Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Howl, Allen Ginsberg
War. Peace. Hope. Sorrow. Sacrifice. Religion.
What do these things mean anymore?
We hold them up. We break them down. We say we care, we don't care, we've tried, we've failed, we just can't keep going, we have to see it all to the end. We spend a lot of time praising our civilization and our progress, but spend very little time looking at the true barbarism of the world around us. We'll find very quickly that, while our methods may now be more sophisticated, evil is and always will be.
I wracked my brains all week, trying to come up with a cohesive plan for this Friday blog post. The inspiration was not showing up, and it didn't (as is all too common in my life) until the last possible moment. My mother was a real trooper last night, and let me keep her up until after midnight, consuming copious amounts of tea and gushing over poetry, and somehow I stumbled across the poem I have copied above - Howl, by Alan Ginsberg. It was a piece of literature I was forced to read in college, and one that I decidedly did not appreciate until my brain was too foggy and sleep deprived to get my own pre-conceived feelings and biases out of the way and just listen to the words.
Moloch.
Solitude. Filth. Ugliness.
Children screaming under stairways.
Moloch was a bloody god worshiped by the Canaanites in ancient times. He demanded fire and war and, according to the Old Testament, the sacrifice of children.
"The people of Israel and Judah have provoked me by all the evil they have done—they, their kings and officials, their priests and prophets, the people of Judah and those living in Jerusalem. They turned their backs to me and not their faces; though I taught them again and again, they would not listen or respond to discipline. They set up their vile images in the house that bears my Name and defiled it. They built high places for Baal in the Valley of Ben Hinnom to sacrifice their sons and daughters to Molek, though I never commanded—nor did it enter my mind—that they should do such a detestable thing and so make Judah sin."
- Jeremiah 32:32-25
I had read all of this before, but this time it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Moloch, as a deity, has long since become nothing but a horror belonging in history books and mythologies, but Ginsberg's poem isn't about a far away land. It isn't a poem about a distant time.
This is now.
This is us.
These are our children who are being sacrificed every day.
The idols we sacrifice our children to today do not have names or statues or lore to build them up. But they are every bit as powerful and terrible as the violent gods of old. They are evils that exist in the hearts of a corrupt and apathetic people. The gods of war and pride and self-indulgence and rebellion.
As Christians, we should be on the frontlines, fighting to protect and to rescue.
But we don't, do we?
We sit back and we let it go.
So you tell me you've got no religion?
Because you don’t need anyone else
To save you or love you or make you
Well my friend that's religion of self
And you say you're a man of science
You’ll believe only what you can see
And say look all that man has conquered
And I'll say it's in man you believe
So don't tell me you've got no religion
Because worship is in our blood
And the heart is a hungry alter
Always aching for something to love
And we're still sacrificing our children
As we lay them down at the feet
Of the idol of convenience
“Because the only God I fear is me.”
- Sarah Sparks, Religion
We cannot fall asleep!
We cannot let the passion die!
We cannot stand idly by, and continue to let the children around us fall.
I am begging each of you to remember, to pray, to seek after the lost and the broken and the sacrificed. The children who have been left as broken casualties of a nation at war. The voiceless, the nameless, the hurting, the unknown. Please don't allow the idols of convenience and comfort keep you from reaching out a hand and being Jesus - being the breath of heaven - to even just one child.
You are all in my prayers continuously.