Consolation for Unknown Authors

 

Typically, persons with new licenses to drive tractor-trailers are surprised to face the following immediate roadblock to their new career: they can’t get a job because they don’t have experience; and they can’t get experience because they don’t have a job. This is such a common complaint amongst these new licensees that I have known several such persons firsthand. Many writers, even ones who have been writing for years, face a similar obstacle: they go unnoticed because they are unknown; and they can’t become known until their work is noticed. Again, I have known several such writers firsthand. Some of these writers, to make matters worse, hate to market themselves or are too humble to obtrude upon others to platform them or to cry up their work. 

Suppose that this predicament remains constant. Is there consolation? Consolation abounds. It runneth over even. Just ask and answer the following series of questions. How many people buy books? Fewer than half of consumers buy books. How many people read articles in full? Well, why do you think that articles are usually brief and their paragraphs frequently only one or two sentences long? They are like that because editors know that few readers will do more than glance at parts of the article. Out of the books that are bought, how many buyers actually read them? Not all buyers, certainly. Even avid readers do not read all the books they buy. How many buyers of books are avid readers? New books not even cracked open are what line so many of the shelves of used bookstores. And then, how many readers read their books attentively? And how many out of those who read attentively apply what they have read to their lives? Of the authors who are celebrated, how many are honestly appreciated instead of merely flattered? Evangelical radio programs and CBC Radio evince that flattery goes on more frequently by far than honest appreciation. Finally, and most importantly, are the books being written, even the ones authored by yourself, worthy of being read? 

I was going to say that the fact that you are an unknown author matters much less than you think. But it matters in a way that you may not have considered. “But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned” (Matthew 12.36, 37.) In light of this revelation from Jesus Christ, it may be good news that your books or articles are left unread. It may be good news because if a person is in danger of being condemned for what he says to someone, how much more for what he writes for multitudes to mentally absorb? Everyone, until and unless faith in the Lord is obtained, is under condemnation already. We are conceived in sin, and we come out of the womb condemned. The degree of punishment, though, assuming that a person never converts, depends a lot on his words. This is the point. 

Rarely do I watch a movie. There is this movie from 1986 called ‘Stand by Me’ that I like, however. Unfortunately, it has two or three ‘customary oaths’ in it. The rest of its faults are more tolerable: the bit of anti-Protestant bias and the disdain at some points in the narrative for the working class in favor of the upper class professional. Books that movies are based on are usually more pure and better than their movie counterparts. With that in mind, I purchased the book that this movie is based on: The Body, by Stephen King, published in 1982. I had read, in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s, some of Stephen King’s other work. I did not remember him as a writer of obscenity. As it turns out, his Body book is so splotched with cursing and expletives that it deserves to be called his Bawdy book instead. It is not readable unless by a reader who likes to walk that close to hell. I counted nine offensive words on a single page; almost every page that I read or looked at had one or more. So I could not even come close to finishing it. This book full of trash talk will soon go into the garbage can where it can feel more welcome: after I tear into it with my angry fingers, which are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made,’ by the way, to rip objectionable stuff. There is not only a time to ‘cast away,’ says the Preacher, but also a time to ‘rend.’ The Body is about to find this out in real time. 

The writer who wants to be remembered (if he ever becomes known) as a classy wielder of the pen or a chic tapper of the keyboard must take the following advice at least: write no word that a character on television in the 1950s would have been forbidden to utter; write no word that would have blocked him from being published in Victorian England. The presence of expletives in literature is an oxymoron because profane speech, instead of standing on the pedestal where literature and classical music are, sits on the toilet with hip-hop, reggae, and rap. Instead of getting graphic by setting forth what a potty-mouthed character actually uttered, why not take the literary road instead of the filthy fiction route by being pictorial like so?—: “Expletives were to his mouth what manure is to that farm implement known as the manure spreader. Fetid speech came off his tongue in explosive jets over a wide area. Whenever he bloviated, his audience drew back as if to avoid contamination.” (I just made that up.) By writing immorally, multitudes of moral readers will be turned away; but readers who think foul language is fine will not be turned off by immaculate composition. So there is a financial incentive to writing decently.

“But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned” (Matthew 12.36, 37.) In view of the foul language that Stephen King’s fiction contains, how will it go for him at the great and terrible judgment when that person called the Word of God puts this promise from Matthew 12 into effect? So if you are an unknown author, take consolation in the fact that you are not as known as Stephen King is. But even if you are never read, you will nevertheless have to give some account of what you have written and why you have written it. You will have to answer for, not only what words you have written down, but what worldview you have attempted to put into the minds of readers. It is obvious that if Jesus Christ will judge for idle words, he will judge even more for the exhibition of any philosophy that does not line up with the way of faith as that is authorized in the Bible. This opinion may sound extreme; but it is the logical inference of that promise in Matthew 12, for a novel whose drift is false philosophy (Colossians 2.8) must be more potentially consequential than some idle words. Writers generally do not know this, but for a writer to be close to being in the clear in this matter, he has to be familiar with the Bible, its doctrines, and its ethics. He has to know how not to violate these categories and how to cause his book to go up the river against the currents of modern and postmodern philosophies and perspectives. But how will a writer possess this knowledge if he is a ‘natural man’ who cannot spiritually discern between the nuances of right and wrong, let alone between the Old Testament Law and the New Testament Gospel? “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are spiritually discerned?” (1 Corinthians 2.14.) Is there consolation in being an unknown author? Methinks that for most writers, more judgment can be avoided by being unknown than the good that can be accomplished by being famous. The more an author is known, the greater degree of accounting he has to look forward to. Here are some questions that a writer might pose to himself about what he has written. Has a word like ‘karma’ been dropped and left open as if that’s a thing? Is there an overarching theism, at least, to be noticed in his novel or story? Or can a reader assume, after reading it, that atheism, without qualification, is the governing arc? Are there any consequences in the narrative from practices that the Bible would condemn? Or are perversions left open-ended as if they’re acceptable? Writing from start to finish is not only a journey; it is a walk through a minefield.            

