Monday Morning Music Ministry

2-12-18

St Valentine is one of those saints who has become known as much for not having lived as for the sacred ascriptions to his disputed existence. The Catholic Church removed him from its calendar of actual saints some years ago, bowing to the back-canonical aspect of his legend. Like some other former saints, he might have been invented to fill a need.

Or, there having been several priests and martyrs named Valentine during Christianity’s first few centuries, the saint associated with love and high interpersonal devotion might be an amalgam.

In any case – and to the extent we keep in context the elements of remembering loved ones, and the power of love, and the encouragement to love – we can affirm the flowers and cards and hugs. Hallmark and ProFlowers and CandyGrams aside, it is good to revere love in the larger sense.

Love, actually, is not love if considered, and exercised, outside the “larger” context. People have tried to define the distinctions between humankind and beasts – laughing, cruelty, imagination, disco music – but Loving must be the predominant quality. We can receive love; we can offer love; we can act according to love, at least when we are not hating, and this explains a lot of history’s art and music and literature and poetry.

Can we understand it? Not fully, I say… but that is part of its allure and fascinating essence. I also think we are fated to only imperfectly express love: and even then only to the extent we can receive it.

“Love is patient, love is kind… ”

Which gets us face-to-face with God’s love. His love created the world – the universe and all therein. His love supersedes His vengeful aspects in that while we were yet sinners, He sent His only Son to become flesh and dwell among us, and take upon Himself the punishment we deserve for our rebellion. That is love.

As I asked above, Can we understand it? As I answered, not fully. We never will. But we can accept it.

Recently we shared thoughts here about unanswered prayer. Can a loving God say No to our earnest pleas? As God, fulfilling His job description so to speak, He knows what we need, even when we are persistent about things we want. The basis of that (as if He needs to justify Himself… but understanding this helps our faith) is… Love.

The heart is a fist-sized organ with fleshy tubes in and out, chambers, valves, and uncountable pulsations. How this hard-working bloody thing came to be associated by poets and painters, saints and sages, with the tenderest of often indescribable emotions is another thing I will never understand.

Yet we draw heart shapes when we are in love, despite the fact they don’t resemble hearts. We send drawings of them to those we love; we carve them into tree trunks. Even the worst characters in history have loved someone – a girl or guy; their mothers; a pet. It is a disease for which there is no immunity. Thank God.

On the other hand, the human race is not immune to the Broken Heart either. In a way, these sad experiences validate the positive truth and power of romantic love: it is not abstract, not an illusion. To paraphrase the poet: Love is real! Love is earnest!

Returning to the God-foundation of these matters (as He is the foundation of all things), even God has not escaped the reality of a Broken Heart. He identifies with our sorrow, our grief, and to the aspect of love that can “leave a hole” in our emotions.

God Himself? Yes, despite His plans and ordained Will, He knew – He knows – what it is like to lose a Son. But God so loved the world…

Please think of love, then, as more than the cheap theme for a holiday; and don’t let it ever become a cheap theme in your life.

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Click: Open the Eyes of My Heart

1-23-12

Being in the cartoon business for most of my life, I am familiar with one of the standard clichés: someone arrives in Heaven and, bing, there are the Pearly Gates; a bearded St Peter; a giant guest register.

Easy to draw, hard to see. That is, to see in the way the Bible describes our first day in Heaven. There is no check-in procedure. No nervous waiting to hear whether the pencil we swiped in fifth grade will keep us out. And St Peter – oh, he will be there, among the multitudes we will want to meet. I burn with curiosity to, possibly, ask questions of Abraham and Moses and St Paul and Luther. And Job! Augustine! And countless martyrs who served the poor and the oppressed.

But the first thing that we will see will be Jesus, from my reading. The Bible says He is seated at the right hand of God’s throne, which might be so blinding white with glory as to obscure other things; yet we will not be able to take our eyes from it.

So, I think visually. But we all must, at least in this case. We imagine Heaven “through our minds’ eyes.”

There are some people for whom this is easier than for the rest of us. Many believers who are blind have testified that they can “see” a silver lining, so to speak, in their sightlessness. For instance, there is the factor of other senses being heightened. And there are the plausible cases for increased sensitivity to other peoples’ challenges. And a practical understanding of dependence. These things, the rest of us can imagine.

But many blind people have shared a unique and tender – but passionate – thrill of expectation that when their sight is restored, when they have their perfect bodies in Heaven, the first thing that they see will NOT be the “Pearly Gates.” That was the testimony of the blind hymn-writer (9000 hymns) Fanny Crosby; it is in the title of a song by the blind gospel singer Terri Gibbs: “The First Thing That I See Will Be Jesus.”

My good friend Anna Marie Spencer sent me a video this week of the latest such person to manifest that powerful faith. Ten-year-old Christopher Duffley was born blind and with severe autism. His mother had been on drugs; he was up for adoption. Pretty tough odds. But at the age of four he started to sing for Jesus, and has touched many people since then. Some day, in Glory, he and Fanny Crosby and Terri Gibbs will look at each other and share stories. I’d like to sketch that get-together.

In the meantime little Christopher sings. Amazingly. He teaches the rest of us onlookers how to overcome, how to triumph, how to… see. “Seeing,” after all, is most special in relation to what we look at. Those of us who sometimes are handicapped by taking good vision for granted, need to see that truth clearly.

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This brief video is of little Christopher Duffley singing “Open the Eyes of My Heart” in Manchester, New Hampshire. My guess is that most of the eyes that were upon him that evening not just saw, but wept, at this awesome performance.

Click: Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord