Category Archives: observation

Spirit Speak

Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed!,” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit. I Corinthians 12:3, NRSV

In some of the occult films, werewolves can’t touch silver and vampires are kept at bay by garlic and crosses. In the same kinds of movies, the demons disguised as humans can’t touch crosses or holy water without harm, and can’t say the words God or Jesus. While such things make for interesting plot points, Paul isn’t writing about them. The power of words and speech isn’t that simple.

Paul has already mentioned idols that cannot speak, the ones people have left behind when the Spirit led them to follow Jesus. But what about idols that can speak, living people who entice with words? Just because someone is a gifted orator, or seems to be hijacked by the Spirit to speak in tongues, does not mean that the words are the Word of God (another name for Jesus). So how to tell the difference?

Look beyond the delivery to the content of what is being said.

Are the words honoring Jesus and his commandment to love God, self, and neighbor? Do the words point the way to an ever expanding inner life and an increasing generosity toward others? Then those words say Jesus is Lord.

Do the words shrivel the inner life, diminishing rather than deepening? Do the words demand devotion to someone or some ideal other than God and the coming reign of love? Does the speech vilify neighbor and justify harming self and others? Then they are a curse rather than a blessing.

In this age of so many loud voices and a cacophony of words, it’s a good idea to put them to the test before trusting their sources…

La Paloma, DeGrazia

It’s You I Like

Tiny Mister Rogers

I met Mister Rogers in 1994 when he came to offer his television ministry experience to the seminary media department. He was in person as he was on television. It took him half an hour to walk across the quad because he would stop and listen to every person who came up to meet him – most telling him how much he meant to them when they were children. Many left in grateful tears, twice blessed because they got to say thank you for the kindness he had given decades earlier.

There was a quiet approachability about Fred Rogers that changed the air around him. He wanted good things for other people, especially the very young and vulnerable, and he spent his life working to bring those good things to fruition. He was that rare and rarely recognized person: a living benediction for all he met.

I remember that every time I see his likeness on my table – a gift from my own child.

Every Single Thing

I was looking for a focus for today’s words when Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers appeared in the movies we think you’d like line of my streaming feed. I’ve seen the movie already, but it brought to mind the Mister Rogers that keeps me company in my work space. I took this picture, planning to crop it down to just Fred:

Everything Is A Gift

Looking to crop most of this out, I saw in this image what I hadn’t noticed before – not when I began writing on gifts, not the twice weekly watering times, and not when I gathered and placed all these things on my sons’ repurposed side table: Mister Rogers is only one of seven gifts in this picture.

Come to think of it, one of eight. I’m going to include the gift of eyes to see what surrounds me as an eighth…

What gifts are gathered on your table?

Unexpected

It was a gift I didn’t request, didn’t really want, but received on Christmas, 1985. When I finally slipped the album out of the cover just after New Year’s and a day before meeting up with the person who gave it to me, I just wanted to be familiar enough with the songs to prove that I’d actually listened to it. But there was something about Brothers In Arms that kept me playing it over and over again. Walk of Life and Money for Nothing were instant favorites, but it’s the title song that haunts. I’d seen enough of pain, loss, and death to realize how little I knew of pain, loss, and death. Listening to Brothers In Arms, I understood the Vale of Tears, the Shadow of the Valley of Death in a whole new way – Biblical imagery wed to life. And that we cause the suffering and death ourselves far too often.

For this one song, it would be on my top ten list…but the rest of the album is amazing, too.

Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms, Vertigo Records, AIR Salem, Montserrat and Power Station (NYC),1985

There’s a thin line between Saturday night and Sunday morning…

History Lesson, history lesson…

I first heard Fruitcakes the song driving from New Jersey to New Hampshire, somewhere on the Mass Pike. I stopped off at a strip mall music store in Plaistow, New Hampshire, and bought the newly released album on cassette so I could play it for the last hour of the drive to my parents’ house in Barrington. I’d always liked Jimmy Buffett, but not enough to pull the car over to buy his latest. But for a song that fills me with delight and makes me think, I will (Lyle Lovett’s Church from Joshua Judges Ruth was the second one that got me to pull over).

