Musings

December 25, 2011

Of Time and Christmas

Filed under: Experiences — jupiteron @ 6:39 am

This day that has so much meaning for so very many people is upon us once again. It stands alone as the epitome of special days. Those Christmases that have gone before stand out in our minds. The dreams we had, the wishes we made, the gifts that came to us or were given to others have found their place in our lives and the lives of those we knew. We, all of us, today want to be with someone who loves us and who we love. Those we choose to pass this day with are the ones who make our lives worthwhile. The twin acts of giving and receiving are engaged in either out of ritual or out of genuine joy. We, each of us, draw on our memories of our past Christmases and wonder what this day will be like for us in years to come. Could it be that this day will be the last of such days for us or for those we love? Will we or someone close to us be just a memory next year? If not next year than one to come, this will be true.

Take a moment away from time today and open up that quiet place within you where the remembered images and feelings are. Go deep into that quiet and see the faces and the kindnesses of those who are no longer here. Cherish the dreams you had staring at the lighted tree in the dark room. Feel that silent and holy night fill your soul and see beyond time that all that ever was and all that ever will be can be embraced in that one fervent moment of peace.

November 26, 2011

Retrospective

Filed under: Thoughts — jupiteron @ 5:42 am

All milestones in life deserve some consideration of all that came before to bring you to this point. I am on the precipice of reaching one that is on the cusp of old age. Round numbers seem to be an easy mark to make in the continuum of any process. The process of moving through the years and making a milestone out of the round number figures is arbitrary yet very well established in the public consciousness and therefore meaningful.

I look ahead and look behind. I see fewer years to come than I have lived through in this life. Lately, I have been revisiting my childhood places and childhood experiences looking for some thread that still is me today. I search for the buildings and the people that populated my early life and observe what has changed and what remains remarkably the same. The people (friends, relatives, public figures) of course have physically changed like I have. The inanimate things that still exist (buildings, physical places, objects that can still be located) have not changed. The details maybe be slightly weathered by use or environment, but they still are there and appear as some kind of time machine to trick me into my past, even momentarily.

So now I see myself as old and yet as young and naïve as I was upon reaching my first decade. Those silent and pure and relatively untouched objects and places of my youth bring me back to the mind I once was, so pure and full of hope and promise. Look in my eyes and see the unconditioned awareness that it took me a lifetime to attain. Or was it there all along and only now I see it for the first time?

September 13, 2011

What Survives

Filed under: Thoughts — jupiteron @ 7:58 am

“When watching videos from 9/11, I can see papers everywhere on the ground. Did anyone collect and keep any of these? If so, what was on them? Probably nothing exciting, but I’m curious.”

“I was a firefighter working on the pile that first week and the papers were everything you could imagine would be in those structures or in the purses, pockets, wallets, etc of anyone. Our world then was full of paper (hell it still is to a great extent) and the force of the explosions blew the paper away from the destruction. You can see the paper material ejected out the exploded windows ahead of the explosions when the aircraft struck. It fluttered around the buildings like flocks of birds, being lifted in the hot air. Heavier things, dense matter, moist things humans, were obliterated when light pieces of paper survived. That was amazing to me. That fact that in the debris you couldn’t find a very large piece of anything because everything was so utterly destroyed, except for the light things like paper. Lots of photos too. People keep photos of their family and loved-ones in their purses, wallets and on their desk and in their cubicles. These were everywhere. It was gut wrenching.” (www.reddit.com)

As this blog exchange highlights, in the massive implosion of the twin towers ten years ago, there were sheets of paper streaming through the sky like confetti. I noticed this phenomenon last Sunday when viewing the video of the collapse on television. It seemed remarkable to me that in the obliteration of these two massive structures, when most of the material of the buildings was pulverized into dust, that something so insignificant as sheets of paper could be seen flying forth in the forefront of the dust clouds that ravaged lower Manhattan. The light paper could fly away whereas the heavier elements of the structure succumbed to annihilation.

As always, I look at such phenomena and seek to find some meaning in the facts. What could it possibly mean that those many and delicate paper sheets could dance through the air and in some perverse way decorate the disaster scene with such a grotesque celebratory effect? What message lies within the apparent effect of these gracious objects in flight as they floated through the air like confetti, mingled with the rain of the debris of horrific destruction?

