(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
You might think from the odd first line that I’m experiencing synesthesia. Who LISTENS to a painting? Who can HEAR the scene it depicts? Not me. And that’s just the point!
I long to be IN the scene, for tight-in frames to fall away from a panoramic view. To hear. To feel. To be out there. To be UP there! To waken sleeping sympathies.
(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
There’s a Price to Passion
I respond powerfully when music is performed well. God bless good musicians!
Unfortunately, my response is equally powerful when music is performed poorly.
If you don’t share this powerful response to music, you may not understand or sympathize with the following….
Sometimes when I’m at church, I find it hard to worship. My body wants to move with the music, but doesn’t feel a groove. It may be a drummer who’s drumming to the beat of a different march. Or it may be guitarists and pianists who are stepping on each other rhythmically. My voice wants to harmonize, but harmony’s made practically impossible by off-pitch musicians or bad accompaniment. It’s a real struggle then to maintain my equanimity, much less worship.
You know who I really pity? Those with perfect pitch. How miserable is their journey through life?
(background image is Rembrandt’s “Saul and David”)
(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
Slow music, even slow dance Are sometimes great But I’m sure you can relate: They’re not for me When I get up early And the night before, I stayed up late.
(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
As I work through posting a year’s worth of poems, I land on some where I can’t remember what prompted the poem. This is one that is ironically opaque to me.
It doesn’t help that the only thing I wrote on Facebook when I posted it was, “The first thought in my strange mind this morning…” Indeed!
(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
I’m not your guy to explain eschatology (what happens in the future, according to Scripture). Frankly, I doubt anyone’s got that completely right. But one book I’m reading now fired up my imagination about the last trumpet, and what trumpets do—they gather.
Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.
(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
When I posted this on Facebook, I kept having to add comments to clarify my intent:
1. Is there anything more pathetic than an opinionated old audiophile with bad hearing?
2. In my experience, drums can be played in a way that complements the other instruments and voices, or they can be played in a way that draws attention to themselves. That’s just a matter of skill. Additionally, since I’m losing hearing in the higher frequencies, poorly-played drums (with their lower frequencies) can easily dominate and muddy up the whole ensemble. But hey, I torture people in my home with very bad accordion playing, so who am I to talk?
3. I want to be crystal clear…. I have nothing against drums, including as part of worship. As I sit here now, I’m reading theology while listening to one of my favorite Pandora stations. It features electronic dance music by artists like Tiesto, ATB, Armin Van Buren (much of it is built on driving beats). All I meant to say in the poem is “be skillful; be aware of how your instrument complements—or detracts from—other instruments.” One of my nephews is a top-notch drummer. I think he studied under a jazz drummer. When I talked with him about this, he expressed opinions very similar to my own.
(background image adapted from one by Carlos Rocha on Pixabay)
FURTHER COMMENTS In my wording for “Today’s Assignment,” I was intentionally inclusive in choosing the word “person’s.” You probably understand this thing I’m starting to understand… that the person GOD displays his glory directly AND indirectly through our fellow men and women (also persons). All beauty is God’s beauty. When a friend chooses the loveliest way to express her thoughts, when a politician is respectful of his political opponents, when an artist uses color or juxtaposition to draw our attention to delightful design, these are all examples of God’s beauty manifested in and through people. We should respond to the degree and in the way God enables us.
Also, I’m on the perennial soapbox of lamenting that people criticize in excruciating detail, but praise in vagueness—if at all.
(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
This poem memorializes something that really happened this morning. I assist St. Bart’s Anglican Church by projecting slides during their service. That means that I show up before their services and step through all the song slides as their worship team practices. They have professional, highly-skilled musicians, which is always a pleasure for me. This morning, the musicians seemed especially creative–maybe even frisky–in their practice time. I believe it was while they were practicing the Doxology that Esther Brister suddenly hit a harmonizing note that blew my mind. I’m not a musician, so it’s easy to impress me. But I wasn’t alone. Everyone there laughed in delight.
The Background Image This afternoon, as I was thinking about what happened this morning, I thought of quasars, and the powerful escape of light from them. That’s probably inaccurate, as I know next to nothing about astronomy. But I’m learning about beauty, and this morning’s occurrence was definitely an outburst of beautiful energy.
(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
Here’s the occasion for this poem…. I woke up in the middle of my night to a son coming home from a miserable shift bedeviled by a horrible manager. In my sadness for him, and my anger at the manager, I could not get back to sleep. So why “Listen Longer”? Deep down I know the Good Teacher never stops teaching.
When I wrote this, I was working through Luke 12. The returning master in Jesus’ parable wants to serve his servants, and is angered when his servants respond with selfishness, looking out for themselves and not each other. I begin to understand the master’s anger.
