Music gives a soul to the universe,

wings to the mind,

flight to the imagination

and life to everything.” — Plato

Strangely enough, a midwife--and not his mother--baptized Antonio Vivaldi the moment he was born. Those who speculate on such things claim tiny Antonio might have been sickly, while others point to an earthquake that hit Venice just then, an event that may have traumatized the new parents. And then there are those who say that his mother rushed things along and thereby devotedly consecrated her new baby boy for the priesthood.

If that's true, she was successful because her son became a priest, a musical priest, at a small church (for Italy and Venice)--this one, Chiessa Della Pieta, a gorgeous place long ago connected to the Devout Hospital of Mercy (Ospedia del Pieta), an orphanage for abandoned street kids, where Vivaldi wrote and taught music for thirty years--and where the young women he taught performed that music. 

It seems a dream today, but we were there for a concert some years ago, right there  in the very church. It was a pure blessing to sit where his students performed, and listen to his Four Seasons, done with a sextet of strings and a harpsichord, by musicians who throughout the text appeared to speak to each other through the movements of the music, to gift each other with the beauty they created.

I think he was right about music--Plato, that is: "music gives a soul to the universe." It opens us into believing that there's reality above our own, it makes us smaller than we might want to think of ourselves and fills us with a joy that isn't our own.

That Vivaldi concert came to mind--maybe I should say came to my soul--on Saturday night at another cathedral, this one also storied, a magnificent creation pioneer Luxembourgers right here in the neighborhood built a century ago as tribute to the God they worshipped. St. Mary's stands atop the highest hill in Sioux County, where its twin towers insist on being seen from miles away. It's a church, but it's also a monument that reveals the story of a people who came to the unbroken ground of Siouxland prairie and simply insisted their God be worshipped in the kind of magnificence and beauty they remembered at home.

Saturday night St. Mary's was the setting for a candle-lit concert by a quartet of strings whose artistry and accomplishment, to my mind and my soul, was no less a pure blessing as that concert we attended in Vivaldi's Venice. The music--familiar show tunes--may well  have lacked the heft of The Four Seasons, but the concert itself, its artistry and grace, accomplished by extraordinarily good and local musicians, in an atmosphere redolent with devotion and worship, will be, at least to me, just as memorable as Vivaldi's work.

We're at war again in the Persian Gulf. The news promises more of the same.

What we heard in church on Saturday night was an alternate vision for human kind, music that "gives a soul to the universe" and out distances the world of fiery anger and brutish belligerence, a reality vastly more important than military strength--candle-lit life, not death.

 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “Many are the woes of the wicked. . .”

 Maybe so.  Maybe not. 

Proportionally, in this world do the wicked suffer more or than the righteous?  I’m not sure.  Some forms of suffering the righteous undergo, in fact, aren’t even background music in the lives of really bad people.

 But that’s a topic for another time.  Give me a minute or so to brag up my granddaughter.

When, years ago, my son and his girlfriend came to a relatively congenial parting of the ways, it was tough on him.  My guess is that it was tough on her, too, but I know it was tough on my granddaughter, who’d come to nearly worship the ground her uncle’s girlfriend walked upon.

How does one explain a break-up to a four-year-old?  Her father told her what she had to understand was that people changed.  That seemed to help.

The next day, at day-care, she ambled up to her teacher with the news that her uncle wasn’t going with his girlfriend anymore. 

 “Oh, really,” the teacher said. 

 “Well, you know,” Jocelyn said, deadly serious, “people change.”

 Her teacher told Jocey’s mom that she had all she could do not to laugh.

 I don’t know that Jocelyn told her teacher a truth she’d totally digested, or if her mind was acting like a tape recorder; but if she understood her father’s explanation, then I’m pleased because at four years old she’s arrived at the level of wisdom that some (many?) don’t achieve until much later, if ever.

We’re talking about wisdom here, I suppose, and today’s passage brings to mind the word wisdom because I’m not so sure as David is that he’s exactly right about the claim he so brashly offers us.  In my world, the wicked aren’t always woeful; sometimes, like it or not, they prosper.

We don’t have to look all that far to find an entirely contradictory appraisal right here in the Psalms—in 73, famously, the plight of the wicked looks a great deal different:  “They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong.  They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills.”  No woes there, no not one.

The Bible, it seems, is probably a whole less squeamish about contradiction than its readers are.  What seems true in one verse seems a whole lot less so just down the block.  How do we make sense of such things?

 Eugene Peterson, in his “Introduction to the Wisdom Books” in The Message, claims that “the Psalms are indiscriminate in their subject matter—complaint and thanks, doubt and anger, outcries of pain and outbursts of joy, quiet reflection and boisterous worship.”  It’s all here in this book.  “If it’s human,” he says, “it qualifies.”

