Once upon a time I was falling in love
Now I’m only falling apart.
There’s nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart.
– Jim Steinman
On April 8, a total solar eclipse made a diagonal cut across parts of Central and North America, with parts of 15 U.S. states within the path of totality. Here in St. Louis, we didn’t get this totality, but were in something like the ninety-ninth percentage and got enough of it to know something strange was happening. Dogs barked and crickets chirped.
Sue and I thought about driving a few hours south to be in that totality but we soon learned we’d be joining thousands and thousands of others flocking to southern Illinois to get a glimpse of this natural phenomenon through those ubiquitous cardboard dark-colored glasses. We took a pass on the expected crowds and the traffic jams and opted instead for finding a quiet place in our own front yard. There, we sat for a few hours and read while we waited for the near-darkness to come. It was time well spent.
The day came and went and we were little changed by it, unlike the ancients who, so were are told, were so freaked out that they thought the world was surely ending. And who could blame them?
But I’m thinking this morning that this eclipse, perhaps, is also a chance for spiritual reflection, an opportunity for us to ask if anything has gotten in between us and God. To paraphrase Jim Steinman’s song, made famous by the Welsh singer Bonnie Tyler in her 1983 single: Are we still falling in love with God or are we falling apart?
There’s a famous poem-prayer about the practicality of this “falling in love,” which is often attributed to Pedro Arrupe, SJ (1907-1991), but was actually written, we know now, by Joseph Whelan, SJ. It goes like this:
Nothing is more practical than
finding God, than
falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.
For those who believe, that falling in love makes all the sense in the world. But we also know that it can be easy enough to fall out of it if we’re not careful and paying attention. So get out there today and experience the beauty and mystery of the world. And while you’re waiting, offer up a prayer and reflect a bit about what might be getting in the way of your love for God. What else is seizing your imagination? What’s eating up your time and energy? What’s breaking your heart and getting you up and out of bed these days?
On April 8, as the moon moved in between us and the sun once again, so many paused in amazement and wonder. Today, let’s be amazed by the God who waits patiently for us to return. Let’s accept that invitation to fall in love once again. After all, nothing is more practical than that.
Right in Front of Our Eyes
Once when I was a boy I was trying to find something — I don’t remember now what it was — but this thing ended up being right there on the table in front of me. My father laughed as he pointed it out to me and said, “If it had been a snake, it would have bitten you.”
As a child, that metaphor scared me a little. What IF it had been a snake? What IF I hadn’t seen it there on the table, hiding among my father’s copies of National Geographic and Organic Gardening, slithering toward me between his overflowing ashtray and transistor radio? I learned to look closely around me for the things I was searching for before I started asking for help. Lesson learned: pay attention to the obvious and the close at hand.
In our search for God, sometimes the same thing happens. We miss the obvious moments and occurrences of the Divine because we’re frantically searching for something “out there,” something that is big and splashy and without-a-doubt “God,” when all the time there are these small, ordinary experiences that we’re missing, hidden among the ordinary stuff of life.
Finding God in our daily lives does not require special abilities or tools. We do not have to be particularly holy, although focusing our minds on the holy around us can be a good place to begin. What is required is our intention — a desire and willingness to pay attention to the life we have been given and find God already there waiting for us, beckoning to us, laughing at us and saying, “If I had been a snake…”
I recently wrote a new song on this theme, this idea that God is “right there,” always in front of our eyes. God doesn’t hide from us. God is always waiting to be found, always delighted when we slow down, pay attention and utter those sacred words: “Ah…there you are.”
Here are the lyrics to the song, and a new video is below (you may have to scroll a little). Thanks to my musical collaborator Phil Cooper for the beautiful piano arrangement and to my talented daughter, Jenny, for creating the vocal arrangement and singing with me. In the midst of the creation of this song I found God again — in the act of creation, in the gift of words and music, in the chemistry that happens when we gather together to create something new.
There you are, there you are
in the green that clothes the trees
There you are, there you are
in the very least of these.
Some days I rise but do not waken.
Sometimes I look but fail to see.
And still, you move and catch my eye
A flash of red, a moment fleeting.
In all the noise I cannot hear you.
In all my words I miss your voice.
And still, a whisper fills my head
A gentle beating, inside of me.
Today I saw you on the street
With all you own spread out around you.
And still, a spirit in your smile
A soul on fire, a gift before me.
There You Are
Words and music by Steve Givens
© 2023 Potter’s Mark Music
A Simple Gift: Coming ‘round right
In 1848, a Shaker elder named Joseph Brackett wrote an easy-to-learn-and-sing tune for his community called “Simple Gifts.” We all know it today because it has made its way into American (and Irish) culture, interpreted and recorded often by folksingers, church and school choirs, and even symphony orchestras. It evolved to become the Christian folk song, “The Lord of the Dance.” The composer Aaron Copland incorporated its melody into his masterpiece, “Appalachian Spring.” The hit Irish dance review, “The Lord of the Dance,” reinterpreted the simple melody and took it as its theme. It has ended up on television commercials. It’s a beautiful song with a long and complex history.
But at its heart, it’s just a simple song extolling the virtues of a simple life:
‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d,
To bow and to bend we will not be asham’d,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come round right.
At a recent meeting of my small faith group, we listened to this song, as beautifully and simply recorded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and folksinger Alison Krauss. There’s a video embedded at the end of this post so you can hear it for yourself.
The thought and prayer that emerged from deep within as I listened was just how important it is to be “in the place just right….in a place of love and delight.” We live in one of the most complex and complicated times imaginable. Complexity can be good in many aspects of our lives. Legal documents are long for a reason. A good novel or song can speak to us on many levels. Interpreting the complexities of faith and religion is the work of theologians, pastors, writers and thinkers.
So while I’m not downplaying the intricacies of the modern world, I am wondering this morning if there is still a place for simplicity – for the simple gift of faith in a God who is love. Here in my 64th year, I am feeling a need and a call to a simpler faith, and by that I do not mean a different faith or a change of faith but rather a simpler and more focused spirituality that allows me to be more fully drawn into this God who is love. I am feeling a need to be content and at peace with that simplicity and leave the complexities to others so inclined. I want to bow toward that simplicity and embrace it more fully, to allow it to truly be my delight. As I enter these latter years, I want and need that faith to encircle me so that wherever I turn, I am forever in its gentle grasp.
Where is this simplicity to be found? I find it in the beauty of the world around me, this ever-evolving gift given to us by a Creator-God. I find it in the Word of God as handed down to us in the Holy Scriptures and in the person of Jesus. I find it in the gathered community that is my Catholic community on a Sunday morning but also in a small group of friends gathered around a kitchen table.
For if we can’t find God in these simple moments and in these great simple gifts, how are we ever going to find God in the complexities of theology and church teaching? We need both. We are called to behold, as Meister Eckart once wrote, “something great, something marvelous, something rare.”
As Christians, we have already received something rare, marvelous and great. We have been given the ability to encounter the Christ — in scripture, in the Eucharist, and in each other. Our job while we’re here is pretty simple. We need to allow ourselves to be surrounded by it all, astounded by it all, encompassed by it all. Simply that.
Book Review: “What Matters Most and Why: Living the Spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola,” by Jim Manney
Whether you’re an experienced and seasoned practitioner of Ignatian spirituality or a seeker looking for new ways to put your faith into practice, Jim Manney’s new book of daily “actionables” is going to be a welcome addition to your nightstand or prayer space.
Manney, a former editor at Loyola Press and author of many books on Ignatian spirituality, including “Ignatian Spirituality A to Z,” “What Do You Really Want?” and his popular work on the Examen, “A Simple, Life-Changing Prayer,” has organized this collection of 365 daily reflections around a traditional Ignatian approach to learning and spiritual development that includes experience, reflection, and action.