It’s a wonderful mix of covers and original songs, poking fun at and holes in the boring, question-ending, rigid answers to life, the universe, and everything – and just plain fun to sing along to. Jimmy Buffett was a master at poking fun rather than making fun – no malice or bitterness. Thirty years later, the whole album is still on my most frequently listened to list. To take life and all its complexity seriously, and to hold it lightly; to delight in what life brings, even the mistakes. To lighten the burdens of others, even for the length of a song, is a gift. And a life lesson…

Jimmy Buffett, Fruitcakes, Margaritaville Records, May 24, 1994

It Takes Two…and four more to complete the band

It’s only 34 minutes long, put out in the beginning of 1963 by Impulse!Records. Every time I listen to it, I hear something new – or I understand something emerging that I hadn’t before. Not one note feels forced in this conversation, and there’s almost an inevitability to one note following another. How is it that the living give-and-take of jazz can feel almost predetermined? It’s a musical mystery.

It makes me wonder about all the many choices that brought me to this point in life – the where of it, the ones I call family and friends, and all the other particulars that would not have been the same had my life taken a different road on this life’s journey. If I hadn’t, then there wouldn’t be…What would the particulars of this life I call mine be? If you hadn’t, then there wouldn’t be…Fill in your own answers.

Had Duke Ellington and John Coltrane recorded a different take on all seven of these songs, I’m sure it would still be on this top ten list: the spirit would be the same even if the particulars within the frame of the songs weren’t. I’m inclined to think the same is true of life in general.

Still, I’m grateful that the years God has granted me have brought these particulars.

Duke Ellington and John Coltrane

What A Dream I Had…

A man waits in the shadows…

I held your hand…

Slow down, you move too fast…life, I love you…

and the shadows wash the room…cast in our indifference…and you read your Emily Dickenson, and I my Robert Frost…

Home, where love lies waiting silently for me…

Remember me to one who lives there, she once was a true love of mine…

It’s poetry set to music – the voice of an age of war and protest, the voice of life seeking fulfillment. It tugs at my soul, asking questions of life and meaning. Do I sleep, unaware of the clarion call? Of course, I do. Do I move through my days too fast/quickly? Certainly. Haunting lyrics, in the best sense. Gentle, tuneful, beautiful: the union of voice, meter, key, and word. The same could be said of almost any album Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel created. I chose this one because I sang most of these songs in high school chorus.

What a wonderful introduction to existential questions and a glimpse of what is sacred and usually overlooked. I’m quite convinced that it’s one of the reasons I asked the questions that guided much of my seeking God’s face in those around me.

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme, Simon and Garfunkel, Columbia ia Records, October 10, 1966.

On the Road – Again

I was five years old when it was released in 1969, too young to realize its genius. And way too young to know how difficult it is to create something beautiful, meaningful, or tuneful when disagreements threaten friendships and working relationships both. The four of them went on to do more, but there was no reunion tour. The sum was greater than the measure of its parts – brilliant parts though they were.

It makes me wonder what beauty might come out of other difficult things…

What is your favorite from the Fab Four?

Abbey Road, The Beatles, Released September 26, 1969, Apple Records

Spellbinding

The range of musical genres on one album, her vocal quality, and how the whole thing hangs together make this one of my favorites. Jazz, blues, musical theater, and pop come together in a way that highlights the unique quality of each – and puts on full display the ability of the artist to move from one genre to another. Nina Simone’s I Put A Spell On You is what a life well lived sounds like – varied, heartfelt, and full of every emotion.

While I was familiar with two of the songs on this album, I was well into my thirties before I listened to the whole thing. I’m inclined to think that was a good thing; my twenty year old self wouldn’t have appreciated the spirit of this album. Some things require a bit of age and life experience to appreciate…

I Put a Spell on You, Nina Simone, recorded in 1964 and 1965, released by Philips Records in 1965

What album do you think requires a little age to appreciate?

(Etta James’s At Last! was a close second to this one…)

Wish You Were Comfortably Numb…

There is no pain. Do you think you can tell heaven from hell? All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall. Pink Floyd lyrics are amazing, but add the music and they are mesmerizing. Existential angst and a peek at the darkness that lives inside every human heart shoot through the music and I greet them. Their presence within me is released, if only for the few minutes between opening chords and final notes. They are true to life, a truth that sitcoms and Hallmark movies do their best to deny or cover up.

But they aren’t the only truths, nor the deepest ones. They aren’t the final word, nor are they the ultimate narrative of a life well and deeply lived. In the end, it’s love and a benediction that close the book of life. Amen.

Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd – on the top ten:

Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd