  There are no ghosts.  There are no libraries. 

* Correction: Pittsburgh Demoise Steel, not The Forge, was responsible for making the Saint Louis Arch.

In his poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” 19th century Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, famously penned the following lines: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; 
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting / And cometh from afar; / Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”  The poem, in many ways, is a lament on getting older and losing the ability to see the world as a child sees it – with boundless wonder and imagination.  Wordsworth, of course, was responding to many forces at play in his day.  The Industrial Revolution, for example, was ramping up, and as thousands flocked to the cities to labor in air polluting, noise making factories, the family dynamics of the villages changed.  Once upon a time, extended families lived together for generations.  Now, for a small chance of gaining upward mobility, that social fabric was torn, and distance came between loved ones.  One brother was in this city; another brother was in that city.  Mom and dad stayed home.  A sister was somewhere up north.  As the engine of industrial advancement chugged away, the angst and despair of those who would be cogs in this great machine only grew.  It was this disillusionment with the world that prompted Wordworth to consider his life now compared to his life as a boy.  Surely, he was closer to God then.  Where were the clouds of glory now?  If the bosom of God is truly our home, what have we done that has removed us?  Made us lost?  Caused this deep and dark fugue? 

Wordsworth’s answer comes at the conclusion of the poem.  He writes, “Thanks to the human heart by which we live, / Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, / To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”  Nature, in a phrase, is the expression of the Divine.  The answer is to simply go outdoors and ponder God’s creation and, importantly, remember that you are a part of it.  It is an attempt to reawaken the senses and find majesty in even the smallest of things.  For Wordsworth, strolling around in England’s Lake District, that might be a plain flower.  A few decades later, across the pond, so to speak, American Transcendentalist Walt Whitman found God in a blade of grass.  It can be done, apparently.  A person merely needs to realign how he or she experiences the world. 

In our current age, we are in the midst of another revolution.  It is not one involving unsightly manufacturing centers and smog that engendered the term “London fog” but a revolution that has the young and old alike visually locked to their cellphones.  It is, to be sure, a neurosis, and it has created the same effects Wordsworth and his literary peers were railing against two-hundred years ago.  Angst and depression are on the rise.  Loneliness is a real issue.  And while family members may not be miles apart, there are still great distances between them.  Family members eating separately, sitting in separate rooms, fixated on separate screens.  Would Wordsworth’s suggestion all those years ago still apply?  Put simply, do we all need to put down our devices and go outside? 

The allure of the Industrial Revolution was that individuals could make more money.  Is the allure of cellphones centered around getting more likes, making more so-called friends, getting more snaps, imbibing more mindless content?  The commonality seems to be presenting itself.  At the end of the day, we are consumers, but overconsumption – and, dear listeners, it would be difficult to argue that we are not there – is a reflection of an unhealthy relationship with the self.  Because we do not know how to say no to our impulses, our impulses now control us and even determine our mood, our disposition, our worldview.  We evict ourselves from the bosom of God because, like Lot’s wife, we cannot turn away.  We are pillars of salt.  We are slaves to a plethora of illusions. 

If there is to be a spiritual revolution, and, by the way, the rumblings are undoubtedly there, then we must take the advice of a long-gone poet and with determination and real intention, seek the Divine where it has always been.  Outward.  Among the flora.  Among the fauna.  Never inward.  So take a walk.  Your dog will appreciate it.  And if you don’t have a dog, that’s alright, too. 

I used to write with a British accent.  The voice in my head as I wrestled with ideas, looking for connections, hoping for conclusions, reaching for just the right word was an invention.  I had never been to England, you see.  I grew up in a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania – Youngsville, if you are interested – and, but for Canada, which to us never really counted, had never been out of the country.  But here I was in college, surrounded by individuals from all over – big cities, many of them – and I felt I had to step up my game.  In truth, I believed that my northwestern Pennsylvania accent was not smart enough.  Even my diction was suspect.  I said pop when everyone else said soda, crick, not creek, kife, not borrow without asking. 