So many human lives came to an end that day. So much physical and mental anguish permeated the atmosphere, radiating from the site throughout the world by means of broadcast. The Great Eye of Awareness that sees such things and remains unmoved can play with us at times like this and give signs that even in the midst of horror and pain there is another side of reality that remains unseen. Perhaps in every act of destruction there is a truth beyond what is obvious to our senses. Perhaps in a world beyond good and evil there is joy.

September 9, 2011

Impossible Vision

Filed under: Thoughts — jupiteron @ 6:26 am

Real or unreal? Can you look at this picture and imagine such perfection and beauty represent something that can actually be seen by human eyes? And can you imagine the extreme technical accomplishment that could place the fabricated eye of Cassini some hundreds of millions of miles away from the eyes of man? The image as you look at it seems to be the product of someone’s imagination and yet it is as accurate and as actual a vision as would be seen if you were suspended out in space orbiting the planet of Saturn. Can those rings be so precise and without flaw? Can that grand sphere glow so darkly as if painted by an artist’s brush? I would suggest you consider the means by which anything is seen. It takes the miracle of light to make anything into a vision. And in all the realm of existence, there is nothing so impossible, pervasive and omnipresent as that which a certain book proclaims was brought into being by the first act of the original creator of heaven and earth. “Let there be light.”

May 31, 2011

A Boy Called Nimrod

Filed under: Experiences — jupiteron @ 4:40 am

It was a movement from Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations. The composer was creating a portrait in music of his friends, one at a time. His very special friend, a friend he loved, was given a musical portrait of the most enormous beauty. The man’s name was Jaeger, which is the German word for hunter and thus the variation was called Nimrod, or hunter. I guess you can now see why the piece is called an “enigma.”

Long ago when I was working as a cashier in a supermarket, a teenage boy would come in from time to time and would latch onto me while i was working. He was the son of an orchestra violinist and was himself learning the violin. We had the experience of classical music to share, and while I was ringing up grocery orders for the unwashed masses on the very imposing electro-mechanical cash register, he would stand beside me in the unused cashier aisle and talk about the music he loved. I would make comments and share my own musical crushes and we would connect on a very intimate level of the soul. He had never heard of the Enigma Variations, so when I mentioned how the music of one particular variation was so terribly moving, he ran home to find a recording of the piece to listen to. The next week he came back to me and shared his feelings about the experience and for some untold reason, an intense bond was formed between us. I told him that from now on, I would call him Nimrod, after the name of the particular variation that had bonded us together. The name was genius, and he recognized it immediately. At the same time I supposed he wanted to give me a name but could not imitate the remarkable unique meaning that I had captured in calling him Nimrod. The next week he returned with my “special” name written on a piece of paper. He folded it and left it on my cash register. He called me “Mercury,” the messenger of the gods.

Time has passed and life has changed. He is no longer the boy of wonder and amazement, and I am no longer a young man of dreams. Many years have come between us since we ever talked together and shared our souls, but the moment of connection that we made so very long ago is still alive in me. Listening to this music, I am transported out of the mundane affairs of my present life into that yearned for awareness that the dream that I am has come true.

February 7, 2011

The Tragedies of Others

Filed under: Thoughts — jupiteron @ 3:37 am

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W. H. Auden

When others suffer, either from the pain of illness or from the pain of heartbreak, does anyone else really care? Of course if your son or daughter is sick, or any other loved one that you are emotionally bound to is going through some difficulty in their lives, you will feel the distress along with them. I am rather talking about the pain of strangers . . . the pain of those who have no relationship with you.

You see it on the news programs where there are those that have gone through a horrific experience of some disaster. You see it in stories you read about someone who is stricken with a physical attack from a disease or violence, and you just feel like you are glad that it was not you or someone you cared about who must suffer so much.

As in the above painting by Breughel, that was so marvelously used in the poem of Auden, the tragedy of Icarus that goes on in the distance is casually ignored by those who know nothing of the heroic and passionate effort and the melted dream of a boy who wanted to fly too close to the sun.

