A couple of years ago, my wife and I were driving from some place to some place else when Five for Fighting’s “The Riddle” came on the radio. “Have you heard this one?” she asked. “I don’t think so…” Then she smiled, “You’re gonna love it.” She was right….
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OK, I know that when you first saw this dazzling pic of Neil in his technicolor dreamcoat, you were tempted to go and google the etymology of “cheese” or something; anything rather than consider that Neil Diamond might have something deep to say to you today. Maybe you thought “Twisted Mystics” was about young hipsters, youth in angst, or mainstream rockers and rollers. Well it’s time to broaden them horizons!
I was first introduced to Neil as a young lad, through the big, bulky “Jazz Singer” soundtrack my mother owned on an 8 track tape. Those tapes were awesome and could double as coasters, or a hammer if you were desperate and really needed to hang that painting. Anyhoo, back to Neil. Let’s take the following words and set them into the mouths of lovers… of a husband and wife. This is what we do here at Twisted Mystics; we transpose. We find the theme and set it to a theological melody. We take a rambling branch and graft it to the Divine Vine from which all branches break forth.
She was morning
And I was night time
I one day woke up
To find her lying
Beside my bed
I softly said
“Come take me”
For I’ve been lonely
In need of someone
As though I’d done
Someone wrong somewhere
but I don’t know where
Come lately
You are the sun
I am the moon
You are the words
I am the tune
Play me
Ah the Cosmic Dance of masculine and feminine! “She was morning… and I was night time.” It’s common knowledge that men and women are different. Common knowledge but commonly misunderstood, or seen as some kind of obstacle (“the battle of the sexes”). Today, there also appears to be a great effort to level the playing field…. to asexualize our sexuality and invite people to “pick” which one they want, as if from scratch. But if we scratch below the surface, we discover an extremely damaging agenda here.
In the olden days (before Neil Diamond) people used to conform themselves to reality. This is a very sane thing to do. Today we are insane. We try to conform reality unto us. Rather than discover in our creation as male and female something of the mystery of God’s image and likeness, we determine that we will make ourselves after our own image and likeness. The problem with this is, aside from a cosmic arrogance, we don’t have a clue as to who we are.
“When we lose sight of the Creator, the creature vanishes,” so spoke Vatican Council II.
Our origins, revealed in Genesis, tell us so much about what masculinity is and what femininity is, if we could but sit still and listen. The mythic elements (not myths) in Genesis speak of man being formed from the earth, with Spirit (God’s ruah in Hebrew, breath) whispered into us. Is this why men seem to be more independent, detached, more comfortable beingalone, distant at times? But in all our land-locked travels, we long to return to the heart.
For I’ve been lonely
In need of someone
As though I’d done
Someone wrong somewhere
but I don’t know where
Men, despite the sometimes tough exterior, long to be in love, lost in it, we long to swim in an ocean that is deep and mysterious. That ocean is made from us, flows from us, flows to us from God…. and from Woman. Then God took a rib from Adam, and formed from his side Woman.
The “first man and the first woman must constitute …the model… for all men and women who, in any period, are united so intimately as to be ‘one flesh’”- Pope John Paul II, TOB, 50).
In Hebrew, the rib bespeaks the whole person. Bone is emblematic of the whole body, the whole person. Woman then is formed from the side of a rational human person. Is this why women tend, generally speaking, to be more relational, intuitive, contemplative, nurturing, gentle, emotional?
Songs she sang to me
Songs she brang to me
Words that rang in me
Rhyme that sprang from me
Warmed the night
And what was right
Became me
Men and women were never meant to clash with but to complement each other. Sin is at the root of this conflict. And so the remedy to the poison brought by the first Adam and Eve, is revealed in the gift of the new Adam and Eve. Never has there been a duet more beautifully sung than that of Jesus and Mary. In their words we learn how to untwist all of our twisted ramblings. For He is the Sun, and she is the Moon, He is the Word and she is the Tune…
And so it wasThat I came to travel
Upon a road
That was thorned and narrow
Another place
Another grace
Would save me
Suffering can set us free. Crying out can often lead to a catharsis. Sorrow affords us a chance to struggle and squirm our way out of the black cocoon of self and into the wide expanse of the world of the Other.
The song Message in a Bottle by the Police captures this journey of self-discovery through suffering. Sting, the lead singer of the former band, is a much revered icon in the music world today. He confessed to Jools Holland of the BBC that Message in a Bottle is his favorite song.
Just a castaway, an island lost at sea, oh
Another lonely day, with no one here but me, oh
More loneliness than any man could bear
Rescue me before I fall into despair, oh
In the late and great Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, the Holy Father seeks to answer two questions that I feel everyone in their heart of hearts asks at some point in this life:
What does it mean to be human?
How can I be truly happy?
