Monday Morning Music Ministry

1-5-15

Life has been likened to a game through the ages by saints and sages, by poets and even pastors. We are warned on one side against a game of “eat, drink, and be merry,” because one day we die. Or sometimes we properly are reminded that like some sports, life can be a very grim game indeed. Me? Sometimes I see life as a grand chessboard. Unfortunately I see myself a checker, not a chess piece. Gulp.

Today we think of our lives as vast jigsaw puzzles, not at all illogical.

See how the pieces fit: babyhood, youth, adolescence, nonage, adulthood, dotage. They usually fit together well, although some of us, putting this puzzle together, really have to search for the piece that depicts maturity. But into each life also come pieces that represent curiosity, hope, disappointment, joy, sadness, grief, happiness, greed, ambition, pride, modesty, temptation, sin, desires, charity, unforgiveness and forgiveness, envy, intellectuality, faith…

Have I left any pieces out? Surely. But I have not only described life’s jigsaw puzzles of me and you, but everyone who has, or has had, a pulse, on this earth. Those pieces, in my analogy, will be of different shapes, some of mine larger than yours; some of yours smaller than his or hers. We all, when complete, form different pictures.

And we know, don’t we, that even the kindly old lady down the street has had bouts with envy or pride. “There is not one amongst us in whom a devil does not dwell,” Theodore Roosevelt once wrote to the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson; and we note he metaphorically used a lower-case “d” in “devil.” He continued, “It is not being in the “dark house,” but having left it, that matters.”

In the same way as the kindly old lady we all know, or TR’s Everyman, there are awful folks and hardened criminals who have tender spots, and are capable of conversions. Think of Ebeneezer Scrooge; of St Paul who, as Saul, persecuted Christians; of John Newton, slave-trader who saw the light and write the words to “Amazing Grace”…

But I want to suggest that no life, no matter how long, or how many pieces make up the picture, is or complete without a piece I did not list above. Did you catch that? Can I give you a hint? – it is shaped like an “L.” Ah! There are a couple holes in the jigsaw puzzle of completed lives.

See the missing piece, shaped like an “L,” for Love.

We have all experienced love, even the most miserable amongst us. We have expressed it and shared it – given it away – some of us more than others. But it is a common and irresistible force. To humans it is mysterious because, as serene as it should be, it can also bring heartache and disappointment. It can be the basis of charity but also frustration of broken dreams.

There is a reason that 95 per cent of songs have love lyrics. Even “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog” is a love song, about dashed dreams. So are the melancholy lieder of Franz Schubert, and the many grief-toned piano sonatas of the perpetually lovelorn and frustrated Beethoven.

OK… that “L” piece fits there. One more hole in life’s jigsaw puzzle. It looks like an L-shape could fit there, but a little differently. Maybe, turned around a little bit, it looks like a “J.” Yes, J for Jesus. Now our life’s jigsaw puzzle is a complete picture.

Those similar-looking pieces, L and J, in fact make any life complete – especially puzzled lives, to reinforce my metaphor! They are the most important of our lives’ components. Indeed, we are not complete without them. We occasionally might flatter ourselves that we are pretty good puzzle-masters; and perhaps so, occasionally. But we are not puzzle-makers, and cannot be. God plays that role.

I sometimes wonder if Love did not exist, could we imagine it? Like a color that might exist but we’ve seen; or a seventh sense: hard to imagine what we cannot imagine. God’s Love, expressed in the Person of Jesus. He loved us so much as to create us and place us on this beautiful earth; loved us so much as to be forbearing as we humans have sinned and rebelled generation after generation; loved us so much as to share the Truth, offer forgiveness, to open Heaven’s gates…

… loved us so much as to lower Himself to the form of a human, His Son, to share our sorrows, show us the Way, and to offer healing and salvation to those who believe on Him; loved us so much as to remain amongst us in the form of the Holy Spirit, to guide, comfort, and empower us. To have His Son take our sins, our deserved punishment, upon Himself – could we imagine such love? And all this, while we were yet sinners?

Surely this love – our puzzle-piece “L” and the similar-shaped “J,” signifying Love and Jesus – can make the puzzles of our lives complete, whole… making sense.

