MaybeToday.org

  As January comes to a merciful end, I slump back in my easy chair and wonder how things may change this year. I’m waiting for the last of my recommendation letters to reach Franciscan University at Steubenville, so that I can begin my studies with them. That program will surely dominate my reading list – and my writing, I suppose – for as long as it takes me to complete it. The chair I’m sitting in will soon be moving upstairs, as I’ll be abandoning my basement bunker in favor of a reworked 2nd floor bedroom, for which I have been overly busy building bookcases.

With the economy in the tank, and my employer having just agreed to be purchased by a competitor, I can’t be very certain where 2009 is going to lead me professionally – or financially. I’m going to revive my PMP certification, just in case. We refinanced the house last week, in part to reduce monthly outlay in order to help pay the increased cost of sending Abby to Montrose School beginning next year, but also to mitigate the risk of having a high mortgage payment in times of uncertainty. So many things seem like they’re one false move away from coming apart at the seams.

Around here, winter runs from the beginning of December until almost the end of March, so it is about half over at this point. The end can’t come soon enough for me. I spent a couple hours in the driveway today, trying to break up and remove a covering of more than an inch of ice, which has been treacherous underfoot for perhaps two weeks, but nearly impossible to deal with prior to today due to bitter cold temperatures and/or the lack of sunlight. Remind me never to buy a north-facing house in New England again.

A year ago this time, I had just established the maybetoday.org domain, and was installing WordPress on my hosting server, trying to figure out how to make this all happen, and doing initial design work. I’ve accomplished only a small fraction of what I’d intended to accomplish with this web site, but that’s the story of my life. Perhaps I can take some small comfort in knowing that, as uncertain as many things may be in my life right now, some things never change.

I’ve spent the better part of the past three days trying to recover from an in-house file server disaster. It’s never easy… The main data files were pretty easily recovered, but it was very painful to recover a music collection consisting of about 45GB of MP3s. Like, I suspect, a lot of people, I’m often overconfident that nothing really serious will go wrong. Not that losing my collection of MP3s would have qualified as a catastrophe – my daughter’s fiancé buried his mother on Monday, which puts things in perspective.

But still, it seems far too easy to go through life as if with blinders on, taking only those precautions that don’t interfere too much with the day to day business of getting on with it. I tell myself that I’ll do things differently this year, but I wonder if I’ll actually get around to it. In the mean time, there’s a room or two to paint, DAT tapes to be restored and converted to DVD, refinancing paperwork to be processed, classes to be prepared, insurance companies to be fought with, piles of books to be read and/or shelved, all kinds of things to be written, and – Lord knows – much to be prayed about, and people to care for. It’s good to start somewhere…

A true winter chill has settled in to Massachusetts tonight, as we begin to close in on the winter solstice. I took the dog outside a few minutes ago to prepare for locking up  the house for the night, and I was taken aback by the beauty of the night as I headed down the porch stairs. The sky is crystal clear, the moon and stars: brilliant. The temperature is just below 20 degrees.

As I was wandering around the back yard, I was thinking how I so enjoyed these kinds of nights when I was young and carefree, and walking all over town with my friends at night – instead of being inside doing homework or other useful things. I think I enjoyed them even more when I was working nights, in my early twenties, loading trucks and sampling drums of chemical waste. It’s not so cold as to be oppressive, just cold enough to keep everything crisp: the ground, the air, the shadows, and the mind. There’s something about a cold, brightly moonlit night that clears the cobwebs from the head, and invites clarity of thought.

I had a lot of room in my life back then for thinking, though I can’t honestly say I did a very good job of it – especially as a teenager. But there were plenty of nights, spent – mostly alone – jockeying trucks and loading them up in the yard over at General Chemical, that I would let my mind wander over various ideas:  working out moral problems, trying to understand political questions, wrestling with religious doctrines, and generally trying to find my place in the world of ideas. I wish I could reach back and grab that kid by the lapels, give him a little direction, and dispossess him of a few particularly noxious notions, but that’s just not the way life works.

