Thursday, March 20, 2014
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Grace after it ends badly
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Show me your "nub"
Mark 3:1 "And he entered again into the synagogue; and there was a man there which had a withered hand.
2 And they watched him, whether he would heal him on the sabbath day; that they might accuse him.
3 And he saith unto the man which had the withered hand, Stand forth.
4 And he saith unto them, Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life, or to kill? But they held their peace.
5 And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it out: and his hand was restored whole as the other"
I'm a southern boy. Born and raised in the segregated and still racially divided deep south. With that being said, we call things just like they are. No political correctness, no, as we often say "beating around the bush." We never described an amputee's infirmity as a "physical challenge"....a "handicap",...a reach deficiency. No, in the south....we called it a "nub". The amputee called it a nub. We called it a nub....and no one was offended. For the purposes of this article.....neither should you.
(My family will still call the amputated limb...a nub)
This speaks to the power of this verse. Today in the climate of political correctness and desperation to be sensitive to everyone's feelings....we have cultivated in the modern day church a tendency to treat our fellow parishioners like a first or second date. We do everything we can to show our best faces around those we actually call our "brothers or sisters in Christ".
Why then are they the ones we are consistently the most fake with?
"I'm not fake!" You go to work or your mothers house not really concerned if you have a bad hair day.....but you'll miss Sunday school to get your hair right. We'll keep the child out of wedlock on the down low claiming it's no one else business.....won't admit our lights are shut off to your "supposed" family. But I digress.
Notice the 5th verse. Jesus said "stretch out thine hand.."
He never asked for the good hand or the withered one.
If He had asked any of us....
We would've shown Him our good hand!
Why? Because we're more concerned with the damaging of our reputation by exposing our withered hand than discovering God's restoration!
When will we learn? His strength is made perfect through our weakness.
Here's your nugget: We would rather make temporary infirmity a chronic life long handicap by masking it in spiritual religiosity rather than being transparent enough to let God use our "nub" for a testimony.
We make a temporary illness intended for a testimony into a chronic handicap.....why?
PRIDE.
LET IT MARINATE FOLKS.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Infiltrate, Not Isolate
The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. - (1 Peter 3:9)
Far too often it seems that Christians don’t want to have any contact with unbelievers. Maybe they don’t want to talk to them for fear of being polluted spiritually. But the church needs to infiltrate, not isolate. And to reach our culture, Christians must go where people are.
I am not saying that we should spend time around unbelievers and stay silent about our faith. We should speak up for Christ when the moment is right. At the very least, we should live a godly life as an example of what it is to follow Jesus Christ.
We see Jesus demonstrating this as He adapted His approach with the people He spoke to. With Nicodemus, who was powerful and affluent, Jesus told him that he must be born again (see John 3:1–17). With the immoral Samaritan woman, He reached out to her and engaged her in conversation (see John 4:1–26).
Before we can reach people, we first have to care. And I think one of the reasons we don’t share our faith more often is because we don’t care. We might think another person’s eternal destiny is their problem. If an unbeliever argues with us, we tend to think, Forget it then. I am going to heaven. You can go to hell if you want to. It is not my problem.
But actually, it is our problem, because they need someone to engage them. They need someone to share the gospel accurately with them. So we need to pray that God will give us a burden for people who do not yet know Him.
The great commentator Alexander MacLaren said, “You tell me the depth of a Christian’s compassion, and I will tell you the measure of his usefulness.”
How deep does your compassion go?
I believe these two pictures accurately describe the difference between the modern day church's focus and mission (we're persecuted)
And Jesus' mission and purpose on earth. (Seek and save the lost)
How can we follow someone and be so far off from his heart and purpose?
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Epiphany of the day
The biggest misconception of the 21st century church is that "church" is an event or a destination...when it is truly a personal identity.
Let it marinate, folks.
WHY CHRISTIANS SHOULD HAVE LECRAE’S BACK
WRITTEN BY DAVID DANIE
Guess which rapper is unashamed to call himself a Christian, talks to God in his music, raps to change lives and his greatest critics are in his own demographic.
