The Water Is Wide

Funnyman

True story:

A lawyer hosts a holiday party at his home. Standing in the kitchen (where people often gravitate) with two other couples (the lawyer's wife was entertaining guests elsewhere in the home) the lawyer is telling a story of having a conversation with other lawyers, one of whom was an ardent feminist. In the course of that conversation, the lawyer had expressed the wish that a certain government official he had dealt with had "possessed a little more testosterone" (meaning, in this case, personal courage) and the feminist had jumped all over him for implying that only men had courage. The lawyer had apologized to the female colleague by observing that she was certainly correct and that she obviously possessed far more testosterone than any male he knew.

All the listeners laughed but one female, the wife of a friend, and herself an ardent feminist. She lashed out.

"You think everything's a joke, don't you?" she said angrily. "Nothing is serious, everything's amusing."

The lawyer stopped laughing and fixed her with a dead-fish stare. "No, I take humorless, self-important assholes very seriously," he said flatly.

The feminist turned beet red, turned on her heel, and stormed off. Her husband glanced at the lawyer, raised his eyebrows, shrugged, and followed his wife. The remaining male in the kitchen was grinning and shaking his head in a manner that indicated that the lawyer was, once again, simply being himself. The friend's wife, the remaining female in the room, looked at him with a wry smile and said "Well played, funny man."

Sometimes, the funny man is halfway decent. Sometimes he's just a prick.

Locked inside your head
Do you realize the things you said
Never made sense?

Nostalgia For The Unknown Home

While walking late one afternoon this past week, the sun was low in the sky and obscured by a thin layer of clouds. I looked up at it and saw it's orange-yellow glow burning behind the white-gray cloud cover and felt something I'd not felt since I was a teenager, walking on crisp fall nights along the streets of my small town. Then, I couldn't explain to myself, much less to anyone else, why I so loved to leave my home after dark and roam the empty streets alone. I'd see the lights through the windows of the houses I'd pass and take comfort in my isolation, my separateness, the darkness that hid me from the light. I was outside, I was looking in, I was separate, I was alone.  And the damnedest yearning would grow within me, a longing not to be within the homes I passed, but for something that I could not define yet was intensely important to me.

I would return home filled with a paradoxical mix of melancholy, satisfaction, and contentment. I had absolutely no idea why I was feeling what I felt or what it meant.

In my walk of a few days ago I felt it again. This time, I would describe the yearning as a nostalgia for a place and time I had never consciously experienced, and, moreover, could not describe. It hit me in a moment of absolute stillness, when there was no sound of children playing, automobiles passing, dogs barking, or even wind blowing. A rare moment of prefect stillness. The feeling startled me, overwhelmed me, then passed out of me like the tide moving back out to sea.

I wonder if anyone else ever feels such moments. My wife claims that she does not.

I also sometimes wonder if this is a symptom of the fact that we are not made for this earth, and what we are feeling is nostalgia for a home we unconsciously know we are presently separated from and to where we unconsciously yearn to return.

Brother Wind, Tim O'Brien and some of the best musicians of Ireland, the UK and America

The Road To Hell

"It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity. How could all this be possible without the merciful love of God, pouring out His grace upon us? Can there be any doubt where wars come from and where peace comes from, when the children of this world, excluding God from their peace conferences, only manage to bring about greater and greater wars the more they talk about peace?"
--Thomas Merton

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

So Little Time

Song of Secret Love
--John Clare

I hid my love when young while I
Couldn't bear the buzzing of a fly
I hid my love to my despite
Till I could not bear to look at light
I dare not gaze upon her face
But left her memory in each place
Where ere I saw a wild flower lie
I kissed and bade my love goodbye

I met her in the greenest dells
Where dew drops pearl the wood bluebells
The lost breeze kissed her bright blue eye
The bee kissed and went singing by
A sunbeam found a passage there
A gold chain round her neck so fair
As secret as the wild bee's song
She lay there all the summer long

I hid my love in field and town
Till e'en the breeze would knock me down
The bees seemed singing ballads l'er
The fly's buss turned a Lion's roar
And even silence found a tongue
To haunt me all the summer long
The riddle nature could not prove
Was nothing else but secret love

Ron Sexsmith, "Secret Heart"

The Way We Danced Was Not A Dance

Old fogey Jessie Winchester sings a sweet serenade to Doo Wop days gone by and makes the much younger Neko Case cry. Inter-generational connection doesn't get much better than this.

