This is another of the “Oxford Collection”, written between the years of 2004-2006. This song (like a few others) grapples with the impression that somehow, the idea of the eternal has been smuggled into our hearts, and how this idea has translated into the relationships we pursue, the art we create, and even the seemingly smaller choices we make every day. C.S. Lewis devotes more than a few pages of his writing to this scheme which proposes that our desires have a useful way of pointing to a reality. We experience hunger, which tells us that food will satisfy us. We are thirsty, and know that a good drink of water should do the trick. We have an ache inside of us for love and unending life– well, that is simply because we were meant to be in love forever. The desire makes sense when we consider how it fits the reality. The desire, however, does not constitute the whole of reality, and this is something we’ve got quite upside down these days. There is a rather fierce opinion going around that if I satisfy this one craving, this one restlessness, this one impulse – then I shall know who I really am and where all the arrows in my life have been pointing me towards.

But we have grown poor at target practice and our arrows are lying all over the ground, like abandoned party favors at a five year old’s birthday celebration…but if you know where this post is going, you’ll know that I mean the arrows to represent something a little more significant than cheap gifts handed out at a party. The point is, we often mistake the arrow for the target, while the bold red and white circle, which may have once commanded our attention, merely sits there, unbothered by the arrows that go swishing by.

Families, churches and leaders should be working to build up a culture which educates the next generation (and, while we’re at it, every other generation) about all the good and lasting realities we should be aiming for. Instead, they often hand us more arrows to shoot aimlessly (at anywhere besides the Right Target) and praise us for boldly committing ourselves to The Thing We’re Sure Will Make Us Happy. CS Lewis writes, in The Joyful Christian: “Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth thrown in. Aim at Earth and you will get neither.”

The first few lines of the song are meant to juxtapose one element of the human condition with what faith in Christ has offered each of us. I’m lonely: well, I’m not alone. I’m exhausted: well, He’s with me in my exhaustion. My heart has been hardened by sin: well, He’s there to take away my heart of stone and give me one of flesh (but I must remember to ask Him to do so…He is curious like that – almost as though He’s waiting for our permission to heal us completely).

The chorus is full of questions…where does this strange desire for immortality come from? And who is the author behind every single one of those stories which ends happily? Especially when it’s so clear that many real-life stories do not offer endings which would make for very cheerful bedtime reading. But not too many children want to hear the one about the princess who wasted away in a cold, dark tower after the brave knight (and would-be hero) ended up as a dragon’s afternoon snack. There is a reason why the happy ending (as elusive as it may feel at times) has a certain ring of realism about it. It is because we are wired for something more than surviving one day at a time (even a slow-witted porcupine can aspire to that). We have a sense that our lives should stretch on (how we grieve when they are cut short!), and that these extraordinarily long lives should be full of opportunities to live well (in peace, love, etc). Our existential desires are the fabric of life’s biggest questions. If the answer is not here, it is somewhere. And if the answer does not lie with us, it must abide in Someone.

“There are some pleasures which are almost impossible to account for and very difficult to describe. I have just experienced one of them while travelling by tube from Paddington to Harrow.”
~CS Lewis, Hedonics

During my freshman year of college, I frequently took the train between Alexandria and Williamsburg (Virginia, that is…not Egypt and New York). These journeys were full of their own little perks, such as leaky roofs and inexplicable delays. But it is not the inconveniences that I recall the most, though they might be the things I would discuss the most with others. Perhaps I described the leaky roofs and long delays the most because I didn’t really have the words to describe the experiences that really left an impression on me. That is, until I read this little essay by Lewis.

I first came across it while browsing through a library in Oxford (the public library, since I wasn’t exactly allowed entrance into the university libraries). I had made up my mind to read as much of Lewis as humanly possible, and that meant perusing through some of his more obscure titles. And by “obscure”, I mean anything that wasn’t The Chronicles of Narnia or Mere Christianity. So I picked up an anthology of his works (the title of which escapes me at the moment), and when the next Saturday rolled around, I could be found curled up on the couch, immersed in a Lewisian world of refreshing thoughts and new ideas (which are actually rather old ideas that Lewis had a knack of bringing back into the conversation as though they’d never left).