What if an unknown author writes cleanly, and perceives the world, through a good understanding of the fundamentals in the Bible, rightly? In that case, he asks himself if he is spending his time wisely. After this, if he is still convinced in his conscience that his time is well spent, he may continue to write for himself unto God, learning much by his studies and research thereby (for writing has a lot to do with learning.) Then, peradventure his time will come to be noticed; if it does not come, he has done what he thought best to do with the time that he spent on reading, meditating, investigating, writing, and so on. “He had died quite unexpectedly of a stroke, in February 1823, before he had completed his sixty-fourth year, leaving behind him a bulky MS., History of the Religious Wars in France, on which he had been engaged for years, and which his widow, in despair of ever finding a publisher, eventually committed to the flames” (J. H. Philpot, The Seceders, p. 27.) Was this man (J. H. Philpot’s grandfather) supposed to write that massive manuscript? There is no information, to my knowledge, from which to make a studied guess on the matter. Producing a sizeable manuscript that is destined to make no public impact, because not published, much less read, was not necessarily a wasted effort. Maybe it kept the man from doing something worse with his time. Maybe he profited, if not financially and by the satisfaction of supplying a beneficent volume to mankind, then mentally and possibly morally. A writer might think that his work is safe on his desktop and his copies online will last a long time. But he doesn’t know what will happen next. Whole sites have been erased from the internet by censors. How many persons thought their manuscripts were safely tucked away, ready for publication, in desks in the World Trade Center? Regardless, if a writer is not convinced that he is engaged in the effort for the good of man and to the glory of God, is it not better for him to remain unknown? On the other hand, if he is convinced that he can benefit humanity and honor God by his writing, what matters it if he remains unknown? God knows what he has been up to. Be consoled, unknown author, if what you have written is edifying; but be consoled even more if what you have written is corrupting. Your literary endeavors might be something of little, if not evil, account anyway. In that case, it is better that you never be known, for contaminating the public more than it already is, must be judged a great evil. Suppose that you are not in the habit of dirtying your pages with filth, though; and suppose that you are at least a moral theist. Is that enough? Will that clear you? If you write fiction, for example, your duty is to at least prompt the reader to admire morality more than depravity. Can you pull that off? It may be that in creating a character for your story, you confound bad qualities with good. Maybe you do this inadvertently. “Every one has heard of the young nobleman, who, having witnessed the representation of a play, called the Libertine Destroyed, declared, on leaving the house, that he would be the libertine destroyed, and actually proved so…History abounds with examples of men who have been betrayed into follies, and even crimes, by the indiscriminate imitation of some favorite hero” (Hugh Murray, Morality of Fiction.) So a writer of fiction should at least have in mind that his duty is to offset the mention of sins and crimes with the consequences that follow therefrom. How many writers would like to be able to say that they wrote The Great Gatsby? Even though The Morality of Fiction was published in 1805, this inquiry into the tendency of fictitious narratives, with observations on some of the most eminent (for such is its subtitle) made me realize that The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, may be a corrupting book on account of the fact that the portrayal of its characters may inspire the reader to imitate a lifestyle of laziness. Oscar Wilde’s well-written Picture of Dorian Gray, from 1890, offers up the same inspiration for imitation, not to mention its allusions to indecency. To write a novel that illustrates the roaring ‘20s, as Fitzgerald managed to do, but at the same time try to avoid encouraging moral laxity, a writer would have to omit offensive language and to include an introduction or appendix that is calculated to counterbalance the tendency of the narrative. That would have not been enough to clear Fitzgerald of guilt; but it would have helped to mitigate the liability while preserving the mood of his composition. I will add that in my book report of The Great Gatsby from many years ago, I had stated that a “great moral…eventually unfolds: the tragic pitfalls of loose morals and easy living.” This is true; but years later I feel that the impression left with me is the ‘easy living’ of its characters. Therefore, my sense is that not enough was done to leave a more proper lasting impression. Or it could be that the cursing somehow spawned the lasting impression that was left.    

After all of this, a person might think that my view is that no one should write who is not a Bible-informed Christian. This is not my view. There is no harm to the public at all, or certainly more welfare than harm, in a collection of secular articles like the ones in People in Peril, a book of tragic accounts and close calls. There is only one instance of blasphemous language in this volume of 573 pages. That’s one too many; but in a book like that it’s a wonder that more didn’t sneak in. Secular worthies exist. The chief historical book outside the Bible that has ever been written, in my opinion, is not even The City of God by Augustine the Christian, but The Wars of the Jews by Josephus, a Jew. I assert this because what he wrote about was nothing less than the sacking of Jerusalem in A. D. 70, which event was nothing less than the record of the fulfillment of certain prophecies that were proclaimed by no one less than Jesus Christ. After being shown the marvelous workmanship of ‘the buildings of the temple’ in Jerusalem, for example, Jesus prophesied: “See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew 24.2.) Not even four decades later, this came to pass. Further into the chapter, he warns particularly about this event. What was prophesied by the Lord about this war, a war that Josephus was to participate in and be an eyewitness to, was later chronicled by this same Josephus as that which he had seen lately come to pass. No historical book except the ones included in the canon of Scripture can be more important than The Wars of the Jews for that single reason. A great and mighty book it is, too, whether we measure it by the yardstick of subject matter, atmosphere, or elegance. One’s consolation may be that it is better to be unknown; it may be possible, however, to be an exception by producing something exceptional.     

Because of the epoch in which we live, which is an evil epoch perhaps without precedent, it is just as fitting to end on a sad note than an uplifting one. Scripture speaks of a time of ‘famine…of hearing the words of the LORD’ (Amos 8.11.) What goes along with that, for purposes of judgment or chastisement, is a time of famine of good books being written and read. And if good books are being written, it is as if, because they lie unsought and undiscovered, they do not exist. Since it is true that God sometimes ‘removeth away the speech of the trusty’ (Job 12.20), he may remove out of sight or out of mind the books or articles of the trusty. There is a famine of actual serious reading in our day. But the ‘trusty,’ whoever they are, must continue to write in view of the possibility that that curse will be broken. 

The Four Chief Causes of Writer's Block

 

Too often have I heard this or that writer complain of writer’s block on Canada’s socialist broadcasting corporation, the CBC. How often is too often? I have heard the complaint from there many times; but even once would be too often because writer’s block is an unnecessary evil. Writers who are privileged enough to be condescended to by the CBC to receive an invitation to gripe about how hard it is for them to write, exhibit more angst across the airwaves than Alanis Morissette is able to put into her most neurotic song. “How about unabashedly bawling your eyes out” indeed! Staring at that blank sheet of paper, man, that’s terrifying! Sitting before an empty screen, ma’am, that’s horrific! If writer’s block is a snag, the writer who experiences it should keep the complaint to himself because, as unnecessary as it is, it is too paltry to be pitied. 

The four chief causes of writer’s block are these: being a slave to genre, a slave to current narratives, a slave to inferior input, and a slave to self. 

By writer’s block I do not deign to include the barrier to fulfill the task of finding an entry point to one’s thesis or tale. Entry point blockades ought to be as easy to break through as rain through a puff of smoke or wind through a chain link fence. Neither do I deign to include one’s loss of heart to compose. That is not writer’s block, but rather something serious: depression. This is like ennui due to burnout or a person’s intuition warning him that his life, as it is, lacks meaning. What I take writer’s block to mean in persons complaining of it is the inability to come up with an idea to write about or the impotency to continue an idea already begun. 