Where All Men Are At Home

The House of Christmas by G. K. Chesterton

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

To anyone who stumbles across this post, have a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I hope that everyone finds their way home for the holidays.

In the Bleak Midwinter, The Gloucester Cathedral Choir

God Will Forgive Me, But I...

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
---Woody Allen

        Regret
       --Charlotte Bronte

 Long ago I wished to leave
'The house where I was born;'
Long ago I used to grieve,
My home seemed so forlorn.
In other years, its silent rooms
Were filled with haunting fears;
Now, their very memory comes
O'ercharged with tender tears.

Life and marriage I have known.
Things once deemed so bright;
Now, how utterly is flown
Every ray of light!
'Mid the unknown sea, of life
I no blest isle have found;
At last, through all its wild wave's strife,
My bark is homeward bound.

Farewell, dark and rolling deep!
Farewell, foreign shore!
Open, in unclouded sweep,
Thou glorious realm before!
Yet, though I had safely pass'd
That weary, vexed main,
One loved voice, through surge and blast
Could call me back again.

Though the soul's bright morning rose
O'er Paradise for me,
William! even from Heaven's repose
I'd turn, invoked by thee!
Storm nor surge should e'er arrest
My soul, exalting then:
All my heaven was once thy breast,
Would it were mine again!

I regret the simpaticas I've pissed away through sheer pissantedness. One in particular, who was too much like me to survive me. Yet, I can't apologize for having been someone I no longer am. You live, you learn, you love again. And again. And again.

Until, you pray, you finally get it right.

Tripping Over Molehills

G.K. Chesterton, from his essay, "The Advantages of Having One Leg":

I grant that those who have serious wrongs have a real right to grumble, so long as they grumble about something else. It is a singular fact that if they are sane they almost always do grumble about something else. To talk quite reasonably about your own quite real wrongs is the quickest way to go off your head. But people with great troubles talk about little ones, and the man who complains of the crumpled rose leaf very often has his flesh full of the thorns. But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere. No one ever had a mystical premonition that he was going to tumble over a hassock. William III. died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose that with all his varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a mountain. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man (not William III.) to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path--bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements, waiting at railway stations, missing posts, finding unpunctuality when we want punctuality, or, what is worse, finding punctuality when we don't. It is of the poetic pleasures to be drawn from all these that I sing--I sing with confidence because I have recently been experimenting in the poetic pleasures which arise from having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot, with the only alternative course of standing on one leg like a stork-- a stork is a poetic simile; therefore I eagerly adopted it.

Today was a day of miniature disasters and minor catastrophes, by the end of which I was settling down with my beloved, pounding down a Shiner Bock, and spitting out, with increasing vehemence, my contempt for the idiocy and venality of both my enemies and my allies. About a minute into the storm, my wife eyed me and asked me why I was so angry about what, in the long run, was all dust in the wind.

There's a reason that I begin each day with the silent prayer, "Thank you Lord, for the gift of sleep. Thank you for the gift of Jan."

The Painful Truth

My wife called me on my interest in singer Tift Merritt. She doesn't buy my theories about Catholic school girl freckles or a striking resemblance to a old girlfriend. No, when I told her I liked Tift's composition "Stray Paper," she uttered a two word judgment that cut to the core: "Nice Jugs."

She's not yielding one inch to my protests that I'm not that shallow. You don't live with someone for over thirty years without being able to dispense with all the horse hockey and illuminate the truth with a bright light. "Nope. Jugs."

Damn, I'm glad she can't wield a five iron.

For lovers of good music and spectacular water-carrying vessels everywhere, here's Tift in Austin singing about a bitter case of love lost in Houston.

