Kipling on How to Be a Free People

By Robin Bates | Published: September 28, 2026
Mowgli takes on Shere Kahn

Tuesday

Last week I wrote about how revisiting C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy unsettled me because I live in a country that is coming to resemble Calormen more than free Narnia. In the back of my mind I heard the withering sarcasm that Bagheera, Rudyard Kipling’s black panther in The Jungle Book, directs against the Wolf Pack, who think of themselves as “a free people.”

This was brought home to me even more by how Donald Trump debased us by welcoming China dictator Xi Jinping with red carpet treatment, complete with Air Force marching band and honorary flyover. This in spite of the fact that, as political blogger Noah Berlatsky points out,

 Beijing has aided the Iranian leadership in avoiding billions of dollars in US sanctions on its oil sales, sent the regime components and chemicals for use in drones and military systems, and even reportedly has helped Iran kill American troops.

Additionally, we see Trump publicly envying Xi’s control over the Chinese press while he himself bans various outlets from the White House and Air Force One. He may also have offered to sell China U.S. weaponry.

Berlatsky has a compelling explanation for such behavior: Trump loves Xi because he wants to be him. “Kowtowing to tyrants,” Berlatsky writes, “makes him think he’s strong.”

The same dynamic, of course, has long been at work with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, even as the president of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” has nothing but contempt for other democracies.  “Trump throws tantrums and damaging trade wars at utterly imaginary sleights from close allies like Canada,” Berlatsky points out.

Back to Kipling. The wolves feel proud of the appellation “free people” as the book opens. When the lame tiger Shere Khan comes to their den seeking infant Mowgli, Father Wolf defiantly asserts, “The Wolves are a free people. They take orders from the Head of the Pack, and not from any striped cattle-killer. The man’s cub is ours—to kill if we choose.”

Mowgli’s fate is decided a few weeks later at a meeting of the Wolf Pack. Each wolf family brings its cubs to see whether they will be accepted, not by the head wolf Akela, but by the pack as a whole. In other words, like a democratic country, the executive head’s job is to preside over the proceedings while the people make the decision. As Kipling writes,

Sometimes a mother would push her cub far out into the moonlight to be sure that he had not been overlooked. Akela from his rock would cry: “Ye know the Law—ye know the Law. Look well, O Wolves!” And the anxious mothers would take up the call: “Look—look well, O Wolves!”

When “Mowgli the Frog” is pushed forward, the head wolf doesn’t bat an eye:

Akela never raised his head from his paws, but went on with the monotonous cry: “Look well!” A muffled roar came up from behind the rocks—the voice of Shere Khan crying: “The cub is mine. Give him to me. What have the Free People to do with a man’s cub?” Akela never even twitched his ears. All he said was: “Look well, O Wolves! What have the Free People to do with the orders of any save the Free People? Look well!”

Why is the United States taking orders from Putin when it comes to our NATO alliances and, for that matter, to our elections? Russia played a role, small but not insignificant, in the 2016 election and in Britain’s Brexit vote as well. As for Shere Khan, although he is balked in his initial effort to claim Mowgli, we see him continue to play a role in the Wolf Pack’s internal politics. Bagheera points this out to Mowgli years later: 

Akela is very old, and soon the day comes when he cannot kill his buck, and then he will be leader no more. Many of the wolves that looked thee over when thou wast brought to the Council first are old too, and the young wolves believe, as Shere Khan has taught them, that a man-cub has no place with the Pack.

Given our own political history, it’s easy to see Akela as Joe Biden and the young wolves as the manosphere that helped put Trump back into office. A significant portion of this democraphic has its own exclusionary agenda— “Jews will not replace us!” chanted rally goers in Charlottesville)—and it is willing to make common cause with foreign autocrats (Putin, Hungary’s Victor Orban, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro) to get its way.

In Kipling’s book, Shere Khan helps unseat Akela: he has the young wolves present their leader with an untried buck, the most difficult prey to bring down. When the head wolf lunges and misses, Shere Khan steps in:

Akela the Lone Wolf lay by the side of his rock as a sign that the leadership of the Pack was open, and Shere Khan with his following of scrap-fed wolves walked to and fro openly being flattered….

“Seeing that the leadership is yet open, and being asked to speak—” Shere Khan began.

“Scrap-fed wolves” is a good description of the grifters who swarm around Trump. 

In response, Mowgli does what the GOP Congress has conspicuously failed to do, which is speak up for the ideals at the heart of the Wolf Pack:

Mowgli sprang to his feet. “Free People,” he cried, “does Shere Khan lead the Pack? What has a tiger to do with our leadership?”

Like a recently naturalized citizen who understands America’s founding ideals more deeply than people whose families have been here for generations, he addresses his fellow Pack members:

Are we all jackals, to fawn on this cattle butcher? The leadership of the Pack is with the Pack alone.

When Akela addresses the Pack, I think of how Joe Biden, inheriting Covid-caused inflation, passed on to Trump an American economy that the Economist described as “the envy of the world”:

“Free People, and ye too, jackals of Shere Khan, for twelve seasons I have led ye to and from the kill, and in all that time not one has been trapped or maimed. 

Then Akela lays out how that legacy is being squandered. He is responding to Shere Khan, who assumes he has the right to determine who belongs in the Pack. It’s like a foreign dictator telling Americans who is American:

“No man’s cub can run with the people of the jungle,” howled Shere Khan. “Give him to me!”

“He is our brother in all but blood,” Akela went on, “and ye would kill him here! In truth, I have lived too long. Some of ye are eaters of cattle, and of others I have heard that, under Shere Khan’s teaching, ye go by dark night and snatch children from the villager’s doorstep. Therefore I know ye to be cowards, and it is to cowards I speak. It is certain that I must die, and my life is of no worth, or I would offer that in the man-cub’s place. But for the sake of the Honor of the Pack,—a little matter that by being without a leader ye have forgotten,—I promise that if ye let the man-cub go to his own place, I will not, when my time comes to die, bare one tooth against ye. I will die without fighting. That will at least save the Pack three lives. More I cannot do; but if ye will, I can save ye the shame that comes of killing a brother against whom there is no fault—a brother spoken for and bought into the Pack according to the Law of the Jungle.”

Akela, however, might just as well be addressing MAGA:

“He is a man—a man—a man!” snarled the Pack. And most of the wolves began to gather round Shere Khan, whose tail was beginning to switch.