The first cause of writer’s block: being a slave to genre. Novels are so much the rage among writers that the pervasive obsession might qualify as a mania. The biography or the history must be set down in the form of a novel, it seems. Why is this? There are two reasons for it: laziness and lust. By writing life and times in the novel format, license to substitute fiction for fact evacuates the responsibility to do thorough research. And by choosing to write a ‘narrative,’ which is the celebrated genre nowadays, the writer has a chance, remote though it undoubtedly is, to be inducted into the snobbiest of clubs and maybe even have his book made into a movie. Hollywood is the wished for solicitor. Lazy writing days and the lust for fame are met together in many a writer in our day, for the desire for a shortcut to fame and wealth is near the bottom of a depraved soul, and our society is an abyss of iniquity. Few writers even know how to develop a novel. Read a recent one at random and see. The wherewithal that it takes to fashion a novel to equal Oliver Twist or even the much briefer Rasselas, has been lost. No one is able to do it. If the best chapter of Melville’s Moby Dick would be as hard to match as our populating the planet Mars, we would sooner occupy the whole solar system as to equal the full scope of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Would-be novelists and novelists in name only continue to peck away at keyboards nonetheless. Creating a chaotic world of sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and dueling verb tenses (even award-winning novelists commit these faults) is de rigueur because Booker and Hollywood are so inarticulate that they are often attracted to even that. Staccato and convolution kiss each other like perverted lovers do, and classic novels would cover their dust jackets in shame if they could as freaks of nature are placed beside them on the same shelves. Of course writer’s block will occur when no idea can be formed about how to get through a grammatical labyrinth and still write a novel that will please the ‘right people’ by being grammatically quirky. How much grammatical confusion must be deliberately missed in the editing process is the question, for it is certain that the ‘right people’ want something that is not only hazy, but also something that smacks of sophistication in the grammatical-nihilist sense. It cannot be fun to write with unreasonable dicta hanging over one’s head. These dicta cast a pall over the very soul of an author, and they hang more ominously over the novelist than the writer who has engaged himself to be married to any other genre. A short story will hardly be noticed; yea, a whole collection can blow trumpets according to the number of stories included, and the wall of non-discoverability will not be likely to fall. But to lay that wall flat by a novel, be it retarded by postmodern conventions or not, is so unlikely that writer’s block to prevent the aspirer from scribbling his first sentence is a blessing if it sticks. Why begin to write if you must write as a slave to the conventions of unorthodox composition? Writer’s block is better. Here is how the postmodern sophisticate would write that sentence: “Writer’s. Block. Is. Better.” What a charming way to write when you have no panache to flourish!  

The second cause of writer’s block: being a slave to current narratives. Usually when I turn on CBC radio, I immediately hear a propaganda narrative being disseminated in order to provoke discontent and unrest. Here are some examples that I decided to note down: (1) Monday, November 4, 2024, at around 1455: The first words I heard were these: “The first time I was called a wop….” (2) Friday, November 8, 2024, minutes before 0500 (maybe I meant minutes before 1500): The first words I heard were these: “It’s hard to be a black woman in the presence of white people who can kill you.” This was on a program called ‘Ideas.’ (3) Friday, November 15, 2024, at around 1325: The first words were not revealing; but the subject was testosterone levels in transgender persons who play sports and the alleged discrimination they face. (4) Sunday, January 12, 2025, at around 1350: An educator, after reading her poem, said, “I had a lot of unlearning to do.” This was regarding indigenous rights. Then she went on to opine on climate change. (5) Sunday, February 9, 2025, at 1350: At this time I heard a ‘conversation’ take place between the host and a queer Mexican immigrant to the USA about the queer’s book about being queer. (6) Sunday, March 2, 2025, at 1359: An interview was wrapping up between the host and an author. The author said: “As a gay man, I even have a career.” (7) Just today, June 2, 2025, while getting ready to proof this article, I turned CBC radio on minutes before what they call the ‘news,’ and heard this: “This is what the abusive husband says to his wife.” Whenever you turn on that radio station, you will probably discern, either immediately or before a few minutes have expired, that the topic in hand has something to do with a propaganda narrative. It is the same with Radio Canada (CBC’s French side.)  

Those notes came in handy because what the CBC broadcasts is a snapshot of the larger scene on mainstream media platforms. Racism, the queer agenda, climate change, feminism—these are some of the narratives that writers are pressured to accept and promote during this present epoch in the West. We all know what the rest of the narratives are. They concern abortion, open borders, migrants, Islam, vaccines, irrational Trump hatred, and even the defense of pedophilia via drag queens and dirty books that are thrust before kids in our libraries. The CBC’s newest favorite is the ‘content farm,’ which is their term for any site they don’t like and want to shut down. Writers must walk the narrow line on these narratives and others, or be ostracized, censored, or worse. This tyranny over the mind and conscience is commonly tolerated and abided by in the interest of keeping the way open to being accepted if not celebrated, though the truth is that the conforming writer will barely be discovered unless he knows someone on the inside. Not only are the tyrannical narratives to be obeyed line upon line and precept upon precept as if the word of the devil is the now the word of God; but because they are unlike ‘the sure word of prophecy,’ these demoniacal narratives must be shifted with in synchronicity with the sinister wings of Satan as they dictate the direction of his loathsome winds. So the writer attempts to get his novel up as straightly in line with where the crooked narratives are bending at the moment, and tries to wedge his thesis somewhere in between all of the other theses that are piled on the dunghills of mainstream media, mass market stores, and the brainwashing sites. What helps him to wedge it in is the state of his novel-thesis, which is rotten and mushy and therefore amenable to being forced in there. By the time it is seen, though, if it ever is seen, the narratives have changed a latitude or so from their position vis-à-vis Perdition and a couple of longitudes, maybe, from Gehenna. So now the writer debates within himself about whether he should do a conforming rewrite or start a whole new project in his ongoing quest to please the forces of darkness at the expense of his own liberty to think for himself and to write without having to drag the ball and chain of mutating narratives behind his pen.           

Any person who writes what he thinks has the best chance at being accepted is a mercenary, a hireling, and a slave. Did Augustine write to please the Romans? Read the first half of The City of God, and see. And that book is one of the chief classics, not only of antiquity, but in the whole of history. Instead of dissembling or temporizing, he demolished the gods of Rome by his theology, logic, and historical learning. He wrote what he believed the truth to be. Did Martin Luther write to thrill the papists? Or did he lay everything, including his life, on the line to speak ‘the mind of Christ’ (1 Corinthians 2.16) most freely? He could have come short of risking his life by selling out his lip. He knew what narratives one should repeat; he knew them better than anyone else did, including the pope. Did he toe the line? Or did he give accursed narratives the boot? “For the world paints for itself a god who accepts our good works, and is pleased with the mass, vigils, foundations, rosaries, caps, pates, hempen ropes, and what more be the works of fools with which the Pope is employed” (Martin Luther, Sermons on Gospel Texts, Volume 3.1, p. 342.) The items that he denounces there are just some of the baggage that Roman Catholicism’s narratives make use of. In the same way, instead of composing ‘acceptable’ narratives or steering clear of deriding them, we should, if we disbelieve in them, write honestly and openly about them. It wasn’t easy for Luther to act upon his beliefs: “I could not so quickly come to the point, to cast to the winds the law of the Pope. It was a bitter and difficult task for me to eat meat on Friday, and conclude that the law and order of the Pope amounted to nothing. God help us, how difficult it was for me, before I dared to do it! Therefore one should become free from this in his own conscience….” (Ibid., p. 337.) Luther’s eating meat on Friday might be like our refusing to confess that global warming is a thing and denying that green schemes are environmentally friendly. So many content creators feel such pressure while making their documentaries that they feel obliged to inject an out of context comment on climate change just to save themselves from censorship by the narrative police. It could be a documentary on the Mongols, for example; but right in there out of place is this comment by the narrator about how climate change somehow had something to do with all their marauding. That is narrative tyranny; and it must be denounced and rejected. In increasingly greater numbers, even evangelical Christian writers are complying with narratives that they know are out of sync with Christianity. They want to be in fashion instead of out of favor; they want to make money more than they want to ‘make their calling and election sure.’ They are like the covetous persons condemned by God through the apostle Peter for exploiting buyers through deceptive words (2 Peter 2.3.) Assenting to narratives that are known to be untrue and injurious, especially when one of those narratives is the LGBTQ fetish, puts the writer in the ‘ungodly’ company of those for whom the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was an example (verse 6.) If that kind of fraternizing seems wise, it is wisdom that ‘descendeth not from above’ (James 3.15) but comes from the devil and will prove to have not been a good decision ‘at the last day.’ To accommodate what you used to condemn only works well one way: if you were wrong before but now you are right. If you were right before but now you are wrong, well, maybe you are one of those persons who were never ‘of us’ in the first place (1 John 2.19.) In any case, it is better to be a freeman than a slave to someone else’s narratives. How does a writer play hopscotch with imposed narratives, anyway, without ruining the narrative that he has in mind to write? It is enough to give a writer writer’s block. Writer’s block is the result of submitting to slavery.             