Look at either one, and if you really can’t understand them fully, just accept them and fit them into your life’s picture. Each one is a piece that passes understanding.

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“The Love of God” is a traditional hymn performed here by the three brothers Aaron, Nathan, and Stephen Nasby, The “NCrew,” their band called Eli Eli. It is a hymn that comes as close as any to defining the indefinable, indescribable unspeakable mystery that is God’s love. There is a legend that a madman in an asylum once heard the song through his barred window and wrote the words of the third verse on his wall. Somehow the plausibility of that story reflects the love, the peace, that passes understanding.

Click: The Love of God

10-13-14

Sometimes when we make life-transitions, what we leave behind is ugly: think of a chrysalis and a butterfly. I am reminded of Mark Antony’s oration over the body of Caesar: “The evil that men do oft lives beyond them; the good is interred with their bones.” But when I “process” Shakespeare’s words what comes to my mind is not only the question of evil. Because good – good works, good deeds, sacrifice and service – can survive our lives to encourage others, at least.

In fact, sometimes we confront the anomaly that what is “left behind’ (please, I am not talking of the movie) can be beautiful – maybe more memorable than what is supposed to be more important! The wisdom that can be drawn from this, and life-applications, struck today’s guest essayist, my friend Laura Pastuszek. She will state her revelations better than I just attempted to do:

Laura writes, My friend collected many colorful shells at the beach on Sanibel Island in December of 2011. And it appears she had a reason in mind for how she wanted artistically to display these dead creatures. However, she never did tell me.

If anything, she may have placed them with care, and they were purposely arranged, or maybe done in a random act? I really can’t recall. And yes, in a way, it matters because these shells helped me through some of the most difficult events that I could have never imagined.

In the three years since we spent this week at the beach together, both of us have had our share of tragedy. Mostly random. Funny how life works that way. It is inconvenient to say the least, unbelievable to sound almost cliché when describing sickness and death. Little did I know that I would experience losing eight people that I cared about, including my brother, mother, and father within one year. And I never dreamed that the “collector of the seashells” would go through radical breast and lymph surgery due to an aggressive cancer that nearly took her life.

The shells I photographed are beautiful!

But they are dead.

How can this be? The sickness and deaths I have experienced were anything but beautiful. In the months and years that I have suffered great loss, I have often asked myself where to find the beauty in the midst of my world. Quite frankly, it has been hard to see, and I have often prayed for the ability to look through such lenses.

Looking more closely at the photograph of beautiful and colorful shells, I could not help but notice the red, brown, purple and other hues of colorful shells. Vibrant, even in death. Really? Death is certainly not vibrant, it is depressing and painful, at least from my vantage point.

Some of the shells are smooth, some are rough. Death came like that for my loved ones. For some it was sudden, for others it stalled for months and it was a brutal road.

One day, just like I took the picture of the beautiful shells, I took inventory of the memories of my loved ones. Was there a big difference between the shells and my loved ones? I realized that the hardest thing to accept about death of a loved one is the absence of a physical “shell.” I only have my memories to rely on for preservation of the inner beauty of my loved ones, and this intangible act is difficult, especially when the territory is foreign.

I have always loved shells for what they looked like on the outside, never for the creatures that were alive within. I never really bothered to know or enjoy the inner being of most of these creatures. But it was that inner being that caused such beauty to last.

Revisiting the photograph caused me to think about death in a whole new perspective. That is the beautiful thing about grief. I realized that I get through it by seeing little glimpses of life, mostly in the obscure; and this revelation about dead seashells definitely is obscure… or at first seemed obscure. But I am being reminded to make the intangible remnants of my loved ones’ lives matter. Intently, I place such memories in my heart and mind, often.

I recall my mother’s words saying, “Honey, you always do a great job…” and my father taking the toothpick out of his mouth, tilting his head my way, waiting for a kiss on the cheek when I greeted him; my brother reminding me to defrag my computer; and my friend chatting with me over the phone about each of her four young children. I capture remnants of my loved ones’ characters, accomplishments, dreams, and spirituality, often. Those things are what I picture deep inside.