Frivolous Pursuits

A reader of a former blog where I posted music and poetry asked me, "What's with the poetry?" In the course of a little back-and-forth, he confessed that while he enjoys my thoughts on other matters, especially spiritual and religious themes, he's not much for poetry, and wonders what connection I see between "frivolous pastimes" like poetry and music videos, and the more serious business of exploring my faith.

I'm not offended by his observations. To some degree its a matter of personal preferences and sensibilities. I don't like all poetry and all music, but I like a good deal of both. Furthermore I strongly disagree that poetry and music, singly or in combination, can't profoundly aid a person seeking to explore nature both human and divine.

As a Catholic, I believe that God communicates with us not merely on a spiritual level, but on a physical one, as well. The very meaning of the word "sacrament," as used by the Church, is that it is a visible manifestation of God's grace. Touch, sight, sound, smell, all of the senses, are engaged to communicate to us some of the most moving and profound manifestations of love, in a way that mere words, spoken or written on a page, standing alone, fail to do. The entire human being is a receptacle, and all of his physical, emotional and psychological "senses" can be conduits that profoundly supplement and enrich the meaning perceived by his intellect.

But why struggle to communicate what I want to, when Catholic apologist and publisher Frank Sheed, writing over 60 years ago, explained it so much better than I ever could?

...But far more than novels, the theologian might gain by reading the poets - and not only because they might improve his style, though that is more important than he always understands. In that awareness of reality which is so vital, the poet really has something to give the theologian.

    Wordsworth's
                        
                    The moon doth with delight
                    Look around her when the heavens are bare

and Virgil's "Sunt lachrymae rerum" witness across eighteen hundred years to the same truth: the poets cannot be happy with the idea that nature is dead. They feel the life in it, though they do not always know what the life is that they feel. The Christian is exactly the reverse: he knows what the mystery is, but for the most part does not feel it. He knows as a fact of Christian doctrine that God is at the very center of all things whatsoever, sustaining them by His own continuing life above the surface of that nothingness from which He drew them: but he does not experience things that way. What the Christian knows as a truth, the poet responds to as a living fact: he sees things so. That is the one-half of his gift. By the other half, he can communicate his experience, so that we see them so, too. Thus the poet can help many people who know a great deal more about creation than he does. He can help them by making creation come alive to them.
---Theology and Sanity

Sometimes, I feel a certain truth, yet don't know how to express it in prose, or don't know how to express it with the force and power that I feel within myself at that moment. I find that during those restless moments a song, a poem, or both, alone or in combination, seem to communicate that truth and that feeling in a powerful way. Whether I'm particularly astute in selecting poems and music that express such feelings or truths accurately is debatable. Nevertheless, I've had a couple of experiences where people have either commented, or e-mailed me, and told me that a particular post that consisted of nothing more than, say, a Chesterton poem and a Groban ballad, spoke to them in some important and moving manner. Even if only one person had ever shared that experience with me, it would still mean that, through this young medium, two people who without it would never have encountered one another, have shared a communication that meant something profound to each.

There are few things better in life than two couples sitting before a fire in a comfortable family room, a couple bottles of decent red wine, or a pitcher of margaritas, on the coffee table between them, talking and laughing and sharing with one another the best that each has to offer. While a blog post is a poor substitute, nevertheless, it can be a means of discovery and communication on many levels.

The remaining number of our "small hours" dwindle with each day. To someone who spent the lion's share of his life heading in the wrong direction, I can't move quickly enough in the other direction, a direction in which the profound truths are to be discovered and the best of them are to be shared. If a little bit of poetry and a little bit of music aids that discovery and that sharing, then I'll employ those tools of expression and communication. If they don't work for a particular reader, either because I haven't chosen well, haven't much of substance to express, or the reader simply doesn't "get it," there's always the next blog down the cyber-highway, reachable with a click of a mouse.

Regardless, I don't see either poetry or music as "frivolous" vehicles for communication, whether the subject matter is the "serious business" of my faith or other "truths" about the human condition.