December 21, 2010

Glowing Shadow

Filed under: Experiences,Thoughts — jupiteron @ 6:23 am

The embers of a fire have a curious feature about them: they are red hot and burning, yet they appear to be quiet and dull. The ash that surrounds them produces this effect. They have in a way assumed a cloak to hide their intensity of heat, and lie unassuming until they are stoked and exited by someone with a need to feel their warmth and capacity for flame.

Just passing at this hour is a celestial event that has not occurred in the past four hundred years. On the day of the greatest darkness of all the year, the winter solstice, the cool, cold brightness of the moon, that borrows its light from the sun, turns into a glowing red-rust ball that appears to be shining in a shadow. The peculiar intensity of its light is very captivating. I stood outside for a very long time in the cold and did not want to lose sight of this strange and beauteous apparition. The duration of this peculiar vision was not very long in terms of time, and yet it seemed to open a state of being that would last forever.

In this world of black and white and light and dark and one extreme to the opposite extreme, it takes an event such as this to remind us that all is not as it seems to be in the usual and mundane world. Like the embers of a fire that require the stimulation of a need for light and warmth to come alive, the glowing shadow of the moon in rare eclipse can reveal that the portal to the infinite lies somewhere in the paradox of the glowing darkness of a shadowed moon.

December 17, 2010

Vision

Filed under: Thoughts,Tribute — jupiteron @ 5:19 am

“All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”

Some hundreds of years ago a very wise and visionary man came up with that statement. In the face of one of the most feared and misguided social forces ever to take hold in the world, the Inquisition, he made his statement of truth. Galileo was imprisoned by these men for having the effrontery to decide for himself what he discovered to be true about the heavens. He came to the conclusion that this planet on which we humans live is indeed not the center of the universe. He dared to find a way to see beyond what was so evident to the senses and discover a truth that in the end now seems so obvious. What courage and conviction this man had.

Today, we know much more about the heavens. We can look through devices of great expense and great power and see deep into the space-time continuum. We see light emitted by matter that extends far beyond the capabilities of this little man who could only see with a device of his own making. Now we claim knowledge of scientific fact that was inconceivable by Galileo of Florence. But can any of us claim the same force of conviction about the unknown that this man did some four hundred years ago? Do any of us have the same sense and awareness and force of belief that this man had when he risked his life and social status for an idea that was shunned and despised by his contemporaries? Ask yourself if you could endure the same persecution in the face of opposition and consequence for something YOU believe in. It is just this sense of personal integrity and quest to know the unknown that distinguish the truly great souls that pass through life on this planet. The truths are out there, but their discovery is left to men who dedicate their ambition and effort to something greater than their own small life.

November 26, 2010

The Rose Platter

Filed under: Tribute — jupiteron @ 3:14 am


On this day some 60 to 70 years ago, my maiden aunts hosted a very large Thanksgiving dinner at their mother’s house. It was the year that their mother had died a month or so before this holiday, and the Thanksgiving meal was an excuse for the very large extended family to come together and celebrate life (odd how after a funeral families always come together to eat a meal in order to reaffirm that they are alive and will go on here, even though someone who has had great meaning in their lives has passed away). A new set of china was purchased for this meal. It was a set of “fine,” modestly priced dishes that the maiden aunts had purchased to make the meal special. My uncle was there with his motion picture camera and took movies of the event. He later made prints of special moments to make convenient the images of that momentous occasion. The one picture I recall was of my aunt bringing the huge turkey to the table. It was placed on a large china platter that was the crown of the porcelain set that they just had purchased. It was the once piece that I saved from the set as I cleaned out their house after their own passing some years ago.

This large rose-patterned platter is the dish that I have used every year since I acquired it. It was an object that represented to me the tradition and history of my family since those early days before I was born. So many of my family who have since passed have taken food from it. When I use it every year on this day, my heart and mind are with them all as I carve the turkey from its caressing shape. This year, however, something untoward happened that ended that tradition once and for all. With the slip of a knife on a downward cut at a joint, the edge of the platter snapped off and broke. The glorious rose- covered platter had come to an end. The accidental slip of the metal had finalized the tradition and symbol of my past. It is a time for endings. It is a time to move on to something new.

