In Ode to Campus Point

My favorite location on earth…(or at least one of the top three)…

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Coming of Age (Goodbye, Oh, Goodbye, My...)

(Well, I see ya standing there like a rabid dog
And you got those crying eyes…)

This is from a song – the words in parenthesis above.

And this song’s got me thinking. The whole coming of age thing. Most coming of age stories are about teenagers, etc. Some souls, however, take decades to “come of age.” It takes time to work out the rot and press coal into diamonds. Not always an easy process – especially in our “eternal youth” culture, or a culture that knows Eros and Venus with the substance and depth of a kid who knows she likes lollipops, and that’s all there is to it. But phileo? Agape? Maybe faint signals of them flash like S-O-S flickers on some obscure horizon, but in mainstream pop culture, they are harder to find than red diamonds (fun fact: red diamonds are the rarest diamonds in existence.)

(Makes me wanna surrender and wrap you in my arms
You know I try to live without regrets
I’m always moving forward and not looking back
But I tend to leave a trail of dead, while I’m moving ahead
So I’m stepping away
‘Cause I got nothing to say)

The self-devouring, others-devouring heart knows what those words above taste like, and the buyer’s regret washes over them like a shower gone cold – will I ever stop being my own worst enemy; will I ever stop leaving a proverbial trail of dead?

So I’m stepping away from those deep, stubborn roots of Self – that tenacious wolf’s mouth that wants to possess all things. It’s the greed that we all have, but no one wants to admit it; unless Humility slays us in her great hunt for believing hearts. She (Humility, Wisdom, Grace) leaves a trail of the proud in her wake.

I’m not proud. Right? Right? Uh oh. I hear a horse galloping behind me. Is that the sound of someone bending a bow and fitting it with an arrow?

(Feels like, feels like its coming
It feels like, feels like…)

God, I don’t want to stiffen my neck (with that arrogance) against You. “Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am a sinner,” as the publican prayed. May I kneel with the ancient stars in the morning (when they sink down and disappear in gold) and rise with them in the ultramarine. (To praise You in whispers and wander the night without rest.)

And when my fear pulls me out to sea
And the stars are hidden by my pride and my enemies
I seem to hurt the people that I care the most…

(Lyrics from “Coming of Age” by Foster the People)

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Coming of Age (Goodbye, Oh, Goodbye, My...)

(Well, I see ya standing there like a rabid dog
And you got those crying eyes…)

This is from a song – the words in parenthesis above.

And this song’s got me thinking. The whole coming of age thing. Most coming of age stories are about teenagers, etc. Some souls, however, take decades to “come of age.” It takes time to work out the rot and press coal into diamonds. Not always an easy process – especially in our “eternal youth” culture, or a culture that knows Eros and Venus with the substance and depth of a kid who knows she likes lollipops, and that’s all there is to it. But phileo? Agape? Maybe faint signals of them flash like S-O-S flickers on some obscure horizon, but in mainstream pop culture, they are harder to find than red diamonds (fun fact: red diamonds are the rarest diamonds in existence.)

(Makes me wanna surrender and wrap you in my arms
You know I try to live without regrets
I’m always moving forward and not looking back
But I tend to leave a trail of dead, while I’m moving ahead
So I’m stepping away
‘Cause I got nothing to say)

The self-devouring, others-devouring heart knows what those words above taste like, and the buyer’s regret washes over them like a shower gone cold – will I ever stop being my own worst enemy; will I ever stop leaving a proverbial trail of dead?

So I’m stepping away from those deep, stubborn roots of Self – that tenacious wolf’s mouth that wants to possess all things. It’s the greed that we all have, but no one wants to admit it; unless Humility slays us in her great hunt for believing hearts. She (Humility, Wisdom, Grace) leaves a trail of the proud in her wake.

I’m not proud. Right? Right? Uh oh. I hear a horse galloping behind me. Is that the sound of someone bending a bow and fitting it with an arrow?

(Feels like, feels like its coming
It feels like, feels like…)

God, I don’t want to stiffen my neck (with that arrogance) against You. “Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am a sinner,” as the publican prayed. May I kneel with the ancient stars in the morning (when they sink down and disappear in gold) and rise with them in the ultramarine. (To praise You in whispers and wander the night without rest.)

And when my fear pulls me out to sea
And the stars are hidden by my pride and my enemies
I seem to hurt the people that I care the most…

(Lyrics from “Coming of Age” by Foster the People)

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"I'm a Dead Man, Until..."

