A few years back I gathered quotes, texts and a few of my own thoughts together in a sort of Advent countdown. It was published in Curator Magazine.
I wrote it so the word count of each entry reduces by one word as the countdown progresses.
Today the magazine tweeted the link to the piece. Thank you Curator.
You know those times when you’ve been napping deeply and your mind sort of starts to wake up before your body does? In fact, it’s almost as if you are outside of yourself in a state that allows you to be aware of your dreams and at the same time what is really happening.
A few weeks ago, I was trying to wake from a nap and my mind (with the help of cough medication) was holding me down. The TV was playing in the background. I could hear the old hymn, “Leaning of the Everlasting Arms”. I wondered if this was IT--If I was slipping across some threshold.
The hymn arrangement was beautiful. It was being played as a meditation on an awe-inspiring truth rather than something like a Sousa march, the way Southern Baptists sing it.
Finally, I awoke sufficiently to realize the song was playing as a part of an advertisement for Guinness beer. WHAT?!
Let’s get something straight right here. This little essay is not about condemning or condoning anything. So, with that said…
I know this, we all need to lean sometimes and the best place to lean is on the Everlasting Arms. I know this too: sometimes those everlasting arms take on human form: family, friends, each other.
No doubt; sometimes in the corner bar, people lean on things that will ultimately fail them. No doubt; sometimes in the corner church, people lean on religion that will ultimately fail them.
God created us as people who need people; as people who need to lean.
Whether at church or the neighborhood pub, think of how true the words to this little song about a place called “Cheers” are.
Making your way in the world today
Takes everything you've got;
Taking a break from all your worries
Sure would help a lot.
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go
Where everybody knows your name,
and they're always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.
Leaning on the Everlasting Arms was written by Anthony J. Showalter in the late 1800s, inspired by Deuteronomy 33:27: "The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms".
I have no idea what Mr. Showalter would have thought of his tune being used in a Guinness ad. Maybe he knew of Mr. Guinness and wouldn’t have minded. Sometimes we make assumptions you know. Sometimes we pre-judge. Here’s an interesting article about Guinness himself:
Click to read: The Story of God and Guinness in Relevant Magazine
This “Empty Chair” ad, I’ve watched it several times now. I’m not even sure it’s really about Guinness beer. I think it’s about leaning, and if it is, I can’t think of a better song than the one written by Mr. Showalter.
Certainly if there is an Honorable Mention for "Best Leaning Song Ever" if would have to go to the classic by Bill Withers:
Sometimes in our lives
We all have pain, we all have sorrow
But if we are wise
We know that there's always tomorrow
Lean on me when you're not strong
And I'll be your friend, I'll help you carry on
For it won't be long
'Til I'm gonna need somebody to lean on
Please, swallow your pride
If I have things you need to borrow
For no one can fill those of your needs
That you won't let show
You just call on me, brother, when you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on
I just might have a problem that you'll understand
We all need somebody to lean on
Does the name Judith Sheindlin ring a bell? She's from Brooklyn, New York (if that helps).
A line you hear often is "Life's not fair." What an unsatisfying answer!
The antithesis of that seems to be: "I'm so blessed."
WAIT, that one depends on which way the gate swings. Our youngest son works for the Oklahoma County Sheriff. For the folks he's around, the gate swings the wrong way, because they're all innocent and "Life's not fair."
You know in some cases, maybe they're right. I heard a statistic the other day that purported that for kids who have parents who are incarcerated, more than 70% of them will at some time be in jail themselves.
Monet's Garden Gate
One of my favorite people to hear speak is Michael Sandel. He's a professor at Harvard. He teaches a class called, "Justice: What's the Right Thing To Do." You can watch it on YouTube or you can read the book by the same name. I highly recommend both. Here's one of my favorite quotes:
“The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be”
― Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
It seems to me that sometimes we can have several "I'm so blessed" and "Life's not fair" moments all in the same day. In other words, both of these states are temporary, and depend on the circumstances we find ourselves in.
Here's a statement I believe is more true and accurate than either of those two: Life's complicated.
Back to Sandel's quote: If we're not careful we'll come to believe that the way things are DOES determine how they ought to be, and how they in fact ARE. Is it crazy to say that the way things are, is not necessarily the way things really ARE? In other words, do we sometimes make the wrong assumptions about reality?
I promise you--if you watch too much Fox News, or if you watch too much MSNBC, you will soon have a distorted reality of the way things are. I know this is coming across as opinionated preaching, but what I'm really doing here is putting in words and ink a new lesson I'm learning.
For me this lesson is this: if I constantly look at life as though I'm looking through a microscope, telescope, or a tunnel, I have no choice but to view and judge every event as a moment of: Life's not fair, or I'm so blessed.
Oh, and you do know Judith Sheindlin. You know her as Judge Judy. Turns out that she is the highest paid judge in the land. A justice of the U.S. Supreme Court makes just over $200,000 a year. Judge Judy makes nearly $50,000,000. Yes, that's 50 MILLION a year! Is life fair, or is Judge Judy just really, really blessed. And if she is, what has she done to merit such blessfullness? Or is it even based on merit?
Here's what I do know, by experience, for myself: If I look broadly at life, taking as big a picture as I can, I see that we are all blessed way beyond what we deserve, that there is more beauty than I can behold in a lifetime, and that when you try to see life as it was Designed and Created, it is in fact, fair.
"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is." --C. S. Lewis
A RELATION OF MINE TOOK THIS PHOTO OF GRAIN ELEVATORS IN WESTERN OKLAHOMA. As soon as I saw it, I thought, "if that were my photo, I would use at as the background for a poem or quote: something from a guy like Wendell Berry. Then this one came to mind from his book called: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays.
To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.
― Wendell Berry
Photo by Corey Lee Fuller. Used without his permission.
This quote came to mind for me again this morning as we had communion at church. Of course, Wendell Berry is speaking in an agricultural sense, but his use of the metaphor is clear.
But I began to ponder this idea of breaking of body and shedding of blood in the context of humanity as a collective "body". No doubt there have been times when we as the human race have justified breaking the bodies and shedding the blood of our own kind. And some of it may have been necessary; maybe.
I also know however, that our human story, which we call history, is full of unjustifiable, senseless breaking and shedding. But dang it... It is everywhere these days: from Ukraine, to Afghanistan to Ferguson, Missouri, to our hometowns where drug-addled "baby daddies" are beating their own infants to death.
In the sermon this morning following communion the speaker suggested that when Jesus lead his disciples through that first, Last Supper, and said, "Do this; and when you do, remember me," He was giving us a center point, a true north, a way to find our way.
We need that, right? Maybe it just old-age coming on me, but we seemed to have lost our way. To borrow a line from the old catcher of the New York Yankees:
If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else. -- Yogi Berra