They have become my beautiful shells, arranged nicely, each showing their distinctive wonder.

And each morning, as the sun rises, I can walk along the water’s edge, and have trust that God is with me in my grief. It is He that helps me to rearrange the picture of my new life, and to heal. It is His spirit that enables me to live through the death of loved ones, through grief, as an act of faith and II Corinthians 5:7 reminds me of this: “For we live by faith, not by sight.”

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We should always feel the assurance of knowing that if we don’t see our friends and loved ones again, whatever the circumstance, we surely may see them on heaven’s shore. In the meantime the lives we lead, and leave some day, will be seen by others as beautiful testimonies of who we were, what we did… and who we served. Like shells on that beautiful shore.

Click: If We Never Meet Again

9-1-14

How many of us have attended church services where the pastor, or perhaps a WalMart-style greeter (some larger churches today have designated Hospitality Pastors) flashes the salesman-white smile and asks everybody how they “are”? Assisted by throat-microphone and ubiquitous large-screen image confronting the audience, the minister often follows with the robotic demands: “I can’t hear you! Good morning!! I want to see everybody smiling!!!”

It seems to have been forgotten by today’s commercialized and cookie-cutter churches that, sometimes, people go to a church to cry, not to laugh. To be reverent and contemplate, not to be jolly and high-five. To approach the altar-rail and be prostrate before the Lord, not to dance. It is a fact that many pastors will earmark a portion of every sermon for jokes, even trolling the internet for the designated yuks. Hellfire and brimstone have been replaced by face-painting and cotton candy.

As a confirmed class clown, I hasten to specify that I am not a sourpuss. Even in church. But it does bother me that the Joy that is our birthright as Christians – which once, in American Christianity, itself succeeded “hard preaching” and judgmentalism – has been replaced by fluff and counterfeit emotionalism.

Joy, indeed, is our unique blessing; not mere happiness, but spiritual joy. But that cannot mean that life’s other emotions are radioactive. Life’s negative aspects can, at the least, teach us lessons. And other elemental emotions – I nominate Grief in this discussion – are part of life, too. And as we cannot avoid grief, it is best to deal well with it.

Scripture tells us that Christ Himself was “a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). In part we can assume it was so Jesus could identify with us in every particular. But I believe it was also to show us that grief and sorrow are parts of life as common as inhaling and exhaling… and how He dealt with them.

I have recently dealt with sorrow and grief, but claim no special burden over others; whining does not become a Christian. But my ears have tuned in to ministrations of others as Christians deal with grief. Random eavesdropping:

“Me? I have two children here and one in Heaven.”

“Pop, don’t feel bad about not grieving heavily. You grieved for Mom while she was alive.”

“Oh! Mourn, honey; don’t hold back the tears. God’s comfort will be sweeter.”

And a new friend from the Philadelphia Christian Writers Conference, telling me of an unbelievable succession of recent accidents, diseases, and deaths among her family and friends, uttered the wisest words I have heard in many months:

“We must not let anybody steal our grief.”

Of course we are used to being warned against those who would steal our joy. But grief is neither foreign nor malignant. It can be healthy, if we let it. Certain emotions we must release: easily said. But more than that, grief can allow us to appreciate things more, even as we miss them; to love people better, even in their absence; to add to our lives… even when it seems like we have lost pieces of our lives.

To suppress grief, or deny the healthy process it requires of us, is really only to postpone it. I do not say we should invite it – surely it is more bitter than sweet when it visits – but, rather, we should befriend it. It is part of life, which by God’s plan in its totality, we must meet unafraid, without apologies, and with a bold, conquering spirit.

“We share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (I Corinthians 1:5).

The poet Longfellow put his refusal to let anybody steal his grief in these words:

“Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul.”

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No offense to the feel-good style of today’s churches, but it has always been true that tears are a language God understands. He sees us when we laugh, but hears us when we cry. I believe our tears are prisms through which He sees into our souls… and we see Him better.

Click: Tears Are a Language God Understands

12-17-12

Like a recurring nightmare, we hear once more of carnage and senseless violence, a bizarre attack and unanswerable questions; and a school yet again is the setting. A lone perpetrator, but a million mysteries. Worse than only hearing the news, we see these days the anguish and fear, the confusion and panic; we see distraught children, and we see the tears on the cheeks of mothers.