In the first question, he looks into our origins, our history, and our destiny to discover just what it means to be to be human. The Pope’s early life was fraught with sorrows – loss of family, Nazi occupation, friends sent to concentration camps, and a Communist takeover of his beloved Poland. But he didn’t let these sorrows exile him to an island of isolation. To make sense of it all, he dove into a heartfelt reflection on our beginnings as man and woman.
One of my favorite reflections in his Theology of the Body centers on the idea of Original Solitude. That is the experience of Adam, in the beginning, as a being that is in fact “alone.”
I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world
I’ll send an S.O.S. to the world
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
I hope that someone gets my
Message in a bottle,
Message in a bottle…
Alas, Adam cries out, I see myriads of creatures, beautiful and diverse, but not another person I can love who can return my love! Sending out an SOS is Adam’s first “prayer.”
(Read the rest at Twisted Mystics!)
OK, this is old school. Olivia Newton John, the early years. She played the lovely Sandy in the movie Grease. As a recording artist, one of her more famous tunes was “Let’s Get Physical.” How’s that for blunt? The lyrics went like this:
I’m saying all the things that I know you’ll like
Making good conversation
I gotta handle you just right
You know what I mean
I took you to an intimate restaurant
Then to a suggestive movie
There’s nothing left to talk about
Unless it’s horizontally
Let’s get physical, physical I wanna get physical …
Let me hear your body talk
OK then. This sounds like the mating ritual of something in a Brazilian rainforest. I’d like to suggest that we’re made for a bit more than only the physical. I think real love goes a bit further than that. Let’s Get Mystical!
The truth revealed in Scripture, and echoed in our hearts through our human experience, is that we are actually a beautiful and mysterious harmony of spirit and matter. We are “sacraments” in the broad understanding of the word; visible signs of an invisible reality. This is part of the brilliant plan of God in making the universe… that there should be things visible and invisible, and that we humans would be the bridges between the two worlds. This explains our restlessness, our deep yearnings for More. It explains why we are at the same time both like and unlike the animals we share the planet with.
You see, the animals are the ones who get physical…. they eat and sleep and forage for food and build their little dwellings in the bush. They mate, they reproduce. But we humans dine, we rest, we create…. cathedrals, symphonies, prayers, poems and promises (a little John Denver reference there). And we make love…. though sadly, even this phrase is being stripped from the vocabulary today. People just have sex. Having sex used to mean being male or female, and checking the appropriate box. It went from a noun to a verb in just a generation or two.
These mystical phenomena we experience as humans set us worlds apart from the animals…..
Read more at the Twisted Mystics blog!
Now raise your hand if you subsequently got/met/became that ___________ and thought to yourself “But wait…. If I could just have/meet/become _________ then I would really be totally happy.”
The rock band Extreme once sang: “There’s a hole in my heart that can only be filled by you, and this hole in my heart can’t be filled with the things I do…”
I remember hearing this song and running out to grab it when it first debuted in 1991 as a “single” – a little cassette tape with just the one song on it. Old school, I know. Right off the bat my spiritual sense was tingling, like Spiderman. “Oooo, why yes, I have one of those holes in my heart too,” I thought to myself. “Seems like everything I think will fill it just fails to satisfy. I always want more!”
Life’s ambition occupies my time
Priorities confuse the mind
Happiness one step behind
This inner peace I’ve yet to find
Wow…. Is this not the soundtrack of our lives? Are we not all starving for inner peace? Look at the self-help sections in bookstores. I just did a google search for “self help” and it gave me 95,300,000 websites to visit. Seriously, who’s got that kind of time?
Thanks be to God I’ve come to realize a simple truth that will save me all of that searching: Self-help is useless. I can’t help myself. I’m helpless. I can’t “pick myself up by my own bootstraps.” That’s physically impossible.
This hole in my heart…. this longing for More, this sehnsucht that sometimes seems to pull my heart out of me in a crazy mixture of joy and pain can only be filled, quenched, and completed by the Maker of my heart.
If I’m not blind why can’t I see
That a circle can’t fit
Where a square should be
I think most of us have come to realize this second truth; that nothing can fill our hearts… that is, no-thing can fill our hearts. That our hearts are made for relationship, for other persons, and ultimately the Persons of the Holy Trinity, the Three Who are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
How long it takes for many of us to come to this discovery… for us to make this journey out of self, to empty ourselves so that God might fill us? Sometimes a lifetime. But all along we should keep up the journey. Keep singing the songs of our generation, but with a heart that stops at nothing to find the truth that really fills us. We’ve got to scratch below the vinyl so to speak, until we come to the core, to the very heartbeat of Music itself, to the Sanctuary where all Song is born. There, finally, we’ll find true harmony.
Here are the lyrics from another melody:
I will rise then and go about the city;
in the streets and crossings I will seek
Him whom my heart loves.
I sought him but I did not find him. The watchmen came upon me
as they made their rounds of the city:
Have you seen him whom my heart loves?
I had hardly left them when I found him whom my heart loves.
I took hold of him and would not let him go…
– Song of Songs 3:2-4
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The Heart of Things 