True Blue

I sometimes wonder, do human beings really,

Really want to be made happy? Really?

We say we do, we get all touchy feely

Fluffy-pinky, winking and laughing hollow

Laughter after drinks and intercourse.

Of course we do!

     (But really?)

  I don’t mean wanting

The way a man wants ice cream after dinner.

But more like hot red beef wants salt, like fire

Wants wood, like heart wants pulsing blood, like blood

Wants fire and burns for battle, broil and brawl.

Like home wants ruddy ember glow, like farm

Wants wet warm springing days of living green,

Like crops want rain, and farmer crops, and drops

Of dew coalesce on thirsty emerald leaves

For love.

                Gloomy blue gray days of moping

Hopeless funk, portend our self-important

Snobbish refusal of color.

                                             Until one day,

A rescuer! Flashing fierce St. Elmo’s fire, singing

Metallic odes on jaw wire; lightning shooting

Neon pain, a feast of feeling, knocks me

Reeling, electric blue bright sparks impart

The truth of Blue.

       A toothache is,

          at least,

real.

Slow Detachment

There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding."

A picture of a messy garage which is not ours, added solely for the sake of hyperbolic illustration

A little while ago my wife and I were cleaning out our garage. As garages go it was not terrible. That is, I have seen worse. There was room to walk, and most of the stuff in the garage had a plan and a purpose attached to it, of the "we-really-need-to-remember-to-put-that-thing-in-the-car-so-we-can-drop-it-off-at-so-and-so's-next-time-we-are-in-the-area" variety. And yet, at the end of the day, we had two pickup truck loads of stuff to take to St. Vincent de Paul (the local Catholic equivalent of Goodwill.) Where does it all come from? 

Standard issue Vietnam-era Load Bearing Equipment, non-modified

Sometimes it was a bit of a wrench, letting things go. More often for her than for me, since I have had to move around so much I have deliberately avoided accumulating too much stuff. However, even I had a moment of soul searching. It might seem strange, but I had to think long and hard before getting rid of my Special Forces Qualification Course Load Bearing Equipment (LBE).

Yes, that's right. I had kept the LBE that I wore throughout the two years I spent in the Q course, because I had modified it so much that the Army supply folks would never take it back. I had removed all the metal clips and buckles and replaced them with 550 cord. I had cut the shoulder pads off because they interfered with the rucksack pads. I had two compass pouches (primary and backup), two ammo cases, and two canteen cases with a canteen cup, black and unreturnable from being shoved into too many campfires and hung over too many Dakota fire holes. I had shortened it so that it would ride high on my chest, about the level of my sternum, because I did not like the belt interfering with the kidney pad of the rucksack underneath it, and I had my name-tape sewn on one of the diagonal back straps.

Of course it was not the modifications that made me reluctant to get rid of it. Those had taken time and effort, but I was never going to use it again. Ever. I would never wear it in combat because I cannot wear it over body armor and I get issued more comfortable and practical carriers nowadays. No, it was purely sentimental reasons that made me cling to it. I put blood, sweat, dirt and pain into that thing by the ton. I considered keeping it around simply as a home defense option. Simply throw it at a burglar and he would be so overcome by all the sadness it contained that he would just give up like poor Artax.

It was a part of the most intense period of my life, but I had no use for it. So I got rid of it.

My wife did not understand that. She keeps things that she has an emotional attachment to. I got rid of my LBE because I had an emotional attachment to it. Does that make sense? It sort of did at the time.

You see, I take very seriously the concept of detachment. "Naked I came into this world, and naked I shall leave it," (Job 1:21). I also take very seriously the distinction between this world and the next, and try to remain cognizant of what is most valuable. "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and vermin corrupt and thieves break in and steal. Rather, lay up treasure for yourself in Heaven... for where your treasure is, your heart will be also," (Matthew 6:19-21). I do not consider these optional bits of advice, or pious sentiments. They are serious, practical, deadly earnest guides for living. They are survival guides for the spiritual life. I value simplicity, freedom, availability. In a word, detachment. I do not want to be attached to anything. That is, I do not want to allow the things I own to have power over me.

