Getting Ready to Pray                     

I am not a musicologist and actually I do not know what that is. How does a D-minor differ from a D-seventh? I do know a few finger shiftings on a guitar.

And I figured one thing out. The note which begins a song is often the note upon which the song ends. Not a great insight I suspect. Just sing the Happy Birthday song and end on a different note than the regular one! It just doesn't sound right. We need to have a correct and happy ending instead!

Several people in our small community delight in scrupulous tidiness; others just delight. Better than a good dessert at the end of the meal is an antiseptic kitchen; all’s well that ends clean. Orderliness is next to godliness or neuroticism, take your pick. Not all things end on the same note of comfort. Living with the disorder in an orderly manner is an orderly thing in itself! If I go crazy because of crumbs then I am an agent of discord as much as the crumby person in the kitchen. If I fix him, rearrange his beliefs, would I allow him to return the favor in his fixing mine?

Some Thoughts 

It does not take very long for us to figure out that we cannot complete or fulfill ourselves by our self alone. We must find something and then somebody to assist our roundness, our soundness. For little children, cars, dolls, tea sets, Lego blocks assist them, but temporarily. Then as older folk we ask real people, real others, to bring us to an harmonious resolve with life. Sooner rather than later, as with the dolls and trucks, they too fail to clean up our crumbs of disorder in life. The quick-draw reaction is to get frustrated and angry with those others whom we thought and hoped would satisfy our longings.

All relationships cause noise, even relationship with inanimate objects, but especially with the animate. These do not really cause the noise; they bring the noise out of us by the way in which they are not exactly like us. Our noise is inside and comes out as we try to wrench and twist others to conform to our hopes and demanding expectations. I probably haven't even told them what my desires for them are. I might not even have known these myself because the noise deafened the song.

It seems good that we do not live with ones who are exactly like ourselves, because then we would dislike ourselves even more. The noise is within us and to resolve it into a song takes more than a little self-awareness, leading to self-acceptance. I might have trouble with those realities (people) who invite me to awareness.

Someone wrote that knowledge maketh a bloody entrance. If Shakespeare didn't say this he should have.

I say that self-knowledge can darn near kill us. Self-acceptance as the source of our noise is a deception if it is not rooted in awareness. So God blesses the confrontation we have with ourselves. Jesus shows us in the Gospel the freedom that comes from self-acceptance which leads to the acceptance of other selves.

This is only a glimpse so keep listening to the noise becoming a song.