IT STILL SITS as the second highest grossing movie ever: James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic, by James Cameron. $2,186,772,302.00 and change. Not a great flick, but a good one. Personally, I’m just as impressed by the fact of James Cameron’s one-man submarine trip down 7 miles to the bottom of the Marianas Trench…
Our world is the Titanic: and what you think is going on in life or the life of the world depends very much on what part of the voyage you focus on. I explain.
For some, we’re on a journey in a mighty vessel to the new world, just over the horizon. Full speed ahead! What could possibly go wrong? Look.. all the best people are here, and agree with us! Moar caviar!
Not long after, the speeding unsinkable shears off countless cold-brittle rivets on an iceberg. The designers had not imagined such a thing, nor prepared for it. As the bow settles, water will keep moving backwards over the watertight bulkheads, until.. doom.
Me, I’m a “life is bow-settling” guy. Death– the water– is creeping up surely and unavoidably. Order is breaking down, people are scrambling for lifeboats, and while some are going full-panic or full-denial, others are trying to abide by their duty, and to help as much as possible, as the Great Ship Utopia begins to founder in earnest into the icy North Atlantic.
For many modern day Utopians– this-worldly salvation true-believers– it is in human reach and wisdom to make heaven on earth. Human beings are basically good, and just need enough browbeating, herd-mentality, and extra rules, and we will make a perfect world out of our super-duper selves.
Bizarrely, the very hubris of the modernist movement that built the Titanic and infected politics, and has also infected the Catholic Church. The clueless notion that the 1960s Church would “Listen to the World”, that we needed no redemption just a little buffing, and all would progress together in a la-la-land journey of common purpose and happy thoughts.. the Denial-As-Faith it took place in an actual sinking-Titanic world.
Consider– at the same time as sin and sacrifice and salvation were being thrown overboard, and a mind-boggling naiveté about human goodness and perfectibility was put on the altar, let us remember that the 20th century was the century of blood; of genocides; of industrial slaughter, of two catastrophic world wars with hundreds of millions dead, injured, made refugee.. plus, with technology abroad to have a third and very final War.
Even as the faux-clever theologians and happy-thinking bishops were trying to remake the faith into something unChristian and unrecognizable, the ovens of Auschwitz were not 20 years cold; Soviet Gulags and Chinese death-camps were brimming over; that World War Three had nearly begun a couple years before over Cuba; that despite the rush of technology and Western prosperity, that fallen human nature had not actually changed, and that we needed the Cross of Christ and His risen life more than ever.
Even the ancient pagans knew better: “Those whom the gods would destroy” they warned “they first drive mad.” Denial is a sweet addiction: but reality is always best.
Forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever….
As if it were 1905, and a perfect world was just ahead, out went the old religion, the Latin, the rosaries, the relics, the art and architecture: come now the felt banners and camping songs, the puppets & clowns, the moralistic therapeutic deist sermons (with a dash of revolution), of a new and sinless humanity feeling its oats in experiment and innovation and… “Iceberg, right ahead!!”
Mortality? Still with us. Human failing, cruelty, blindness, and evil? Check. Our limitations, blindness, and failed good intentions? Yup. Hurting one another, deliberately and just because? Pretty much. Violence, false belief, unspeakable deeds, a foolish naivete? Mass murder? Warfare? Always & everywhere.
Prisoners at Jiangbei prison, Hubei province, in 1998. Look! Free transplants, slave-labour, and neatening up the political process all in one!
Only, for all these abiding and tragic realities of our bent human nature, progressive religion has no answers, having treated as flotsam and jetsam the faith of our fathers, the wisdom of 20 Christians centuries and 15 Hebrew centuries before that; the riches of Roman Law and Greek philosophy and theatre; and all the good things of Western Civilization. Yard sale.. we have shiny new plastic things!
So the next time some smirking collar tells you all is well, celebrate yourself, God is (only) love, and love is probably God, hug a warm puppy and be happy– realize he’s trying to sell you a berth on the sinking Titanic, has no answers, no salvation to pass on to you, and is not in touch with the Real, or Jesus, or God– nor the reality of life and death and sin.
ITYS,
There’s more wisdom and human feeling and recognition of sin in the following Scouting campfire song than in a modernist post-Christian hymn or sermon.
The Titanic (Husbands And Wives) Camp Song
Traditional
Oh they built the ship Titanic
To sail the ocean blue
And they thought they had a ship
That the water would never go through;
But the Lord’s Almighty hand
Said that ship would never land,
It was sad when that great ship went down.
Chorus:
It was sad. It was sad.
It was sad when the great ship went down.
(to the bottom of the…)
Husbands and wives,
Little children lost their lives
It was sad when the great ship went down.)
They were off from England
And not very far from shore
When the rich refused
To associate with the poor
So they sent them down below
Where they’d be the first to go
It was sad when that great ship went down.
Chorus
The boat was about to sink,
And the sides about to burst,
When the captain shouted, “All
Women and children first!”
Oh, the captain tried to wire,
But the wires was on fire,
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Chorus
Oh, they swung the lifeboats out
O’er the deep and ragin’ sea,
When the band struck up with,
“Nearer My God to Thee.”
Little children wept and cried,
As the waves swept o’er the side,
It was sad when the great ship went down.
Chorus
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