Before those tears dried, there were calls from some quarters to change laws and outlaw guns. But on the same day a school in China was invaded, children injured at the hands of a knife-wielding maniac. Arsonists have, throughout history, claimed the lives of men, women… and children. Innocents. History’s pages are, in some ways, chronicles of the slaughter of innocents.

Would that we had the power to outlaw hatred and evil, not just guns and knives. Then we might be spared seeing mothers’ tears… and mothers themselves might be spared the constant fears, and all-too-common realities, that continuously, cruelly plague them as protectors of their precious children.

Mothers’ tears must burn like acid. I write as a man, a father, who cannot imagine that special maternal bond. We grieve for mothers as well as their lost children in these nightmarish situations. What I have been slowly comprehending, as time goes on, is the news footage of events around the world, seemingly different, is more and more alike to me. Mideast terrorism, wars in Afghanistan, genocide in Africa, religious persecution everywhere, and random attacks in our own neighborhoods: I used to listen to statistics, see the weapons, read the demands or justifications, the “claims of credit” of armies and groups. They all become as white noise. Now I only see, more and more, the tears on the cheeks of grieving mothers.

Are the tears of a Palestinian mother any less sacred, after a missile strike, than the tears of an Israeli mother after a bus bombing? An Afghan mother whose village has changed “sides” every week for months – are her tears less precious when one faction or other patrols her streets? A Christian mother in Pakistan loses her child to Muslim zealots; a mother from an African tribe loses all her children when a rival tribe sweeps her village; mothers all over the globe lose their daughters to traffickers and slave masters – do we harvest those tears to weigh and measure them… against what? The humble teardrop is a leveling agent.

There was one mother in history who shed such tears, and in fact witnessed almost all these varieties of separate, horrible atrocities happen to her son. She experienced grief a hundredfold, for her son was persecuted, taken from her, framed, tortured, abandoned by almost everybody except her, and murdered. She witnessed it all. The woman who cried those tears was Mary. It is a risky thing to attempt to quantify grief, but hers was unique because she KNEW these things would happen to her son – and to her – 33 years in advance.

Mary was chosen to be the one who would fulfill prophecy, a virgin who would bear the Incarnate God, sent to humankind to assume our sins and suffer the punishment we deserve. Mary knew these Old Testament prophecies, and she listened to the angels who visited her. When she in turn visited her cousin (who was pregnant with John the Baptizer), Mary spoke the classic “Magnificat”:

My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. Because He hath regarded the humility of his handmaid; for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Because He that is mighty hath done great things to me; and holy is His name. And His mercy is from generation unto generations to them that fear Him. He has showed might in His arm: He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble. …

Christians remember Mary’s prayer in the Advent season. We remember the promises of God, knowing they are blessings. We meditate upon the ways of God, as Mary ultimately had to. And we are confronted by the obscene vagaries of life, as Sandy Hook mothers must.

There is sin in the world. A loving God gave us free will, desiring that we experience life. He did not create us as angelic robots. Such beings cannot know sorrow nor joy. Redemption and salvation cannot be experienced by beings who need them not. No angel could ever sing “Amazing Grace” with tears of joy streaming down the cheeks.

But with life, in all its fullness, come the other tears, to which we return in sadness; and, can we all agree, in confusion and bitterness and at times unspeakable grief. There is no escaping it. It is human nature to feel these emotions, even when we trust God fully. In our seasons of pain we can try to understand human nature, and sometimes hear people apologize for it. But our attempts to understand are futile.

In that futility – beyond the fundamental proposition that it is a sinful nature – we must recognize on the other hand that God’s antidotes are easy to understand. He knows our sorrows, He understands our weaknesses, He feels our pain, He identifies with our losses, He has sent the Holy Comforter on whom we can call, He offers us peace that passes understanding.

Let us pray that weeping mothers and grieving families find that peace, and draw closer to, not farther from, God at these times. To lose faith, after losing a child, would intensify the unbearable misery of those who suffer.

