Ancient Visions

A long time ago in a land far away, a conqueror deported prisoners from a land that he had conquered. While performing his role as king of Babylon Nebuchadnezzer noticed that some of prisoners carried with themselves, into captivity, a literacy that seemed to surpass the literacy of the people who served him in Babylon. A very smart, educated young man, Daniel, interpreted some dreams that the emperor Neb had not been able to understand. So Daniel, having spiritual resources that extended beyond Neb’s understanding, spoke a synopsis of the dream. . . which he knew because he had an ancient heritage based on the Creator YWHW’s revelations that been given to his ancestors, back in the day. Then Daniel, after describing the dream, interpreted it for Nebuchadnezzar. The dream went something like this: Four beasts were coming up out of the sea. It was kind of weird: Four beasts were coming up out of the sea. But they were not regular critters like you might see roaming around ancient Mesopatamia. There was a lion like an eagle; but it morphed into what looked like a man, with a human brain. Then there was a bear with a weird mouth that looked like rib bones, between its teeth. . . if you can imagine that. It started eating some other animals. Then there’s this leopard, and get this. . . with wings! and four heads! The leopard started dominating all the other critters that were around. Then the weirdest beast of all showed up. . . the toughest kid on the block, so far. It had ten horns. One of the horns sprouted. . and get this: eyes! I’m like. . eyes on a horn?! and if that’s not enough. . . a mouth. He’s like, running his mouth, uttering great boasts! Eyes on a horn! Say what?! But hey. You just never know what’s gonna happen in this life. Suddenly the scene changes. The Ancient of Days takes his seat, and millions of people are standing around

him, and He starts breaking the seals on the ancient scrolls. I’m not making this up y’all. http://www.micahrowland.com/carey/Revelation 5_9.mp3 to be continued. . .

Paris 1937

. . .from chapter 15 of Smoke. The year is 1937. Philip and Lili are in Paris, standing on a bridge over the Seine River, near an international exposition, where Lili is commenting on the nearby German pavillion. “This city is on the edge of Germany,” she said. “But the border is hundreds of miles away.” “Paris is closer than you think, to Berlin.” Philip considered this. Then he pointed beyond the Russian pavillion, to the west, and said, “Over there, between us and where the sun will set, is Versailles, where the treaty was agreed to and signed after the war. The treaty should ensure peace and security, n’est que ce pas?” “That doesn’t mean a thing to Adolf Hitler.” Her eyes, stern with the memory of where they had just come from, were cast down upon the Seine. “Germans know. That treaty means nothing to the Nazis.” “Do they? Do Germans know?” “Some of them do, though they will not say it. There is a lot they will not say. We have neighbors in Munich who will not say that they have done business with my father for many years. Instead, they pretend to not know us. These last few months when we were at home, near the shop, when I would walk on the streets, I felt at times that I must have some horrible sign on my head, something like a mark of shame, a big. . . yellow patch of . . . verboten, or something . . . Even people my own age would act as if they had never known me. What makes people do such things? What compels them to change their attitude toward others whom they have known all their lives, people they grew up with?” “They must be scared as hell of the Nazis.” https://www.amazon.com/Smoke-L-Carey-Rowland/dp/1495330834 Glass half-Full

