the greatest of these is love

Pardon me.  Have you seen the movie "Crash"?  Very much the way it starts by flashing around to seemingly unrelated stories, I am going to start with two apparently independent vignettes.  Just like the movie, it will all come together in the end.

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A little while back, Christians worldwide celebrated their holiest holiday, the one that gives irrevocable substance to their beliefs - Easter and the holy days preceding it.  Long story short, the man bold enough to call himself the son of God breaks bread with his friends and then tells them that the next time he will eat with them will be "on the flip side."  After a night of ardent prayer in a garden in Jerusalem, one of his "friends" leads those who would arrest him to Jesus, beginning the end, so to speak.  The next 24 hours will find this supposed Messiah tried, beaten, and hung on a cross, crucified until dead.  The miracle, though, upon which Christians base their faith and find their salvation, is that after resting in a tomb from a Friday afternoon until a Sunday morning, Jesus rose, bringing veracity to all his claims and reconciling a broken relationship between humanity and a pure deity.

I have no idea who named all the holy days, but as Easter approached this year, my cousin's wife inquired if anyone knew what the word Maundy meant (as in Maundy Thursday, the night that Christians remember The Last Supper and take part in a sacrament begun on that night 2000ish years ago).  I'll admit, I referred to the expertise of the internet to help me answer her, but upon finding this article, I remembered things I learned in seminary.  "Maundy" is taken from "Mandate."  Let me explain further:

After humbling himself and washing his friends' feet in a symbolic act of what he was about to accomplish on a far larger and bloodier scale, and after instituting the sacrament of Communion by offering his friends his body/bread and blood/wine and asking them to remember him when they dined together, Jesus gave them one last mandate.  "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.  By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." (Gospel of John, 13:34-35 ESV)

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Do you know who Beth Hart is?

I've mentioned her before, but lately she's been taking up a lot of space in my brain and in my heart.  I believe I have come to decide that she is truly the greatest performer of my time for what she does.  There are two reasons for this:

1. She seems to have perfect pitch - she never misses a note!
2. She is so completely honest and raw... she pours every part of her heart into her music.  I saw an interview with her when she said that she wrote when she was sad and toured when she was not, more or less.

Having lost myself in hours of YouTube videos over the last several weeks, I've seen her live performances from all over the world, in all kinds of venues from stadiums to dive bars, and multiple versions of her more popular songs.  She is a consummate performer - she enjoys every moment of what she does (even in a bittersweet, maudlin kind of way) and recognizes at every opportunity how lucky she is that she gets to sing her heart for a living.  She is so real.

She is a storyteller and I love that.  Through her songs and the tales she uses to introduce them, I learn more about her and her life and her inspirations.  She has written the most sincere love song I've ever heard and the most painful plea for love, too.

Beth did not have the fame she deserved in the USA, so she does most of her touring overseas, throughout Europe.  She very clearly feeds off of the energy of her crowd, so she interacts with them frequently throughout the concert.  She loves it when her crowd sings along, they obviously love when she talks to them, and there is always this intense intimacy between her and those in attendance at her shows.  I hope to be so lucky one day.  

As I've been vicariously participating (via YouTube), I noticed a trend in her closing song.  It is not normally the same song, though they are almost always incredibly personal and sometimes heart-wrenchingly painful songs.  One can almost imagine Beth's fans leaving the concert in a contemplative way not unlike the worshippers at a Maundy Thursday service.    

After concluding her Wroclaw (Poland) concert with the song that made her [at least somewhat] famous, she sincerely thanks her fans for being "so nice to me."

Maybe I was in a particularly melancholy mood while watching this one night, but I thought to myself, "what kind of pain makes a person thank total strangers for being nice to her?"  It was enough to push tears into my eyes, thinking of all I knew she had been through from reading up on her and watching interviews with her.  Divorced parents, possible abuse, a heroin user by age 15, when she was 22ish her old sister, who she holds in high regard, died from AIDS, which she caught from a dirty needle.  It took Beth years to care enough about herself to clean up (and the love of a good man).  Her self-esteem is still just awful and my heart aches for her.