This requires an attitude that may seem radical to others. It means that I have to be guided by what I know rather than by what I see. For instance, if someone backs into my car and totals it, and I get angry and say even so much as one harsh, angry, or spiteful word to him, I am in the wrong. My sin is far worse than his. All he did was damage a thing, a mere object of metal and plastic, whereas I attacked a person who is destined to live forever. This means that if someone owes me money ($100, $500, $50,000, or $1,000,000 makes no difference) and they refuse to pay it, then I would be wise simply to let it go rather than take them to court and get embroiled in a heated argument over it. If the price of getting my money back is losing my peace or thinking hateful things about another human being, then it is not worth it. Human persons are of infinite worth, money and things are of finite worth.

The same is true of things. I have always been hesitant to buy nice furniture, dishes, books, clothes, etc. because once you own something that is pristine, brand new, fancy, expensive, artful, or whatever, you feel bound by it. It limits you. You now feel a responsibility to maintain it, to keep it in the state that it is in, to defend it. It tempts you to worry about getting a scratch on it, or spilling something on it. I read of a fairly wealthy couple who had a habit of donating their car every few years and buying a new one, and when they drove the new car home the first thing they did was take a hammer to it and leave a dozen or so large dents in the hood and doors, just to remind themselves not to be attached to the niceness of this car. Is that crazy? Is it radical?

If I am so attached to my leather couch that I feel the slightest hint of anger when someone scuffs it through carelessness, I am allowing a mere thing to have power over me. Is it so radical now to put a few deliberate scuffs in it, just to forestall that? Or to buy a second-hand couch?

I must be careful, though. As the T. S. Eliot quote above indicates, detachment is a slippery concept, and wrongful detachment can be more spiritually deadly than attachment. Detachment does not mean that I have a right to despise nice things. As far as I know I have no right to despise any good thing whatsoever. Human art and craft, the making and sharing of beautiful, useful and interesting things is a highly worthy goal, and in a mysterious sense it is an act of prophecy. As a case in point, yesterday my wife and I bought a beautiful original oil painting by Don Crook from an art show at the state fair. It depicts the novel "Moby Dick" lying open on a wrinkled sail cloth, with a ship's compass, pipe and lantern around it, and the epic final battle with the white whale literally exploding out of the pages. It is now hanging next to my book shelf as I type this blog. It cost about $250.

Incredibly realistic painting found at http://www.lifeartworks.com/incredibly-realistic-paintings-photos/

It would not be spiritual detachment, but rather churlish lack of imagination, not to admire that painting, and to be inspired by it, not to be grateful for the gift of talent and the years of work, discipline and sacrifice it took to refine his gift. Nor am I going to take a hammer to the frame or cut a slash across the canvas. I am going to treat it with the respect it deserves. Every work of art is a statement made by the author that says, "Look! I see something beautiful and I want you to see it and be drawn out of yourself as I am." Or: "I see something ugly, which presupposes that there must be beauty. Look at the ugliness, and lament as I do." (This speaks of true art, which must be differentiated from sensationalism, which feeds upon ugliness without looking for beauty.) Each work of art, or meticulously and superfluously carved piece of furniture, is an image and imitation of the piece of God that the artist sees, which we could not see unless he or she shared it with us.

Detachment does not mean despising these glimpses. In fact, someone who refuses to buy mass-produced crap from Walmart and sacrifices time and money to buy handmade beautiful things and support those who produce them may be extremely detached. Detachment simply means seeing things as they are. Glimpses of God are only glimpses. They are images of God, and therefore sacred; But they are also not God, and therefore utterly expendable.

Every glimpse is temporary, provisional, partial, seen through a glass, darkly. When the glimpse is taken away, as all glimpses are eventually, the measure of our attachment to it is to be found in our sadness in its passing. We are all attached, and we all must be detached from the glimpses so that we may seek the real thing. That is, after all, the purpose of moths, vermin, rust and thieves. They serve a holy function, anticipating the loss of all shades, shadows and images. The final detachment is death and purgatory, but every loss or disappointment or setback here on earth is an opportunity to practice letting go of the crutches that we use to support our fragile egos. Ultimately they are opportunities to surrender our egos, to realize that we are not our surroundings, abilities, thoughts or appetites. At our core we are beloved Children of God, and He is enough. 