My Milton Meditations

We’ve heard some big questions raised lately about the ancient book of Enoch. Now I don’t know but I been told that Enoch had written about the revolt of the angels, when they were cast out of heaven, long before this world was even around. So I was remembering back to my college days at LSU, studying English literature. We read John Milton’s poem, published in the 1600’s, when the Brits were beginning to catch a whiff of democracy. Oliver Cromwell and a host of other rowdy Englishmen made their first attempt to convene a legislative Commons. King Charles I wasn’t into it, so he sent his soldiers out to stop the democratic outburst. So the English had a civil war in 1642, which might have motivated poet John Milton to compose his classic epic poem, Paradise Lost, about Satan’s rebellion against God, a disturbance that got him thrown out of heaven and banished forever. But I digress. So, getting back to my theme for the day, Milton. . . there was another Milton that came to mind: Milton Friedman, the economist who I remember as an originator of “trickle down” economics, back in the day, when President Reagan was trying to convert the Washington bureaucracy, the “deep state” to a more Republican way of doing things. Milton Friedman was a Nobel laureate whose home base was the University of Chicago. His conservative world view and economic theories had originated in his mind, as a reaction, when he was working in Washington in the Depression 1930’s, during the FDR New Deal days. Milton’s subsequent middle-of-the-country conservatism was a reactionary fiscal and academic retaliation against the liberal and their statist economic strategies of allocating money to the lower ends of society in the working class. The Democratic worldview favored a “percolate” strategy in which funds and assets would be governmentally provided to the working folks, the lower classes of America. In contrast, Milton Friedman’s strategy was known as “monetarism”; it favored a a steady, minimal, explanation of the money supply, what some folks call “trickle down”. This 1970’s theoretical strategy was a reactionary response to the 1930’s New Deal policies, related to Keynesian economics, as had been theorized in Britain in the 1930’s. Milton Friedman called price/wage-fixing “economic overkill”. We were recently in Chicago area, Northwestern University in Evanston, where I noticed this flyer pinned to a bulletin board, with a message of resistance against the conservative establishment at University of Chicago.

So much for battles, whether in heaven, hell, England, America, or wherever. . . Lastly, in my Milton meditation, and on a lighter note. . . is Milton Berle, also known as “Uncle Miltie”. He was television’s first superstar. . . a comedian whose career had started back in. Vaudeville and early Hollywood. He had started as a stand-up comedian. This Milton’s life and career goes way back, to working with Charlie Chaplin in early Hollywood movies. Then. . . a pioneer in radio entertainment, he had a comedy broadcast sponsored by Campbell’s Soup, Philip Morris and Texaco. brands that were important to the greatest generation, my parents’ generation. When TV was experimental, Milton was right there, a pioneer who stood up for black performers on his shown, back in the day, when many Americans had not yet comprehended the “all men created equal” words of our Declaration of Independence. Elvis Presley’s earliest TV gigs were on Uncle Miltie’s show. Lastly, there’s the town of Milton, Florida, on the panhandle where our family spent our earliest vacations, back in the day, 1950’s.

So there you have it, for what it’s worth. . . my Milton reflections from this 1951 baby boomer writer with a memory that refuses to surrender to the battle of amyloid plaque against brain cells. Go figure! Glass half-Full

Two World Wars

Sarajevo rebel shoots Archduke. . . provoking world war puke: Austrian/ Kraut bullyhood suddenly in disarray. Kraut bellicosity says hey hey hey: let’s start the war today. So German panic goes manic. . .

But human folly is overflowing, Kraut aggression is growing, always has been, since bismark lit the spark of bellicosity, igniting European-wide atrocity. So krauts, hot to trot into the fray, turn around and attack the opposite way. Anxious to start the deathly dance; they make war on France! Russia rushes to the fray; can’t let France be blown away! Brits and Belgians descend into mudding battlegrounds; Ottomans join as Germans amp up artillery rounds. Round and round the war goes and where it stops nobody knows. . . Krauts launch chemicals and chlorine gas, rendering this world war their most lethal task. From the Marne to the Gallipoli, the bloody business spreads so tragically. From Verdun to Istanbul the tragic damage done, soldiers, doughboys shot down. . . the deathly spiral swirls round and round. Up in Russia, Czar Nicholas’ empire goes down; Bolsheviks take control from town to town. German tornadoes sink the Lusitania, American passengers perish in krout mania. Yankee doughboys take up the burden. . . of European war in Somme and Verdun. Finally, with Germany surrounded, millions of artilleries having then been pounded, the nations signed an Armistice, fulfilling many a peaceful European wish, with a little help from their yankee friends. But pshaw! twenty years later they fought the war again!. . . when an Austrian corporal, with his weird mein kampf, launched third reich holocaust, to snuff again the European lamp.

