On memorization

My pastor friend wrote in the church newsletter about the value of memorizing Scripture. He said it’s a rare person who literally can’t memorize Bible verses.

I found myself thinking about how hard it is to memorize. I write about the fruit of the Spirit a lot, but I always find myself going back to the Bible (not a bad thing) to get the list right. It’s weird.

Then I started thinking about the things that I DO know by heart.

“In my most secure moments I still can’t believe I’m spending those moments with you, and the ground I am walking, the air that I breathe, are shared in those moments with you.”

“Darling be home soon, I couldn’t bear to wait an extra minute if you dawdled; Darling be home soon, it’s not just these few hours but I’ve been waiting since I toddled for the great relief of having you to talk to.”

“What the world needs now is love, sweet love, it’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. What the world needs now is love, sweet love, no, not just for some but for everyone.”

“I may not always love you, but long as there are stars above you, you never need to doubt it — I’ll make you so sure about it. God only knows what I’d be without you.”

And perhaps more to my dear friend’s point …

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’ve first begun.”

“He is now to be among you at the calling of your heart, rest assured this troubadour is acting on his part. The union of your spirits here has caused him to remain, for whenever two or more of you are gathered in his name, there is love.”

“I’ve done every devotional, been every place emotional, trying to hear a new word from God, and I think it’s very odd that while I attempt to help myself, my Bible sits upon a shelf with every promise I could ever need — and the Word was, and the Word is, and the Word will be.”

“Momma taught me how to pray before I reached the age of seven; she said, ‘There’ll come a time when there’ll probably be room in heaven,’ but I’m feeling kind of guilty ‘bout the number of times we do what we must do — we forget what he said, but we figure that he’ll still make room. You gotta put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the waters, put your hand in the hand of the man who calmed the sea, take a look at yourself and you can look at others differently by putting your hand in the hand of the man from Galilee.”

Maybe if I sang my Bible verses, I’d remember them better.

Same as the old boss after all

“How can you write about Neil Sedaka and being silly when there’s a war going on?” I heard the voice from a little corner of my consciousness, but the death of Neil Sedaka was on my mind Saturday, so I wrote about him for Sunday, and Mary and I were silly on Sunday, and I preferred to write about that for Monday.

I have little to add regarding the latest war against Iran anyway. The great battle in this world is not left versus right, but the state versus the individual. The left favors one version of an all-powerful state, and the right favors another version, but neither side is particularly interested in protecting individual rights.

And war is the state’s favorite tool. The left is criticizing the right-handed president’s war actions, but it had no problem when a left-handed president took similar actions. This president has said a lot of pretty things about ending wars, but in the end it’s another case of “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

As a result I have little to say about the war against Iran. War is a function of the state, and I have no interest in the state except to find ways to reduce its size and power. Peace, on the other hand, takes concerted efforts by individuals, one individual at a time.

And so I offer, once again, my Declaration of Peace, from this individual to each individual I meet.

A Declaration of Peace

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to step back and ask, “What in the world are we doing?” and consider a different approach, it behooves us to explain what in the world we are doing, and why.

These truths ought to be self-evident — that all humans are created equal, endowed by our Creator with rights that are certain and unalienable, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — but then governments are created to tinker with those rights, to abridge those rights, and eventually to trample those rights.

Ostensibly governments are created to do those things that individuals cannot do, but there are many acts that individuals will not do and should not do, and they are no less heinous when committed in the name of government, and among these are theft, extortion, blackmail, and murder.

As a free and independent human, therefore, I declare that I am at peace with my fellow humans and that I will not initiate violence against them. This I pledge by my life, my fortune (such as it is) and my sacred honor, so help me God.

Partners in silly

I have a sign on my office wall that says, “Be silly sometimes.”

“Take a picture of me using onion rings like glasses, and then I’ll do you,” she said.

“Come over here, we’ll make it a selfie with both of us,” I said.

“OK.”