So I am in gratitude. I cherish the memories of the times that the platter had featured the bird for us. I cherish the moments that accompanied the fine feeling of warmth and love that came with those meals. I cherish the intimate sharing and smiles that the great rose platter had witnessed. Oh fine object, created with the image of roses that carried us though so many years of Thanksgiving feast and love, I place your image in the pantheon of inanimate souls that have given me the meaning in life for which I am so grateful.

November 5, 2010

The Charm of Greeting Cards

Filed under: Thoughts — jupiteron @ 3:14 pm

I have kept every greeting card that ever was sent to me in my entire life. I can go back to my childhood years and see the wonderful wishes that those I once knew sent to me in their little, purchased pieces of art. They ARE art, you know. One doesn’t normally consider them in that way, but when you think about it, and consider that a thought and picture are created to touch someone’s feelings, usually on some occasion, you can appreciate them in that light.

In a time when letters in the mail were common, and the physical touch was cherished, these cards would come to acknowledge some occasion. They would come as a kind of tangible gift, and usually represented the sensibilities of the ones who sent them to you. Aside from that, the quality and uniqueness of the greeting package (the picture and words combined) would say so much about the way that someone thought of you. It would give you some window into the mind of the sender, to see just how your personality and theirs joined up.

Today, greeting cards are not sent so much anymore. In the climate of electronic communication, where contact and thought and picture can fly about on the back of tiny electrons, the touchable gift of a greeting is not so meaningful. We have grown accustomed to voice calls and electronic mail, and the physical expression of paper, picture and words is overlooked and considered archaic. Opening an envelope and pulling out the greeting in the form of a ”present” no longer matters in a world where speed and efficiency is valued over care and poetry. We live in a time of cheap thought, cheap actions, and where durability and the tactile sense no longer matter. For myself, when greetings on paper no longer come, I will just go back into my treasure chest of all the minds and hearts of those I have known as they are captured in the greeting cards they hand picked and sent to me with their love.

August 29, 2010

The Criterion of Faith

Filed under: Thoughts — jupiteron @ 8:17 am

Much has been written and said about the mainstay of all religious thought and feeling that it would seem superfluous to add yet another word to what many have already expressed. From the time we are trained as children to imagine some invisible man off somewhere beyond the clouds that had an integral and personal interest in our welfare and fate, we became victims of whatever we were told to believe. Also, other matters in our lives required equal suspension of our sense of reality. Santa Claus and the Easter bunny and the Tooth fairy would all require the same trust that what we were told was the truth, and most of the time we were rewarded for our blind belief in such phantoms of generosity.

How can we look at our tendency to trust in the world beyond the senses, and evaluate the truth or folly of such a daring and irrational act? Faith requires us to go beyond the ordinary experience and vision of our lives and boldly interact with that for which there is no proof or material reward. The reward may come, and therefore the proof be had, but how is it that one can feel with certainty the operation of a force for which there is no present certainty?

As I write, I am reminded of two motion pictures that moved me to tears. One was called “Les Miserables” with Charles Laughton and Fredric March, and the other was called “A Miracle on 34th Street” with Natalie Wood and Maureen O’Hara. These two movies caught the essence of what it means to believe. The endings of both present us with a reality that is not violated from the material point of view, but nonetheless transcends material reality to show us a real world in which a miracle can be seen. I say “can” be seen because only those who “can” see the event as miraculous will appreciate it. Others who are not of faith will only see it as an event of chance.

And so what is it that I have to say here that can add to the many thoughts that have already been expressed about the nature of faith? I would point out that from a certain point of view, faith and imaginings are one and the same. You cannot tell the difference between them from the standpoint of logical thought. The one hallmark of faith that makes it transcend ordinary imagination is the power of the will and heart acting together. It is a power and strength that does not manifest itself in the force of action or conquest, but rather the awesome and heroic bending of our soul. In surrender one can feel the magic of faith. Only in surrender one can know what is true.