One thing I might tell that young man, were I to have the chance, would be not to get impatient with life, but to treasure the opportunity that such a life provided for reflection. By the end of the decade, I’d grown quite tired of the kind of labor that provided me that opportunity for reflection because of the lack of mental challenge inherent in the work. I wanted work that allowed me to use my mind, and eventually, that’s exactly what I found.

But what I lost in the process of finding “meaningful work” was the freedom to think for myself. It could hardly be any other way: how could I possibly think for myself if I was busy thinking for somebody else? The great questions of my life would have to wait for my “spare time,” so that I could focus my mind on “meaningful” matters like desktop configurations, networking protocols, technical security schemes, business benefits, requirements analysis, project dashboards, and stakeholder satisfaction.

Life, it turns out, is full of trade-offs – not simple solutions, or “progress.” I should also not have been surprised when my weight ballooned after giving up manual labor – though I’m sure it never crossed my mind at the time. No doubt, I’ve appreciated the financial benefits of my current career – and I’m hardly ready to give them up. But as I find it harder and harder to keep my mind focused, during the day, on matters that seem to me ever more trivial, I have to wonder where this is all leading.

I took a deep breath this weekend, and began the process of applying to Franciscan University’s Masters in Theology program. This is going to be a long road, and I hope I’ve weighed the trade-offs appropriately. For all the good – and there is plenty of it – that the last 15 or so years have meant for me, I can’t deny that I feel myself being called back to an earlier, simpler way, in many respects – even as I look forward to brand new possibilities. Truth be told, there have even been plenty of days over the years (more recently than prior) that I’ve wished I was working outside again. I’m not sure how reasonable that is at this point, but I do need some kind of fresh start.

So, October draws to a close. It’s been a very quiet month on maybetoday.org. I wish I could say that I’ve accomplished a lot here or there, but the truth is I’ve been quite run down this month. I did spend a chunk of time mapping out some ideas for how WORDsearch might be improved moving forward, but it’s hard to think of anything else significant I’ve managed to do in my free time this month.

I will confess to watching much of the Red Sox’ attempts to progress through the baseball playoffs, which certainly cut into my time to accomplish any work after-hours. I think the late hours of these games, driven by MLB’s desire to maximize cross-country viewership for the sake of advertising rates, seriously compromised my ability to function mentally during those weeks when I was watching, and I’m only now beginning to catch up.

My body is so very different than it was before I had the heart attack – I don’t know if that’s a function of changes in my body itself, or of the effects of the medications I’m on now, or some combination, but it’s impossible at this point for me to deny that I simply cannot withstand the same kind of bodily stress that was such a chronic part of my routine existence just a couple of years ago. If I die young, it will not be from lack of understanding of what’s been killing me, but rather from a lack of resolve to deal with it prudentially. Lord have mercy.

The feast of Saint Jerome is always a special day for me. Perhaps it is because he was such an unsaintly saint. It’s tough to read much of his writings because of his cantankerous personality, but there have truly been few more brilliant men that have populated the planet. Of course, he’s appreciated most for his work in translating the Scriptures into a single book that could be read by any literate person in the Western world (and understood by all). It’s astonishing, given the frenetic pace of publication of vernacular translations of the Bible over the past 100 years, that Jerome’s Vulgate translation effectively served as the official (de jure, or mostly de facto) version of the Scriptures for roughly 1,500 years. What a great gift this guy was to the Church – and how strangely inspirational to see politeness not overly regarded in the search for truth!

Pink Floyd keyboardist and co-founder Richard Wright died Monday at his home. He was 65.

Rock stars die all the time, and I never really knew anything about this quiet guy, but news of Wright’s death set me to reflecting quite a bit yesterday on my youth, the role of pop music in the lives of youth, and the fate of those whose lives turn them into rock stars.