I firmly believe in being silly sometimes. Why did we do this? Specifically to be silly. It was exhilarating.

World getting you down? Try something silly.

“I’m glad we could be the ring bearers,” she said.

The Tra-La Days Are Over

I scraped 79 cents together and bought a record for the first time in 1961. I was 8 years old and I’d heard this song on the radio that began, “Wo wo wo wo, yeah yeah yeah, heyyyy Little Devil.” I found out when I bought the record that the singer was a guy named Neil Sedaka.

I had no idea what he was singing about, I just liked the music, and I misheard some of the words — when he told the girl, “You’ve met your water love,” I figured that water love must be something that happens to bad girls. (The real lyric, of course, is “Waterloo,” but what 8-year-old knows about Napoleon?)

I got excited when I found out that this was the same singer who sang “Calendar Girl” a few months earlier, and not long afterward he became the first singer I bought a second record by, a little song called “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” and a third not long after that, the best one yet, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do.”

I ended up buying every 45 rpm single Neil Sedaka released between 1961 and 1963. It was the first time I could say I was a fan of a singer. And I saw that he wrote his own songs, with some guy named Howard Greenfield, and I was intrigued because he obviously was singing his own harmonies and a lot of the backup vocals. My interest in multi-track recording my own songs traces back to my fascination with Neil Sedaka.

Like many pop singers of that era, he seemed to disappear after the Beatles changed the landscape in 1964. Around 1970 I blundered across an album called Emergence and got excited to see that Neil Sedaka was still out there!

Another four years went by, and suddenly Sedaka was back in the top 10 with a song called “Laughter in the Rain” and an album promoted by Elton John of all people called Sedaka’s Back. Now in my early twenties, I was thrilled to see my boyhood hero back in the spotlight.

Somewhere around 1976 or 1977, I got to see him in concert in Madison, Wisconsin. It was an entertaining show — I was a little disappointed that most of his early sixties songs were relegated to snippets in a medley, but otherwise it was a great evening.

I was working in radio then, at an “adult contemporary” style station, and one night a kid called in a request for “Stairway to Heaven,” expecting me to blow him off and chase him off the phone, but I told him, “Sure, no problem.” He called back, very confused, after I played Neil Sedaka’s 1960 hit, “Stairway to Heaven.”

Less than a year after I became editor of the venerable Door County Advocate 25 years later, Sedaka played a concert at Door Community Auditorium in Fish Creek in July 2003. The paper was offered an opportunity to do a phone interview, and I seized the chance to interview my old hero for myself. I recognized the familiar smile in his voice, he seemed to be sincerely touched to hear I was a fan boy, and he was a generous and gracious interviewee.

The rise of the internet made it easy to check in from time to time to see if he was still going, and he not only was still going but seemed to have the same buoyant energy as he moved into his eighties. During the COVID scare, he did regular video concerts from his home, singing three or four of the old tunes each time, always smiling.

Not long ago I saw a video where he played a new song from a new album due in April. The song, “Good Times, Good Music and Good Friends,” is not bad for a guy who would be 87 when the album is released.

Except he won’t see his 87th birthday on March 13 after all. Sedaka was rushed to the hospital Friday morning and died a short time later.

I’ve reached the point where I generally take in stride the passing of the people I admire, but this was my first, and so it hits a little harder. I put his greatest hits album on the turntable Friday night and couldn’t help but be teary-eyed; after all that we’ve been through, breaking up is hard to do.

I’m so glad I had a chance to talk with him for 10 minutes and tell him I loved his music. He was a genuinely nice human being.

On the shore

On a desolate island somewhere in the Pacific, a lone figure sits on the beach watching the waves undulate to, it seems, infinity. Is this the beginning of the story, the satisfying conclusion, or somewhere in the middle? Does she want to be in this desolate place, or is she lost — banished, or abandoned, or washed ashore after some catastrophe? Is her goal to be rescued, or is she content on this beach? Will welcome a rescuer with open arms, or resist? Or perhaps her predicament is not being sure if staying or going is the right course of action.