“That would be me,” laughed Lecrae.
The Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist suits this depiction perfectly. However, Rapzilla had another artist in mind to whom this description applies just as well: Machine Gun Kelly (MGK).
“I am a Christian,” the Bad Boy recording artist said before his Mar. 8th concert in Silver Springs, MD. “I’m a really God-fearing man. I make music about God. It’s just scary, that’s all, ‘cause my talks with God are a little more intense.”
Lecrae, familiar with MGK, had heard no evidence of faith in his music. The Reach Records rapper admitted he was shocked to hear the Cleveland-born rapper had claimed Christianity.
Lecrae is so unashamed of the gospel that he’s labeled as gospel while MGK admits he would never be mistaken for a “Christian rapper." Despite that difference, their life stories are stunningly similar.
Both MGK and Lecrae were raised in broken homes: Lecrae never met his father; when MGK was nine, his mother cheated on his father and abandoned them.
His depressed father failed to be the anchor MGK needed throughout a childhood plagued by bullying, homelessness and throat polyps, which nearly took away the one last thing he had—hip hop.
Both he and Lecrae turned to drugs, alcohol and women to numb their pain. Since then, they’ve both turned their own and—more importantly to them—others’ lives around.
“Because of [MGK], I'm gonna walk someday, because of his message,” said a disabled fan from his wheelchair in September of 2011. “’Cause I know he came from nothing, and I’m coming from nothing too.” That December, the fan walked across the stage into the artist’s arms.
Both MGK and Lecrae are heroes: their music changes lives.
Tragically, while Lecrae’s divinely-inspired music possesses the potential for eternal impact, as a spiritually confused artist, MGK is only capable of touching his fans’ earthly journey.
MGK is a wild boy, dividing his time between smoking weed and having sex. Richard Baker, the artist’s real name, knows there’s more to life, and his listeners can hear it in his lyrics.
“Save me Lord, save me Lord, what the (expletive) is this curse you gave me, Lord?” says MGK in the first verse of the track “Halo.” “Everybody think I finally made it Lord, but all I am is now is a slave, my God.”
He explained to Rapzilla that his song “Save Me” is a cry to God for help. Crying out to God, or at least praying to Him, isn’t a rare occurrence for MGK.
MGK (Machine Gun Kelly)
“We pray before every show,” he said. “We leave a lot of decisions up to Him.”
MGK claims he’s supportive of Christian hip hop. As a self-proclaimed Christian, he wasn’t aware of any reason for him not to “agree” with it, although he admitted that he hadn’t heard of a Christian rapper besides Lecrae.
“I’m a very God-fearing person,” said MGK. “God just knows my lights are a little bit darker maybe than the average Christian rapper.”
Lecrae got saved after a friend invited him to a Bible study. A friend like that has either not shown up in MGK’s life or has yet to make a visible impact. MGK is one of countless artists who are open to Christianity and could be one influence away from surrendering their life to Jesus.
“That’s exactly why I’m [in the mainstream],” said Lecrae. “The only reason why I’m there is to have influence and opportunity to share Christ with the people in that world—that’s it. And hopefully I can be that for the MGKs of the industry.”
The Christian hip-hop scene still doesn’t know what to make of the radical shift Lecrae has made in his music since his album “Rebel” to his more recent “Church Clothes,” rapping less about the gospel and more about relatable happenings from a Christian worldview. As a result, he’s been accused of selling out for money and fame.
Essentially , all he’s done is left the pulpit to be a missionary .
The importance of Christians in the mainstream can’t be understated because artists like Lecrae—and Sho Baraka, J.R., No Malice, Mali Music, Dee-1, S1 and others—are able to build relationships with rappers like MGK, Kendrick Lamar, Big K.R.I.T. and Tech N9ne who are open to Christianity. Those believers could ultimately be the one positive influence whom God uses to turn the religious willingness of those admittedly confused artists into relational willingness.
