Two Winter Tales

Two Winter Tales

“Cold Pew”

Predestined, we are so comfortable with
where we are going in this life and the next
that we hardly notice how our padded pews
have frozen our privates.

                          

“Snow Journey”

January's snow caterpillar shimmers toward sky,
bearing no idea what will become of him next.

“...it will decide EVERYTHING” (re: my previous post)

When I was in school everybody was reading (or at least carrying around a copy of) Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. I didn’t read it (nor did I carry it around to make it look as if I might be). I am not bragging about this; it is one of many wonderful things I missed while getting “my education.”

Recently The Sun magazine ran an excerpt from Siddhartha on its “Dog-eared Page” page. That’s where the editor prints “selections...from works that have deepened and broadened our understanding of the human condition.” It seemed time to read a small portion of something I’d missed, and what I read made me miss it.

Siddhartha says to his friend and fellow truth-seeker Govinda:

“Love, for me, Govinda, is clearly the main thing. Let seeing through the world, explaining it, looking down on it, be the business of great thinkers. The only thing of importance to me is being able to love the world, without looking down on it, without hating it and myself - being able to regard it and myself and all things with love, admiration, and reverence.”

I wonder if my life and outlook and “in-look” would have been different had I read and incorporated those few words forty or fifty years ago. Maybe they would not have struck me then as they strike me now, because idealism was everywhere when I was young. And they are idealistic words, are they not? ...though I wonder what viable alternative there is to them if we expect to live with ourselves and with one another in this world.

Merry Christmas...or else

There are those among us who believe that, at this time of year, everyone should say and/or be willing to hear, “Merry Christmas.” It’s as if there’s something wrong in not celebrating this distinctly Christian holiday, even you happen to be Jewish, or Moslem, or Hindu, or something else, or “none of the above.”

In the hands of some, “Merry Christmas” is not just a greeting, but a challenge, even a threat. “What, you don’t celebrate Christmas? Well, shame on you. You must not be a real American.”

Retailers who instruct their employees to greet customers with “Happy Holidays” or the like are absolutely doing the right thing. If I were greeted at checkout in the local grocery store with “Happy Hanukah” I’d probably think it was a joke, unless I were terribly offended. Public schools that do not allow Christian celebrations of the holidays are right as well; frankly, I don’t want my tax dollars being used to promote my religious tradition by someone who may understand it in a way that I believe is wrong.

So, if you meet me on the street and we are strangers and you want to share some sense of the joy of the season with me, just wish me “Happy Holidays.” I will know you wish the best for me, however I take “the best” to be, and that will be enough. I trust Jesus would approve your respect for me as a fellow human being, and I will strive to show the same to you.

Several years ago we received a Christmas card that carried a poem by Pedro Arrupe, SJ. It was produced by the Sisters of Joseph of Baden, Pennsylvania. I offer it to you, in the  broadest, most inclusive sense of what Christmas means.

Nothing is more practical than
finding God, that is,
than falling in love
in a quite absolute, final way.

What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.

It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you will do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read,
who you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Fall in Love,
Stay in Love,
and it will decide
EVERYTHING.

Happy Holidays to you, my gentle readers.

A Wonder of Artists

Our Cleveland Singers’ Club sponsors an annual competition for male college and beyond student singers...male classical student singers. Aspiring rock, country, hip hop, jazz, and folk singers need not apply, or so it seems.

These young men dream of careers in opera, oratorio, art song, early music, and such arcane musical forms as are hardly noticed by the media and merit only the barest mention at the Grammy’s. For years they work and study and practice and then practice some more. If they succeed they may earn a comfortable living. Only the most wildly successful make it big and strike it rich. They know that the odds are against them, that most of American society doesn’t care, and that few of their contemporaries have any idea at all about what they are pouring their souls into.

I heard two of our contestants sing last Sunday afternoon. They sweated out their few minutes before four judges and a handful of an audience, but were worked very hard to make it look easy. One of them was an African-American in his 40’s - twice as old as many of the others - who’d apparently just started his studies. I’d love to know what drove him to want to learn pieces by Handel and Ravel at this time in his life. Perhaps he walked away with a $1,500 prize; but whether he won anything yesterday or not, he also received the invaluable experience of having been heard and critiqued. It’s something these artists do countless times on their way to any sort of success at all. Their art is exacting and its standards are astronomical...yet still, few notice.

Why do they do it? The question is close me because one of our daughters is perfecting her craft in the world of classical music. It was one thing when she worked for and earned a bachelor’s in music education, but when she wanted to go on and get a master’s in vocal performance I really wondered about her sanity, even though I had no doubts about her gifts. She earned that degree, and is indeed doing what she loves to do...and working retail to help pay the bills. It’s the way of classical singers. Why do they do it?