I hope the title of this post isn’t overly corny – and I’m sure I’m not the only one to whom it will occur to use it. It refers, of course, to the title of what is my favorite song from Pink Floyd’s landmark 1973 album, Dark Side of the Moon – a song Wright wrote, or co-wrote with Roger Waters. Like all Floyd music, it is tortured to a point that approaches despair. And I had to wonder today if Wright ever found an answer to the angst-ridden but cynical cries for justice, peace –and just plain sanity- that comprised so much of the music that defined his professional life. Even acknowledging that Roger Waters was the primary architect of the eventual Pink Floyd milieu, both musically and lyrically, it would seem impossible to separate any of the members from the whole.

For that matter, it’s hard to picture Wright (and others like him) apart even from the larger community of commodities we call rock stars. For all the glamour and magnetic appeal these characters have to adolescent minds, it’s not a pretty sight when you peel back the thrill. There is no hope in rock culture: it promises a quick fix in some form of indulgence (for the going price, of course), but it cannot offer hope, because it cannot be open to the future; it cannot be open to life. Hence, the prevalence of drugs, fornication, and contempt for roots (tradition). It struggles to build its own tradition – a kind of “history” that spans perhaps 50 years – but it doesn’t really know how to grow up, have children, bury parents, nurture wisdom. It’s hard to overstate how important deep roots are to true flowering. Yet rock “culture” encourages kids to envision their roots in rebellion, which is the very death of culture.

I was not a real big Pink Floyd fan as a teen (I actually listened to them more later on). Although I was, of course, mesmerized by Dark Side of the Moon – as the whole world seemingly was. I liked the two follow-on albums, Wish You Were Here and Animals, I just wasn’t wild about them, like so many were. I also never liked the early work (although Meddle’s OK), and I could never understand the appeal of The Wall – an album that, even from my youth, I’ve always thought was the epitome of whining self-indulgence and overbearing melodrama. There are a few good songs, but surrounded by much too much drivel. Dark Side, however, was a piece apart. Just the fact that it spent more than 14 years on the Billboard charts is mind-boggling – occupying, as it does, a world of faddish impatience in which yesterday’s style is today’s trendy object of scorn.

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My own engagement with Pink Floyd began in a manner quite befitting the spirit of the psychedelic world the band embodied in 1973. Unlike so many events of that period, I remember this clearly, as I must have understood at some level, even then, what a cad I was.

I was 12 or 13 years old when I decided I wanted a copy of this album, which had already quickly become a signature of the age, and I was by then fully entrenched in the lawless and immoral underbelly of the so-called counterculture – despite my tender age. My bicycle at the time was a black Schwinn I’d inherited from my older brother, which had an aluminum basket on the handlebars for cargo. I rode the bike to the Natick Mall after dark, and stole a copy of the album from one of the stores. I’d left the bike just outside the door. I slid the album under my coat, headed out the door, hopped on the bike, and started pedaling down Speen Street toward home – even pulling the album out of my coat to admire it along the way.

But something happened during the ride, and when I got back home, I realized that I no longer had the album. It must have bounced out of the basket somewhere on Speen Street. I was furious. I had stolen it fair and square, and considered it cosmically unjust that I had to go back to the store and steal it again, greatly increasing my risk of getting caught.

So I got on the bike again, and pedaled back up Speen Street – carefully retracing my route in the vain hope of finding “my” album. I never did. Instead, I stole a second copy that night – the same way I had stolen the first – but I held this one in my hand the entire way home. Believe it or not, I still felt gypped by fate.

I share this story because it needs grieving as much as Richard Wright does. The memory – not so much of my actions, as of my unfathomable self-righteousness – stands as a sentinel in my conscience, always ready to mock any attempts to justify myself, while also providing a quiet witness to the danger of being glib about the potential for perverse ethics to blind us to truth.

I bought that album eventually – some years later – and I played it a couple times yesterday, raising a mental toast to Rick Wright as I listened. Now he really gets to play The Great Gig in the Sky – though what that means to him, I surely cannot say. I can say that he drank deeply from a poison cup I know all too well, and that the darkness that streams forth from it is a formidable enemy for any man. The end can come so quickly, and so easily find us hiding from the light, even searching the lonely road for the ill-gotten fruits of our violence and shame.