If MGK surrenders his life completely to Christ, hundreds of thousands of his fans outside of Lecrae’s target audience would be listening to a Christ-led artist, perhaps for a first time.
Don’t assume that Lecrae possesses a ploy to convert as many people as possible. This means much more than a spiritual roster.
“Everybody that I have relationships within the industry—I respect them and I never want them to feel like projects,” he said. “I never want them to feel like I’m leveraging their name or I’m only hanging out with them because they’re my project and, ‘I’m gonna get you saved buddy.’ I really do want them to know I genuinely care about them.”
Kendrick Lamar & Lecrae
Kendrick Lamar is one of Lecrae’s closest friends in the mainstream. Staying true to form, Lecrae refused to shed light on any spiritual growth that Lamar has had since they formed a relationship.
“The Lord does what the Lord does,” Lecrae said. “I wouldn’t dare trace anything back to me in terms of my conversations and dealings with [Lamar]. I’m just available and if the Lord sees fit to use me, praise God.”
Critics in the church will question the need for Lecrae to enter the mainstream. They’ll ask, can’t he build common ground with artists in the industry while still making pre-“Church Clothes” music?
Lecrae met Lamar, Don Cannon and Lupe Fiasco before “Church Clothes.” He knows it would be difficult to continue to build common ground with mainstream artists while still being labeled as a Christian artist.
“You do Christian hip hop? That means your music is for Christians. That’s what people think. I’m out here with them all the time—that's what they think,” said Lecrae, explaining why he’s been so adamant about avoiding the “Christian rapper” label. “As a missionary, I don’t want any hindrance.”
Monday, March 10, 2014
How resourceful are you
David was conscience-stricken after he had counted the fighting men, and he said to the Lord,
'I have sinned greatly in what I have done. Now, O Lord, I beg You, take away the guilt of Your servant. I have done a very foolish thing.'" - 2 Samuel 24:10
It just seems to be human nature. As we grow in wealth and ability, our confidence moves from complete trust in the Lord to trust in our resources.
King David decided one day that he needed to know how many fighting men he had in his army. This was a grievous sin in the nation of Israel. God always made it clear to the nation that He, not their army, was their source. It was against the law of God to number the troops. David's general, Joab, knew the serious nature of such an action.
But Joab replied to the king,
"May the Lord your God multiply the troops a hundred times over, and may the eyes of my lord the king see it. But why does my lord the king want to do such a thing?" (2 Samuel 24:3)
Joab knew that David was treading in dangerous waters when he brought up the idea to him. But David had it in his mind that this is what he was going to do. And he did. The result: God judged David for this sin by smiting the nation with a plague that resulted in the loss of 70,000 lives.
Recently, I was having lunch with a former stockbroker who lost everything in the 1987 stock crash in the United States. He made an interesting comment.
"You cannot know how to fully trust the Lord in the financial area until you really have to. When I lost everything, I was forced to trust Him when I knew I could not pay my next bill unless God provided. This was the time I learned to trust God. I never had to trust God before I lost my money because I had plenty. We don't willingly enter this level of trust with God."
I, myself, have experienced this very same teaching moment with God. I went from a beachfront condo, BMW, more money than I could need, custom tailored suits every week.....monogrammed custom shirts...complete home recording studio....to being car-less, homeless, friend-less, jobless and hopeless. I lost everything including my fiancée 2 months before the wedding all back to back to back. All while serving in the church and heading the music ministry.
I wouldn't trade those very recent 2-3 years for anything in the world. I survived an attempted suicide and severe depression. I had no where to turn but God. Nowhere. After years of knowing about God....we really became family. He was no longer a deity, alpha and omega....the point of thousands of sermons I've heard.....not just my Savior who died for me.....He became MY DAD. The birthing of that relationship (not religion) destroyed all fear of anything, anyone, anywhere and anytime in my life. It's an incredibly liberating way of life that is beyond all description.