So I turned the page, and there was the word “Hedonics”. Simple, curious, and a little bit wonderful. And that’s just the title. I read the essay and such a thrill of understanding rushed through me that even now, the memory of the moment makes my heart beat just a little bit faster, almost as though I’ve glimpsed the object of my affection from across a crowded room.

I say “understanding”, but I really should say that it was a feeling of being understood. Lewis was able to describe something that had followed me for years, like a quiet friend who hasn’t been given a name yet. Even Lewis admits that pleasures such as these are “very difficult to describe”. But his effort is about as close as you can get…and it’s certainly far closer than my own attempts.

“But what is this experience?” you might ask….it is the delight of traveling through an everyday hamlet with its scrappy train station; watching people get off the train with bright and expectant faces, as their eyes scan the platform for a familiar face. It’s the enchantment which comes from rushing past houses, with my face pressed up against the window, soaking in the scene of laundry hanging from the windows, toys scattered on the front lawn, hastily-painted signs announcing a sale at the hardware store down the road…for the tiniest of moments, I’m a character in that story, and then the train ushers me away. But it fails to steer me away from an almost mystical notion that a family, back in that town, is about to sit down for dinner, exchange accounts of what they all did that day, and make plans for the next day…maybe with laughing, crying, silence, yelling…maybe even a little of each. But that dining room is a theatre, where the drama of human life is played out, day after day, while the trains go rumbling past.

The piano in this song is intended to invoke the feeling of being on a train. It is meant to suggest an air of lightness, but not frivolity. For life is not a joke, even if we say that God has a sense of humor. But His glorious humor is the substance of our salvation, and the real joke is the pathetic way that evil tries to distract us from the true good.

I will stop my own thoughts here, and let Lewis take us into a conclusion. May your train rides be full of leaky roofs, inexplicably long delays and moments of blissful serenity which remind us of those things that we all share….

“there was the charm of sudden silence at stations I had never heard of, and where we seemed to stop for a long time. ..the point is that all these things between them built up for me a degree of happiness which I must not try to assess because, if I did, you would think I was exaggerating. But wait. “Built up” is the wrong expression. They did not actually impose this happiness; they offered it. I was free to take it or not as I chose – like distant music which you need not listen to unless you wish, like a delicious faint wind on your face which you can easily ignore. One was invited to surrender to it…I accepted the invitation – threw myself open to this feathery, impalpable, tingling invitation. The rest of the journey I passed in a state which can be described only as joy.

…We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism – the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good. But we have hardly yet begun what may be called Hedonics, the science or philosophy of Pleasure. And I submit that the first step in Hedonics is to knock the jailer down and keep the keys henceforward in our own possession…He is a sham realist. He accuses all myth and fantasy and romance of wishful thinking: the way to silence him is to be more realist than he – to lay our ears closer to the murmur of life as it actually flows through us at every moment and to discover there all that quivering and wonder and (in a sense) infinity which the literature that he calls realistic omits. For the story which is the experience most like the experiences of living is not necessarily the story whose events are most like those in a biography or a newspaper.”

Far above the Ephel Duath in the west, the night sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among a cloud wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end, the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

~ from Tolkien’s “Return of the King”

Anyone even the least bit familiar with “The Lord of the Rings” will know how terrible the place called Mordor is. Even the name sounds ominous. It’s like the New Jersey Turnpike, but with less concrete and more orcs. A seemingly never-ending stretch of unfriendly territory, which reeks of loneliness and despair. Which is why, when Sam sees the single star piercing through the gloom, the reader is filled with a surge of hope…very similar to the kind of hope that the Evangelist John writes about: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1)

But this song is not really about Mordor, or the Turnpike, or even the Gospel of John. Not explicitly, anyway. In my last post, I made a mention of the bad days and the long days, and how these may be a vehicle to growth in the spiritual life. This song takes that idea a little further. What if it’s precisely in the storm when we begin to understand what things like courage, love and faith really are? They certainly take on new meaning, beyond that of sentimental words written hastily in a Hallmark card. Not that I have anything against Hallmark cards – but they don’t quite have the same transformative power as Sam’s extraordinary epiphany in the heart of Mordor.

When I speak of “the soft words”, I’m thinking here of the risk that can come with hearing exactly what we want to hear. If, as Tolkien writes in his famous essay on Fairystories, we were made for “joy beyond the walls of the world”, might the journey to such joy be full of unexpected twists and turns…perhaps even down darker roads and uneven paths? What if “our ideas” of joy do not actually correspond to the fullest potential of the person (as designed by God)? If we were meant for happiness beyond the frontiers of the world we know, it can only mean that we will be drawn out of ourselves and out of the comforts we have constructed. And sometimes (even often) such a “drawing out” hurts.

If it is the case, then, that the trials in life have the capacity to carry us closer to the wondrous shock of the resurrection, then all of our stumbling and scraped knees take on a curious significance: yes, we fall on stone, and it can seem pretty hard and wearisome at first. But if it’s hard, then it’s sturdy. And if it’s sturdy, then it’s safe to build upon it. This is why Christ is referred to as the Cornerstone…not because the first disciples were all accomplished architects and this would have been their metaphor of choice. Rather, Christ calls us to build our whole lives upon Him, because such a strong foundation promises “light and high beauty” to be discovered, as we live the kind of life that reaches — with perseverance and hope — towards the heavens.

GK Chesterton writes in “Orthodoxy”:
All Christianity concentrates on the man at the crossroads. The vast and shallow philosophies…all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? – that is the only thing to think about, if you enjoy thinking.

* * *
This song, written in 2005, is a short reflection on these crossroads. At the time I was composing it, I had in mind (at least initially) the “broader” vocational questions…would I get married one day? Would I have children? What if I’m called to the religious life? And I do not mean to discredit those questions, for they are perfectly fine questions to be asking. But something of Chesterton’s “instant” can become a little lost in the process. Rather than imagining that the crossroads exist at rare moments of life (those kinds of moments that deserve their own epic soundtrack) he suggests that the crossroads are much nearer to daily life. How I choose to live my life begins the moment the sunlight wakes me up, and even before I step on the floor next to my bed. One foot in front of the other. Cue the sweeping strings and the soaring flutes.

It can sound almost a little paralyzing, right? This notion that every moment of the day and each decision is somehow of the same magnitude of significance. But that’s the odd thing about this Christian life: it’s all important, because all of it has been swept up into the mystery of the Incarnation. If God Himself swept the floors of a home in Nazareth, then there is something curiously divine about sweeping floors. This means that the opportunities for goodness are endless, but the excuses for bad behavior start to run a little thin: there are not two radically separate categories for the manner in which we talk to the anonymous cashier and the manner in which we speak with our dearest friends. Christ eliminated those categories once and for all.

But then You remind me, You’re inside me, in Your garden of grace.

First, you must understand something: I do not have an excessive fondness for gardens. I do not, of course, prefer concrete walls. But a garden in full bloom (especially one that hasn’t been tended to in a few weeks) reminds me too much of a childhood spent sneezing from allergies, or getting bitten by bugs. Actually, perhaps my favorite memory of the garden is that of my parents staying up late with their friends in the backyard on a summer evening, and I could hear them through the open window of my bedroom, while the occasional aroma of cigar or pipe smoke would waft lazily through the screen. I loved falling asleep to those sounds and smells.