July 26, 2010

Growing Old

Filed under: Thoughts — jupiteron @ 5:16 am

Given enough time, we all grow old. Curious that we still use the word “grow” in this context. One normally thinks of growing in the sense of becoming more or greater than the present state. In this usage, we are saying that we grow into a state of decrepitude.

I have been looking at the photographs of men and women who were young some forty or fifty years ago. These people are still living but have changed physically in a very dramatic way. I try to see the metamorphosis in the light of progression and not deterioration, but my thoughts always gravitate toward sorrow. I see the difference between a young face and an old face as a kind of inevitable tragedy and wonder what the message of becoming old means in understanding the nature of life.

I see physical aging as a kind of camouflage. As we live our lives the marks of time add onto and conceal our purest state. The more years we accumulate experience and thought and memory and emotion, the more the soul becomes hidden behind the baggage that we carry with us. We eventually become weighed down so much that we collapse under the weight of the costume and succumb to the grave for respite.

July 14, 2010

Temps Perdu

Filed under: Experiences — jupiteron @ 6:05 am

In life there are many times when you see things come to an end. The death of someone you know, the loss of some treasured possession, episodes of your life that run their course and times of both joy and sorrow, all of these have their day and draw to a close. There are some things in life, however, that create the illusion of being everlasting. A relationship of depth and intimacy, a monumental building, the mountains and the sky, these are things that you can count on to be there as long as you have eyes to see. Can you ever imagine a time when Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or the sea will not be there? Of course you can’t. But if you reflect on the nature of these things you will know that a number of conditions will cause these seemingly permanent things to no longer be. Who could ever have conceived on the day before September 11, 2001, that those two huge structures would not be there on the 12th? All things made in time can be destroyed in time.

Last month, I witnessed the end of an institution that formed an essential part of my life for four years some forty years ago. The high school I attended, Cardinal Dougherty High School, was shut down in a fit of suddenness by the stewards of the Catholic Church who saw that it would no longer make enough money to support its continuing existence. Like the board of directors of a large corporation, it was deemed appropriate to close down one of the non performing branches because revenues were no longer providing a satisfactory return on investment. Apparently, the higher calling of the spiritual life of sacrifice and service is no longer relevant in the catalog of values that makes up the playbook of that body of men. It is all about preservation of capital and increasing the profitability of a catholic education that is most on the minds of those holy ones today.

But I digress. The end came quietly. The day before the final graduation at the school, I took my camera and entered the building for the last time. I wandered through the halls, which were remarkably unchanged in forty years, and took random pictures of the spaces I had known and bonded with all those years ago. The names and the faces and the voices and the sounds of those times came on to me in an avalanche of feeling. How I remembered the thoughts I had during those difficult years. How the sensuous, sensual stimuli and attached experiences flooded my mind with meaning. I cannot describe the overwhelming joy of the moment as I walked through the school building that day. All those distant memories of the past came alive for me and I felt them in the present tense once again. And I could not understand how those long gone times had all of a sudden revived and given me such joy of beholding.

Now for the final lesson and gift that my high school gave me on the last day of its legitimate life. I realized something essential about the nature of time and place and meaning and how the three come together to form something more real than the physical facts they represent. All things have their true reality in the mind and not in the molecules and atoms that make them evident to the senses. Buildings and symphonies and the animated body have their time to be but symbols of their true reality. The poetry of experience is what never dies. As long as there is meaning attached to a thing or place or people, one can always go home again.

May 22, 2010

Wilhelm Richard Wagner

Filed under: Tribute — jupiteron @ 5:18 am

On this day nearly 200 years ago an unlikely soul came into being in a small room in Leipzig, Germany. Through sheer force of will this soul that came to be known as Richard Wagner laid down monuments of sound that would torture and enrapture humanity forevermore. I cannot in my twentieth century costume presume to pass judgment on this man of steel that made music that was and still is at the pinnacle of human expression. I can say that even though the man may not have been a person that I might have enjoyed company with, I cannot imagine the world of music without the masterpieces that this soul created.

Look into his eyes in the posted photograph. Even though the picture is in black and white, you can see the blue soul within. The power and the sensitivity of his look are merged into the steel of his face. The struggle that he endured to come to terms with his vision is evident too. One can have compassion for this man who although he may have had many faults of character, still managed to gift to mankind the glory of what it means to be human.