I hope you embraced the light, Richard, for we all move into the consuming fire in the end. Sorry about the thievery.

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Ever since high school, I’ve been keeping a journal of at least occasional thoughts, as well as some other minor writing. Sometime during the summer of what I think was 1984, I threw away all my collected writing to date – with the exception of a small set of poetry that was the lyrical content of some music I was composing at the time.

I’ve often since regretted that action, thinking that, in my rashness, I’ve deprived myself of a good source of knowledge and insight into myself as a person. I’m not sure I still regret it, though, as I don’t know how keen I would be to encounter the young man behind those ten years worth of missing documents. I’m not entirely certain of the reason for this, but I have some ideas.

I still possess what is now over twenty years of the document record of my life, often recorded at low moments of melancholy bellyaching, yet also including a fair amount of constructive thought, in one form or another. Occasionally, I go back through it to recollect the way I have traveled. The bellyaching tends to be pretty repetitive – I’ve been struggling against more or less the same demons for most of my life, even if my footing in that struggle has changed radically over time – but I’ve always found it at least entertaining, and at times even inspiring, to re-enter the thinking of my younger self.

Lately, though, I’ve been finding myself less comfortable with what (or who) I encounter when I dig into my past. I’m not referring to the record of my struggles – I understand what that’s all about, regardless of how frustrating it might be to see the evidence of sin’s tenacious perseverance, and my own characteristic feebleness – but rather to the record of my ideas about things that were important to me. Where once I would have found my younger self’s thinking to be at least a good jumping off point for considering some matter, I now find myself, more and more, rolling my eyes at the narrowness and shallowness of what I once thought.

p>It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be able to say that I’ve moved on, but I’m beginning to not recognize myself in my own history, if I can say that without undue melodrama. It’s not that I’ve ever been completely satisfied with the way I’d put things ten or fifteen years prior, and I’ve certainly always felt there was room for improvement and development, but I’m beginning to consider my youthful thinking less in terms of development (of at least certain strands of thought), and more in terms of correction – even repudiation. It seems I was, in some matters, right out to lunch.

The net result of this has been a loss of confidence in myself, and in my ability to perceive reality with sufficient and appropriate clarity. It’s great to learn from one’s mistakes, to grow, to overcome deficiencies. But what should this suggest my current life might look like to me in another fifteen or twenty or thirty years? Would I discover (or at least surmise, for how could I say with certainty even then?) that my ideas, today, had been not only immature and unrefined (which would be par for the course), but even at cross-purposes with reality (that is: lies)?

Multiply this problem by, not a few decades, but the infinite shadow of eternity, and it becomes easy to fall prey to the conceits of the relativists, and their confounded coupling of skepticism and progressivism. At the least, it does seem to raise a valid question about the limits of human knowledge, and of what it means to be coming to know the truth. If we are growing in wisdom, we should always have the luxury of looking back with a certain bemusement, but it seems illogical to me that the path to truth should ever look, in retrospect, to have been just plain wrong – leading me to wonder exactly what path I’m actually on.

As I write this, it occurs to me that I must sound like I am complaining of a lack of personal infallibility. So many people have such trouble with the concept even of the infallibility of the Bride of Christ, and here I am grousing about how inconsistent it seems with life in the Spirit of Truth for an individual to fall into error. It sounds silly when I put it like this. But, still, wrong-headedness must be seen, it seems to me, to be rooted in resistance to the Spirit.

In reality, some of the Protestant theories of revelation tread down this same path – I’m thinking of the doctrines of soul competence and the perspicuity of Scripture. They’re not identical to what I’m talking about, but they likewise assume that error can be known (or avoided), not through the faculty of reason, but through grace, somehow. And that this is available to individuals through the Spirit. When you examine them, these are really much more radical doctrines than the Catholic dogma of infallibility, which grace is attributed only to the Church as a whole – including, in some circumstances, the Pope speaking for the entire Church.

So I really can’t go there, as tempting as it is. In the end, I suppose I simply cannot know just how misguided I may be at any particular time. That’s the inherent danger of opinion, isn’t it?