It has long been warned that if God were removed, so to speak, from America’s classrooms, that trouble, danger, and evil would fill the void. This week one Adam Lanza entered a school to fill that vacuum. And all the mothers’ tears alone cannot wash away the horror.

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Mary cried tears of joy and tears of grief, as the mother of Jesus. May the timing of the Sandy Hook school massacre in the Advent season find some little connection as we contemplate the tears of mothers. The beautiful and profound new Christmas song “Mary Did You Know” is coupled with images of Mary and her Son. They are moments of birth and joy, pride and love, loss and death, and are from the movie “Passion of the Christ.” As is well known, these are difficult images to behold, so this is a Warning to Viewers; yet the scenes correctly portray the grief of one mother who witnessed, not just learned about, the massacre of her Son.

Click: Mary, Did You Know

Years ago, when my wife had her heart and kidney transplants, the Lord used the circumstance to give our whole family a burden for others in the Heart Failure Unit at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia. He also graced us with a boldness to pray with those patients who waited… or who received the medical miracles… or whose transplants went awry… or their families in those situations, or, sometimes, times of grief.

There were questions, always questions, and we were laymen with few answers. We often were asked by pastors, even, how we managed to deal with peoples’ confusion and fear and doubt and sorrow and terror and loneliness. Well, it was the same as we dealt with faith and hope and conversions and even healing. It wasn’t us, it was Jesus — all we could do was share Jesus. (“All”? Yes, it was everything we could do).

We frequently sang a gospel song that became many patients’ favorite: Leave It There. Its words include:

If your body suffers pain and your health you can’t regain, And your soul is almost sinking in despair,
Jesus knows the pain you feel, He can save and He can heal; Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

Leave it there, leave it there, Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.
If you trust and never doubt, He will surely bring you out. Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

After a time I learned the amazing coincidence (?) that the gospel song had been written only a few blocks from Temple University Hospital, where we met for those services! C A Tindley, the son of a slave, educated himself, moved north to Philadelphia, secured a job as janitor of a church… and eventually became its pastor. His large mixed-race flock of 10,000 enjoyed his powerful preaching and his moving hymns for years. (One of his hymns, I’ll Overcome Someday, was transformed with different words and tempo into the Civil Rights anthem We Shall Overcome.) Tindley Temple United Methodist Church was his “home,” and today there is a C A Tindley Boulevard in Philadelphia.

So every time we sang that song in the Heart Failure Unit, we did honor to a man in whose neighborhood we sang, who taught untold multitudes (and still does, through such songs) that we should “be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God”… and leave them there at the foot of the cross.

By the way, another coincidence: this Gaither Homecoming video by Lillie Knauls and Babbie Mason is my favorite version. After my father died, in Florida, my sisters and I did not know what to do with furniture, kitchen appliances, household goods, and such, a thousand miles away from where we each lived. I called my pastor, whose sister, I knew, worked in a church nearby in central Florida. Could they find a needy family, perhaps, who could use these things? A few days later I received a phone call from another lady in that church who said she could indeed direct a couple families to the goods, and took down the information. Her name had rung a bell in my head but I thought, “no, it couldn’t be…” But it was. Lillie Knauls! A professional gospel singer, but also on the staff of that church. I was indeed happy to return blessings I had received from her through this performance…

But through it all, the simple message: through all of life’s challenges: don’t fret. Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there.

Click:   Leave It There

Not much to write here this week, because the music we have chosen, and the message that both inspired and flows from it, are delivered beautifully by Sonya Issacs on the clip.

You might know the story of the horrible accident, and the faith of the man who suffered the loss of his family, behind this song.

To me there are several lessons. The role of faith… a faith that can only arise supernaturally by the Holy Ghost. How God can heal through the creativity of music and poetry – and be turned back to praise Him – what mystery! How healing can come from a determination to trust, and even praise, God when the world cries “despair.” Amazing.

In Mr Spafford’s case, these lessons he learned and taught have blessed uncountable millions of people. Yet that was not his intention. He was just having a conversation with God about his family who drowned right where “the sea billows rolled.” How profound this hymn is when we know the circumstances of its creation.

Is it well with your soul?

Click:  It Is Well With My Soul