Ask God today to keep you from trusting in your own resources. Ask Him how to balance trust and blessing
Sunday, March 9, 2014
The reason why most christians will die poor
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Oculus is finally here
Friday, March 7, 2014
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Your past & present pain MUST equal your predestined purpose
"If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we suffer." - 2 Corinthians 1:6
"God must love you a lot! He doesn't allow someone to go through the kinds of adversity you have experienced unless He has a special calling on your life." Those were the words said to me by two different mentors at two different times within a three-year period. Later I would learn another related truth from a respected man of God - a man who lives in another country, a man whom God uses throughout the globe. "The depth and width of your faith experiences are directly proportional to your calling." What were these men of God saying?
They were describing a process of preparation that God takes each of His leaders through when He plans to use them in significant ways. A "faith experience" is an event or "spiritual marker" in your life about which you can say, "That is where I saw God personally moving in my life." It is an unmistakable event in which God showed Himself personally to you. It was the burning bush for Moses; the crossing of the Red Sea or the Jordan River for the nation of Israel; Jacob's encounter with the angel. It was the feeding of the 5,000 for the disciples. It was the time when you saw God face to face in your life.
If God has plans of using you in the lives of many others, you can expect that He is going to allow certain faith experiences to come into your life in order to build a foundation that will be solid. That foundation is what you will be able to look back on to keep you faithful to Him in the times of testing. Each of us must have personal faith experiences in which we experience God personally so that we can move in faith to whatever He may call us. Do you need a personal faith experience right now in your life? Pray that God will reveal Himself to you. He delights in doing that.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
Is being moral enough?
I recently heard someone use the phrase “moral Christianity” to describe what they believe is the current temperature of faith in America, and it grieved me. Moral Christianity points people toward godly—or moral—answers without pointing them toward God. It shows people how to live by good rules without showing them how to be disciples of the Good Shepherd.
Don’t misunderstand me. There is nothing wrong with teaching others to live by godly principles. After all, God’s Word is an instructional manual for a successful, godly life. It’s a light for one’s path (Psalm 119:105). But there is something wrong with teaching “moral, do-good Christianity” without showing others how to connect with the Savior. If we simply do what’s right without being disciples of the Author of Life, we may look more like the unbelieving Jews than the disciples.
I’m sharing this because lately I have been convicted about this, I have been asking myself, does what i share cause others to want Jesus, not just want to do the right things or have a better life so they can be more comfortable?
If I only offer up moral Christianity without pointing you to Christ, what good am I honestly doing?
In John 5:39-40 Jesus said to the Jews . . .
“You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me. But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life.”
Knowing truth and knowing the Author of Truth are two entirely different things—and only one of them leads to the life we desperately need.
At the end of January, during a quiet moment with the Lord, I scrawled these thoughts, which I believe He gave me, in my journal.
Knowing the right answers will not transform you. Going to church alone will not transform you. Being religious and even memorizing Scripture will not transform you. Only being in right relationship with me while you experience these things will transform you. The Jews in the New Testament knew the answers, but they didn’t know Me. They did not have a love relationship with Me, therefore their hearts remained unchanged. Knowledge of the truth alone cannot transform. It’s My love working together with truth that transforms.
People who are experiencing war overseas, divorce in the United States, and death in their families don’t need to know just good principles without knowing the Prince of Peace. They don’t need to know how to live unless they know the One who gave them life. To give them truth without pointing them to The Truth is dishonoring to the Lord—and offering a balm to the wounded that does not heal.
So what does this have to do with you? A lot, actually. Just like me, you are preaching a sermon with your life. You may not be standing in a pulpit or putting words on a page. But every day, you are a witness for the Lord. Will you only show others what it means to be a moral Christian—or will you demonstrate what it looks like to intimately walk with the Savior?
Monday, March 3, 2014
The lore of the lorax
"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells."
-- Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991)
One of the qualities that make fairy tales and nursery rhymes so resonant is the fact that we cannot get them out of our minds. Sometimes this is because a story is particularly vivid or poignant, sometimes because a rhyme, over its history, has become progressively better crafted and thus easy to remember. We are especially sensitive (or vulnerable) to the rhetoric of wordplay in our toddler years, and that is why we are full of rhymes that seem to have no particular meaning except that we memorized them at a time when our brains were literally hungry to acquire language and rhythm. When we’re in groups and can’t find a song whose lyrics everyone knows -- even as adults -- we sometimes resort to chants like "Row, row, row your boat" (or inane songs we’ve acquired through sheer repetition, like the theme from popular TV shows like Gilligan’s Island).
In many cases, the rhetorical value of "children’s" rhymes is lost to us because their historical context has passed. For example, we generally don’t think of the Black Plague when we play "Ring Around the Rosie," and we don’t think of the political allegory underlying "Jack and Jill" (even though Jack explicitly breaks his crown). Even things we don’t like become part of popular culture and then folklore; think of those silly commercial jingles and the hateful tunes you can’t get out of your head (all the more perplexing because your very need to purge them causes you to replay them, and thus commit them even further into memory).
So when someone like Dr. Seuss comes along, he becomes culturally ubiquitous because his works bring together all the elements that make folklore indelible in our consciousness. I have yet to meet a literate English speaker who doesn’t have some clear memory of a Dr. Seuss book. In fact, most of those who recall their initial engagement with Seuss will describe it as an especially memorable or even formative reading experience. In the same way that Charles Dickens has become an integral part of English language culture through our use of the name "Scrooge" from A Christmas Carol, Seuss has entered the cultural dictionary with "Grinch." These days (particularly after the film adaptation), one is actually more likely to be criticized for being a Grinch than for being a Scrooge.
Among Seuss’s forty-four books, many of them radical in their time, the one that has received the most attention in recent years is The Lorax, which was the center of some unexpected controversy in the American Northwest.
The Lorax is one of Dr. Seuss’ explicitly rhetorical books, one that he himself classified as "propaganda." It is a classic cautionary fable structured around a flashback narrated by the villain, the capitalist Once-ler, to a nameless young boy who has come to the Once-ler’s dilapidated Lerkim to hear the tale. The story is set in a dark, murky, post apocalyptic landscape caused by the Once-ler’s wholesale exploitation of the ecosystem, which was supported in a former time by Truffula trees. As the faceless Once-ler tells his tale through a "snergelly hose," we flash back to the old days, when the land was a bright paradise of multicolored Truffula trees and happy Swomee Swans, Bar-ba-loots, and Humming-Fish. The Once-ler arrives in a covered wagon reminiscent of those during the American frontier days. Like a pioneer, he is out to better his life, but he is not the homesteading pioneer as we might expect; he is more the 49er, and he strikes it rich when he discovers the profitability of the first Truffula tree, whose tuft he knits into a Thneed. With what might be termed classic Yankee ingenuity, the Once-ler devises ways of processing more and more Truffula trees at a steadily increasing pace, "biggering and biggering" his manufacturing operation until he has turned the formerly Edenic paradise into a landscape of industrial blight with polluted water, polluted air, and a sunless panorama of Truffula stumps.
All of the Lorax’s interventions are for naught, and when the last tree falls, he is mysteriously "lifted away" into a hole in the dark clouds. And as the young boy discovers, it is only after it is too late that the Once-ler learns his lesson. At the end of the tale, the Once-ler drops down a single remaining Truffula seed, the seed of hope at the bottom of the capitalist Pandora’s box.
The rhetoric of the story’s surface requires no explication -- its moral is explicit and self-contained. So much so, in fact, that some readers respond to the motif of the tree cutting and forget that that particular form of exploitation is part of the underlying theme, which Seuss characterized as "antipollution and antigreed," not merely anti-logging.
