The Ghosts of Woodstock

August 14 to 16, 1969.

I wonder if you have noticed that this year is the year of Anniversaries? 400 years ago, Henry Hudson sailed up the Hudson River. 200 years ago, Robert Fulton sailed The Steamship along the same Hudson River. And 40 years ago today, the three day Peace Fest began in Bethel, NY, named Woodstock. All those events took place just outside my Window on the Hudson.

When Hudson sailed the Half Moon up the river that now bares his name, Native Americans who had lived in the region for 12,000 years saw the strange creature move up the river like an ancient sea monster. His voyage marked the beginning of a new age in the New World, the age of European colonization in the region.


In 1809, Robert Fulton received the first patent for his steam boat. In 1807, he had sailed the Clarmont up the Hudson River claimed by the newly founded United States of America, wrested from the sovereignty of the British just twenty years before. Fulton's voyage heralded the beginning of a new age for the New Nation, the age of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1969, August 14 to 16, another epic event nearby the shores of the Hudson River, the mega outdoor peace revival in the tradition of the camp revivals more than a hundred years before, took place. Hundreds of thousands of youth gravitated together in the quest for peace in a three day music fest. That event launched the voyage of a million ships, people throughout the world who had been awakened to the hope of peace in our time. That marked the beginning of another revolution in the USA, the Peace Revolution.


I lived during the Woodstock event in another place so today I see the ghosts of Woodstock rather than real memories. The ghosts who hoped for peace, yet sought that through unbridled license. During the time of Hudson, and the time of Fulton, Asia knew the kind of peace that the ghosts of Woodstock sought. They sought peace through the use of opium and courtesans. The peace of the Chinese aristocrats, sexual freedom and opium, had become the peace of American youth.

How in the world did we get peace and freedom confused with drugs and illicit sex? How in the world did we become so very confused? Why did so many of us cast away common decency in the name of freedom and love and peace? What set the conditions for that great delusion?

Peace had been in the air. Our parents' generation had been engaged in a life and death struggle with Fascism in Europe and Asia. They had no illusion about the way peace would come to the world. Peace would come through the barrel of a cannon and values worth living and dying for, not through the hashish water pipe and sexual abandon. After victory had been declared over the armies of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the world geared up for another war, a more subtle and difficult to understand war. The war for peoples' hearts, minds, and souls erupted in the life and death struggle between international communism and democratic capitalism.



Here came the rub, though. The sermon of communist preachers---that we are all brothers and that we should do away with greed, ownership of property, and live like saints, giving to others according to our ability and receiving according to our need---struck a cord with what the Woodstock generation knew to be true. What is, indeed, true. God implanted that desire in every person's heart!

Yet, although we believed in our hearts that message, something seemed wrong about the preacher. Like Elmer Gantry, preaching with a tongue of fire while living a life of selfish seduction, the communist preachers seemed to have another agenda. Rather than set us free from our chains, they desired to chain us. Rather than free the people from opium that befuddled us, they sought to befuddle us with opium. Rather than show us the way of love towards all people, they showed the way of infidelity and broken hearts. They offered a dream of peace, love, and freedom but gave us a nightmare of murder, death, and slavery.

Yet the dream still lives because the message is true, although the messenger was a false prophet. In our hearts we know that peace, love, and freedom are the highest ideals. Our hearts did not betray us, we betrayed our hearts. The ghosts of Woodstock would have us believe that drugs, free sex, and communism will set us free, will bring us peace, and will blossom love in our hearts. How very, very wrong they are. They gave us drug addiction, broken families, and lives of unbridled license.


Banish those ghosts! In their place, let the heavenly hosts enter triumphantly! They herald a peace, love, and freedom that comes through holiness, through living as the children of God. The Heavenly Hosts will usher us into another Revolution on the Hudson. They speak to our knowing hearts of love between all people of all religions, of all races, of all ages, of all nations. Not a love couched in drugs and illicit sex, but a love embracing the sanctity of families as well as the sacredness of the person. There we will find the cornerstone of peace, love, and freedom, not in the ghosts of Woodstock.