The third cause of writer’s block: being a slave to inferior input. It is a fact that what you produce, as well as the quality thereof, largely depends on what you imbibe. It strikes me as paradoxical that the more thorough and meticulous the book is that you read, the more likely it is that ideas will rain down on you concerning the same topic treated in said book. Exhaustive treatment leads to new avenues. Ideas come from a writer causing you to think. This means that to benefit, you must labor to read no faster than the speed that permits you to lay hold of what the author communicates. If you have to stay with a paragraph for awhile in order to grasp it, it is essential that you do this before you move on. The same rule applies to the sentence. Often it is the sentence that you leave behind misunderstood that is, and that might have been for you, the stimulus to new thought and the opener of ideas. Finishing a paragraph, thankfully, will often open that puzzling sentence up to your understanding. If it doesn’t, return to that hard sentence and deal with it. Even the process of cracking the code of a sentence that should never have been written does a lot of good because if you can figure that cryptic sentence out, average sentences will not give you trouble. I thought reading 16th century French was hard work. How about deciphering the likes of this from the same century, originally in Spanish?—: “Never was a thing, which I might suspect of your love, so far from the truth as to give me occasion for not believing my suspicion many times more than your excuse” (Frederick Morris Warren, A History of the Novel Previous to the Seventeenth Century, p. 270.) Warren’s history from 1895 is an obsolete criticism of antiquated books. Notwithstanding excerpts like the one above, it has enduring worth because it provokes thought. If a writer reads nothing but what was written yesterday, he will be more enervated than stimulated, and should not be surprised that he has no idea what to write about. 

A common burden among ministers of an earlier age was that so much of their time was consumed by having to write letters. Their quills were busy because instead of indifferently going along with current narratives, they met them head on. So writer’s block, to them, was never a concern. Furthermore, their minds were so enriched by what they read that they had more ideas than they had time to develop. “If any reader expects from the title a fictitious tale, or something partly drawn from my imagination, I fear he will be disappointed. Such writing is not in my province, and I have no leisure for it if it was. Facts, naked facts, and the stern realities of life, absorb all the time that I can spare for the press” (J. C. Ryle, Christian Leaders of the 18th Century, p. 11.) What was Ryle in the habit of reading? He read the works and lives of men that had been used of God to civilize, through the influence of the Spirit and the Gospel, the continent of Europe and the American colonies. With that for his stimulus, he had too much to write about, and had to pick and choose. Do surgeons and welders wring their hands about how they will begin their next job? They don’t have time for that. The one has patients lined up; the other has projects calling for attention. So the one reaches for his scalpel; the other grabs his torch. J. C. Ryle suffered no writer’s block because he was no slave to inferior material as his input.         

The fourth cause of writer’s block: being a slave to self. If a writer isn’t naturally disinterested in what he can gain from writing, he is not really engaging in an honest, thinking way with what matters. If what is happening in the world is not pressing upon him more than his fantasy of being known in literary circles and on interview channels, he should wonder at the propriety of his priorities. You can tell when a writer, even a writer who is engaging confrontationally with destructive narratives, is desperate in his promotion of self. When he is interviewed, he has his book placed strategically on a shelf to his left or his right behind him or he has a poster of it on the wall that all the viewers will see. The writer who does that has his eye on self. When he writes his book, therefore, he must be thinking of what these viewers will get excited by. They call it throwing ‘red meat’ out there for the partisans to devour. And this is why fact-finding books are not as focused and incisive as they should be. Self takes too much room, fact-following not enough. Instead of obsessing about how to get that red meat smelled and devoured, it would be better to make sure that that meat has not been chewed up already because of all the rehashing it has undergone by peers. For example, every writer today seems to think that the Enlightenment was a positive force. They’ve heard other authors say that; and they’ve read it in the up to the minute books that they’ve just finished reading. If they were to dig into the past instead of give automatic credence to present-day replicators of untested narratives, they would discover that the Enlightenment was a downturn, not an ascent. Really, it was an attempted mountain climb without benefit of rope attached to God, and we’ve been in freefall ever since. Not to pick on Julie Ponesse because almost any author from any academy could be chosen, but in her book called My Choice, the Ethical Case against Covid-19 Vaccine Mandates, the typical tiresome narrative to combat present-day Western tyrannies is predictably had recourse to: the Enlightenment, with its usual negative change agents: Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant. She, an ethics professor, doesn’t even seem to know that a Freethinker is a person ‘freely’ thinking his own way philosophically, that is, without dependence on theology, religion, or God. If she knew it, she would probably capitalize the word. What happened in the Enlightenment was on this wise: Characters like Hobbes, Kant, Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire were on the side of the mountain trying to reach Truth. Let’s call that mountain Modern Babel Mountain. The first tossed away the crampons; the second tossed away the chalk; the third tossed away the carabiners; the fourth tossed away the harnesses; the fifth tossed away the ropes; and the freefall began. They are overconfident, falsely educated numbskulls who believe that science was generated or even advanced by the Enlightenment. The Protestant Christian ethos was the gas in the car; the Enlightenment proceeds on the strength of its fumes. It is because we are running on fumes that the car is sputtering today, as we see in the politicization of science, from which ‘politic’ unscientific mandates were imposed on us during the Covid hype; and as we see in the folly of ‘green energy,’ which is more wasteful and inefficient than the 19th century use of the dirtiest coal. Is burying these giant used up wind turbines under good soil a sustainable disposable system? This has been done; you may see it online. You would think that every Freethinking writer by this time in 2025, after mustering the same old Enlightenment narrative for the umpteenth time to combat even worse or ever worsening narratives—narratives that would not even exist except for being spawned by the Enlightenment, by the way—would get a permanent comatose-level writer’s block. To get around writer’s block when they do contract it, they rearrange the same names that were used last time, and then compete with the same audience that is already familiar and in line with the faulty narrative, and continue to be slaves to self. That is, after all, what the Enlightenment is all about: the Pretended Almighty Self.