It is at this point in the meeting that Bagheera unleashes his sarcasm. To be taken into the pack years earlier, Mowgli needed sponsors, which he found in the black panther and in the Himalayan brown bear Baloo. Bagheera even killed a bull for the Pack in exchange for its pledge. Now, however, the Pack honors past pledges the way Trump honors past treaties (including the Obama treaty monitoring Iran’s nuclear weapons program). Here’s the exchange:

“A bull paid ten years ago!” the Pack snarled. “What do we care for bones ten years old?”

“Or for a pledge?” said Bagheera, his white teeth bared under his lip. “Well are ye called the Free People!”

At this point, Mowgli brings out the ultimate weapon, the “red flower” of fire,” which allows him to save both himself and those wolves who have not succumbed to Shere Khan’s enticements. He follows Bagheera’s contempt with some of his own, referring to the wolves as “sag,” the Farsi word for stray dogs:

There is no need for this dog’s jabber. Ye have told me so often tonight that I am a man (and indeed I would have been a wolf with you to my life’s end) that I feel your words are true. So I do not call ye my brothers anymore, but sag, as a man should. What ye will do, and what ye will not do, is not yours to say. That matter is with me; and that we may see the matter more plainly, I, the man, have brought here a little of the Red Flower which ye, dogs, fear.”

And further on:

I see that ye are dogs. I go from you to my own people—if they be my own people. The jungle is shut to me, and I must forget your talk and your companionship…. Nor do I think that ye will sit here any longer, lolling out your tongues as though ye were somebodies, instead of dogs whom I drive out—thus! Go!” The fire was burning furiously at the end of the branch, and Mowgli struck right and left round the circle, and the wolves ran howling with the sparks burning their fur. At last there were only Akela, Bagheera, and perhaps ten wolves that had taken Mowgli’s part. 

While I feel Mowgli’s pain at the betrayal, I balk at the wholesale dismissal of the Wolf Pack. The impulse to honor freedom is never entirely extinguished, and there are always wolves—more than ten—who refuse to sell out to the Shere Khans of the world. The red flower we carry is the power of the vote, which throughout American history has been painfully won and lost and rewon time and again. 

While we might find it momentarily satisfying to watch Mowgli walk away, that is not the solution. Nor would it work to replace Akela with Mowgli while foregoing Parliamentary procedure. Someone showing up with irresistible force to put his foes in their place is itself an autocratic fantasy. (“The iron fish smashed the tyrant’s head, and became a tyrant in his stead,” as William Blake puts it.) While wolf packs are indeed vulnerable to lame and parasitical tigers that prey upon their fears, they can also rediscover their founding ideals and stand strong.

This civics lesson was imparted to me through the Kipling-inspired Cub Scouts when I was eight. Robert Baden-Powell, who founded the Boy Scouts, was a friend of Kipling and got his permission to model an organization for younger boys on The Jungle Books. I can still recall the pledge we recited every week:

The Cub Scout follows Akela. 
The Cub Scout helps the pack go. 
The pack helps the Cub Scout grow. 
The Cub Scout gives goodwill.

Akela, as we all understood at some deep level, was the spirit of community. (“Look well, oh wolves.”) In the pledge, both teamwork and individual worth were affirmed and goodwill pointed to being a positive presence in the world. While we’d like to see more goodwill at present, it has guided citizens in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago, and other locales when they have stepped up to protest ICE deportations. Although, with the cynicism of college kids, many ex-scouts came to see our Cub Scout and Boy Scout pledges as hokey, they now appear as an indispensable bulwark against the onslaught of Trumpism. 

So yes, calling ourselves a “free people” in 2026 opens us up to Bagheera’s sneer. It also, however, provides us something to aspire to.

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ICE Buys Fahrenheit 451’s Mechanical Hound

By Robin Bates | Published: September 27, 2026
Artist Michael Whelan imagines Fahrenheit 451’s mechanical hound

Monday

Recently I compared ICE agents to the firemen who destroy books in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. (“Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice,” I hear Robert Frost saying.) Now, as if in confirmation, Rachel Maddow recently reported that ICE has put in a large order for robot dogs. A “mechanical hound” figures prominently in Bradbury’s novel.

An ABC article has the report:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is looking to spend up to $2 million on robot dogs, according to a federal procurement notice.

The Boston Dynamic SPOT Robots will help “support public safety and law enforcement operations by providing a remotely operated robotic capability for inspection, situational awareness, and hazard assessment in environments that may pose risks to personnel,” according to the notice.

Adding to the dystopian feel, the ABC article reminds us that the development follows news that ICE is spending $16 million on electric shock gloves.

Bradbury’s hound is programmed to hunt down people based on their personal chemistry. As someone explains, its calculators “can be set to any combination, so many amino acids, so much sulphur, so much butterfat and alkaline.” Once it hunts down and captures its target, the hound grips it in its paws and injects massive jolts of morphine or procaine through a four-inch hollow steel needle jutting from its snout.

Normally the hound sits in a corner although it never ceases to radiate a terrifying aura:

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast.

Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubber-padded paws.

In the novel’s most terrifying scene, the hound goes after Montag, the fireman-turned-book reader. He saves himself only by blasting the beast with his fire hose:

It made a single last leap into the air, coming down at Montag from a good three feet over his head, its spidered legs reaching, the procaine needle snapping out its single angry tooth. Montag caught it with a bloom of fire, a single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue and orange about the metal dog, clad it in a new covering as it slammed into Montag and threw him ten feet back against the bole of a tree, taking the flame-gun with him. He felt it scrabble and seize his leg and stab the needle in for a moment before the fire snapped the Hound up in the air, burst its metal bones at the joints, and blew out its interior in the single flushing of red color like a skyrocket fastened to the street. Montag lay watching the dead-alive thing fiddle the air and die. Even now it seemed to want to get back at him and finish the injection which was now working through the flesh of his leg.

The hound can target Montag because, we learn earlier, the chemical balances and percentages of all those working in the fire station are recorded in a master file.

Turning from sci-fi to our current reality, think of how the Trump administration is attempting to set up national databases, something that Republicans used to oppose. Think also of how much misinformation is in those bases. For instance, although Trump’s Department of Homeland Security claimed that there were 185 non-citizens on Nevada’s voting roles, further examination determined that all were citizens. In other words, the actual number was zero. 

