Our Lives Have Started For Real

I re-read The Life of a Day by Tom Hennen – https://www.doe.mass.edu/mcas/pdf/2013/259294.pdf – and, after some meandering that took me back to this post from January 28, 2018.

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From the poem The Life of a Day by Tom Hennen:

“We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t the one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real.”

I read this and, once I got past the guilt of conviction, a couple of things came to mind. 

A Don Williams song: “I got high hopes that tomorrow, is gonna be better than today.  It don’t look like its comin’, I know, buy why not believe it anyway.”

And Matthew 6:34: “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

It is so easy to reject or set aside today in hopes of a better tomorrow, especially once you get to, say, 10:00 a.m.  It is easy at that point (sometimes earlier) to tell myself “no, this isn’t the one I’ve been looking for.”  But of course, today is the hand dealt today, and who knows what tomorrow’s hand will be, if it is dealt at all.  So, how do I play this hand?

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Funny how four years and a pandemic allow you to read something through different lenses.  Here, I am now wondering why I left off the portion of Hennen’s poem immediately below the portion quoted above:

“Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.”

It is, in the midst of it, hard to imagine that any day in the last two years “is going by perfectly well-adjusted….”  And while I, like Don Williams, “have high hopes that tomorrow is gonna be better than today,” today is here, now. And I am still wondering, how do I play this hand.

Sad Songs

Pardon me for a minute while I dwell on sad songs.

I was listening to Mary Gauthier, singer/songwriter, on a recent Broken Record podcast, when this line stopped me cold – “I got holes I can’t fill, and bills I can’t pay.  I’m gonna walk in the water ‘til my hat floats away.” 

Ranks right up there with John Prine’s lines from Sam Stone:

“….There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes….

But the gold rolled through his veins,

like a thousand railroad trains,

and eased his mind in the hours that he chose,

while his kids ran around wearing other people’s clothes.”

Or perhaps Bill Anderson and Jon Randall’s Whiskey Lullaby released by Brad Paisley and Allison Krauss. 

“She put him out, like the burning end of a midnight cigarette.”

I’m not really sure what it is about sad songs, but they deliver such a punch.

Okay, I’m done — for now.

New Math

Today, from Howard Thurman, Deep Is the Hunger:

“All of life is a planting and a harvesting.  No man gathers merely the crop that he himself has planted.  This is another dimension of the brotherhood of man.”

I read this recently and it has been rolling around in my head.  After some time I noted a subtlety that escaped me initially.  Thurman’s use of “and” in place of “or” (planting AND harvesting) is significant.  In that word choice he tracks the sentiment from St. Francis of Assisi: “For it is in giving that we receive.”  That is to say that, in mathematical terms, when you give X you don’t necessarily lose X.  That I can’t quite explain it logically doesn’t make it any less real.  It is what I think of as the Almond Joy conundrum (from the old commercial) – “With Almond Joy,  You can share half and still have a whole.” 

But then it occurs to me that math is not my strong point, nor God’s.  Moreover, concepts like giving and receiving, planting and harvesting, particularly when the “commodities” are grace, love, and forgiveness, to name a few, just don’t fit into any mathematical formula.

Happy New Year

I know of no better New Year’s prayer than this one – Through the Coming Year – by Howard Thurman:

Grant that I may pass through the coming year with a faithful heart.

There will be much to test me and to make weak my strength before the year ends.  In my confusion I shall often say the word that is not true and do the thing of which I am ashamed.  There will be errors of the mind and great inaccuracies of judgment which shall render me the victim on my own stupidities.  In seeking the light, I shall again and again find myself walking in darkness.  I shall mistake my light for Thy light and I shall shrink from the responsibility of the choice I make.  All of these things, and more, will be true for me because I have not learned how to keep my hand in Thy hand.

Nevertheless, grant that I may pass through the coming year with a faithful heart.  May I never give the approval of my heart to error, to falseness, to weakness, to vainglory, to sin.  Though my days be marked with failures, stumblings, failings, let my spirit be free so that Thou mayest take it and redeem my moments in all the ways my needs reveal.  Give me the quiet assurance of Thy Love and Thy Presence.

Grant that I may pass through the coming year with a faithful heart.

I know of no better New Year’s song than this one – One Good Year – from Slaid Cleaves:

In these I am reminded that most of my wounds are indeed self-inflicted, or, to take Thurman’s harsher note, most often I am (ugh!) “the victim of my own stupidities.”  Still, God sees past the dunce cap firmly planted on my head and steps in to “redeem my moments in all the ways my needs reveal.”  That, more than anything else, should make this a —

Happy New Year!

Riding On This Speck Of Stardust

In Deep Is the Hunger Howard Thurman provides some perspective, reminding us that while it was once thought that the earth was the center of the universe, we now understand that earth is “a mere speck of stardust whirling mathematically through space,” and that we live in the northern part of the western half of that “speck of stardust.”  This is not, however, cause for despair, it only [only!] means: “significance must be redefined in terms more useful than those of space occupancy.”  That is “in addition to my own intrinsic worth, I must find some movement or cause or purpose that is more significant than my own life.  I must find something that gives some radical test for all that is highest and best in me….  In my relationship with people, with organizations of whatever character, with things, I must be working from one center, my concept of the highest.”

Okay, but I gotta say that some days, I am content just riding on that spinning speck of stardust.