So for me to employ this metaphor in speaking of the spiritual life is a strange step. But setting aside my personal reservations about gardening, I believe there’s something to this. There is the fairly obvious reference to growth. Trees, bushes, grass, flowers, weeds…these all grow, and will do so especially well under the careful attentiveness of an experienced gardener (i.e. not me). But the natural world doesn’t have a monopoly on growth; there is growth of a supernatural variety, as well. Through prayer, discipline, small acts of charity, the cultivation of the virtue of hope…through these means, and many more, the grace that is at the heart of the Christian life grows and grows until it has transformed the garden into a glorious kingdom.

This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself. – Gaudium et Spes 24

God walks through the garden of our heart. He is there, tending to the weeds and pesky bugs (if we let Him, of course). There, the waters of baptism flow unceasingly, watering all the good seeds and washing away the dirt of sin. The sweet fragrance of charity rises up from the blossoms of our virtuous deeds, and faith flowers under the sunlight of truth, even when all else might be bathed in shadows. If God is this close (and there is no doubt that He is, even if I’m not “feeling it” at the moment”), then we are suddenly invited to consider the marvelous possibility that all of our daily decisions (big and small) may flow spontaneously and freely from the heart of this garden, from Whom all good things come.

And finally, a word must be said of the long days and the bad days, since they will inevitably come. Perhaps you are having one of these days right now. But a garden that doesn’t see a little rain from time to time will not grow as quickly. Maybe a violent thunderstorm will even come through and tear up a tree or two. Which sounds like a bad thing…but perhaps that tree was starting to rot from the inside, and needed a good storm to shake things up a bit, for the better. And we mustn’t forget that the rain which falls in this garden is unlike any other rain, for it is made of the tears of God.

As this song bears the name “Monica”, I reckon the connection is fairly evident. But still, to recap from last week: Monica was the mother of St. Augustine, and she had more than a little to do with his conversion and general trajectory in life (at least the part of life that was headed in the right direction).
At the root of this song is the question: “is it true?” It’s the question behind a lot of life, even if we don’t necessarily use those words to explain what is happening or what we might be feeling. But most of what we end up doing in life has an awful lot to do with our fascination with the good, the beautiful and the true.
But then comes the catch: it’s easy to settle. For a half-truth. For a shadow of the real thing. For an echo of the real song. We’re like kids chasing after the next shiny object that we come across…New car! New job! New favorite song! New hobby! A new me for a new year!! Sooner or later, though, we’ll have to be honest with ourselves and stop running after every sort of fleeting happiness that the world proposes. And I don’t mean to suggest that there’s only one brand of happiness (that would be dull, wouldn’t it?) But the truest kind of happy is the one that is the fullest expression of what it means to be human. To be free. And to be authentically loving. It also means that it might look a little (ok, maybe alot) different than what we expected.

“He’s so enlightened, he knew everything by the shadows on the wall that told him…”
My philosophy professors would be pleased to know that I managed to give a little nod to the allegory of Plato’s Cave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave) in the refrain. I take a line or two to consider the (not so good) sense of entitlement that often comes with knowledge (example: learning X about the world has put me in a position of superiority over Person Y, who is still “lagging behind” in the darkness of ignorance…even if that darkness is — more often than not — in fact the shining radiance of innocence and virtue). In particular, I wanted to reflect on the assumptions that are frequently attached in connection with newly-acquired knowledge (example: I’ve learned this random nugget about Religion X, so Y must be true of all believers who subscribe to this worldview). At the end of the song, the main character is re-thinking his assumptions, and re-visiting older ideas that he had dismissed on grounds that no longer seem quite as plausible. Not now that he has had the experience of stepping into what he thought was a very dynamic marketplace of living ideas, and found instead that he was stranded at sea because no idea was strong enough to serve as an anchor during the storms of life.

And, through it all, the Monicas of the world have never stopped praying.