 The richness of this immodest claim is not that it is forever true.  The essential joy of what David claims about the woes of the wicked is the rich human happiness he feels in forgiveness.  About the specifics, maybe he’s not to be trusted; after all, he sings a different song later in another concert. 

 But about the big picture, he’s on the money—and the big picture in Psalm 32 is the triumph of forgiveness.  About that, there’s very good reason to brag. 

Ashes at Lent

As far as I know there was no sign that begged passers-by to take a handful along and bring it home.  He says himself that he did what he did so that when he returned home he could tell the story. Maybe we should consider those ashes something of a souvenir of his visit to Buchenwald, a concentration camp as bad or worse than any of the others with memorably horrifying names. Just a week or so later, he'd visit Dachau. More horrible? How does anyone compare horrors anyway?

Buchenwald was his first visit once the war was over and cleanup had begun. It's difficult to imagine how anyone could be unaffected by what the troops found.  

In the center of the camp was the crematorium, surrounded by a high stone wall. Unwanted prisoners, the sick and the maimed, were brought to this building at night and as soon as they stepped inside the wall they slid down a chute into the basement and were killed instantly. An elevator took the dead bodies to the main floor, where they were cremated. I counted five ovens in the crematorium. Human ashes were dumped on a pile outside of the camp.

This is the way he wanted to remember in his diary. Now, here's the act: "I took a handful of human ashes out of one of the ovens and sent it home to tell the story."

Home, eventually, was here. It's an odd to think about, but I can't help but wonder whatever happened to that little pile of ashes he grabbed from the pile. He sent it home, he says. Did he include, in his letter to his wife, an explanation of what it was, or did he wait to get home to try to explain? Even eye-witnesses couldn't believe what they saw, what they'd seen, dead bodies like cord wood, fifty boxcars stacked with shrunken bodies ready to be shipped somewhere even more hideous. Where? How might he have 

The chaplain's own remains have been in residence at a local cemetery for years and years, as have those of his wife. When he died, did his children find that jar or sack or whatever he kept those ashes in? Did they know? Did he tell his children the story? How? When? Maybe some years later, he simply dispensed with them himself when he started to feel as if the story lost currency--or when he realized he no longer could muster the strength it took to tell the story? When he himself passed away, did his wife hold on to the ashes or drop them in his office wastebasket?

It's Lent. A week or so ago, many of us wore ashes across our foreheads as if to recite aloud the OT passage about "dust to dust." I couldn't help thinking about that vial of human ashes the chaplain sent on home to tell the story, in part because we use ash and not dust to adorn our foreheads. Ash, I'm told, is more adhesive. 

It's not the same really--I mean using Buchenwald ash, or ash from any other human source. It's not easy to find hope in a cupful of human ashes taken from a pile outside a crematorium. If that kind of human ash were the stuff of the forehead cross, it would bespeak the sins of others more so than my sin, than my mortality, than the brevity of my life. Wouldn't be Lent exactly, or would it?

For me at least, it's difficult not to wonder just where the ashes he sent home could be today. 

Then again, the best guess is that they've simply disappeared into the dust from which they'd come.

"Whose Glory Fills the Sky"

But as I was saying, yesterday it was the second verse of "Christ  Whose Glory Fills the Sky" that stopped me. 

Dark and cheerless is the morn
unaccompanied by Thee;
joyless is the day's return,
till Thy mercy's beams I see,
till they inward light impart,
glad my eyes, and warm my heart.

 Again, the good Rev. Wesley's intent is not a chore. What he's saying is that morning's opening moments--the hour or so before dawn--is "dark and cheerless" if it opens on its own, outside of the redeeming love of Christ. Only if "Thy mercy's beams" are present can my eyes be made glad and my heart be warmed. Beauty is in the Son, not the sun.

For a moment--correct me if I'm wrong--a dawn, even a knock-out gorgeous dawn, isn't a metaphor or a symbol. It's not much of anything if I don't have Jesus. 

I don't care to quarrel with Charles Wesley, with his theology or his poetic talent. But when we sang that second verse, I was struck by how perfectly understandable the spirituality of the hymn was, there, on display: this world's darkness is cheerless without Jesus. I get that. I understand.

But let me try to put it this way: a dawn is gorgeous only if I know the Lord. 

Traditional Native religion would have some trouble understanding the dualism there, the strange sense that white folks require a God who stands somewhere outside the dawn to make the dawn the dawn. Traditionally, they might want to say that God is dawn. He's also rocks and trees and skies and seas. God is the great mystery of life itself, the Great Spirit who lives and breathes in all things, including those shaggy bison. We honor that God when we honor the Missouri River and don't ruin it with pipelines because that river isn't a symbol or a metaphor. 

