rising

what i haven't been talking about is my crisis of faith, brought on by the Very Bad Thing, which i'm not talking about but only alluding to in the most general of terms.

the fallout, though, was that i very much didn't like who i was becoming as a result of it and if God was going to support that, i wasn't interested. but i went through the lenten season thinking maybe to reconnect myself with the voice i had lost, the way i had loved being and i was at an undisclosed location and this guy, an ordained clergyman in a mainstream church looked me right in the eye and he said "don't let the asshole take anything else from you."

which was a pretty strong statement but i still didn't have any other lenten project this year other than to simply talk about God and related concepts as if i was still whole and i won't tell you where i was when i heard a guy speak and maybe it wasn't what he said so much, but i knew i was going to be all right after all.

anyway, what had been missing was my voice. music had gone out of my soul and i had not been writing or performing music and even my little bit for choir had been way sub-par but first i got together the people i'd drafted before the Bad Thing to sing a piece i'd written before not because i still wanted to do it, but because i HAD wanted to do it.

heal me up. that was the title of it. i'm not kidding. so we did that, and it was ok. but i still wasn't up to creating music. and then all of a sudden i got the brilliant idea to re-set one of my benedictuses (benedicti? why do i even need a plural?) for connie and donna sue, because it's awesome to write for them and the more i write for them the better i get at it, because awesome musicians only get awesomer when music is written expressly to play to their strengths.

and it HAS to be done before easter, because although a benedictus may be sung properly at any time of the year, i WANT this one to go for lent. nevermnd connie's surgery and donna sue's vacation. so i trot this thing out with just three weeks to go and i'm all, like, no, of COURSE we don't have to do it right now. it can wait until next lent and so donna sue and connie just bite down and do it and it's beautiful.

they are awesome and talented. often i feel like i'm the schmoe, the one who doesn't belong up there with them, but hey, i wrote the song so i guess i can sing it if i want, and besides, i wrote my part so i only have to sing things that i'm good at so i sound like a better singer than i am.

and then some stuff happened. i made some recipes, which i may or may not tell you about, and did some stuff, including play a couple of games of golf, and then it was holy saturday all of a sudden and i was thinking about last year and what i wrote then and i was maybe going to write something more beautiful or poetic to tell you about it, but instead i'll just quote to you from a thing i wrote to a friend a the time:

one of the things about the vigil is that you don't always know when the third star will be visible.

you don't always know when Jesus will appear.

so you wait.

and you watch.

on cloudy nights one may use the astronomical time of sunset, but looking out my window i see that the clouds are lifting, so i'll go and wait.

for now, i'll turn out all my lights and sit in the coming dark.

see you on the other side.

and later:



do not look for the first new light where the sun has gone down; the Light always appears at the darkest point of the sky.

and so Jesus, the Christ rose from the darkest night to new dawn.




so there i was, out on the lawn, my house dark, looking for the first new lights. i lit my new, clean candle and singing lumen Christi  i brought it in and lit new candles in every room, and sang the exsultet.



and then i had dinner.

may blessings fall upon you and yours.