Now imagine the hound going after those 185.

Time and again we’ve seen ICE and other law enforcement agents targeting the wrong person. Sometimes there has been a mistaken address (this occurred with Louisville’s Breonna Taylor); sometimes a mistaken identity (Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, shot and killed by ICE in Biddeford, Maine, had a valid work permit); sometimes flaws in face recognition technology.

Furthermore, what if the technology is deliberately tampered with? Montag mentions this possibility to his superior early in the book when the hound starts growling at him:

It would be easy for someone to set up a partial combination on the Hound’s ‘memory,’ a touch of amino acids, perhaps. That would account for what the animal did just now. Reacted toward me.

We’re seeing instances of bad cops using Flock surveillance technology to track down ex-girlfriends who are hiding from them. Think what people could do with access to both robot dogs and a national genetic base.

In fact, one can imagine racial profiling taken to a whole new level. What if, instead of targeting individuals, one started targeting race DNA. This is easier to imagine now than it would have been in 1953, when Bradbury wrote his novel.

Robot dogs, taser gloves, Black Hawk helicopters swooping down on Chicago apartments, innocent civilians being rounded up and shipped overseas, U.S. citizens being shot for no reason by federal agents at point blank range. A year ago author Maggie Thrash mentioned to me that dystopian novels are no longer as popular as they once were. As I summed up our conversation,

Why read dark warnings about the future when the future is here, when George Orwell’s 1984 appears to be an operations manual for the current administration and Handmaid’s Tale is a step away from becoming reality?

 So yes, it comes as no surprise that ICE would want to spend some of its billions on robot dogs.

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The Greatest Story Ever Told?

By Robin Bates | Published: September 26, 2026
Jacob Jordaens, The Four Evangelists

Sunday

My friend Robin Collins, a Religious Studies professor at Messiah College, has co-authored a very interesting article arguing that the truth of Christianity is best found, not in eye witness or second hand accounts (which sometimes contradict each other) but in the story as a story.  The article is entitled “The Greatest Story Ever Told: How Theism Predicts the Light of Christ,” and the co-author is Joshua Rasmussen, Baylor professor of philosophy. It recently appeared in a collection of essays, Moral Arguments for God’s Existence: Navigating the Terrain, edited by David Baggett and John E. Hare and published by Oxford University Press.

For those who believe that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and perfectly good, Collins and Rasmussen contend that it was inevitable that a man like Jesus would come into the world and that his life would unfold as it did.

This theory begs the question why God waited for as long as God did to bring this story about. Their answer involves the wide reach of the Roman empire, which provided an unprecedented opportunity for the rapid spread of the gospel. I’ll touch on that shortly.

First of all, let’s note how the article reverses the normal way we think about truth claims. Normally, when we encounter a story, we look for verification outside the story. “The search for the historical Jesus” takes this approach, looking at the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and Joseph of Arimathea to test whether Jesus was real and whether events transpired as The New Testament says they did. 

According to Collins and Rasmussen, however, such evidence only confirms the story. The existence of the story itself is the main proof of its authenticity. Collins explains:

God’s ultimate goal is to give us the greatest possible gift (God’s self) to us in the greatest possible way—specifically by providing a way for ourselves to be united with God so that our identity as a person is a finite expression of God’s self while we still retain our own individuality. Since giving us the greatest possible gift in the greatest possible way would constitute our greatest good, it follows that God’s ultimate goal is to give us the greatest human good.

To achieve this goal, God, who is infinite, would first of all have to become incarnate in a finite human being. Through the model of Jesus, humans get a glimpse of what it means for a human to be unified with God. By creating a new human/divine vision—a pattern of perfect faith, hope and love—Jesus created a way to for divine virtues “to become dynamically present in our own lives.” We don’t only hear the story of Christ but are invited to participate in it.

Can we still do so when the going gets tough? To fully appreciate what God is offering, that authors note, God must enact these virtues “in the most extreme type of circumstances; otherwise, they would not be strong enough for the most difficult life situations people face.” The most difficult trial involves unjust persecution, extreme suffering, humiliation, a sense of abandonment, and death. In Roman times, no execution was more humiliating than crucifixion.

By sharing in God’s virtues, the authors go on to say, we “are freed from the forces that hinder moral and spiritual growth (i.e., are “saved from sin”), since living in alignment with the highest virtues is incompatible with destructive tendencies.” This transformation, they add, “restores our connection with the divine and brings us into deeper harmony with ultimate reality.”

Adding to the power of Jesus’s actions is the narrative arc of the story. The authors note that the hero’s journey is one of the world’s most compelling stories and that people, when they encounter Jesus’s story, become caught up in the transformation. Nothing is more powerful than a good story, Tyrion says in Game of Thrones, and this is the greatest story.  As the authors put it,

The human experience of suffering and vulnerability is not arbitrary; rather, it provides a unique opportunity for forming profound connections with others and deepening our participation in the good and the divine life. The transformation we undergo here through unity with God is imprinted upon us, leading to fruits of virtue and connection with God and others that we can enjoy after this life on earth.

If each of us becomes “a unique expression of God’s infinite being within the constraints of [our] finite life,” then we continue to grow, both in relationship with others and in our participation in God’s life. Thus, 

like a great story, this vision of the afterlife is not static but endlessly dynamic. Rather than a mere continuation of earthly existence, it is an eternal deepening of divine participation. Each person, reflecting an inexhaustible aspect of God, will continue to manifest and experience divine beauty in ever-greater ways. This view aligns with C. S. Lewis’s conception of the heavenly state, in which each person will eternally know and praise God, communicating some infinite aspect of divine beauty that no other creature can fully express. Since divine beauty is infinite, this process of knowing, praising, and participating in God’s life will never be exhausted. 

Jesus sought to awaken humanity to this vision/reality, not only through his teaching but through his death and resurrection.

Joseph Campbell tells us that the hero’s journey may be the most universal of all stories, featuring a central figure who overcomes great challenges to achieve or experience something of immense worth. Jesus’s journey has all the elements of that journey, which is one reason why so many people over the centuries have embraced it. “By viewing Christian doctrines through the lens of a story,” the authors point out, “we see how Christianity offers not just static moral goodness but a development of characters, purposes, and grand discoveries.”

This story, they point out, provides hope “that suffering and struggle have meaning.”