But then, I think everyone could agree with Wesley's spirited final verse:

Visit then this soul of mine,
pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
fill me, radiancy divine,
scatter all my unbelief;
more and more Thyself display,
shining to the perfect day.

 One of the peculiar results of 19th century mission work among First Nations was its somehow surprising successes. But, if you were Native and if you believed that all of life is religion, then picking up another form of religion wouldn't be particularly troublesome, would it? Sure, we'll become Christian, some said. What's the fuss?

 

For a time, this morning, as I wrote these words, the sky outside my window a gorgeous peach stole lay along the shoulders of the eastern horizon, a soft orange that faded into yellow, then to blue up high before the sun made its grand debuted. Now, long swaths of sunlight stretch over the fields east to west, scattering darkness. It's Midas time--everything wears a bit of gold. This morning's cloudless dawn is not glamorous, but it's beautiful.

"Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies" a wonderful hymn, and I'll sing it joyfully again soon, I hope. Wesley's a wonder, isn't he? 

But he's not the psalmist:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech,

and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

There is no speech nor language,

where their voice is not heard.

Wesley's good, but I'd like to believe that David got it right.

Whose glory fills -- i

 

Charles Wesley wrote something like 9000 poems in his life--can you imagine? It's a wonder he slept. Nearly 6000 were hymns. Even today, his work is all over the hymnbook--yours, mine, and the folks down the street. His brother, John Wesley (two of the 18 Wesley kids), became more famous as an itinerant preacher who had a hand in begetting the entire movement called Methodism.

If Charles thought it difficult to live with his sibling's celebrity pulpiteering, his envy certainly doesn't show in his work. Give a listen: "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," "And Can It Be," "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing," "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today," and "Rejoice! the Lord Is King!"--all Charles, all his work, and there's hundreds more.

John Wesley is an important historical figure in the history of Protestantism, but brother Charles' creations are still sung hundreds of thousands of times every Sunday. Not bad for a kid brother.

We sang one yesterday, an old fave some consider as beautiful as anything Brother Charles ever wrote. "Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies" is a paean to Jesus, the light of the world. Its stunning poetry is rich and thoughtful. You can sing "Christ, Whose Glory" without thinking about the path it takes through life; but if you listen to the praise his poem creates, it's easy to see why the old hymn won't soon be laid to rest. 

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ, the true and only Light,
Sun of righteousness, arise,
triumph o'er the shade of night;
Day-spring from on high, be near;
Day-star, in my heart appear.

The major motif is clear enough--Jesus, the son is Jesus the sun. Just as dawn--I'm sitting beside it right now--chases away darkness, so the Son sweeps hope and joy and life to a darkened world. What's real and what's symbol are sweetly entwined.

But in church yesterday it was the second verse that stopped me. 

(A little needle-picking theology tomorrow)

Great-grandpa

I'd become convinced before that night that whatever ills had befallen, I was vastly more capable of crying than I'd ever been, tears for no apparent reason. Check that--not "for no apparent reason," but for reasons that seemed unlike any ordinary reason for tears. Just did more of it. I didn't think I was depressed about being crippled, nor was my condition such that I absolutely couldn't determine what kind of future I--and we--would have. What I recognized about myself was that I just shed tears more easily than I had before the stenosis (and what the heck is "stenosis" anyway?). 

Maybe there was a cause/effect thing going on here, I thought--the stenosis somehow made me shed tears, froze something in my heart just as it had frozen something in my legs and in my balance and made me look soused when I walked, which I couldn't really do at all without a walker.

I cried a lot--not about my condition, not because I'd won a badge that hung from the rearview, not because just getting in an out of our Subaru was a dangerous challenge, an event I hadn't yet accomplished without sinking like a baby in a high-chair.

Not only that, the phone call I'd just taken didn't pass along news that was at all surprising. I knew our granddaughter was about to have her baby, our first great-grandchild, knew that baby was going to be a little girl, and knew the pregnancy had gone extremely well. I was no more surprised about her birth than I was concerned. Everything went great, my wife told me when she called.

"And what was the name again?" I asked. My wife wasn't altogether sure herself--"It was 'heaven' spelled backwards," she said, "and I don't know how to say it exactly." That would take a while. But that's the headline that night: "You're a great-grandpa!!!" 

So I cried. Wasn't scared a bit, wasn't worried. I was 76 years old, but I couldn't remember the last time I actually wiped tears away tears of joy, and that's what they were--tears of joy. 