Also, the song that had been playing in my head is “Why It Matters” by Sara Groves: https://youtu.be/D32dlKv2x38
Here are the lyrics of that song:
Sit with me and tell me once again Of the story that’s been told us Of the power that will hold us Of the beauty, of the beauty Why it matters
Speak to me until I understand Why our thinking and creating Why our efforts of narrating About the beauty, of the beauty And why it matters
Like the statue in the park Of this war torn town And it’s protest of the darkness And the chaos all around With its beauty, how it matters How it matters
Show me the love that never fails The compassion and attention Midst confusion and dissension Like small ramparts for the soul How it matters
(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
I sometimes envy composers and conductors. But even they must long for a fuller, more perfect expression of what it means to be made in God’s image.
I don’t usually bother with rhyme patterns. For this one, I pushed myself a little, and it probably shows in the last two lines. “Which sadness serve” can be read in two ways: 1) music can convey sadness (“serve it up” as it were), and 2) music can serve to comfort sadness with its soothing salve.
(if you are viewing this via email, the website has a recording of this poem and commentary; click the title above)
Commentary
Slowly, slowly it dawns on me what artists, musicians, and dancers have been doing all along. Some of them speak a language I never learned. But I start to catch their drift.
I’ll try to expand on that…. King David wrote that
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Psalm 19:1 (NIV)
When we witness something beautiful or magnificent, it points us to God. I’m not enough of a philosopher or theologian to defend that statement. It’s just something I sense or intuit, and increasingly so. Somehow, I am becoming more appreciative of beauty. It’s subtle: I watch someone dancing, or view a painting, and something deep inside me responds with joy. Even though I myself don’t speak the language of dance or of painting, I begin to recognize its words.
This is a poem I started writing yesterday and finished up this morning. Yesterday, I thought of the phrase, “running out WITH time,” and asked myself how that might upend the notion of “running out OF time.” So, I didn’t know where I was going to go with the poem, but started writing anyway.
In a friend’s Sunday School class several few years ago, the friend asked us all if we thought there would be no time in Heaven. It seemed that my friend and I were the only ones willing to assert, “I don’t know of any reason why time should NOT continue to exist!” It surprised me that we were in the minority on this one.
Where do people get the notion that time will cease to exist in the eternal state? I suspect one source is a spillover of neoplatonism. But take this with a huge grain of salt. To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, “I served with a philosopher. I knew a philosopher. A philosopher was a friend of mine. I am no Philosopher.” Regardless, the theory is that people with this thinking lump time in with matter, and therefore consider it unworthy of their ideal, immaterial “Heaven” (a disgusting non-place, if you ask me–I’m looking for the restoration of God’s GOOD creation).
Another possible source is an old translation of Revelation 10:6
And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer:
Revelation 10:6 KJV
Most modern translations render that along the lines, “that there should be no more delay.”
I ran my poem by a philosopher/theologian this morning, and he assured me that whatever reasons people come up with for saying that there will be no more time in Eternity are a matter of “blindly swallowing [wrong notions of secondary issues] without theological reflection.” Whew (it could have been me)!
Back To The Poem: Time Our Fellow Inmate Here’s how I got around to using my upended phrase…. It occurred to me that people may think of time as one of life’s evils… that it limits us, perhaps even imprisons us. If so, the answer is to think of time not as the prison, but as a fellow inmate! Someday the prison of current limitations will be torn down. Then we’ll escape our prison cells and joyously run out WITH our fellow inmate, time.
I have no idea why this little song came to mind. I was on vacation, looking around at the mountain flowers. Below the song as I formatted it then, I have posted something I’m playing with, the score and rendering by Musescore. The voicing is ridiculous, I know…. I’m just learning that program.
Every day, when I lie down for a nap, I listen to beautiful music and try always to think of where beauty was born. This may sound silly to some, but I’m trying to put myself in a place where I can better appreciate beauty. So — brace yourself — I picture myself sitting on the edge of a cliff, looking out over a beautiful creation. The creator himself is sitting next to me. I am listening with him. That’s how I fall asleep.
After several weeks of doing what I just described, I was sitting one evening listening to beautiful music. Suddenly, I had a different perspective: the music struck me as a capturing of the beauties of sound, not their mere production. So I thought of an orchestra:
The strings “pluck it from the air.”
Percussion releases it from drums in all its vigorous exclamations.
Brass and woodwinds kiss it with their lips.
Strings express the tension of pent up beauty with their bows.
And then, the point: God can’t help but express (voice) beauty, and loves to share it with us, his creatures.
This is probably as close as I’ll ever come to synesthesia. I was reading Romans and listening to Bach and Morricone. How I wish I could hear the music in all of them for all it’s worth!