If God exists, they conclude, 

we have reason to expect reality to reflect the greatest kind of story—one rich in meaning, transformation, and ultimate resolution. A great story involves struggle, character development, and the triumph of good over evil. We can see Christianity as a dynamic display of these elements in their highest form, including the Incarnation and Atonement, where the highest being enters history and overcomes the greatest kind of human suffering to provide the greatest kind of good (unity with God) in a dynamic way. 

As to why this story was so late in coming, the authors point to the historical context. Because of the extensive infrastructure of the Roman world—the Pax Romana, widespread roads, and a common trade language—the gospel message could spread rapidly and extensively. If there had been divine incarnations previously, they had remained isolated.

Since “the greatest story” can sound like Christian chauvinism, the authors are careful to note that other traditions “provide meaningful elements to the master story, whether as foreshadows, echoes, contrasts, or alternative pathways of discovery”: 

Although non-Abrahamic religions and philosophies, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, have a cyclical or timeless—and therefore non-narrative—view of ultimate reality, nonetheless all cultures have valued stories, with their most prized stories having a universal narrative structure. Whether in ancient myths, religious texts, or modern literature, great stories consistently contain themes of transformation, sacrifice, redemption, and the struggle between good and evil. Accordingly, if God wished to relate to humanity in a meaningful way, it would be natural to do so in a format that resonates with universal human experience. 

Of course, if one doesn’t believe that God is omnipotent, omnipotent, and perfectly good—or believe in God at all—then Jesus’s story would not be the inevitable narrative that Collins and Rasmussen believe it to be. That’s why they subtitle their article, “How Theism Predicts the Light of Christ.”

Then again, maybe the story itself works as an indirect proof of God, more so than any historical record. How would such a story emerge, an improbable account dealing with origins, purpose, and what happens to us after we die, if not for such a force blowing through the universe? There’s a deep wisdom in stories that no one can fully account for.

In any case, thinking of Jesus’s story in this way can help Christians understand why it is so compelling while giving them a clearer sense of what is meant by the incarnation and the atonement. We see not only why God manifested God’s self in Jesus but also what it means to participate in God’s never-ending story.

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Tintin Gave Shape to My Sense of Wonder

By Robin Bates | Published: September 25, 2026

Friday Memories of Books That Shook My World

My four Georgia grandchildren, all of whom are voracious readers, are enthralled with graphic novels. As I watch their delight in Japanese manga and in the Five Worlds, Amulet, and Princeless series, I think of my own childhood love affair with Tintin, by the Belgian artist Hergé.

I remember scouring bookstores throughout Paris when we were there in 1962 trying to track down every volume. David, Jonathan and I couldn’t read them then, given that they were in French, but we could three years later when we spent the year attending a Paris school (by which time I was 13, Jonathan 10, and David 8.) I’ve written about our difficulty in finding Tintin au Congo (1930), which the author had withdrawn from circulation since it is blatantly racist. (We found it on the last day in a used bookstore.) The other books are far superior although even they have the colonialist plot of “enlightened European travels to exotic cultures and saves them.” But that’s not what attracted us.

The books allowed our imaginations to roam freely. Tintin is always poking around in wonderful interiors, such as Incan tombs, haunted Scottish castles, Egyptian pyramids, Chinese opium dens, underwater shipwrecks, secret treasure rooms, and lunar caves. There’s always excitement as he is chloroformed or knocked out at least once in every book. My own kids grew up on the English translations but I’ve never been able to make the adjustment.  For me, Snowy the dog will always be Milou, Professor Calculus will always be Tournesol (meaning “sunflower”), police inspectors Thomson and Thompson will always be Dupond and Dupont. Oh, and Tintin is not pronounced like the dog actor.

As I look back, I think the series spurred us to do our own exploring, providing us with a narrative framework. Every Thursday (which French kids get off) the three of us visited historic sites, such as the Cluny museum, with its unicorn tapestries; Notre Dame, with its gargoyles; the naval museum at the Palais de Chaillot (which reminded us of Le Secret de l’Unicorn and Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge); the Louvre (I especially was riveted Nicolas Sebastien Maillot’s giant painting The Raft of the Medusa, with its desperate survivors); and the Chateau de Vincennes (from which a prisoner is rescued in the sequel to the Three Musketeers). It’s as though we ourselves were Tintin, venturing out into new and exotic places.

I use the word “exotic” deliberately, referring to Edward Said’s critique of the West for “orientalizing” the “exotic east” and “inscrutable orient.” While Hergé is undoubtedly guilty, it’s also the case that every culture exoticizes other cultures. I remember Tintin in America, which sees the United States as a combination of wild frontier (with Indians wearing headdresses) and urban landscapes run by gangsters. My own Slovenian students, when they visited us in the United States, imagined they would encounter Hollywood America, where beautiful people lounged by large swimming pools ingesting drugs.

My later travels abroad continued to tap into Tintin’s fascination with the foreign. When I spent a college semester in France, I got as close as I dared to a teargas-filled demonstration; burrowed into every castle and Roman ruin I came across; and was enchanted by Mont Saint-Michel. Years later, thanks to Tintin, it seemed natural to pack up our three kids for a Fulbright year in Yugoslavia (this in 1987, before Slovenia had broken free). The castles we encountered there reminded me of the one in Le Sceptre d’Ottokar, my first Tintin book and my favorite.

My longing to visit the Incan ruins, meanwhile, was set in motion by Les Sept Boules de Cristal and Le Temple de Soleil. A few years ago Julia and our son Darien gifted me with trip to Peru, which was magical.

I don’t know whether Tintin’s job as a journalist played any role in my working for newspapers my first two years out of college—perhaps not as we see him doing very little journalism—but I sense that he reinforced certain values. I certainly took note of his readiness to help people in distress and was struck by him punching out a Brit for bullying a Chinese man in Le Lotus Bleu. Few things make me angrier than people tormenting those who are vulnerable, and I have called out colleagues for insensitive behavior to office assistants.

I was also impressed, in Tintin au Tibet, by how he risks his life in the Himalayas to save his young Chinese friend Chang, who has been carried off by the Abominable Snowman. The Tibetan monks comment on his great heart, which is how I saw him as well. I was also impressed by how his faithful friend Captain Haddock is prepared to cut his climbing rope when he slips, thereby saving Tintin. Loyalty to friends, even if it involves sacrifice, is of paramount importance.