“…I see you walk through…”

A poignant line from the band Crowded House. (And if anyone out there even knows that song without looking it up online, I will…congratulate you…non-verbally…using typed words.)

Why is it a good line for this particular moment?

Because I just saw a film (“San Andreas”) in which a man races against all odds to get to his loved ones. It seems the earth and the sea are against him. And he’s a dead man until he lays eyes on his loved ones again – at least that’s how he feels.

The film has relationship subtext: in this day and age, it’s about as easy to keep a relationship healthy as two people trying to survive an earthquake.

It’s about isolation. The endless tug-o-war between selfishness and serving. Between self-centered works of flesh, pride, and who-knows-what-else, and the true miracle of this world: faith and love. It’s about the deep chasms and tectonic plates that shift beneath the surface of the heart; and, if not dealt with properly, crack open and swallow us whole. Or things from far off come in when we least expect it – the tsunami that draws all seas to itself, and then steamrolls fifty billion tons of water across your back with an ironic smile and a white mist that never leaves the horizon.

Okay, maybe the movie wasn’t consciously going for all that. It just wanted stuff to go KABOOM.

But it was a surprisingly good movie. Click the link to read my full review.

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Dark Nights of the Soul, and Why I Envy Nightingales and Satellites

The soul is a strange bird. Dickinson said hope is the thing with feathers, but the spirit and heart of a person has feathers too – strange ones sometimes.

In the dark night seasons, when even your most valiant efforts to draw near to God utterly fail and you can’t seem to find any of the joy or healing that you know is hovering out there somewhere beyond the bend of the stratosphere, you begin to envy satellites in the way that poet John Keats envied nightingales.

In a stanza from his poem “Ode to a Nightingale,” he observes the way a nightingale flies wherever it wants to and climbs to the heights for a better view when he is stuck on the ground. I would re-write it “Ode to a Satellite” if I could. If only I could orbit all of existence and see us, you and me – our lives, times, histories, joys, sadness – from a grand vantage point, like the mind-blowing view of the satellite in the video below, and somehow make sense of the story in a clean, linear fashion, from the first page to the last.

In the dark night seasons, the integrity of the story feels compromised. The pages feel charred and crumbling. The soul craves elevation, like a person yearning to climb a tree to see his way out of a very dark, maze-like forest.

Or like a satellite flying over all civilizations and beauties, quiet and at peace. Perfect clarity. Perfect vision. Like a nightingale that “singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

Before you watch the video taken from a satellite soaring over the earth, read this first stanza from “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats. Today I quote this stanza in ode to the satellite:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

         My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

         One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

         But being too happy in thine happiness,—

                That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees

                        In some melodious plot

         Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

                Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

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Dealing With Heartache

It’s when your spirit aches so much that you feel claustrophobic in your own skin: feverish and restless, pacing in your mind, dizzy and a little “out of it” – concussed, almost.

Better is one day in Your courts than a thousand elsewhere…

Life feels empty sometimes. It can strike with an odd, unexpected sharpness: when you desperately miss someone’s presence in your life – family member, someone you love romantically, a friend, etc. – and you try to connect with them but the connection fails, falters, is ignored or even betrayed, and your heart just dies quietly in a vaporous, invisible solitude; or you’re grieving someone (or something) that you lost; or perhaps major disappointments begin to outnumber the major “wins” in life.

All these things remind us that even the best earthly loves, the best triumphs, the most fulfilling ambitions or careers, or the people we idolize or place at the center of our universe, can fail us.

…my heart and flesh cry out, to You the Living God…

They can break us with more power and efficiency than we know. Even after it’s happened we don’t know half the damage it’s caused. Only God sees it. Only He has the night vision to go searching in those caverns.

We can have it all, and then lose it all just as fast (or faster). And a great, swelling void appears.

So what happens next?

As I’ve learned, there’s only one answer that satisfies and heals that void in any real, lasting way:

How lovely is your dwelling place,
    Lord Almighty!
2 My soul yearns, even faints,
    for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
    for the living God.
3 Even the sparrow has found a home,
    and the swallow a nest for herself,
    where she may have her young—
a place near your altar,
    Lord Almighty, my King and my God.
4 Blessed [happy] are those who dwell in your house;
    they are ever praising you. (Psalm 84:1-4, NKJV)

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