The book from New World Library offers readers a daily dose of wisdom from established writers — from historical and contemporary Jesuit writers and thinkers to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela to Buddhist, Hindu and Jewish texts — in addition to Manney’s own insightful commentary and calls to action. “What Matters Most and Why” is designed as a tool to help readers/prayers find additional depth and awareness during their times of daily prayer, as added inspiration for going deeper and wider in the awareness and gratitude that naturally spring from the daily examen of consciousness.
As author Chris Lowney writes in the book’s foreword, Ignatian spirituality is a “superb technology, ideal for navigating today’s complex, volatile world.” The wisdom and approaches to prayer and life found in Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises are now 500 years old and yet retain a contemporary freshness, depth and applicability missing from much of today’s self-help philosophies. What Manney has given the world with this new volume is an easy-to-read and apply daily guide to the ancient wisdom of St. Ignatius and those who have followed in his footsteps. He does so with a clarity and conciseness that make this daily guide indispensable reading for mature Christians seeking inspiration to take their spiritual lives to both a higher and deeper level.
For more information or to order, visit: https://www.jimmanneybooks.com.
The Seeds of My Father’s Garden
“But some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold. Whoever has ears ought to hear.” (Matthew 13:9)
My father’s garden wasn’t much by the standards of many gardens. It was situated on a small plot of land in the backyard of my North St. Louis home in the 1960s and early ‘70s, planted with love, passion and knowledge gleaned from the pages of Organic Gardening magazine.
It sat at the back of the yard, near the alley, and I can still picture its layout in my mind’s eye, row by row. Onions against the fence, followed by lettuce and cabbage, tomatoes and green peppers, beans growing up the legs of my no-longer-used and rusting swing set, carrots, radishes, and no doubt a few others I can no longer remember.
All organic, and all planted with the knowledge that the soil was (or could be) naturally fertile and ready to accept the seeds or the young seedlings that my father started in our basement during winter under fluorescent lights. If it sounds like I appreciated all his effort and creativity, I didn’t. Not at the time, anyway. I was a kid and saw it as largely wasted space where I couldn’t play ball and poor use of a swing set, even if I didn’t use it all that much anymore. I was told, in so many ways, to keep out.
All these years later, I have a more mature view of what he was trying to do. He was giving us healthy, organic food free of pesticides and herbicides. He was helping us get by on a mailman’s salary and trying to teach us something we could take into adulthood with us. He was giving us something extraordinary amid the ordinary of an urban backyard. He was doing all this to tell us he loved us, even if he could never muster those words.
More than anything, I think he was seeking quiet, sacred moments with himself and God. He was trying to make sense of his father’s suicide (unknown to us kids at the time). He was silently grappling with own failed professional career as a chiropractor and perhaps wrestling with the oncoming darkness of depression and alcoholism.He was searching for something sacred in an ordinary garden. What I thought was wasted space he knew was holy ground.
We are called to prepare our hearts for the coming of the Word of God into our lives of faith like my father organically prepared the soil of his garden. The Word is planted in us already if we can just stir up the earth a little and add a little compost. The incarnation of Christ is not just about Christmas. It’s about the continual coming and planting of the Word into our lives today. It’s about seeking the extraordinary in the midst of the ordinary.
We need the Incarnated Jesus. We need a walking, breathing, working-with-us Jesus. Otherwise, he remains a word on a page of old parchment, an unfulfilled promise, an old story that’s nice to listen to but never quite seems real. A scattered seed that was planted long ago but never really took root and grew and bore fruit.
In contemplating the Incarnation during these post-Christmas, cold and often-dark days of a Midwest winter, I come to see and appreciate how our human and earthly nature is quickened and sparked by the Divine, just as life begins to grow in the dark of the soil. Even in the depth of winter, we can begin to see life through that spring lens. We can see we are the soil where the Word of God grows and, over time, we can learn to recognize the holy when God puts it right before our eyes.