How much are we shaped by the books we read? I think of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, who is enticed to a sea life by his “light holiday reading.” When surrounded by the “babel of voices” of the other sailors, we are told that Jim

would forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light literature. He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.

If you know the novel, then you know that Jim falls short of his ideal. Bookish fantasies and adult reality “keep little company together nowadays,” to borrow from Shakespeare’s Bottom. Yet even though I haven’t lived Tintin’s adventurous life—not even close—I can see how his determination to do good and his own devotion to duty had an impact.

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Rereading Narnia in the Age of Trump

By Robin Bates | Published: September 23, 2026
Pauline Baynes, illus. from The Horse and His Boy

Thursday

As my church reading group discusses John Gatta’s Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm, I’ve been rereading the seven Narnia books, some for the first time in decades. The Horse and His Boy, one of my favorites, reads very differently in this era of DJT’s foreign policy.

At the same time that I was reading what “the Tisroc (may he live forever)” has to say about Narnia, I was hearing reports of DJT’s unhinged speech to the United Nations General Assembly. It included the following statements:

Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild, and create a far greater country than it ever was before? Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?

Of his conquest of Venezuela and seizure of its oil, Trump said,

It was perhaps the biggest deal ever made. To the victor belong the spoils – you’ve all heard that…

Compare this now with the Tisroc and his son as they discuss Narnia.  Rabadash is outraged that Narnia’s gorgeous Queen Susan, whom he wishes to marry, has escaped his clutches. He desires to invade Narnia and carry her off:

“But why, O my father,” said the Prince…, “why should we think twice about punishing Narnia any more than about hanging an idle slave or sending a worn-out horse to be made into dog’s-meat? It is not the fourth size of one of your least provinces. A thousand spears could conquer it in five weeks. It is an unseemly blot on the skirts of your empire.”

“Most undoubtedly,” said the Tisroc. “These little barbarian countries that call themselves free (which is as much as to say, idle, disordered, and unprofitable) are hateful to the gods and to all persons of discernment.”

And a little later:

“It is very grievous,” said the Tisroc in his deep, quiet voice. “Every morning the sun is darkened in my eyes, and every night my sleep is the less refreshing, because I remember that Narnia is still free.

It so happens, however, that Narnia—not unlike Iran–has an ace in the hole. The Tisroc points this out:

It is commonly reported that the High King of Narnia (whom may the gods utterly reject) is supported by a demon of hideous aspect and irresistible maleficence who appears in the shape of a Lion. Therefore the attacking of Narnia is a dark and doubtful enterprise, and I am determined not to put my hand out farther than I can draw it back.

Would that the Tisroc in the White House had the same foresight.

Rabadash has a follow-up proposal, however. He will capture neighboring Archenland—”They are at peace with us and unprepared and I shall take Anvard before they have bestirred themselves’’—from which point he can dart into Narnia and seize Susan while spilling minimal Narnian blood.

The plan is seconded by the Grand Vizier, who is a perfect stand-in for Trump’s sycophantic advisors in that he spends the entire time kneeling, head flat on the carpet. “O Tisroc, whose reign must and shall be interminable,” he says, “I think that with the aid of the gods it is very likely that Anvard will fall into the Prince’s hands. And if so, we have Narnia by the throat.”

Think of him as the late Senator Lindsey Graham, groveling before DJT while prodding him into war.

Thanks to Shasta, Aravis, and the two horses, the plan is thwarted as they warn Archenland’s King Lune of the impending attack. As a result, Rabadash finds Anvard’s castle gates barricaded upon his arrival. Before learning of this check, however, we hear him addressing his troops in language very similar to the threats Trump has used against Iran:

Attend, all of you. We are now within a furlong of the castle. Remember your orders. Once we are in Narnia, as we should be by sunrise, you are to kill as little as possible. On this venture you are to regard every drop of Narnian blood as more precious than a gallon of your own. On this venture, I say. The gods will send us a happier hour and then you must leave nothing alive between Cair Paravel and the Western Waste. But we are not yet in Narnia. Here in Archenland it is another thing. In the assault on this castle of King Lune’s, nothing matters but speed. Show your mettle. It must be mine within an hour. And if it is, I give it all to you. I reserve no booty for myself. Kill me every barbarian male within its walls, down to the child that was born yesterday, and everything else is yours to divide as you please—the women, the gold, the jewels, the weapons, and the wine. The man that I see hanging back when we come to the gates shall be burned alive. In the name of Tash the irresistible, the inexorable—forward!

In Lewis’s vision, Narnia is the “green and pleasant land” that William Blakes longs for in his poem “Jerusalem.” Bree describes it as follows:

“Narnia,” answered the Horse. “The happy land of Narnia—Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests ringing with the hammers of the Dwarfs. Oh the sweet air of Narnia! An hour’s life there is better than a thousand years in Calormen.” It ended with a whinny that sounded very like a sigh.

Having recently witnessed England’s plucky fight against the combined fascist forces of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, Lewis could imagine Narnia as an idealized version of his native land. So could I when I read Horse and His Boy as a child. Whatever its sins (and there have been many), the United States has always purported to be on the side of democracy and freedom. If I got myself arrested while protesting the Vietnam War, it was because I felt that my country wasn’t living up to its true self.

Trump, unfortunately, has gotten me to acknowledge that the U.S. also has a Calormen side, a tyrannical and imperialistic impulse that associates with dictators while looking with contempt at freedom-loving nations. In the eyes of many, he has turned blood-soaked Iran into Archenland, which is to say into a small nation fighting valiantly against a bully. Iran appears to earned the right to use King Lune’s words against Rabadash:

By attacking our castle of Anvard in time of peace without defiance sent, you have proved yourself no knight, but a traitor, and one rather to be whipped by the hangman than to be suffered to cross swords with any person of honor.

