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First, thank you to everyone who sent me music in response to last week’s post, Our Message to the Universe. I will begin sharing your selections soon. Anyone else who would like to share music, I would love to receive it: patm@justathoughtbypat.com
Second, an important correction to last week’s post: I attributed the song “Crossroads” to the band, Cream. That is incorrect. Originally titled, “Cross Road Blues,” the song was written by blues musician, Robert Johnson, and was initially released in 1937. Cream later covered the song, which they released in 1966.
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“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
These words the poet Robert Frost had etched on his tombstone.
They were taken from his poem, The Lesson for Today.
“And were an epitaph to be my story ~ I’d have a short one ready for my own. ~ I would have written of me on my stone: ~ I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
How apt, how poignant, how perfectly suited for this moment in time.
Frost wrote the poem at the start of World War II and when his own life was in turmoil. His wife died, then his daughter, followed by his son’s suicide.
Life had dealt him a hard hand and initiated in him what he called his quarrel with life.
Tragedy has a way of reminding us of the doctrine of “Momento Mori.”
Remember, you must die.
Not that you do die, but that you must die.
Try as we will to play God, life is forever reminding us we are not God.
Several passages in the Old Testament urge a remembrance of death. In Psalm 90 Moses prays that God would teach his people “to number our days so that we may get a heart of wisdom.”
In Ecclesiastes the preacher insists that “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart.”
In Isaiah, the lifespan of human beings is compared to the short lifespan of grass: “The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass.”
Who wouldn’t quarrel with life when we’re made to feel so temporal?
I remember when my quarrel began.
It was at my father’s wake, staring at his dead body and wondering how a man I spoke with a week ago could end up like this.
Who decides such things?
At the time the only thing I knew of an afterlife was of an “up there” and a “down there.“ I remember as his casket was being lowered into the ground wondering in which direction should I look for dad.
Very unsettling.
The guy who helped get me born had himself been summarily dismissed.
- How unfair
- How capricious
- How cruel
Then later I found out how truly sinister life could be when my friend, Darrell Schaupf, stepped on a land mine in Vietnam and was blown to smithereens.
I remember Darrell sharing with me just a few months earlier how he dreaded being drafted because his grades were bad.
He shuddered at the thought of fighting.
Then, sure enough, nine months later his body was sent home in a body bag.
I was shaken to my core.
So by the time I started college my quarrel with life was raging. At age 18 I felt so small and insignificant. What did I know?
- All my education came from Catholic schools.
- All my beliefs had been handed down.
- All my questions already been answered.
I felt hopelessly ignorant and alone.
Just months into my freshman year a light broke into my darkness. I was at a party when Mark Pearson, a fraternity brother of mine, sang the ballad, When Johnny Comes Marching Home.
It sends shivers down my spine remembering what I heard.
It was irrefutably true — in my generation music moved us like no other artform. Music told our story, formed our perspective, spurred us to action.
Music changed our lives.
Mark’s music stirred my soul ablaze and awakened me to an even greater doctrine of life: Momento quod debes vivere.
Remember, you must live.
Not that you do live but that you must live.
It commenced a stirring in my heart — to live as I hadn’t lived before.
Living for the things we believe in has never been more important.
- To stir the souls of our neighbors
- To engage with eyes to the future, not the past
- To act on what we believe
Now go, be stirred!
Just a thought…
Pat
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