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” – CS Lewis

Bonus: because I didn’t have room on the album for this song, I included a little part of it in an interlude in one of the songs from “The Luggage of an Optimist” (spoiler alert: it’s on “Don’t Look Down”)

The first two “song-posts” will have a common theme: St. Monica. In this one, the connection might not seem so obvious, so here’s a little backstory:
St. Augustine (b. 354) was the son of Monica and Patricius. His mother prayed fervently for his conversion (Augustine was taking a few interesting detours through life, to say the least). Prayers were heard, and hearts were changed, and wouldn’t you know it, but little Auggie turned out to be a pretty important theologian.
Jump ahead a few years: shortly before Monica’s death, she and her son had a mystical experience in the harbor town of Ostia, not far from Rome. There, they both had the sense that they had touched something of the eternal, a glimpse into the glories of heaven (I’m not giving the story the credit it deserves – you can read it here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/augconf/aug09.htm, starting about 20 paragraphs down). Sure, it would have been marvelous even if just one of them had experienced such a blissful moment. But the degree of marvelous-ness went up several notches by virtue of the fact that it was shared. By mother and son, no less.

So that’s the Ostia part of the song. The rest is an extrapolation of sorts, on a dream that I had once. In said dream, I was soaring high above this gorgeous landscape – there were green cliffs, white rocks, and the blue sea. But the colors were curious in the sense that they were more green, white and blue than anything I’d ever seen in real life. And it was serene. And finally, there was a voice, which said “one day, you’ll see, all of this will seem like a dream.” And I woke up (a little reluctantly…it had, after all, been a good dream, and those are hard to come by these days) I wrote down the words I’d heard, and they stayed with me throughout the rest of the day. I was restless with them. So I did what I normally do if I’m feeling restless: I wrote a song. And that’s where the chorus of this song was born: “and He said to me: one day you’ll see, all of this will feel like one of your dreams…”

So the rest of the song is spinning out this idea about how the heavenly life will be utterly real and complete, so much so that the gritty, raw, all-consuming life that I lead now will feel like a dream…without taking anything away from the importance of living well here (and He said to me: all days can be steps on a road leading to Me, til you wake up in My arms…)

From the prayers of the day: “Since you have been raised up in company with Christ, set your heart on what pertains to higher realms where Christ is seated at God’s right hand. Be intent on things above rather than on things of earth…” Colossians 3:1-2

Why Trobairitz? Fair question. It’s the feminine counterpart of the troubadours, who were traveling singers/composers of the Middle Ages. According to Wikipedia, the word trobairitz comes from the Provençal word trobar, the literal meaning of which is “to find”, and the technical meaning of which is “to compose”. I like seeking and finding. I like composing. Voila.

Why Tuesday? Because, for many, it’s the toughest day of the week. Not quite halfway to the weekend (oy), and the effects of Monday are still settling in (vey). Tuesday is the kind of day where most of us need an extra boost…or at least an extra nap.

So. I waited ten years between recording albums…which means I’m not entirely sure when I’m going to get around to recording the next one. Anyways, I didn’t want that to keep me from sharing some music. Basically, what I’m going to do here is keep a kind of musical journal of sorts. Each week, I’ll aim to post a new song (and by new, I mean ones that may have been recorded weeks, months, even years ago) along with some accompanying thoughts/reflections/Scripture/quotes…just enough to give you a reflective pause in your day, but not so much as to keep you away from your work for too long.

And it will be pretty simple. No fancy images (essentially just lyrics), no CGI or special effects or elaborate vocal harmonies…just me and the piano, most of the time. In fact, I have a song that starts off “it’s just me and the piano…”. Maybe you’ll hear it here. Or maybe not. You’ll have to come back to find out. And I know it’s probably more correct to say “the piano and I.” But this is not a website for grammarians.

Keep in mind, not all of these are professionally recorded. A number are rough drafts – unpolished versions of songs. But life is unpolished, too. And I hope to be working on that, as well.

Enjoy and God bless!

Welcome to my website! I’m excited about figuring out how this all works (I welcome suggestions, by the way) So while it will be a work in progress for a little while, that won’t keep me from posting items on here (as often as daily life allows to happen). Also, the links to the right will take visitors to important places, like I-tunes and Amazon, so music may be purchased and enjoyed

A bientot! See you soon!