I took about a one minute listen to what a writer had to say on how to cure writer’s block. His advice was to give yourself permission to write garbage—on the supposition, I suppose, that this would lead to somewhere good or that the garbage could be polished up later. This writer, if he takes his own advice, probably writes garbage.  

To echo the sound wave on the other side of the body of this article, the four chief causes of writer’s block are these: being a slave to genre, a slave to current narratives, a slave to inferior input, and a slave to self. While writer’s block is an unnecessary evil, it is a good thing for a writer to be halted by it until superior input drives him into his proper genre, enables him to do battle victoriously against current narratives, and humbles him enough so that he will no longer be a slave to self while he prosecutes his mission, which mission, hopefully, is a Divine calling looking down on, not up to, the Enlightenment.

What Every Preacher Needs to Know

 

In late April of 2025 I watched a YouTube video on the subject of Judges because I love that book and because the video about the book was only three minutes long. The video, What Every Preacher Needs to Know about Judges, is on The Master’s Seminary channel; and the speaker is a ‘Doctor of Ministry.’ He is also called ‘Staff Pastor’ and ‘Director of the MacArthur Center for Expository Preaching.’ 

I will give this video this man did some criticism. The criticism will have a point. It will prove itself, I think, to have a good reason for existing. 

First, the doctor of ministry says that ‘nice Christian people’ do not like to read the book of Judges because it is ‘too violent and too primitive.’ How does he know that? Did he take a poll amongst ‘nice Christian people’? Or is this nothing but a thoughtless platitude?  

Second, he says that the theme of Judges is not a ‘cycle’ of depravity, but a ‘tailspin.’ What does he mean by this? He seems to be trying, and failing in the attempt, to say something wise here. He is barely thinking when he says this. The opinion is false. Regardless, he doesn’t think much of it because near the end of his video he calls the theme ‘cycles of depravity.’  

Third, the ‘radical depravity of God’s people’ in Judges is on ‘Technicolor display,’ he says. Does this inform us of anything? Is the book of Judges a movie? 

Fourth, he draws three lessons from the book of Judges. The first one is that ‘society is wrecked by sin.’ We saw an example of this, he says, when the Dodgers won the 2024 World Series, for buses were burned and someone ‘blew his hand off with fireworks.’ This was ‘a very book of Judges kind of moment,’ apparently. The second lesson is that the book highlights the fact that ‘sinful people need a Saviour.’ The third lesson is that the book of Judges closes with ‘darker stuff than Sodom and Gomorrah’ but with the glimmer of hope of God’s tenacious grace. Is what happened in Judges 19 and the near extermination of a tribe by other tribes for the wickedness committed by the tribe of Benjamin really darker than the filth of sodomy that drew down the righteous judgment of God upon whole cities?  

Familiarity with the sermons of Spurgeon will make this video by this doctor display itself, maybe in Technicolor, I guess, as utterly weak. And it reveals something disturbing about how this man spends his time. Has he ever actually studied the book of Judges? Has he ever read a good exposition of the book? ‘Nice Christian people’ don’t like to read Judges because it’s too violent? Are these the same ‘nice Christian people’ who are addicted to violent movies? The truth is not that ‘nice Christian people’ don’t like to read the book of Judges. The truth is that people generally, whether they are ‘nice’ or not, and whether they are professing Christians or not, don’t like reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament. The issue of them not liking to read the word of God, any part of it, has nothing to do with them hating chronicles of violence. They love Technicolor violence especially. And they love cycles of depravity. This is why they watch soap operas, sitcoms, and horror films. They adore ‘darker stuff than Sodom and Gomorrah.’

What bothers me the most about this video is what contributed to the incompetence of the man who narrated it. I think that the ‘Dodgers’ is a baseball team based in Los Angeles. I’m glad that I don’t know if it is for sure. I’m relying on my faulty memory. For certain I am unable to name any current player on any professional team of any sport. But this man knows so much about who the Dodgers are that he knows when they won and all about these buses being burned after they played such and such a game; and he even knows that a person got a hand blown off in relation to the event. Should a man teaching ‘what every preacher needs to know about Judges’ be a sports aficionado, as this man obviously is? My sense from this video is that he could tell us what years the Dodgers won, who their best players have been, who’s who on the team right now, and what some of their statistics are. This is not the kind of man that we need teaching what preachers need to know. You see how naturally he plucked a sports anecdote from his mind to try to illustrate what goes on in Judges? He didn’t stop long enough to think how stupid it was to say that what happened after the game was ‘a very book of Judges kind of moment.’ Burning buses is not that kind of moment; getting a hand blown off by pyrotechnics is not that kind of moment. What is ‘a very book of Judges kind of moment’? Something closer to that kind of moment would be the sacking of cities: the kind of thing that Antifa and Black Lives Matter do. Something closer to that kind of moment would be mass rape by Philistine-like people: the kind of thing committed by Pakistani Muslims in the UK. What does the doctor think went on during the times of the Judges? Gatherings for sports events and subsequent vandalism because one side lost to the other? This is the man who is telling preachers what they need to know about a biblical book? What every preacher, or would-be preacher, needs to know is that the odds that a doctor of ministry knows what he should know are not good; and that the odds that he is addicted to sports are high.

I said that what would be closer to ‘a very book of Judges kind of moment’ would be what Antifa and Black Lives Matter do, and what rape gangs do in the UK. But these crimes would be like ‘Judges moments’ only if they involved conflicts between rebellious people of God and children of the devil. Are victims of riots in the USA and rape victims in the UK the children of God? It would be too much of an assumption to say that they are. What would be a ‘Judges moment’ today? A ‘Judges moment’ today would be a saint asleep on the lap of a Delilah, having his strength shorn by his enemies. What might this look like in Technicolor? Imagine a doctor of ministry fallen asleep on his couch in front of the television set after enjoying his Delilah Dodgers, dreaming of making a homerun in the final inning of the World Series. This would be a ‘Judges moment.’ This is Doctor Samson getting a haircut. “It was said of Samuel Rutherford, that he often did fall asleep talking about Christ, and was often in his dreams saying sweet things about his Saviour” (C. H. Spurgeon, A Bundle of Myrrh.) 

What does sanctification include if not separation? What should a doctor of ministry and teacher of future preachers be separate from if not worldly sports events? Understanding a book of Scripture requires some degrees of separation from Scripture’s nemesis: the World. “As for the house of feasting, the joy of harvest, the mirth of marriage, the sports of youth, the recreations of mature age—they are all as the small dust of the balance compared with the joy of Immanuel our best beloved” (Ibid.) 