In her adult years, she reconciled the broken relationship she had with her father, who left when she was still young.  When she wrote one of her more recent albums, 37 Days, she asked him what his favorite song was.  He told her he didn't know why, but it was this one:

She told him she knew why - Because he is an addict, just like her.  Clean or not, it is a continuing struggle, laid bare in this song.  "God knows I can't change me; I've tried and tried... it's been a long time at the bottom.  Spent a lot of time way down there.  It's been a long time at the bottom - I don't know how I made it here."

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So how do the two parts of this post "crash"?  Really, it's quite simple.

You don't know what another person is going through or has lived through.  You don't know their joys or the pain they carry unspoken.

Be kind.  Love one another.

the ugly side of the rainbow

I remember when I was a child (I'm just full of memories lately, aren't I?), probably like most children, I thought puddles were fun.  I don't think I was ever the kid that took a running start and jumped into a puddle with both feet, but I know I liked to trudge through them and watch the water move in response to my tiny footprints.  To my mother's horror, my favorite puddles were in the parking lots of the local shopping center or mall.  My favorite puddles had the rainbows in them.

It meant very little to me when I was barely as tall as my mother's waist that the pretty puddles had oil in them.  What's oil to a five-year-old?  All I knew was that those were the ones I wanted to step in.  All my mother knew was how little she wanted to clean the oil off of my shoes, or God forbid, my ankle socks.

photo credit

Not so pretty now that I know the destruction of the rainbow puddles.  Sure, the little puddles in the mall parking lot made my mother's blood run cold, certainly imagining how likely or not likely it was that she would be able to salvage socks soaked with oiled water.  The "rainbow" in the Gulf of Mexico makes my blood run hot - hot with rage, not only over the event itself, but also people's varying reactions.

First, you have the people who immediately get to the heart of the problem - the fishing industry will suffer so!  The price of fish will sky rocket!  And the poor fishermen!  How will they make a living if all the things they were going to kill are already dead?  In all seriousness, especially in this abysmal economy, I do feel great compassion for their plight.  Even though I wish they would find a better way to feed their families, I regret that their livelihood has been torn away from them.

Next, you have the people who don't even try to hide their complete lack of substance.  As the rainbow puddle expands toward the crystal blue waters of the Florida Keys and other vacation destinations, hissy fits are thrown hither and yon - "What will happen to the travel industry??"  Once again, I feel badly for people who lose their job security when the economy is already in such awful shape that the unemployment benefits I collected for 8 months in 2006 have been extended to two years for the nearly 10% of America's workforce that isn't working.  However, my compassion is starting to wane.

What about the 13 humans who lost their lives in the course of the BP oil spill?  What about their families and friends?  What about the animals coated in oil or killed in the blast itself?  I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before, but I'm really stunned by how little people are focusing on the devastating effects this catastrophe has wrought on ecosystems and the world we live in.

We have become so obsessed with the horrendous state of financial affairs the United States has endured over the past two years (I can't believe it's already been two years since the economy as we knew it came crashing down around our feet), it seems our automatic reaction to all tragedy is, "How will this affect me financially?"  We worry about the fishing industry, we worry about travel and resorts, we even worry about the beauty of the clear water and coral reefs (though now we are at least starting to move toward a bona fide ecological worry). 

To turn the tables just a little bit more, let's look at it like this: we need look no further for the blame of this "accident" than our own money-hungry culture.  No matter how tragic this event is and no matter how sad we are about it, it doesn't change the fact that it was our stupid decision to start drilling for oil underwater.  So, while we're polluting water, destroying ecosystems, and killing each other, someone in subSaharan Africa is walking several miles to a dirty and polluted body of water, gathering as much as they can in their vessel, and imbibing disease and filth because they have no other choice.  Drink dirty water or be thirsty and dehydrated - that's the other choice. 

It's been a long, exhausting and frustrating week.  I really don't have the energy to wage the all-out battle on water pollution for the sake of keeping America comfortable that I had intended to make.  I hope my semi-mindless rambling has at least caused you to pause and think before complaining about how needlessly expensive your catfish dinner is.