MUSIC at Midnight is the Moral Rearmament play now touring the country, and its message is that of Frank Buchman d’outre mer. If you have a problem, if the world has problems, try two minutes’ quiet time, tune out your own brain waves, and you will get the divine multiplex broadcast. Every hour on the hour— just keep tuned to Station WGOD. Long ago a quiet time taught me, at least, that Buchmanism was the opiate of F. Russell. That mid-week matinee of MRA renewed the lesson.
The beans-and-cod quatrain about the Lowells and the Cabots needs an additional verse, to judge by the “Boston citizens” listed in the program as sponsoring Music at Midnight, for the God-conversant Cabots (four) and the Lowells (two) are now on the same party line with Senator Edward M. Kennedy. In the peaceable kingdom that Frank Buchman left behind him, the John Birchers lie down with the New Frontier, to be joined in pasture by the consuls of Germany and France among the assorted others. The recipe for this Secular Front embraces a Gilbert-esque selection of names: Shattuck and Sullivan, Adams and O’Keefe, Bigelow and Berenson, Christian Herter and the Very Reverend Michael Walsh, S. J.
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