Later, Lune is prepared to be magnanimous in victory:

“Your royal Highness needs not to be told,” said King Lune, “that by the law of nations as well as by all reasons, of prudent policy, we have as good right to your head as ever one mortal man had against another. Nevertheless, in consideration of your youth and the ill nurture, devoid of all gentilesse and courtesy, which you have doubtless had in the land of slaves and tyrants, we are disposed to set you free, unharmed, on these conditions…

DJT, of course, doesn’t believe that the United States should be constrained by “the law of nations.” Indeed, he would be as outraged as Rabadash if forced to submit to conditions:

“I hear no conditions from barbarians and sorcerers,” said Rabadash. “Not one of you dare touch a hair of my head. Every insult you have heaped on me shall be paid with oceans of Narnian and Archenlandish blood. Terrible shall the vengeance of the Tisroc be: even now. But kill me, and the burnings and torturings in these northern lands shall become a tale to frighten the world a thousand years hence. Beware! Beware! Beware! The bolt of Tash falls from above!”

DJT and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are seeking to dismantle any international agencies that would hold America accountable. These include not only war crimes committed in Iran but bombing small boats off the coast of South America and threatening neighbors Greenland, Cuba, and Canada.

It’s doubly ironic to watch this reversal happen given Lewis’s attempt to turn Middle Easterners into bad guys. While Lewis assumes westerners will identify with “free Narnia and the north” rather than repressive Carlormen— “I’m a free Narnian, says Bree. “Why should I talk slaves’ and fools’ talk?”—suddenly Rabadash’s depiction of westerners as barbarians appears apt.

In the end, Rabadash (thanks to Aslan’s magic) is turned into a braying ass and becomes known in history as Rabadash the Ridiculous. Trump is well on his way there. With the “No Kings” march in October and the mid-term elections in November, we may begin restoring America to its place as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

My easy identification with free Narnia, however, has taken a gut check. Before looking abroad, we need to deal with our own Tisroc (who thankfully will not reign forever).

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Using Stephen King to Reflect upon Tragedy

By Robin Bates | Published: September 22, 2026

Wednesday

A passage from a Stephen King novel returns to me from time to time as I think back to when we lost our oldest son 26 years ago. It was a fluke accident since normally Church Point on Maryland’s St. Mary’s River is a safe place to swim. In fact, we had taken Justin and his brothers to swim there many times when they were children. An abnormally wet spring had created dangerous currents, however, and one of them grabbed him and that was that.

To be sure, he had taken a slight risk. He jumped in fully clothed and wearing heavy leather boots. It was a strange enough action that some people, wondering what he was doing in the cold water, thought it a suicide attempt. When we talked to witnesses and people he had seen earlier in the day, however, we realized it was anything but. For the first time in months, the day was beautiful and he was feeling effervescent. Filled with the holy spirit (Easter had been the week before and he was an enthusiastic Christian), he ran up to the cross that overlooks the river, kissed it, and launched himself into the water. It was like a Baptismal cleansing.

In fact, we heard from someone that he had done this once before, emerging soaked and joyous.

I want to focus on the risk part, however, because that is what has me thinking of the Stephen King passage. In The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, nine-year-old Trish McFarland at one point asks her father if he believes in God. In reply, he first tells her what he doesn’t believe:

I don’t believe in any actual thinking God that marks the fall of every bird in Australia or every bug in India, a God that records all of our sins in a big golden book and judges us when we die—I don’t want to believe in a God who would deliberately create bad people and then deliberately send them to roast in a hell He created…

Then, however, he adds,

..but I believe there has to be something. 

After a pause, he continues:

Yeah, something. Some kind of insensate force for the good….I think there’s a force that keeps drunken teenagers—most drunken teenagers—from crashing their cars when they’re coming home from the senior prom or their first big rock concert.

He goes on to add other examples—a force that keeps most planes from crashing and that has preserved the world from nuclear conflagration—but it’s the first example that has stayed with me over the years. And not only because that force failed to protect Justin.

I think of my own leaps. I was hiking with my niece at Morgan’s Steep this past weekend, a lovely overlook in Sewanee that, at one point, features an almost vertical rock face around thirty feet high. I recalled climbing it, without a rope and wearing only Keds tennis shoes, when I was 11 or 12. There are enough holds, not evident from ground, that make the climb possible. Nevertheless, one slip and I could have easily been seriously injured or even killed.

I think also of a moment when, as a college kid, I crossed the highest level of the Roman aqueduct in Nimes, France. People weren’t supposed to be up there—one had to tiptoe between huge holes and a false step would have meant certain death—but it was there so my friends and I did it.

Although I can come up with two examples, for the most part I was a cautious kid. I think of risk takers far more adventurous than I, including anyone who rides a motorcycle, and wonder if King is on to something. Statistically speaking, more people should come to grief than actually do.

Trish’s father prefers the words “subaudible” and “insensate force” to “God.” It’s true that “God” brings unnecessary complications into the conversation. It certainly does in Justin’s case, who had attended four church services (!) in the 24 hours before he died, it being the weekend after Easter (April 30, 2000). His last words before drowning were “Jesus, God.” A wise Franciscan monk in Barcelona told me that young people Justin’s age are particularly spiritually attuned at his age (21) and that his spiritual questing had taken an unexpected turn.

I found the idea comforting because it led me to think that Justin was still searching in some form. I never for one moment thought of blaming God because, even though heaven is present “in a grain of sand” (William Blake), God isn’t a puppet master. I think of God rather as a primal force that delights in creation—it’s as though this force/God is endlessly discovering itself in beauty and complexity, including the complexity of evolution. By seeking to align ourselves with this force and becoming conscious of it, we discover further wonders, including works of art and scientific theories. 

Put another way, we use the brain and the mind with which we’ve been gifted in amazing ways. Ultimately, however, creation is so much bigger than we are—than we can artistically imagine or scientifically understand—that we can’t hope to grasp why bad things happen to good people.

A powerful articulation of this is God’s response to Job. Instead of offering an individual explanation, God presents Job with the magnificence of creation, which overwhelms the lesser explanations (including the idea that Job somehow brought his suffering upon himself or that God is unfair). Although Job could remain buried in his sorrow, an alternative is to open himself to creation, which is what Julia and I tried to do as we emerged from grieving. Like Trisha’s father, we worked from the premise that “some kind of insensate force for the good” governs the universe. We sought ways to join our tiny efforts with that force, including reaching out to others (students especially) who were suffering.

In other words, I do not think the universe operates like the blind happenstance that Thomas Hardy refers to in his poem “Hap” (see my post on it here). Rather, I believe something closer to Dante’s closing line in The Divine Comedy: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (“the love that moves the sun and other stars”). 