Emily, dear Emily

Filed under: Tribute — jupiteron @ 4:11 am

I NEVER saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.
I never spoke with God,
Nor visited in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

I often think of this lady when I contemplate my own little life. Indeed, from her pen poured eighteen hundred word jewels that were tucked away in a trunk. Only after she passed from this world did anyone discover what she had made.

Here I am a poor wordsmith, “publishing” my feeble efforts to lay a trace of my mind for posterity, and no one knows I am here. I tell you my invisible readers that as I write these words for you, I am really talking to myself. I suppose that was Emily’s trick too. Who was it that she was addressing in those eighteen hundred poems that she tied neatly in bundles and put away to be found or not. What did she hope for when it came to her word children? What did she have in mind for their eventual future?

To me the questions are moot. It is enough to express your heart and soul and offer it to paper. It is enough to make a mark in the moment to reverberate through time.

May 6, 2010

Bill Moyers

Filed under: Tribute — jupiteron @ 6:37 am

On the last day of April of this two thousand ten, this man of worth and integrity signed off the air for the last time. During his final program, at the end of one of the segments, he gave us an editorial in his inimitable style. This is a piece to be cherished. As he spoke his words to us one could hear and see the annals of journalistic excellence open up for our view. Beginning with a statement that invoked a major god in the pantheon of verbal commentary, E. R. Murrow, Moyers captured our attention as he unfailingly does with bold reference to his bias in presenting stories to his audience. Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists, bias is okay as long as you don’t try to hide it. And hide it, Bill Moyers did not. He ranted on about the plutocracy in which we live and instead of ending on a note of despair, showed us that there is hope among us. The guests that he chose for his last program marked the moment with a positive commentary on the possibilities and movements that may save our dear country from the festering forces that are ravaging the American consciousness. The water must be cleared of the hogs for it to be clean.

And so “thank you” Mr. Moyers for the gift of insight and the gleam of your pure heart that we can all look to in a moment of despair. A voice still stands in our midst that has the courage and conviction of goodness and love.

April 5, 2010

Easter Pie

Filed under: Tribute — jupiteron @ 3:00 am

I can remember the thrill of Easter when I was a child. It was all about coloring eggs and Easter baskets and the precious chocolate forms that were placed inside. It was really a basket full of treasure: jelly beans and Hershey’s kisses and small chocolate eggs. In the center of the basket was always the large coconut crème egg with the colored decorations on the surface. As wonderful as the anticipation and the gift of the basket on Easter Sunday morning was, there was one other tradition that was looked forward to on that day. It always came to us because of the skill and generosity of my Aunt Nina. A maiden aunt with magic baking hands, she would come up with the two pies that I will forever associate with Easter: an Italian Ham Pie and an Easter Rice Pie. Oh what joy it was to indulge in these delicious treats. I really do think that they were among the most valuable things of my childhood.

So now, today, I make the pies each year with the twenty or so eggs that are required and think of Aunt Nina and her precious gifts to us. With every bite she comes to me in memory and she does what she never could do easily in life, she smiles.

April 2, 2010

Good Friday

Filed under: Love,Thoughts — jupiteron @ 4:06 am

This day that commemorates the great suffering of a man called Jesus who lived and died so very long ago is strangely referred to as “good.” Is it that the good involved in this characterization has to do with the outcome or product of the great suffering of Jesus (the redemption of mankind), or is it that one should look upon the act of suffering as being in and of itself a good?

I have often been involved in great experiences of suffering, and in my humanness never once realized any “good” that was related to it. It is only after years of psychic distance from those torturous experiences that I am able to see the value of having endured the pain. When one is in dire need and when the soul yearns for comfort and release, we always feel that we are very alone. It was the night before the crucifixion that the story tells us that Jesus was truly by himself in Gethsemane. His disciples were asleep and he was left isolated and in anguish as the last trace of his human self was being consumed by the flames of agony. Yes, agony! It was an extreme condition of pain and intense suffering that he endured. But as we well know, he was not alone. He was visited by an angel that gave him comfort.