Because I gave a doctor of ministry a chance to bless me with insight, I regret that I know that, in 2024, these Dodgers won the pennant, trophy, medal, cup, plaque, or whatever it is they kiss these days. I would rather remain ignorant of something like that. Do you see how wearisome it can be to dip into sermons, discussions, or even blurbs delivered by contemporary evangelicals? They drip with worldly information that is of no account. Within minutes of beginning to listen to one of their unlearned ‘expositions,’ you get soaked with worldliness when they, like a wet dog, attempt to anoint you by shaking their dirty water all around.     

Get wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. But know this in order to it: you need to surpass your official superiors. This is especially what every preacher, or would-be preacher, needs to know today. You need to get to this point, which is easier to do now than ever before: “I have more understanding than all my teachers” (Psalm 119.99.) The reason that this is easier to do than it was before is because even theological doctors these days cannot honestly confess the rest of the verse: “for thy testimonies are my meditation.” What is their meditation? Too often, even when preparing a brief talk on what a book of the Bible contains, their meditation is something as worldly as a sports event. This worldly meditation is so much their focus that they can’t resist using sports to illustrate the Bible, which causes them to entirely miss the mark they aim at. When the testimonies of the LORD are meditated on, though, something remarkable happens. Even the few arrows that are shot at random seem to strike between the joints of the harness because biblical meditation generates a kind of instinctive aim. The arrows, then, are like birds that follow their migratory paths even when the birder, after bidding them Godspeed, pays them no attention. 

What is the book of Judges about? It is about, not a cycle of sin merely, but the consequences of making unholy alliances and turning from God to idolatry. What happens in the book is the fulfillment of the following promise by the LORD: “But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell. Moreover it shall come to pass, that I shall do unto you, as I thought to do unto them” (Numbers 33.55, 56.) We see the beginnings of this fulfillment in the first chapters of Judges. See the repetition of ‘neither did’ in chapter 1: as in, “Neither did Zebulun drive out the inhabitants of Kitron, nor the inhabitants of Nahalol; but the Canaanites dwelt among them, and became tributaries” (Judges 1.30.) And then see verse 3 of chapter 2 where the promise from Numbers is alluded to. They did not entirely drive out the wicked nations, but joined with them in idolatrous practices. The book of Judges is a cycle of idolatry, bondage, and deliverance. If the theme of the book of Judges were a tailspin, as the doctor says, there would be no deliverance found in the book, only idolatry and bondage, for a tailspin, by definition, is a rotating nosedive. A tailspin can be recovered from; but the doctor would have to tell us that because recovery is not included in the definition of ‘tailspin.’ And the purpose of God in not driving out the nations before Israel was to prove Israel (Judges 2.21, 22.) The idolatrous nations were permitted by God to linger for that purpose. What is the permitted existence of sports idols for vis-à-vis the Christian? It is for the Christian’s proving. Will we be in bondage along with the world’s people before these idols? Or will our profession of faith in our Deliverer be proven to be genuine by our refusal to join heathen worship?                 

I wrote the preceding paragraph, not after looking at Commentaries, but simply by cracking open the book of Judges and comparing it with what I had recently read in Numbers. Did this man even open the book of Judges before making his video? Or did he make it on the strength of having watched his latest game on TV? 

A lot may be taken issue with in this three minute video. Ought this to be the case? There should be nothing to object against if this man is a doctor of ministry associated with a reputable seminary. The custom amongst evangelicals today, unfortunately and unbiblically, is to question the character of a writer who points out uncomfortable facts. This untoward defensiveness only serves to show that the ones guilty of it are not ready for personal reformation, being, for now, obstinate, which trait is not in tandem with a teachable spirit. A doctor telling preachers what they need to know about anything at all should, at least, before thinking to strike back at just criticism, be willing to be admonished by a man who was more consecrated than he is: “If I walked in the fear of God as I should, they would have to imitate me, and the fact that they are wandering from the right path is possibly my fault, my guilt. So I must show them the kind of example I want them to follow…If Paul, who had great zeal for doing his duty, still felt guilty when there was some evil in the church, what, I ask you, will become of us, who are as cold as ice when compared with him?…nowadays there are very few people who can tolerate being admonished or having their faults pointed out” (John Calvin, Sermons on Job, Sermon 3.)

The Seven Degrees of Feminist Trauma

 

The way things are going for so many women these days, romantically, is beginning to make virginity until marriage, traditional roles, and even arranged marriages look like the better options that they are. Some promiscuous women are even acknowledging this now. Those women who persist in practical feminism are doomed to undergo a lot of psychological trauma, not to mention the physical and financial ramifications of using their teens and twenties for playing around. While boys are belittled in school, the girls there are told that they can accomplish literally anything. But after school, the interesting thing is that the majority of them find that they can’t marry the man they want, and thus cannot be as happy as feminism promised them they would be. This realization hits them hard right about the time they feel the urge, because of their dwindling eggs, to settle down to make the babies they want with responsible men. The problem, then, however, in their late twenties, is that the men they are used to dating don’t want to marry them; and this problem is compounded by the fact that these women are not attracted to the responsible men that they should have married ten years earlier when they were virgins or at least more eligible. They have become addicted, by their late twenties, to ‘bad boys,’ and no other kind of man will do but the bad boys who don’t want them permanently. Tragically, this state of affairs is unnecessary; and we know this because of stories that we have all heard women of previous generations tell. Who has not heard an old woman say that at first she thought that the man she ended up marrying was kind of odd but that after a few dates he grew on her and pretty soon they were happily married with children? This man, if we were to give him a label, would not be tagged as a ‘bad boy,’ but a ‘nice guy.’ The nice guys who are responsible are always more weird than cool. The cool cats sleep around while the duty dog nice guys work on pet projects in garages after work because they know that they are invisible when present before the girls. Many of these nice guys wind up being later ‘settled for’ by women addicted to bad boys; and they are the ones who lose their houses and kids when their forty-something women divorce them to go back to their addiction or just to get a payout. These nice guys suffer the greatest trauma, which leads to reputational abuse, dispiritedness, isolation, financial ruin, and even suicide for multitudes of them. The women who persevere to follow the protocols of feminism, though, reap their own traumatic rewards. And here is how that unfolds, in seven degrees: anxiety, frustration, bewilderment, doubt, frenzy, cynicism, bitterness.                 

After being easy for more than a decade (what now is called ‘hooking up’) the woman starts to get anxious. Anxiety is the first degree of feminist trauma where romance in view of marriage is concerned. The men she sleeps with or even only dates feel that anxious vibe coming across. She hopes for the best nevertheless, but can’t get a man to commit. She doesn’t know that it’s because she’s going for the wrong kind of man. She figures that any man willing to sleep with her will possibly want to marry her, even though, as far as externals like age, looks, and financial potential matter, the bad boy is more of a heavyweight catch than she is. So she uses up months and years engaging in one night stands and getting into ‘situationships,’ and might even fall for a fairly long-term shack-up waste of time, maybe more than one.   

Then the second degree of trauma strikes: frustration. This vibe comes across to the men even more feelingly than her anxiety does, and makes the men uncommonly nervous and ready to run. She doesn’t realize that her frustration makes her irritable and curt because her mind is not on her manners, but her biological clock. She can’t notice her bad manners because of the ticking of that fast-running timepiece in her ovaries, which, although located in her lower abdomen far from her ears, seems to tick like a megaphone right against her eardrums. Who can conduct herself with good manners while being continuously yelled at like that?   