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Blake’s Celebration of the American Revolution

By Robin Bates | Published: September 21, 2026
William Blake, depiction of Orc, the spirit of revolutionary energy

Tuesday

In observance of America’s 250th anniversary, which lasts all year, I recently read William Blake’s America: A Prophecy, which celebrates the revolutionary energies that the world was witnessing in Britain’s American colonies. As I read it, I couldn’t help but substitute DJT for King George. Those of us who feel that we need a new revolution to revitalize the nation can find inspiration in Blake’s poem. 

In America Blake draws on a complex cosmology that he invented and that I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that the spirit of revolution is embodied in the figure of red Orc (nothing like Tolkien’s orcs), who is chained like Prometheus. Bringing him food is a silent woman, daughter of the deity that has imprisoned him. To her he reveals his longing for freedom, which captures the excitement that America’s fight for independence stirred in many:

“Dark virgin,” said the hairy youth, “thy father stern abhorr’d; 
Rivets my tenfold chains while still on high my spirit soars; 
Sometimes an eagle screaming in the sky, sometimes a lion, 
Stalking upon the mountains, & sometimes a whale I lash 
The raging fathomless abyss, anon a serpent folding 
Around the pillars of Urthona, and round thy dark limbs, 
On the Canadian wilds I fold, feeble my spirit folds. 
For chain’d beneath I rend these caverns; when thou bringest food 
I howl my joy…”

Inspired by this “dark virgin,” Orc breaks his chains, leading her to speak for the first time:

Soon as she saw the terrible boy then burst the virgin cry. 

“I know thee, I have found thee, & I will not let thee go; 
Thou art the image of God who dwells in darkness of Africa; 
And thou art fall’n to give me life in regions of dark death. 
On my American plains I feel the struggling afflictions 
Endur’d by roots that writhe their arms into the nether deep: 
I see a serpent in Canada, who courts me to his love; 
In Mexico an Eagle, and a Lion in Peru; 
I see a Whale in the South-sea, drinking my soul away. 
O what limb rending pains I feel. thy fire & my frost 
Mingle in howling pains, in furrows by thy lightnings rent; 
This is eternal death; and this the torment long foretold.”

Blake is well aware that revolutions involve “howling pains” along with the joy of freedom, as Ken Burns’s series on the American Revolution makes clear.

We next get a glimpse of both George III, described as “the Guardian Prince of Albion [England],” and America’s revolutionaries. The “Warren” in the list may be Mercy Otis Warren, who according to Frank Hudson was a female Thomas Paine:

The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent,
Sullen fires across the Atlantic glow to America’s shore:
Piercing the souls of warlike men, who rise in silent night,
Washington, Franklin, Paine & Warren, Gates, Hancock & Green;
Meet on the coast glowing with blood from Albion’s fiery Prince.
Washington spoke; Friends of America look over the Atlantic sea;
A bended bow is lifted in heaven, & a heavy iron chain
Descends link by link from Albion’s cliffs across the sea to bind
Brothers & sons of America, till our faces pale and yellow;
Heads deprest, voices weak, eyes downcast, hands work-bruis’d,
Feet bleeding on the sultry sands, and the furrows of the whip
Descend to generations that in future times forget.—

In defiance of the king, Orc roars out his exhilarating call for freedom, tapping into images from Jesus’s resurrection as he does so: 

The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up;
The bones of death, the cov’ring clay, the sinews shrunk & dry’d.
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing! awakening!
Spring like redeemed captives when their bonds & bars are burst;

Let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field:
Let him look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air;
Let the inchained soul shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years;
Rise and look out, his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open.
And let his wife and children return from the opressors scourge;
They look behind at every step & believe it is a dream.
Singing. The Sun has left his blackness, & has found a fresher morning
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear & cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion & Wolf shall cease.

Orc continues on in this strain. In the following passage, Urizen is the white patriarchal version of God who has perverted Jesus’s message. (This is the God that many Trump churches worship.) As Orc and Blake see it, true virginity is not to be found in “pale religious lechery” but in open and free sexuality. What state religion condemns as “lustful fires” are actually holy, with humans being able to walk through them without being consumed. That’s because “everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.” The “soul of sweet delight,” Blake assures us, “can never be defiled”:

The terror answerd: I am Orc, wreath’d round the accursed tree:
The times are ended; shadows pass the morning gins to break;
The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts thro’ the wide wilderness:
That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, & none shall gather the leaves;
But they shall rot on desart sands, & consume in bottomless deeps;
To make the desarts blossom, & the deeps shrink to their fountains,
And to renew the fiery joy, and burst the stony roof.
That pale religious letchery, seeking Virginity,
May find it in a harlot, and in coarse-clad honesty
The undefil’d tho’ ravish’d in her cradle night and morn:
For every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d.
Fires inwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consumd;
Amidst the lustful fires he walks: his feet become like brass,
His knees and thighs like silver, & his breast and head like gold.

Two passages especially hit me given that, on this 250th anniversary, we have a president who would dearly love to be a king. The first passage shows George III realizing that he can’t subdue the soul of America. In our America, the Trump resistors are our Washington and Paine and Warren. The king laments,

America is darkned; and my punishing Demons terrified
Crouch howling before their caverns deep like skins dry’d in the wind.
They cannot smite the wheat, nor quench the fatness of the earth.
They cannot smite with sorrows, nor subdue the plow and spade.
They cannot wall the city, nor moat round the castle of princes.
They cannot bring the stubbed oak to overgrow the hills.
For terrible men stand on the shores, & in their robes I see
Children take shelter from the lightnings, there stands Washington
And Paine and Warren with their foreheads reard toward the east…

For his part, Orc—now called “Boston’s angel”—points out how, in George III’s world, truth, trade, generosity, the laws of peace, and the virtues of abstinence have all been perverted:

He cried: Why trembles honesty and like a murderer,
Why seeks he refuge from the frowns of his immortal station!
Must the generous tremble & leave his joy, to the idle: to the pestilence!
That mock him? who commanded this? what God? what Angel!
To keep the gen’rous from experience till the ungenerous
Are unrestraind performers of the energies of nature;
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science,
That men get rich by, & the sandy desart is giv’n to the strong
What God is he, writes laws of peace, & clothes him in a tempest
What pitying Angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs
What crawling villain preaches abstinence & wraps himself
In fat of lambs? no more I follow, no more obedience pay.