Some days, being stranded in a far-off place sounds like salvation from the buzz of stimulation overload — one yearns to sit somewhere and watch the waves, relieved of the hectic pace. Some days, the last thing you want is to be left alone.

Where am I going with this? What conclusions do I draw? Probably nothing more than recognizing we don’t know the whys and wherefores of the scenes we encounter moment to moment. It doesn’t hurt to ask, “Can I help?”

“‘Let me help.’ A hundred years or so from now, a great novelist will say those three words are the most important one can say to another, even more important than ‘I love you.’”

There I go, quoting fiction again. (Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever.”) It’s amazing how much truth can be drawn from make-believe stories.

This post is a waste of time

“I wish I didn’t waste a moment,” I said as I tucked the “smartphone” back into my pocket after a 20-minute drift through social media.

Which are the wasted moments? Well, surely the endless scrolling in search of random knowledge. Or … is doomscrolling or binging several episodes of a favorite television show a welcome respite from harsh reality?

With time, as with physical objects, I suppose “one person’s waste is another person’s treasure.” But there definitely are times when I emerge from a period of time ruefully thinking I could have spent it more wisely.

I advise myself, “Stop looking back, this is today,” because it feels like time is better spent focused on the present moment and moving forward rather than on regrets for past behavior. “Don’t beat yourself up, just resolve to do better next time.”

And sometimes we do need to “waste” time while our bodies or minds are recharging — resting from hard work or exercise, or processing a complicated work of art or situation.

But we shouldn’t just shrug and say, “I don’t know why I wasted so much time,” and brush it off. It behooves us to answer that question: Why DID I waste that time? And was it really wasted, or did I learn a little something?

Edison, I think, said something to the effect of, “I did not fail 100 times in my attempt to create electric light, I successfully identified 100 ways it would not work.

The time was not wasted if we move on recognizing we have found another way of wasting time that we ought not repeat.

A whisper in your ear

I can’t retrace my steps, so I am not sure how I found “Where angels dance,” the rerun I pulled from the archives after a frustrating day struggling with technology that refused to work for me, starting with my third internet outage of the month. That was strike 3, by the way, and I have scheduled installation of a better service in a couple of weeks.

On a night when the rift among the U.S. government’s supposed leaders was on full display on national TV, and I found myself with very strong opinions, my technological frustrations led me instead to a day when I wrote:

“Given a finite time to have any impact on this universe, spend every minute in love, in spirit-lifting, on big ideas, on generosity, on making every moment count for something positive.”

My past self — and I must believe the hand of God — reminded me that focusing on the squabbles among those who purport to run our lives is not going to lift spirits or spread love.

I am a broken record* but nothing is amiss that could not be solved by following the two greatest commandments, to love God and one another.

I post a link to my daily scrawl on Facebook because it’s the modern equivalent of the town square or the general store where people once gathered to discuss the affairs of the day, but it hurts my soul to go there anymore because so many people are there to call each other names and blame the other side for the hate that has infected the political class for decades.

I would rather avoid Facebook altogether, especially because I can’t seem to stop myself exploring what the latest outrage is about. But I feel a need to drop in among the shouters and whisper, “I love you,” in their ear.

The fruit of the Spirit that I have the most trouble with is self-control. I want to post and get on with my day without seeing what horrible things people are saying to each other, but it seems I refuse to control that impulse.

Let me just remind myself, and anyone willing to read this, that we are all children of God unworthy of his love, but he loves us anyway, and we would do well to follow his example. I don’t understand or share your rage, but I love you as a fellow human.

—

* If you are younger, let me know if I need to explain the “broken record” metaphor.

P.S. I am surprised to see I have not yet collected “Where angels dance” into one of my books, but if you would like to read more musings like it, may I suggest A Declaration of Peace or See the World! The links are to ebooks, but you can find the paper editions in the sidebar to your right or by scrolling down on your phone.