Tag: faith

Grace, Actually

jono55

Jimmy Carter passed away this week, at the age of 100 years. He had been our 39th president of these United States. Carter’s entire adult life was one of devotion to public service. When he was voted out of office, he picked up a hammer and went to work with Habitat for Humanity. He was also a humble man who taught Sunday School and who traveled the world as a private citizen, working always for peace, human rights, and the dignity of all men and women.

He and I shared a love of music in nearly all of its forms, without either of us being able to play an instrument. I learned just this morning that one of his favorite songs was Amazing Grace. So that’s two things that he and I shared.

Amazing Grace, by Judy Collins

The contrasts between this good man and the one recently re-elected could not be greater. Words like decency, self-sacrifice, faithfulness, moral rectitude, unselfishness, courage, honesty … all of these words have been used for many decades now in describing Mr. Carter and his works. None of them are ever used in describing our incoming president.

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From The New Yorker

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In the language of the land of divorced people, there are basically two groups, unceremoniously named dumpers and dumpees. Robin and I were dumpees. Neither of us had found the process of getting divorced to be pleasant in any way, and when we began dating were both still nursing bruises of varying degrees. We fell in love and in 1992 were married. We had decided that rather than have a subdued and quiet marriage ceremony, perhaps at a midnight chapel on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, we would instead celebrate how good can sometimes alchemically arise out of unhappy events.

Part of our planning was to sit down with the church organist, who was in charge of helping people select music for such ceremonies. We told her that one of the selections we wanted was Amazing Grace, a song we both admired. At first the organist knitted her brow “Well, we usually play that at funerals … but … hmmm … just a minute … if you think about the lyrics… hmmm … they could also apply to happier occasions, couldn’t they?” We nodded assent, and into the program it went.

What we couldn’t have predicted is what the large group of friends we had invited would do with it. Robin and I stood at the front of the church and facing the minister, while those friends began to sing the hymn behind us. We had chosen only the first three verses to be sung, and the first one was performed in a rather standard and church-y way, but the next two steadily increased in volume and passion to become expressions of joy that swelled and filled the church. We received lots of presents from those same people, but what I remember most clearly thirty-two years later is their gift of that song.

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
   That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
   Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
   And grace my fears reliev’d;
How precious did that grace appear
   The hour I first believ’d!

Thro’ many dangers, toils, and snares,
   I have already come;
‘Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far,
   And grace will lead me home.

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Amazing Grace, by Walela

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From The New Yorker

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For me, she nailed it.

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Amazing Grace, by the Scottish National Pipe and Drum Corps and Military Band

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So this morning we begin the laborious process of learning to write a new date on our correspondence. I usually complete the task by mid-July, but then I was never a quick study. Six months later I’m right back in a muddle once again. Hardly worth the trouble, really. If any of you receive a letter from me, you’ll pretty much know that it was written in 2025 whether I put it on the page or not, so not to worry.

We’ve got our work cut out for us in the upcoming 12 months. Slightly less than half of the American citizenry decided that they would like to have a degenerate for president and so in three weeks he takes office. He is assembling a band of quacks, charlatans, and marauders to assist him in cleaning out the vaults, men and women whose curriculum vitae under normal circumstances would disqualify them from any job other than brigand. I have no crystal ball, but like my great-great-grand-daddy might have said, you don’t get apples from a shit-tree, son.

Hang on, friends, it’s going to be a ride. It might help to remember that to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose. At least that’s what good ol’ Ecclesiastes said, and I’ll go with him every time.

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Turn, Turn, Turn, by the Byrds

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Alarum!

jono55

There are way too many alarmists working in the weather service. We were told to expect 1-2 feet of snow in the mountains above 8000 feet along with sub-zero temperatures. None of this sounded good to Robin and I as we tried to plan our Thanksgiving journey to Durango. We hunched over the weather app on my phone on Wednesday, waiting and watching, finally calling the pet sitter at mid-day to tell her “Game On.”

Predicted driving conditions

Our wills were in order, we had food for two days survival, enough warm clothing, and a reliable vehicle. We said our prayers and climbed into the Outback, looking tenderly at our little home for perhaps the last time. Off we went, anticipating treacherous patches of glare ice, hard drifts across the highway that could make you lose control, and trucks skating sideways right at us coming down a mountain two-lane road.

What we found was no snow at all on 99.4 % of the road, and temperatures in the thirties. The countryside was beautiful under a couple of inches of new and trackless snow. It was a breeze.

Actual driving conditions

I tried to imagine the home life of those prognosticators, how each flutter of a leaf or errant drop of moisture must send them into fearful spasms where they rush their families into basements or attics, handing out stored hardtack when their little ones cried out from hunger.

Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once.

William Shakespeare: Julius Caesar

I’m looking for a hive of valiant meteorologists. Growing less interested in what the Chicken Little variety has to say.

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Elon Musk is naming people that he might recommend to be fired when the new administration takes over. Naming people might be thought of as reckless of life (by uncharitable folks like me) when he and his new orange BFF have a large following of blackshirts and brownshirts who like nothing better than than to be given an excuse to hit people.

The richest man in the world publicly picking on ordinary citizens … anybody see a problem here?

Where’s my dictionary … let’s look under “bully” … ahhh … there we are. Perhaps that should be the name of his Musk’s new quasi-official-department: The Office of Cravens.

He fits right in with his new pal, President-elect Bonespurs.

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(Ran across a line from this poem, and just had to look it up.)

When Great Trees Fall

by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory,suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die
and our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

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There are those who speak our language, this English we trample on and murder daily, in such a way as to ennoble it. Or perhaps to show how innately noble our mother tongue really is. Maya Angelou had one of those voices. Each syllable ringing clearly as any bell. No mumbling. No idiosyncratic elisions. Poetry.

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If We Make It Through December, by Phoebe Bridgers

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So it is December. I must now join the consumer herd in search of some small remembrance for a handful of people. It is a dangerous thing, this entering a large and crazed group of people which has already been in motion for at least a month now. The herd slavers as it passes, every pupil dilated, every nostril flared, every breath labored. They have only just left one of the seemingly endless Black Fridays behind, and are looking desperately over their shoulders at signs reading: Only (X) shopping days till Christmas.

I will do my duty. I am no shirker. If overconsumption is required of me, overconsume I will. I am a full-blooded American, after all, and once I am galloping with the rest of the swarm it pays onlookers to be cautious of those sharp hooves and horns!

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