People trembling for telling the truth? The ungenerous as unrestrained performers of the energies of nature? Generosity become a means by which to get rich? Megachurch preachers advocating GOP austerity measures as they take in millions? It sounds all too familiar.

In response to Orc’s rebellion, George sends forth his forces, which Blake describes as plagues:

His plagues obedient to his voice flew forth out of their clouds
Falling upon America, as a storm to cut them off
As a blight cuts the tender corn when it begins to appear 

In the end, however, the plagues boomerang as America’s spirit of freedom in turn travels to Europe, where it challenges the crowned heads. While they seek to escape, withdrawing into their decaying fortresses, Orc will not be denied:

Stiff shudderings shook the heav’nly thrones! France Spain & Italy,
In terror view’d the bands of Albion, and the ancient Guardians
Fainting upon the elements, smitten with their own plagues

They slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built heaven
Filled with blasting fancies and with mildews of despair
With fierce disease and lust, unable to stem the fires of Orc;
But the five gates were consum’d, & their bolts and hinges melted
And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, & round the abodes of men

Would Blake be disillusioned by what America has become? Actually, he predicted it. In another poem (“The Grey Monk”) he has the most succinct statement I know of revolutions going bad:

The iron hand crush’d the tyrant’s head
And became a tyrant in his stead.

As it channels Orc’s longing for freedom, the revolution to overthrow Trumpism must be non-violent. Above all, it must never lose sight of thevision that drives it. It must “look up into the heavens & laugh in the bright air.”

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On Autumn and the Preciousness of Life

By Robin Bates | Published: September 20, 2026
Van Gogh, After the Harvest (after Millet)

Monday

As we look ahead to autumn, which officially begins tomorrow, I share one of my favorite seasonal poems. Looking back, I’m amazed that I have never devoted a blog post to John Keats’s “Ode to Autumn,” which I first encountered when a high school freshman and felt instantly compelled to memorize.

I didn’t know then that it was his last poem, that he would be dead a year later of tuberculosis. It does indeed feel like a valedictory to life, with the poet experiencing the full fecundity of nature as only someone dying can. The sun may be going down and the gathering swallows may be preparing to head south, but life feels so rich that, like the bees, the poet feels that “warm days will never cease.” Because the end is near, one can set down one’s scythe and concentrate only on the beauty of the moment. Life may be oozing away but, like the cider press, it is happening slowly and in such a way that one can watch it for hours.

We are like the small gnats, “borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies”—which is to say, vulnerable to whatever existence dishes out to us. And although spring gets all the publicity when it comes to birdsong, autumn has its own music. In the darkening landscape of the soft-dying day, with the sunset touching “the stubble plains with rosy hew,” the poet becomes attuned to nature’s chorus: gnats mourn, mature lambs bleat, hedge crickets sing, the red-breast whistles, and swallows twitter.

Many years ago I wrote about my dear friend and colleague Alan Paskow when he was dying of cancer. In the evenings we would often sit silently on his dock looking out upon a Potomac River inlet and reveling in nature’s beauty. He could fully appreciate how precious the moment was and I was privileged to see the world through his eyes.

In Alan’s memorial service, we listened to a recording Alan had taped in his final weeks of him reading a similar poem, Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” in which he also explained why it meant so much to him. (You can listen to or read the recording here.) In it he said/wrote, “There is something that lures us and that helps us and that enables us to see things, feel things, perceive things—that gives a kind of density and, for lack of a better word, significance to what we do.”

We shouldn’t have to be dying to see heaven in a wild flower and hold eternity in the palm of our hand (to borrow from another Romantic poet). “Ode to Autumn” shows us how to live into the world around us. 

Ode to Autumn
By John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
    Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
    With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
    And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
        To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
    With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
        For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
    Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
    Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
    Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
        Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
    Steady thy laden head across a brook;
    Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
        Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
    Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
    And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
    Among the river sallows, borne aloft
        Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
    Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
    The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
        And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

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Trust the Lord for Spiritual Food

By Robin Bates | Published: September 19, 2026
Nicholas Poussin, The Israelites Gathering Manna

Sunday

Today’s Old Testament reading is the Exodus story of manna in the wilderness. Reformed slave trader John Newton has a good poem on the episode.

The Israelites are understandably complaining about starving to death. “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread;” they cry out, “for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”

Relaying God’s word, Moses assures them, “At twilight you shall eat meat, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread; then you shall know that I am the Lord your God.” And so it happens:

In the evening quails came up and covered the camp; and in the morning there was a layer of dew around the camp. When the layer of dew lifted, there on the surface of the wilderness was a fine flaky substance, as fine as frost on the ground. When the Israelites saw it, they said to one another, “What is it?” For they did not know what it was. Moses said to them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat.”

There’s a follow-up that Newton references in his poem:

Then Moses said to them, “No one is to keep any of it until morning.” However, some of them paid no attention to Moses; they kept part of it until morning but it was full of maggots and began to smell. So Moses was angry with them.

Best known for “Amazing Grace,” Newton contends that we must continually renew our faith in God since not doing so will lead to “the worms of pride and strife.” He may be talking about how religious awakening can degenerate into sterile ideology. Although (to quote “Amazing Grace”) God may have brought him through “many dangers, toils and snares,” he’s not home free yet. He must continue to renew that faith daily lest it become a “notion[ ] resting only in the head.” 

Manna Hoarded
By John Newton

The manna favored Israel’s meat,
Was gathered day by day;
When all the host was served, the heat
Melted the rest away. 

In vain to hoard it up they tried,
Against tomorrow came;
It then bred worms and putrefied,
And proved their sin and shame. 

‘Twas daily bread and would not keep,
But must be still renewed;
Faith should not want a hoard or heap,
But trust the Lord for food. 

The truths by which the soul is fed,
Must thus be had afresh;
For notions resting in the head,
Will only feed the flesh. 

However true, they have no life,
Or unction to impart;
They breed the worms of pride and strife,
But cannot cheer the heart. 

Nor can the best experience past,
The life of faith maintain;
The brightest hope will faint at last,
Unless supplied again. 

Dear Lord, while we in prayer are found,
Do thou the Manna give;
O! let it fall on all around,
That we may eat and live. 

In my experience, renewing one’s connection with God is like exercise: if one doesn’t attend to it regularly, the heart suffers. However meaningful past experiences have been, “the brightest hope will faint at last/ Unless supplied again.”

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