https://www.amazon.com/Smoke-L-Carey-Rowland/dp/1495330834 Glass half-Full

Times half time

In the darkest era of the 20th century, a little kraut colonel summoned up the demon of ancient iniquity, the destroyer, the mystery of iniquity. He mounted up the forces of hell itself to destroy the people who, for thousands of years, had written the pages of history. The furious feurhrer wore down the defenders of mankind for a time, times and half a time. As the ancient prophet had foretold: (1933-45) He will speak out against the Most High and wear down the people of the Highest One and he will intend to make alterations in times and in law, and they will be given into his hand, for a time, times and half a time. (Daniel 7:25) Then the furious feurhrer, by his iniquity, ran his precious third reich into the fires of hell itself, even to a point of destructive desperation wherein he raised his gun to his own head and blasted himself dead in a Berlin bunker. During the war, the American defenders of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness allied themselves with the Europeans to destroy the third reich and to clean up the mess that the third reich had inflicted on mankind. Not long thereafter, the persecuted people, the ancient descendants of Moses, were released from their captivity and holocaust, liberated by the Americans and the British from their tribulations at Dachau and Treblinka and Auschwitz. As the ancient prophet had foretold. (1945-1948) But the two wings of the great eagle were given to the woman, so that she could fly into the wilderness to her place, where she was nourished for time, times and half a time, from the presence of the serpent. (Revelation 12:14) In 1967, the Israelis were able to gain access to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. They had ancient plans in mind,

which they have not yet been able to manifest, to, Lord willing, build another temple. This could take some time, and some serious negotiations. So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again , with plaza and moat, even in times of distress. (Daniel 9:25)

It is the opinion of this author that there is room enough on the Holy hill in Jerusalem for a temple to be built right next to the Al Aqsa mosque, if all parties would just settle down and heed the the advice of Jesus Christ who said: (Matthew 5:9) “Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall inherit the earth.” Glass half-Full

The Big Middle

On Friday, we attended a middle school graduation; young people were completing 8th grade, having been prepared for the next big step in education . . . the next step in adolescent development. . . moving on toward high school. In my youth, I had been at that stage in 1965. My class ascended past junior high school and into the big leagues, high school! So, at this special even, this morning, student and faculty speakers were talking about “middle” school, and students being prepared to enter “upper school.” It was a little strange to me, because where I grew up, we referred to these phases of life education as “junior high” school and high school. And then. . .for whatever reason. . . I know not what. . . I found myself contemplating this concept of “middle”. . . whatever that is . . . a word that can be used as an adjective or a noun. I was contemplating “middle age”, which is a period of life that I used to qualify for, but at age 74. . . maybe not. Now it’s more like. . . what they call “old age.” Even though I still feel like a middle aged person! Read ‘em and weep! Just kidding! It’s all good, y’all. Life is good, and there’s so much middle to muddle on. . . There’s the middle ages:

And there’s Middle Earth, an imaginary place dreamed up by J.R.R. Tolkien, where hobbits’s live, where the shire is something like a middle ages way of living. There’s the middle of the road, where the yellow line is, or the median, or whatever that keeps you from drifting over into oncoming traffic. . . . also the “middle of the road” in a symbolic political sense, where American citizens used to conduct their politics, back in the day. . .before magamania and the proud boys and their maralago donald attacked our Capitol, thereby magnetizing US politics so that most folks are either stubborn donkeys or lumbering elephants with not much in between. Then there’s the middle of the country, which is roughly somewhere between New Orleans and Chicago and between, say, Ohio and Iowa, between Alabama and Texas. . .or maybe between one side of Kent, Ohio and the other

Let us hope and pray that those middle schoolers are never confronted with soldiers who were sent out to to quash their Constitutionally-guaranteed rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and their first amendment right to free speech and free assembly in the middle of the land of the free and the home of the brave. King of Soul

Call Me Thishmail

Call me Thishmail. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having a few bucks and a baccalaureate, and nothing in particular to interest me in River City, I thought I would traverse the Gulf coast and establish meself in the fair city of St. Petersburg, to seek my game and fortune among the old folks who had made their home there. Such was my fateful acceptance of this strategic relocation, chosen for me by insurance-peddling kinfolk, affording me the great American opportunity to translate a post-academic question into a business response. But that was a long time ago, miles and miles before I slept, and dreamed a dream and thereby drove my little yellow VW up to the Appalachian wonderland,

and long before the darkness of failure descended upon me and I ultimately redirected the VW to Waco, where I found myself in the presence of the Holy Spirit. . . you know— the One mentioned in the Book of Acts— and the Spirit of the Risen Lord redirected my voyage through the various gulfs of experience.