After frustration scares off enough men, the third degree of trauma wells up: bewilderment. She can’t believe, and is farther from solving the riddle than ever, that none of these men so willing to tango won’t go near a jewelry store, much less tie a knot and do a chicken dance at their wedding reception. Instead of telling men in general to man up, like she did during her periods of anxiety and frustration, now her videos, if she’s into doing videos, are queries put mostly to women. She’s not willing to take the advice to ‘be yourself’ or ‘date yourself’; and she’s extremely annoyed, now, with the old line that “it’ll happen when you least expect it.” She still ‘knows her worth,’ of course, but the men she wants to get down on one knee in front of her don’t seem to know it very well. How can it happen when you least expect it when your worth is not noticed for what it so obviously is? What man doesn’t want to ‘wife up’ a thirty-four-year-old woman who’s had just a handful of abortions, more men than she’s had dental appointments or grades in school, has a therapist, is on antidepressants, and even makes her own money? How bewildering! And if her face is caked with chemicals called makeup, her hair changes color every two months, her nose ring hangs just right, her fingernails extend a full half inch past her fingertips, and her tattoos run up and down her arms like they used to for 1972 convicts, what could the turnoff possibly be?! Where are the men who are not only six feet tall, handsome, and well on their way to being independently wealthy, but also willing to snatch up the thirty-four-year-old catch? It just doesn’t make sense.           

After this trauma has been absorbed, the woman falls from frustration all the way down to doubt. Her common saying now is: “I’m going to die alone.” She half believes it too. She’s exhausted now, real soul-searching has begun, and because of that, this is where she is most tempted to quit digging her wedding grave and take a pickaxe to the philosophy that has been dooming her to old maid solitude from the start. Late thirties or early forties are ages on the far edge of a zygote being conceivable in a woman, incidents of miraculous intervention excepted; if the earth were flat, this edge would be the country farthermost from the safe and fruitful interior where zygotes are produced aplenty. What will she do? Will she turn celibate, at this late stage, and act like a virgin who won’t even kiss unless a ring is made to adorn her naked finger? Or will she attempt to slice through men like a Ginsu knife through beer cans until, either she becomes too dull to attract a man, or finally cuts into a heart that’s been waiting all its life to spill slavish love upon this one particular princess? Neither option is especially appealing to her at this point. But the second option is still more fun in practice, at least she supposes that it is; and to switch ideologies before her friends or audience will cause uncomfortable blowback. So a woman in fourth stage trauma usually reaches for the Ginsu knife before a year of doubting has passed, and soon begins to wield it like a Samurai on an infomercial.           

So if the woman continues to hang on to the empty feminist promise that ‘knowing your worth’ will get her the man of her impossible dream come true, even after doubt has warned her to ditch feminism and disembark the sinking ark that will never make it to shore, she enters the next phase of feminist delusion: frenzy. This, her fifth degree of trauma, is when she doubles down on promiscuity as a last ditch effort to land a man inside her boat. Caution is really cast to the winds this time. What happens in whatever city at this stage better stay in said city, let me tell you! She tries not to have any anxiety on display before the men anymore; and she succeeds at this more than she has done in the last ten years. She acts like she doesn’t care; and really, the truth is that she doesn’t care half as much as she did when she was thirty. Even menopause is on her mind now because forty to fifty is a faster track than thirty to forty, the old folks say, and she believes it. So she lays it all out there. “If happiness happens, it happens,” she says to herself. “If it doesn’t, cats will be my companions.” Seeing married couples with children will always be hard. But she has begun to be more scornful than envious.      

Then around the corner at the age of about forty-five, the trauma of cynicism settles on her heart—the heart that is now variously scarred by Cupid’s arrows that were shot by insincere men. Hardcore feminists are now her fellows, fellows being the right word for them too because of their manly mien. But what kind of manliness is this? It’s manliness of the butch type; it’s a mutant form of toughness. It’s not necessarily lesbian; but it frequently becomes exactly that. She used to talk a lot about her ‘feminine energy,’ which is all the proof we need that she had a kind of manliness inside her during all her former degrees of trauma, latent and toxic though it certainly was. In her sixth degree of trauma, her male energy is fully out of the closet. If toxic masculinity exists, this is one of the forms it takes: feminist cynicism incarnate. Toxic masculinity is that which cannot help but show disdain for true masculinity and traditional femininity. Now the woman has gone from being a propagandized victim of feminism, to a feminist in theory but also in practice when it is to her advantage, and finally to a raging feminist demanding every penalty that can be thought of to damage men. “Believe all women”—: this is now her motto. She hates men now, and is not afraid at all of being found saying it because all men are misogynistic rapists, after all, if not actually, then for certain potentially. 

She has sometimes given nice guys a chance ever since she began to feel anxious in her late twenties. But she thought that butterflies in the belly were supposed to be necessary and everlasting, which nice guys have not the wherewithal to generate; or if they do, these butterflies are not very active and have life spans comparable to the ones found in literal gardens. She would have discovered that even a bad boy could not have kept her butterflies alive if she had been able to tame one into marrying her; but she was never able to retain one for long enough to find that out. She has been so picky about men that she never got picked. If she had been picking on herself instead, criticizing herself, improving her character, and aiming no higher than she had a right, based on her standing, to aim, she had gotten her man, her marriage, and her chance at marital happiness. Setting the bar too high beside her own questionable height, she was unable to reach up high enough to receive the marriage kiss. She demanded perfection in men, but proved too defective to attract that level of magnificence. Even if she had been committed to by a bad boy, the odds are high that she would have been disappointed to the point of divorcing him because of his failure to be up to her ideal. What kind of man did she think her worth deserved? What was her ideal man like? She wanted a successful man, preferably of the white collar set; hunky but not husky or barrel-chested; with good hair genes that defy male-pattern baldness or even thinning; with a mischievous smile of one hundred and one variations; sensitive enough to drop a tear but never known to sob; so funny as to overtop her own witty remarks to make her howl with laughter, but never hinting, thereby, that she is an inferior wit; in matters of intimacy, knowing when to advance and when to abstain, respecting the borders of each one of her moods; and toward all other pretty persons of the female sex, extending respect, but with a sort of distance that silently communicates that he is unavailable but not unapproachable. She wanted a nice guy wrapped up in the image and frame of a bad boy, who could be nice when he had to be nice, bad when he had to be bad, reading her mind exactly at each suitable time; a man who could work hard but never stink up a sweat, make money as easily as a shuffler spits out cards, flawlessly interpret her meandering complaints as if gifted by God with the spirit of interpretation, who would then promptly give her precisely what she was asking for in ‘not so many words’; a man so rare that the question “where have all the good men gone?” must be answered thus: “they never existed except in your mind.” She should have set the bar at least as low as her own moral height, irrespective of all other qualifications, which are all secondary. She could have accepted a ‘shy guy’ like the following old woman testified to having done when she was many years younger. See how low this woman’s bar was. She says: “One morning [not long after the honeymoon] while eating breakfast in our kitchen [his kitchen] the phone rang. ‘Hello?’ Ian answered. Then a pause before he soon said, ‘No!’ He listened, then said, ‘Never!’ and he returned to the table. He told me that a teacher in Sandugo was sick, and they asked if I’d come to teach that day. Upon hearing I wouldn’t be able to come then, they asked when I’d be able to come. They heard Ian say ‘Never!’ before he hung up” (The Senior Paper, May 2022.) What woman would put up with this today? What woman would permit her husband to decide for her like that? What woman today would not have divorce on her mind after that incident? How does this woman end her article?—: “Ian has been gone 16 years. I certainly miss him.” This woman had set the bar appropriately, especially considering that she was a widow with two children when she accepted the man’s proposal. Maybe she had gone through some degrees of psychological trauma before this. But it is likely that she never went through any of them because she’d been married before, was relatively young when she married for the second time, and knew and accepted what level she was at and what kind of man she was able to receive a proposal from. She was open to the ‘shy guy’ after he finally got the nerve to invite himself over for coffee at her place, which was after he’d been too timid so much as to talk to her at the dances they both saw each other at, even when she stood next to him. This man had had to take a course (something called a ‘Christopher course’) to get his courage up; and she ended up marrying him when he did. He was not a bad boy, only a nice man with weaknesses and flaws. And this woman was wise enough to show him she was interested and to be passively ‘wifed up’ by him.                  