But there’s something special about The Lorax’s rhetoric. With the figure of the "smallish" and strangely ineffectual, paternal Lorax, Seuss evokes a powerful sense of pathos, nostalgia, and guilt -- which is probably why proponents of the timber industry have tried to ban the book in at least three states. According to Gary Ball, in an article in the newsletter available on the Mendocino Environmental Center's Web site, some pro-logging and anti-environmental groups like those associated with the deceptively named Wise Use Movement (WUM) "have even gone to the extreme of creating a community uproar in order to ban . . . The Lorax, from elementary schools' reading lists. Led by the owners of Baily's, the logger equipment merchants . . . WUM adherents packed a number of heated school board meetings resulting in The Lorax being removed from the mandatory reading list in public schools."
In 1991, 20 years after its publication, the hardwood industry responded to The Lorax in kind with a pro-logging book called Truax, in which the hero is a friendly and even-tempered lumber man who explains the virtues of logging to a hysterical figure called the Guardbark. The Guardbark is meant not only to represent the Lorax, but what the timber industry considers the irrational rhetoric of environmentalism in general. He's depicted as a bucktoothed cross between the Green Man and the Jolly Green Giant, and since he is none-too-intelligent, he is easily swayed by the calm Truax's pro-logging lecture. Though it does not qualify as what folklorists term "fakelore," and is clearly a response to what the industry believes a threat, the logic behind Truax is reminiscent of what happened in the mid-1900s when W. B. Laughead appropriated and adapted some logging lore to promote the Red River Lumber Company of Minnesota. We all know the result: those fabricated tall tales about Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox.
It’s probably clear from what I’ve discussed above why The Lorax would evoke a strong response from the timber industry, but there is far more going on in the book than meets the casually analytic eye. There’s something weirdly familiar about The Lorax, something especially odd, simultaneously cathartic and irking about the dramatic arc of the story. It sticks with readers at many different levels in the same way that a good parable sticks with us and survives repeated reflection as we become progressively older and (we hope) wiser.
2. Theodor Seuss Geisel
Before he was Dr. Seuss, Theodor Seuss Geisel was a failed novelist. He was an English major, and he studied at Oxford (one of his professors was the eminent Emile Logouis, a specialist on the work of Jonathan Swift, author of works like "A Modest Proposal" and Gulliver's Travels). He studied the psychology of advertising, and in his Botany and Zoology classes he amused himself by manipulating the Latin names for plants and animals. Seuss admitted that his study of Latin, particularly the insights it provided into the etymology and construction of words, was a great influence on his writing.
In the mid-1920s, Seuss lived for a time in Paris, where the likes of Hemingway, Joyce, and Stein -- writers who would forever change the face of literature with their innovations -- were establishing themselves. Seuss’s later writing uses many of the same literary techniques.
Before World War II, Seuss had already earned a name for himself with the wildly successful advertising campaign for the insecticide called "Flit," making the phrase "Quick, Henry, the Flit!" part of popular culture. Seuss drew liberal political cartoons during World War II; he also made documentaries and propaganda films under Frank Capra while he served in the Signal Corps.
In later interviews, Seuss was always quite honest about his rhetorical intentions. He referred directly to the influence of writers like Belloc, Swift, and Voltaire, and did not hesitate to refer to his own radical and revolutionary ideas. "I’m subversive as hell!" he once declared. He said of his Cat in the Hat: "It’s revolutionary in that it goes as far as Kerensky and then stops. It doesn’t go quite as far as Lenin." Seuss was a writer fully aware of his political and rhetorical intentions (much like George Orwell, whose Animal Farm is often read in elementary schools), and he crafted his literary tools to most effectively deliver his charged messages.
The verse style for which Seuss's work is famous is called anapestic tetrameter. Seuss folklore explains his fascination with this meter as the influence of the rhythm of the diesel engine in the ship he took home from Europe, but he also singled out Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as a literary influence. Goethe's "The Erl-King" (narrated from the point of view of a child who is being kidnapped by the King of Elves) is written in anapestic tetrameter. There are English writers who also used this meter, one of the most memorable being Lord Byron, who wrote "The Destruction of Sennacherib." The best-known example of anapestic tetrameter in American culture is, of course, "The Night Before Christmas" (which we cannot help but associate with the Grinch these days).
