Bait and Wretch

I'll tell ya, you gotta keep your guard up all the time. The happy-clappies have gotten a helluva lot more sophisticated than gathering in a circle with guitars singing Kum Ba Yah. I used to be able to sniff them out a mile away (sometimes literally). But now, these baby boomers have infested the jockey shorts of the synod, and now are pulling strings of everything from the CCM, the CTCR, CPH, and every other SNAFU group in the LCMS. See Are Eh Pee!

And they're sneaky now. It used to be they could be identified by pony tails and denim. Don't get me wrong, there's still those out there. But the real sneaky ones are the nicely dressed, clean cut boomers. They're R. Lee Ermey on the outside, but John Lennon on the inside. They may look and act like the nice kid selling AAL insurance, but on the inside is a Che Guevara wannabe. They may try to look like bankers, but they're still the same pot-heads they were while going to Concordia.

Case in point.

I get this record from CPH called "Music Promotional Library 2007". I'm all for free stuff. So I open the box, and the damn things are smaller than a '45. I put it on the turntable, and it makes a helluva hiss. One of the residents here starts laughing at me. After I punched him in the nose, he explained that these records won't play on the old record player. Hell, who said anything about old? I just got this thing 40 years ago. It even has that new 8-Track deal on it.

Anyway, he gets me his record player, and we give a listen to the first tune. The booklet says it's supposed to be the Te Deum. Cripes, I don't know what page of TLH that came from, but it sure wasn't any Te Deum I ever chanted. But it could be worse, I figure. At least it wasn't rap-and-roll or whatever they call that racket these days. There were no tambourines or 12-string guitars.

I skip over to track 3 - Veni Sancte Spiritus. Now this is looking promising. Could it be possible that CPH is reforming its image as a purveyor of useless trinkets and trying to act like a church publishing house? Well, a fella can dream, can't he?

The music opens with a Latin chant - which is sufficiently medieval to scare away the campfire crowd. But then it happens. I knew this was too good to be true! The tinkly piano, the wispy, whiny vocal that sounds like a choir of ten-year old girls, the nauseating sound of "contemporary worship." The damned chameleons at CPH are trying to sneak in "contemporary worship" into my chapel under the radar by doing it in Latin. The whole tune is typical LCMS tripe. Whiny. Feminine. Campy. Flutey. Fruity. But every few bars, there is a half-assed attempt at "chanting" in Latin.

The "emerging church movement" meets the "Ablaze!(tm) movement." The result? I need to make a movement. In fact, I think I'll save myself the trouble right now and just stick my finger down my throat.

I shot a note to that kid Ratzinger and told him to watch out - given the latest indult giving the green light to the Latin Mass and all. As we all know, when the LCMS gets a cold, the pope sneezes.