There is something about the way we react to pain that leads us to an understanding of its purpose and design. Extreme discomfort always provokes us to cry out for help. We reach out of our isolated selves and yearn for the comfort of a hand to help us. And it is in that process of yearning that there awakens in our selves the outreached hand of succor that caresses our being and lifts us to the realm of peace and love. Somehow we need the suffering to make us break the barriers of our isolation to realize that right there with us in the garden of our hearts is the transforming caress of love that turns those tears of blood into the rich, red rubies that adorn our soul.

March 26, 2010

Celebration

Filed under: Love,Lyrical — jupiteron @ 5:51 am

On this day after the day that formally joined the hands of two souls in holy union some long ago time, I celebrate the magic of fate that validates my faith in the divine hand in human affairs. I speak, of course, of the wedding of my father and my mother on March 25, 1950 in the Church of the Holy Souls in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It being a Lenten service, a wedding gown was forbidden, and the bride was only permitted the dress of an ordinary Sunday event. The occasion was marked by all the denial that was the hallmark of the Catholic prescription for salvation. One was never permitted to enjoy this time on earth in anticipation of the divine reward to come after passing into death. Death was the threshold upon which you passed into the heaven of eternal happiness.

I have long since abandoned the Catholic way of life. I see now the hypocrisy that permeated the life of the keepers of the tradition. I have long ago discovered that denial has little to do with salvation and that indulgence in love is the pass that one needs to achieve life everlasting in eternal happiness. In this fine light I now imagine the blessing of the hand of God that waved over these two beings on that one day long ago, and made their union issue my soul into the world to find the truth that I now know. I live for love and believe that when one surrenders to its power, that the glow of the face and the shine in the eyes are the only raiment that can truly witness the glory of its truth. What is it that they could possibly be looking at staring up to the left and off into the light?

February 22, 2010

Memento Mori

Filed under: Thoughts — jupiteron @ 9:41 am

With the passing of Ash Wednesday, I am reminded each year of this solemn and inevitable fact of life: we all must leave our bodies and return them to the earth dust from which they came. As a child, we were paraded by the nuns into the church on the morning of this day to have the priest plant palm ash in the form of a cross onto our foreheads. We would wear this black ashen mark on our face all day, and it was supposed to remind us that we were dust “and to dust you shall return.” In a child’s mind I don’t suppose that the full weight of that statement penetrated my understanding. First of all, I couldn’t see the mark unless I looked into a mirror. Secondly, there were many people that I would encounter on this day that never had the mark. Were we, by reason of being Catholic, the only ones who knew this dreaded secret? Had God chosen us to light the way to the grave with these black marks of ash on our faces? Mostly it was something that we had to do and the mark became meaningful in the same way that any Halloween mask would be meaningful: it was fun to wear.

Now that the Catholic Church no longer has a hold on my heart, and I have discovered for myself the meaning of life and the cycle of life and death, the marks that I see on this day are only a reminder of the parochial view that I once held as a child. I see life now as more of a process and journey with death as a kind of punctuation mark. The forbidding symbols that grace this page in that beautiful painting of Phillippe de Champagne, “Vanitas,” represent the three aspects of our life on earth: life, death and time. These symbolic objects are like stage props that tell you that no matter who you are or what you become in terms of this world, all is vanity. And since he uses the Latin word, vanitas, to title his painting, he is alluding to my favorite book of the bible, Ecclesiastes. In that book one can feel the force of the Holy Spirit weave the web of emptiness and yet inspire me to believe there is a truth beyond our world. Implied in those awful and emphatic pronouncements is an awareness of a world beyond. The wisdom comes from somewhere and yet the dark shadow the world we live in seems so bleak.

“For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again” (Ecclesiastes 3:19).

Yet just before this passage there is prefaced one of the most beautiful and wonderful passages in the whole bible. It is a passage that inspires one to believe that there is some grand plan that we all partake of and that we all benefit from.

1To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

3A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

4A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

5A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

6A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

7A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

8A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

All shadows are cast by light, and the trick is to step back and see where the shadow ends and the light begins.

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