I am now amused by the thought of this behavior, but only because I experienced a small epiphany soon after my sophomore year.  I was reading a classic work of American literature and discovered that I knew the meaning of every word on the page.  I did not need to defer to a dictionary.  The language was not foreign or overly erudite.  I got it.  It was then that I concluded that I no longer needed to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.  My writing voice changed.  I was a student from northwestern Pennsylvania, and that was fine.  I could be smart, too. 

The heart of the epiphany, really, was that I was also capable of creating great works of literature or, if you will, great art.  I studied a host of authors in earnest, mostly American.  Many came from humble beginnings just like me.  They were just serious about their craft.  They wrote on what paper they could find.  They held down real jobs.  Blue collar work.  But they kept at it, honed their skillset, leaned in to their passion for wordsmithing.  I began keeping a journal.  I collected phrases – the curious ways some folks worded an idea.  Dialects.  Diction.  I noticed how much of it was defined by region.  I was fascinated.  I remain so.  But I also noticed something quite telling as I continued my studies both undergraduate and then graduate.  Getting to tell your story to a mass audience is quite the luxury.  Few make it past the gatekeepers – those agents and publishers who have dollar signs for eyes and little regard for literature and art for its own sake.  It must be trending for it to pass.  The story might be genius, but if it is not somehow participating in the current discourse – something, by the way, that turns on a dime – then it will not pass muster.  Thank you for submitting.  I am not the right agent or publisher for it. 

All of this is to wonder about the curriculum that was presented to me and my peers.  We read what was approved.  We studied what managed to get by the burly bouncer in major publishing houses.  The voices were not exhaustive; they were select. 

Was I, therefore, exposed to the widest array of human experiences?  Of course not, and I don’t pretend that I or anybody else could possibly absorb that array.  However, my formally educated self wondered about the stories of the truly disenfranchised.  People like my Uncle Butch, a man with barely an education who loved “go-buggies” (cars) and John Wayne.  To my knowledge, he never read the Romantics or the Transcendentalists or any of the other formalized literary groups I was exposed to in college, yet many of the things that came out of his mouth were sheer poetry.  Clever and colorful.  Original.  A verbal celebration of his life, a life out of the spotlight yet a vastly important life nonetheless. 

Uncle Butch was no stranger to want.  As a boy during Christmas, his parents neglected to put up a tree, so he, in his words, “throwed a pine branch in a bucket, put it in a corner, and called it done.”  Even the toys he and his siblings got that year from the Salvation Army were already broken.  His was a hardscrabble youth of selling dead turtles and sporting duck ass hairstyles to a hardscrabble adulthood, working where he could to make ends meet -- garages, shops, and lumberyards  -- because there were seasons when, as he phrased it, “I don’t need much, buddy.  I just need to get to where I’m going.  I just hop right in to my truck and VROOM! …. I’m bookin’ down the road, smoking the tires!”   

What he did not get in material, he made up for with imagination.  Nobody could tell a story quite like Butch.  Animated might be the closest adjective to describe his intonations, points of emphasis, and, of course, word choice.  Butch did not drive around town, doing errands.  He “boogied all over hell and back.”  Nor was he prone to hurrying anywhere to retrieve something someone had set on the curb.  Not Butch.  He would rather “run just as hard as he could, picking ‘em up and putting ‘em down ‘cause that thing had ‘free’ written all over it”  or he might even “rip down the road, just haulin’ freight.”  If he felt good, he “felt as fine as the fuzz on an old woman’s toes,” and if things were not going so well, he might be tempted to grab his “shootin’ irons.”  

This was his way of speaking.  Not studied.  Simply natural.  And yet no one even knew about it except those within his orbit. 

In the end, he was a man who lived and died.  Just like us all.  An individual.  Uniquely created by God.  A man with a voice and a story to live and a story to tell.  Perhaps the invitation is there to see that in ourselves and, I hasten to say, others whose names may not be on curriculums and syllabi but who are just as important and loved by God nevertheless.  Shakespeare said “we must hasten;” Uncle Butch said, “It’s time to agitate the gravel.”  It means the same thing, for ours is a shared humanity.