Goethe is known for saying that there is a genius in every child and a child in every genius. Seuss, as we know, had decided to "be a child" all his life and explained his own creativity by describing it as the "insane logic" of a child. Goethe is an interesting connection for Seuss because of this similar attitude toward childhood consciousness, but this link is especially relevant to my reading because Goethe's most renowned work happens to be Faust, whose protagonist is an Alchemist.
3. Anagram Alchemy
Recently, while I was pursuing my own suspicions about the hidden religious meaning of "I AM SAM / SAM I AM" in Green Eggs and Ham, I ran across an essay by Darren McGovern called "Green Eggs and So’Ham: A Qabalistic Interpretation of Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham." McGovern’s essay is -- almost by necessity -- rather tongue-in-cheek, especially toward its conclusion where his reading takes on the frenetic quality of a rant. But he begins by introducing a serious consideration, which happens to be an authentic part of some spiritual traditions: "Unlocking the (imaginary?) hidden meanings within nonsense can automatically set one to thinking of the mysteries. This, done with discipline, can lead to deep contemplation of Holy things and God Himself and that is the true path to illumination." Referring to the methodologies of the Qabalah [Kabbalah] and the Hermetic tradition, McGovern goes on to say that "By deciphering the meaning between the lines, the roots of words, the correspondence on the Tree of Life, and connections to myths, we can invoke the truth that lies hidden. . . . Distilling the information to extract the ‘gold’ from the original matter is an alchemical transformation operation."
McGovern's claim is not as outrageous as it first seems, and his essay just scratches the surface of the analytic potential that a Hermetic/Kabbalistic reading of Dr. Seuss offers. In fact, it is precisely this approach that reveals the true nature of Seuss's genius and explains why works like The Lorax are so profoundly resonant with his readers.
What Seuss uses is a complex interweaving of symbolism and anagrams, relying both on the appearance of the text and its sound, to carry a range of potential meanings that all serve to amplify the overarching theme of the work. This is generally true of Green Eggs and Ham and many other Seuss works, but applied with true genius in The Lorax.
Let me begin with a reading that will seem, at first, to be outrageous, and then show how it is a very rational reading in keeping with both the rhetoric of The Lorax as a fable and the underlying alchemical and Kabbalistic techniques used by Dr. Seuss. (If you doubt the degree to which he used anagrams, keep in mind that he also wrote under the identity of "Theo LeSeig," which is a condensation and rearrangement of "Theodor Geisel.")
Everyone who has read the book recalls the declaration: "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees." Since he is the guardian of the trees and the critic of the Once-ler, whose transgression is to chop them all down, it is not accidental that the Lorax’s name sounds vaguely like "lower axe" in English. This is where most scholarly readers stop their analysis because it appears to be a fully adequate explication in keeping with underlying moral of the story. But Dr. Seuss’s construction of names is highly sophisticated if we bother to look more deeply. The sound value of "Lorax" is a red herring that allows adult readers to resonate with deeper underlying messages within the story once they have uncovered one of its upper layers. To do justice to Dr. Seuss, we must look at the name letter-by-letter.
L O R A X is an anagram that breaks down into three symbolic clusters: AO, RX, and L. AO represents Alpha and Omega (O -- Omnicron -- here is a substitute for W -- Omega -- in keeping with the transformation of the Greek to Roman alphabets). These two letters, as we know, symbolize Christ, who said, "I am the Alpha and the Omega." RX (as I discuss in my column on the Caduceus), is usually taken to mean "prescription" as in the pharmacist’s symbol, but it actually comes from another transformation of Greek to Roman alphabets; the R and X represent Rho and Chi, which in the Greek alphabet are P and X. Chi and Rho are the first two letters in Christos, or Christ. The X written over the P is the typical Chiro recognized as the symbol for Christ.