What’s frustrating is the stubborn obscurity of the distinction between opinion and understanding – not that I’ve ever witnessed understanding attempting to masquerade as opinion, but opinion certainly strives mightily to be passed off as understanding. It’s very easy to walk away with an ignorant opinion from an encounter with a genuine source of knowledge. Isn’t that, in a nutshell, the basis of faithlessness?

As for whether my younger self had any real clue whatsoever, or what my older self would make of my current self, I suppose I just need to be at peace with myself, and cultivate hope. And it wouldn’t huty to consider the significance of the fact that the areas of my youthful thought I now see the need to renounce are exactly those areas where I had trouble, as a youth, with Catholic Church teaching.

I’ve been very tired over the past couple weeks. I run out of steam before I get home from work, and I haven’t been able to find my second wind, for the most part. I wish I could write during the day, when my head is often buzzing with ideas I’d like to pursue, but by the time I get home, I just don’t have the energy.

This especially concerns me because I’ve been making noises again about getting my application in to Franciscan University so I can begin my prep work for their MA program. I can’t help wondering if I should just drop the idea, and simply pursue my own academic agenda at my own pace. I haven’t even been reading – I’m too tired to think these days. How can I succeed in course work in this condition?

Perhaps I can fight through it somehow. It’s true that I’ve allowed myself to be somewhat sucked into the excitement of the Boston Celtics’ renewed success, and I’ve been staying up watching some playoff games. But in reality, I’m getting more sleep at night than at any time I can remember. I think my recent TV watching might be more a function of my tiredness than a cause of it, though maybe there’s some reciprocity going on.

Tomorrow promises to be a particular challenge, as Abby and Rebecca have their annual dance recital. It’s a long afternoon – the schedule I saw calls for 47 different routines in succession – and most of the music will be awful. The experience will no doubt rekindle in me a desire to pick up the thread I was writing on the role of pop music in the life of children, and I suppose that if I manage to find the energy to work my way through it, that will be a good thing.

It comes quickly, and it goes like lightning. Life is truly over in a heartbeat. I wrote once, long ago – was it really more than yesterday? – about my need for a “certain urgency,” about my need to realize that the pressure is on before I can motivate myself to do what needs to be done. What it has taken me far too long to figure out is that life itself – or rather, death – provides that certain urgency to me, and to all, all the time. It is over before we have a chance to act, unless we act at every opportunity, rather than waiting for the “right” opportunity. The kids are grown and gone before they can be taught many of life’s serious lessons. And I can only marvel at how life has passed me by.

The Easter season is over, and the Church moves back into Ordinary time. I feel a little reluctant to let it go, though I’m not sure why. But as I said the final “alleluias” of Night Prayer last night, I felt a little twinge of sadness.

I suppose I am, as usual, resisting the passage of time because of a sense of disconnect between what I’ve accomplished, and what I’d hoped to have accomplished. I need to learn to be more satisfied with my effort, and perhaps to not set expectations so high, either – although it would also help if I could waste less time, and become more productive!

At any rate, it is Ordinary Time now. One of the great things about the seasons of the liturgical cycle is that there are so many times each year when something is starting over. During the first half of the year, you don’t go more than a couple months before it’s time for a new season: Advent, Christmas, Ordinary Time, Lent, Easter, then back to Ordinary Time. And then there are the built-in periods of even more intense focus: the octaves of Christmas and Easter, the Easter Triduum, the “novena” between Ascension and Pentecost.

But now we start a long, stable period that will carry on through the entire second half of the year without interlude – right up until Advent. It’s time to settle in to a steady working routine, time to get comfortable in the familiar four-week cycle of readings from Morning and Evening Prayer. The Sunday Gospel readings will return again to Matthew’s narrative, relaying Jesus’ Galilean mission: the healings, miracles, and parables. It’s a time to focus a bit less on the great events of salvation, and more on the person of Jesus Christ, the man who is God. It’s time to focus on what it means to the human race for him to have walked those dusty roads long ago – a simple man, without so much as a place to lay his head. It’s a great time to be alive.