Let me guess from the outside listening in: it’s because they have fallen in love. Someone, somehow got them to listen to - maybe even put before them - a piece of music and they fell in love with a rare beauty. The object of their love is the power, the intricacy, the diversity, and the passion of the most extended and complex of Western music’s expressions.

They might have had other infatuations on their way to finding their true love, and they might still eye and enjoy and even be good at other forms of music. But the reason they do what they do is that have given their hearts to that enormous body of classical music that has moved generations of listeners,and even today continues to inspire and challenge and bring joy to people around the world.

I applaud all young men and women who are pursuing careers in art forms that continue to celebrate and to shape our understanding of human nature and history, of how and why we are here and for what. They are among our greatest hopes for our future. They deserve our notice, our encouragement, our gratitude...and a decent living.

Home to Ghosts and Memories

We spent two nights in northern Wales last summer, staying at Galedffrwd Mill B&B near Bethesda. Our host told us about a long-abandoned graveyard near the crumbling foundation of a stone church, and we went to find it toward dusk of a gloomy day. The next morning we returned to take a few pictures, which in no way capture the eerie aura of the previous night's visit.

Bethesda is part of a huge slate quarrying area of Wales. Whole sides of mountains remain ripped and shredded as a result of once-thriving, now lost, industry.

Most of the markers in this cemetery appeared to us to be made of slate. They surely mark the resting places of tough quarrymen and their equally tough families. They seemed to be in as good a shape as they day they were cut and inscribed...lasting monuments to the people whose labor blasted and cut them from earth's grip.




If you want to remember me, make me a grave marker of slate, not granite. In the meantime, if you want to wonderful place to stay in a fascinating corner of the British Isles, book a room at Galedffrwd Mill B&B.

Happy Halloween!

Mid-October Pansy Honors All Late-Bloomers AGAIN

Last week I cut back the sprawling remains of a peony, and this delicate pansy - a leftover from two seasons past - smiled at me. During the summer I had felt sorry for the poor plant’s ungainly stems, no match for the summer’s extremes of heat and rain. It was a being that held no promise. For some reason I decided to let it be, and forgot about it. But on October 10 it stood up to surprise me.

Proof of life’s tenacity? Perhaps, but something more than basic cell survival is at work here. I saw the pansy’s blossoms as proof of beauty’s durability. In the face of adversity beauty, when graciously protected and not yanked from its soil too quickly, can remain...can even surprise us and bring a smile to our faces.

Degrees of Truth

Sunday the Plain Dealer ran a piece by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer in which he took off (as usual) against all things Obama. His last point described the Occupy Wall Street protesters as “Starbucks-sipping, Levi’s-clad, iPhone-clutching,” and as “indignant indolents saddled with their $50,000 student loans and English degrees...” Obama’s crime is understanding their cause.

I can let all of Krauthammer’s searing charges against Occupy’s forces pass except the one about having “English degrees.” ’Tis the unkindest cut of all. Garrison Keillor will not take it lying down. I won’t either.

Why would a columnist who uses the English language to make his living speak disparagingly of English majors? Because he is one of that company of writers and talking heads who abuse the English language to make their points. That way they can make a living off readers who have little regard for language’s primary responsibility to represent truth--literally or figuratively or however truth can be represented.

For Krauthammer and his fawning readers the difference between truth and falsehood is of no consequence if what he writes confirms their mutual prejudices. He uses the English language as a blunt weapon to pummel his targets into submission. He cheapens English by using it carelessly, randomly, and oh-so-very cutely. A person with an English degree who has learned anything at all can spot his kind in a minute and call their bluff. They are called “elites,” though I personally know few English majors who are elite in a convincing manner. But of course, he doesn’t care about them because he’s got his readership, and he’s got editors who have little concern for truth in opinion pieces if it sells papers.

There is a vast difference between an article that reasonably presents cases for and against matters such as Occupy Wall Street and an article that pitches junk words and phrases into the wind and hopes they land on some “enemy” somewhere. English majors know that, which may be why they are protesting corporate excesses that attempt to masquerade as reasonable corporate profit.

The Plain Dealer’s Kevin O’Brien is a second-rate minion of Krauthammer. Rush Limbaugh presides as glorious leader of the pack from out in talk-radio land. Sadly, the left also has those who forge English into blunt weapons: Maureen Dowd for one; Michael Moore for another. 

Krauthammer claims “the real (?) Tea Party”, unlike Occupy Wall Street, has “a program--less government, less regulation, less taxation, less debt.” All together now, you indolent English majors, “Do those things, one-by-one or taken together, constitute a ‘program’?” Not in any sense of that word, no.

One last confession: my bachelor’s degree is in philosophy. No doubt there are plenty of us elite philosophers out there in the streets, too. Something about searching for an honest columnist, I suspect.