A look at Nigel Pennick’s Magical Alphabets shows how the L in LORAX is not an extra letter (or an article), but rather another condensation of the Christ symbol in conjunction with the theme of protecting trees. The Roman L is equivalent to the Greek Lambda, which, Pennick notes, "is connected with plant growth and the mathematical progressions associated with the figure in classical geometry, upon whose principles organic growth proceeds. It is linked mystically with the geometric ratio known as the Golden Section. As the 11th letter of the Greek alphabet, Lambda represents the ascent to a higher level." The Lorax, of course, is the protector of the trees, whose growth would be associated with the Golden Section (also known as the Golden Mean); when all the Truffula trees are gone, the Lorax is "lifted away," ascending to some mysterious higher place.
The Roman L and Greek Lambda are equivalent to the Hebrew Lamed, and Pennick's entry for that letter is also quite interesting: "Lamed is the directed energy that one requires to initiate any action, and the sacrifices that one must inevitably incur in the process. The esoteric significance of Lamed is thus 'sacrifice.'" This is not only in keeping with all of the Christ associations I've pointed out above, since Christ is also the sacrificial Lamb(da) of God -- it also explains the page on which the Lorax first appears, pulling himself out of the first Truffula stump in a burst of multicolored energy as an axe falls away to the ground.
The word TRUFFULA also breaks down into several phonetic anagrams of which "True Alpha" (TRU ALFFU, the U sound being like the neutral schwa sound like the E in the ER ending) and "fulla fruit" (FULA FRUT, i.e., "full of fruit") are the most relevant. Since it is literally the Tree of Life in the story (Seuss capitalizes the T in Tree), the fact that the Truffula Tree contains seeds of its own destruction, the "fatal fur" (FATUL FUR) of its tufts and the "future fall" (FUTUR FAL) of the Truffula paradise is especially ironic.
The three kinds of animals who depend on the Truffula Trees seem, at first, to bear cute, nonsensical names, but all of them are laden with meaning both through symbolism and anagramming. Swomee Swan rearranges into the phrase, "As men we sow" (a contrast to the Once-ler’s greedy reaping of the trees). It also becomes "Woe’s-me Swan," suggesting the lamentation of the swans’ departure; this anagram is especially poignant coupled with the symbolic meaning of the swan, whose dying lament (the source of the term "swan song") was associated with Christ’s dying breath on the cross.
The Humming-Fish are somewhat easier to figure out because one need only condense the "Humming" into "humin’" ("human") to see that they are also a Christ symbol. Christ was a man associated with the symbol of the fish, thus a "human fish."
Finally, the Brown Bar-ba-loots are also linked both to the anti-logging rhetoric, by anagramming into the phrase, "Ban blows to arbor," and to the crucifixion narrative: "Barab’s loot." Barabas the thief was let go by popular vote when Christ was condemned to the cross. The prefix "barba" also means "bearded," linking the Lorax and Christ through their appearance, not only their ascension, and "barb" suggests the crown of thorns.
The Once-ler’s name, the weird "Snuvv," the "Lerkim," and the "snergelly hose" all resonate with the same Alchemical and Kabbalistic logic. A full explication of The Lorax would take its own book, so let it suffice for this essay to point out that the "Thneed," which is what the Once-ler makes out of the Truffula Trees, is "The End."
So "What was the Lorax? And why was it there?" The answer is that despite his disavowal of interest in any particular organized religion, Dr. Seuss drew on the deep structures of esoteric Christianity, Judaism, and Islam to present us with a parable about The Fall and the potential of redemption. We need only perceive more carefully with the "insane logic" of children and mystics. The last Truffula seed is the Philosopher’s Stone, which has the potential to transform the crass gold of greed into the true gold of enlightenment. From the Good Dr. Seuss, it is not an especially expensive prescription, or, for that matter, a hard pill to swallow