We have seen our imaginary feminist woman, au contraire, go through the degrees of anxiety, frustration, bewilderment, doubt, frenzy, and cynicism. Now she passes on from cynicism to bitterness, the last and worst degree of trauma. This can happen even before menopause. During this degree, her penchant is to lash out unreasonably. Before, this behavior was intermittent; now it becomes her lifestyle. Isn’t it interesting that the apostle Paul thought it necessary to instruct Titus to teach aged Christian women to not be ‘false accusers’? (Titus 2.3.) If even old Christian women have the tendency to falsely accuse, how much more the secular women who have reached the degree of bitterness? Who pushed the ‘me too’ movement the most in recent times? It was women who were way past their ripe stage of beauty. And they were women who were bitter about their loss of love life. Only bitter women would demand that their allegations of rape or sexual harassment, many of them decades old, be believed without proof or even inquiry. (See Deuteronomy 19.18, 19 on what should happen to false accusers, even today.) Getting to bitterness from cynicism is as natural as switching from briskly walking to getting on a travelator in an airport. “Let bitterness take me where it will,” the woman reasons; then she flies off on her broom. “I’m invisible to men, and I like it that way,” she affirms, even while she mourns the death of her romantic trinity: wedded bliss, giving birth, and her bad-boy-nice-guy doting husband. “Menopause is a blessing because now I don’t care what men think, and there are no more cat calls and whistles.” This she says to other women, all of whom know that she’s lying, which is written all over their faces. In truth, she hates what menopause has done to her. She used to be full of desire and unusually pretty. She is finding out, now, that the prettier women are, the more menopause delights to dig its furrows into them at last. “That which is best when ripe, is worst when rotten; liquor which is sweetest in one stage, becomes sourest in another” (C. H. Spurgeon, Enduring to the End.) The great preacher wasn’t talking about pretty women aging there, but about bright professing Christians becoming apostates. The thought fits, nevertheless, the inferior subject that I have chosen to make it highlight. My poem says the same thing in other words:

MENOPAUSE

Those girls on whom most beauty rests

Doth menopause most love to blight,

Must glory to humiliate.

Faces taut that promised youth

Forever,

Figures fit that seemed no time

Could weather—

Cursed are they without consent,

Though prompted to recover.

No plastics made and mixed by man

Can cover monster menopause

To hide from view the rotting grace

Of nature.

So high from which this grace doth fall

That august beauties of the earth

Might feign be termed angelic waste

Once menopause hath wrought

Its wounding to the uttermost.  

      

It is not without wisdom that a better poet warned virgin women to get their man while the getting is most feasible: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/Old time is still a-flying:/And this same flower that smiles to-day/To-morrow will be dying.” 

Women today seem to be picky for the wrong thing. They’re addicted to tall weeds when just below the weeds are these rosebuds that are unseen. Instead of falling in love with rosebuds, they become obsessed with weeds posing as flowers. And before they know it, their own flowering beauty has begun to fade, and time has driven them to the age of thirty and fast-diminishing fertility. Then comes forty, fifty, and solitary old age. 

The obvious root of this outcome concerns the subject of morality. It used to be that men were the ones most likely to look for a mate based on appearances, and to tarry, perhaps, for a decade or so beyond the age of twenty. Now the women are doing this at least as much, in addition to their insisting that a man have plenty of resources, of course. If they were to insist on virtues instead, while being virtuous themselves, they could secure a man for marriage before time has had time to fly and to carry their cute smile away with it. The plain inference to be gathered from the fact that virtue is not what’s looked for is that the basis of virtue is paid no mind. This basis is religion, the Protestant religion that was so much in the ascent during Robert Herrick’s day (1591-1674.) And without faith in the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the cornerstone of true religion, it will matter little, in the end, if a woman lost her prime before marrying. She will have lost, not only her dream in this lifetime, but her soul forever. Since it is true that in the next life, persons “neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22.30) and that this has reference to persons saved from their sins and going to heaven, how true must it be that no unforgiven sinner in hell will marry or be given in marriage? If sleeping around is equal to whoring around, and a whore is called a ‘deep ditch’ in Scripture (Proverbs 23.27), it must be that tramps and the playboys they fornicate with, if persisting to the end of life as impenitent souls, are destined for that pit called hell. Therefore, away with all whorish behavior; and away with romance too until heaven may be said, with biblical knowledge and experiential confirmation, to be one’s new and certain destiny. 

Nice guys and virgin daughters, take note as well. No one gets to heaven by being nice or staying chaste. “He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3.18.) ‘Condemned to hell’ is the default future of sinful man. The sentence just hasn’t begun yet. This is hard for unbelievers to believe; but that’s what the word of God teaches. What is romance, marriage, and family compared with this metaphysical reality? It is as nothing when compared with it. This is why Jesus spoke like so: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14.26.) If a person’s chief pursuit in life is romance leading to marriage, as natural and innocent as this pursuit is, he or she needs to know that this is a journey towards hell. It cannot be allowed to be the chief thing. The chief place in one’s heart must be the Lord Jesus Christ, evidenced by living the way that the Bible commands us to live. 

Romantic love is lovely if you can get it; but if you can’t or even if you can, obsessing over it is a sign that greater love and communion have not been found and enjoyed. Obsession is ignorant love. It is love that is uninformed about the nature of man. Once a person knows enough about what man and woman are made of: sinful flesh, obsession may be easily overcome. No man or woman is worth obsessing over. Obsessing over romantic love is a warning signal that subjects divine have not the first place in one’s life. If this state of affairs continues to the end of one’s life, nothing will be seen, in the afterworld, to have mattered except what was ignored in this one.