Sing Me To Heaven

This choral piece is sweet and touching. The lyrics are below. Go here to read the stories of healing and grace associated with this song.



Sing Me to Heaven
Text by Jane Griner

In my heart's sequestered chambers lie truths stripped of poets' gloss
Words alone are vain and vacant, and my heart is mute
In response to aching silence, memory summons half-heard voices
And my soul finds primal eloquence, and wraps me in song

If you would comfort me, sing me a lullaby
If you would win my heart, sing me a love song
If you would mourn me and bring me to God,
sing me a requiem, sing me to Heaven

Touch in me all love and passion, pain and pleasure
Touch in me grief and comfort, love and passion, pain and pleasure
Sing me a lullaby, a love song, a requiem
Love me, comfort me, bring me to God

Sing me a love song, sing me to Heaven

Alleluia from "Sing a New Song" by Ronald Staheli

Chained, The Crabby Old Man Within Me, and Change

Chained
For some reason, I have had these reoccurring thoughts of late.  About people who get stuck in life.  And about how I fear one of those people might be, well, me.

I have been wondering about how we can chain ourselves to the ground, restricting the arc of our lives by our own inability to see what is really going on around us.  Or by our inability to change.  And how we are unable to move from those "stuck places".  This may be the root of much of the bewilderment, confusion, and pain we experience.  I have been thinking about these things.  We make subtle choices to become stuck.  It's easier to be stuck than to get up and move, or so we think.  These things don't just happen.  It's really not meant to be like this.  This wasn't supposed to be.

Becoming "Self Aware"
There has been much talk in recent years about becoming "self-aware", particularly among those of us who have had the luxury of spending a little time and money on psychotherapy.  To be self-aware is defined as,  "awareness of yourself as an individual or of your own being and actions and thoughts".  In shorthand, this means that we might simply "get ourselves", and hopefully, most of the time, be better able to understand why we behave the way we do.  Or so we hope.  So I hope.

Not Me, I am All Better
But over the past several years, I have often found myself making the sadly self righteous comment that someone I know, he or she, this person or that, is "not very self aware".  I say this when I feel that someone is not "getting it" about how they are behaving, or what they are doing to themselves or others by their actions or their inability to change.  Why they can't deal with that character flaw they have, or that difficult relationship, or that troublesome child, or that impossibly stupid recurring situation.  Things never seem to change.  Clearly, they are stuck.  And I think I know why.

I think I have it all figured out.  Those people, they are simply not very self aware.

As if I am.  As if I really do "get it".  As if I am all put together.  When I think this through, I then wonder if I am not becoming a judgmental and crabby old man.  At 52.  What a sobering thought that is.

The Truth
I should know better.  I should know we all stumble through this life, sometimes with what seems to be just enough available light in front of us to take the next step forward.  We are not very good at this becoming adults and growing up stuff.  Life is bewildering and mysterious.  Friends come and go, a loved one becomes deathly ill, a relationship becomes irreparably broken, we loose a job, and we are confounded by the separation and pain around us.  We feel chained to the ground, as if we have become some kind of modern day Gulliver, unable to move.  Sometimes, it seems to make no sense at all.

And then, I hear, again,  this story of choices, for what seemed like the first time all over again.  A Story of Investment.  A story meant for me.  In particular, the last lines, 

"And get rid of this "play-it-safe" who won't go out on a limb."  

Wait a minute.  What is this about?  Was Jesus an entrepreneur?  Is this story really just about money?  Is that all that's here?  But wait, there is something more.

Maybe God is calling us, through the echos of history, to take risks with our lives.  To step out of the comfort zone.  To loosen our own chains.  You know the ones.  The chains of self doubt, of insecurity, of fear of change, of timidity, of doubt.  The changes that restrict us from changing.  From becoming more than we are.

I think He wants to start with that crabby old man that is trying to emerge from within me.

Of Quarks, Coldness, and Creation

Looking Up
Orion the Hunter.  Every night He guards the winter night sky over our home.  Far above the back yard, standing tall and pointing to the northern sky.  In the spring and summer, He disappears below the horizon, preparing the way for warmer summer months.

But for now, it is still winter.  Often, at this time of year, those in colder climes tend to become tired of the cold and dark, and cold.  Oldest daughter of our clan has had some brutal winter weather of late, with 18" of snow overnight some days back; the worst blizzard in Chicago in decades.

Of late, I have been thinking about this winter coldness, of constellations, and of how it all came to be.  It seems nearly beyond comprehension that nightly, hanging above my house, is this amazing constellation with blue and red giant stars, and that light takes 776 years from one star to reach my upward looking eyes.  And just below the belt of Orion, there is a stellar nursery, a place where new stars are being born.  Just the other night, I grabbed my binoculars, went out in the yard, and found, sure enough, found the M42 Nebulah, a place where new stars come to life.  Over our back yard, light years away, new stellar life taking form.  As I look up, I am seeing the night of the 13th Century.  How can this be?

Looking Around
Back down here, on earth, we bustle about our daily lives, with morning and evening, days and weeks, months and years blurring together.  We joke with one another about how "time flies" and how we do not really feel that much older.  But then, something happens that reminds us we indeed have been here quite a while, and the end is out there....perhaps close, perhaps far off.  We don't know.

But that starlight over our yard, some of it took almost eight centuries to reach us.  Fast and slow, our busy world below, and the slow universe suspended overhead, each night.  Our little lives and this immense stellar canopy overhead.  If we just take the time to look.  And ponder it all. 

And so, I stand in the back yard, binoculars in hand in my 52nd year of life on this planet, looking upward and wondering.  And thinking.  How can you live here each day and not be struck by the depth of this creation all around us?  How can you not be affected by this?  How can one be more concerned with sports scores or celebrity lives than by what is really going on here?  By the beauty and the tragedy of it all.  The joy and the heartache in even one day, let alone over the centuries.

Do you have a few minutes to share with me in thinking about such things?  Take a look at the video below, of winter in one of the most beautiful places I know of.  It is the pure beauty, the enormous complexity, and the stunning simplicity of these images that started me thinking about all these things.  Were we created?  Is this all some giant stellar accident?

I wonder about these things.  Daily.


Winter in Yosemite National Park from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo.

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