Steeple Times, March 2017 (Vol. 12, Issue 3)

M o n t h l y N e w s f r o m F P C Ty l e r • Vo l u m e 1 2 , I s s u e 3 : M a r c h 2 0 1 7

Lent: A Time For Moral Self-Reflection My siblings and I have recently come to own our mother’s childhood home in Marlin, Texas. It has been in our family since 1891, and though it has been renovated at least twice it is a treasure. One of the simple pleasures of that house is that it has books that have been purchased and read over the years by several generations of my family. There are first edition copies of a number of classics, as well as books that didn’t become classics. On a recent trip, I found a first edition book by the late journalist Edward R. Morrow, This I Believe. Some of you are old enough to remember that book, and some of you are old enough to remember when these essays were first presented as radio broadcasts in the early 1950s. The assignment for the essays was simple: writers had a 600 word limit in which to articulate their most deeply held values. The writers came from a wide range of professions, and most of them were not especially religious. Or at least not in the sense that they adhered to official religious teachings. But although they were not religious in the formal sense, they spoke of the writers’ beliefs and personal faith commitments. One essay that struck me, even though I do not agree completely with the author’s belief (“I believe, above all else, in human reason-in the power of the human mind to cope with the problems of life.”), was writ-

ten by financier Bernard Baruch. In it he says, “Because I place my trust in reason, I place it in the individual. There is a madness in crowds from which even the wisest, caught up in their ranks, are not immune. Stupidity and cruelty are the attributes of the mob, not wisdom and compassion.” Baruch had seen the frightful power of mobs. He witnessed the rise of Communism and Socialism in Russia and then the Soviet Union under Stalin, as well as the rise of Adolf Hitler’s national Socialist Party in Germany, through those movements’ appeal to mobs of people. He knew that otherwise good, decent and wise people can get swept up into unspeakable evil when a mob mentality is manipulated by demagogues. I suspect we see the same phenomenon at work in the crowd before Pontius Pilate when they cried out, “Crucify! Crucify him!” In Lent, we have a window of time to examine our lives using what 12-step programs refer to as a “searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.” Not that we shouldn’t always be willing to engage in moral self-reflection, but Lent is a special time to focus more intently on our moral lives and failures. I pray we will use this Lenten season to search our souls and see where we have fallen prey to our own base instincts.

i n t h i s i s s u e | H I G H L I G H T S & F E AT U R E S FA @ FPC: Masterworks Concert | pg 3