And lo, it was good. It was very good. Dang right. I'd been at Heartland Manor for three days. I needed 'em maybe--tears of joy. 

Heartland was my third hospital in about a month--two stints just up the road, a week an hour away in the city, and now Heartland Manor, when the hospital staff determined that my condition would require more than the kind and level of care I could get closer to home. I'd just then become a resident of a home that was that for people--some younger, some older--who mostly had conditions I couldn't help thinking had gone farther south than mine.

Anyway, there I lay in my little hospital bed, wiping away tears of joy, when a nurse came in. Dissembling wasn't an option--my eyes were smeary and I was sniffing. 

"What's the deal, Jim?" she said and stood right over me, blessedly, as nurses do.

I told her, and just like that something in me squeezed another half-dozen out. Voice warbled, nose ran--I was a mess. Tears of joy.

Here's the story: she cried too, which only guaranteed that this blessed spell I was in was going to keep leaking waterworks.

Another nurse just happened by. "Tell her, Jim," nurse #1 said, both of us squeezing Kleenex. "Girl or boy?" she said. 

"Girl," I said.

"And what's her name?" she said, reaching for the box.

"I don't know," I said. I didn't. "H-e-a-v-e-n spelled backwards or something."

That's when Nurse #3 dropped by, having noted all the commotion. Just like that a quartet of blubbering sobbers started singing, all of it, all of that wet stuff sprung from sheer joy. 

This fourth bawler had heard the name before. She pulled a pen from her garb, grabbed some paper from somewhere, and spelled it out in big blocks: "N--E--V--A--E--H," she wrote because she didn't want Great-grandpa to be a fool should the new mom call. She hung the baby's name up above the tv.

I stayed at Heartland Manor for two and one-half months. Still can't believe it. And I told my wife when finally I could get in and out of the car without spilling all over the driveway, that it wasn't good for my marriage to be there that long because I fell in love at least a dozen times.

It's true. Let me tell you about the night my wife called to tell me about the baby--our great granddaughter, the first. 

Don't mind my sniveling.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

“. . .but must be controlled by bit and bridle

or they will not come to you.”

 Just a few years ago, Bernie Ebbers, who is, according to Forbes, “perhaps the most powerful American businessman ever to face a criminal trial,” was found guilty and went to jail, his sentence yet to be determined.  His crimes?—securities fraud, conspiracy, and filing false documents.

 On hearing the verdict, Ebbers hugged his wife and step-daughter, and then cried.  His lawyer continues to plead his innocence.

 Bernie Ebbers was a celebrity entrepreneur who turned a small, long-distance company in Mississippi into one of the largest communications providers in the world, WorldCom.  He was WorldCom’s CEO from 1985 to 2000, and, when his company’s stocks were flying, his personal worth reached close to a billion.  Today he’s dressed in a yellow uniform provided by the state. 

 The government’s case was that, faced with a more grim business future than he’d seen in years, Bernie Ebbers cooked the books. In decisions that involved millions of dollars, he flat-out lied. 

 I feel closer to Bernie Ebbers than I do to Kenneth Lay, the other CEO who was, several years ago, deeply discredited by gigantic financial fraud, who presided over the power giant Enron before its demise.  I feel closer to Ebbers because I know where he went to church when he was a boy. I know the songs he sang in Sunday School.  We learned our catechism out of the same books. We are both hyphenated-Dutch and were reared in the Reformed faith.

 What Kenneth Lay and Bernie Ebbers share, in addition to the notoriety that has come from the demise of their businesses and their having been colored by accusations of deceit, is this alarming truth: they both taught Sunday school.

 The purgative power of tragedy, Aristotle said, was that we suffer, all of us, when basically good human beings fall on their faces, not because of what others do to them, but because of what they’ve done to themselves. We see ourselves in those people because tragic stories begin in good hearts. 

 A significant part of me hurts for Bernie Ebbers—not because I believe him to be falsely accused or convicted, not because I don’t regard his crimes as evil. I find myself in him, even though my sourest weaknesses don’t include greed.

The second half of verse 9 of Psalm 32 bites and bites hard.  God is speaking, as David hears him, and what he says is that too often his own people can be mulish.  Without a bridle, we go where we damn well please, even good, good people.  Too easily, maybe, we bray like that mule in Jeremiah, “sniffing the wind in her craving—in her heat who can restrain her?” As Spurgeon says, “We should not be treated like mules if there were not so much of the ass about us.”

Today, I hope—and I should pray—that Bernie Ebbers has been jerked back to a path he knows well, one that’s straight and narrow. 

But in its tragic dimension, what his story and his fate make clear is that I too—too often—require a steel bit through the teeth.

Wish it weren’t so.