The Price of Mastery

A little over a week ago I was deadlifting, which is one of my favorite lifts. It is a very heavy lift, in which the bar is resting on the ground and the lifter simply grips it and picks it up. I like the lift, but this particular time I went a little too heavy, and I lost my form. I tried to muscle through it anyway and ended up pulling a muscle in my lower back. So for the last week and a half I have been taking it easy. The whole next week I did not work out at all, and this week I am only running and biking. Next week I will add body weight exercises, and work my way back up.

The day after the injury I was visiting with my family in South Carolina, just sitting around eating ice cream, and I went into a series of back spasms that felt like they were bending my spine in half backwards. Never having experienced physical pain like that before, they rather took me by surprise, but eventually I took a muscle relaxer and the spasms stopped, or at least reduced enough so that I could function. It did not prevent me from continuing to visit, albeit from a prone position on the living room floor.

My Mom and my Aunt, lovely women that they are, went into full on maternal mode, offering every possible remedy and comfort they could think of, from a hot shower to a left over hydrocodone. My Aunt especially is an empathizer, to the point where I truly believe she feels pain sympathetically. She was more upset about it than I was. As I hobbled to the car, bent over like an old man, I told her, “It happens, you know? It’s just part of the price for living life. Sometimes the price is higher than others.” I don’t think it comforted her much, but it made a lot of sense to me.

In the intervening weeks of slow rehab I have been thinking about that statement, and I realize that I was touching on a far-reaching principle. To put the same thing another way, there is no greatness without sacrifice.

My cousin was once show-casing his photos at a photography show and an admiring person admitted, “I wish I could take pictures like that. You know, I wanted to be a photographer once. I got a camera and tried to learn, but all of my pictures were terrible.” When describing this event afterward my cousin said, “What I wanted to say was, ‘No you didn’t want to be a photographer. If you really wanted it you would have kept doing it over and over until you got it right. I can show you my early photos if you want. They suck. I just didn’t give up, that’s all.’”

The key component of talent, it seems, is the desire to do something. However, this desire is not simply the thought, “Oh, wouldn’t that be nice,” or at least it cannot be for very long. Unless you happen to be Mozart (prodigies do exist, although they are very rare) your initial attempts at any kind of greatness are not going to be great at all. They are going to be terrible. Even Mozart’s first compositions were not great compared to his mature work. They were comparatively great, great compared to the work of all the other three-year-old composers in the world.

In the same way, on a slightly less abrupt difference curve, the little girl who wants to be a dancer is not a great dancer. She does not have strength, grace, discipline or control, except compared to other little girls her own age. All she has is the raw desire, to dance, and a certainty that she can, in fact, do it. Whether or not she ever becomes a great dancer is entirely determined by what happens next. What encouragement will her efforts receive? Too little approval and she will lose confidence and give up. Too much, or the wrong kind of approval and she will think she already is a great dancer and will not work hard enough to achieve her full potential. Will she get distracted by lesser pleasures, such as parties, flirtations, pop-culture and allow the greater interest to be crowded out? Will she find a better goal, such as becoming a mother or a nun, and give up the lesser one to pursue the greater one?

(In any study of mastery there are two major questions: How does one become a master any given pursuit? And how does that mastery fit into the greater context of life? I only address the first question in this blog. The second would be topic enough for a book, rather than a blog.)

On thing is certain: if that little girl truly wants to become a dancer, she will have to sacrifice for it. She will have to turn a critical eye to her dancing as it is, comparing it to what it could be. She will have to avoid the temptation to blame her shortcomings on others, (“I would have, but I couldn’t afford lessons, my parents didn’t encourage me, it was a silly dream, I never had any encouragement, I wasn’t pretty enough, Lilly Perfect won that competition because her Dad knows the judges, etc.) She will have to choose to see failures as learning opportunities, and most of all she must not give up. She must pay the price.

The price is in getting up early or going to bed late, saying no to that extra slice of birthday cake, practicing your chosen pursuit when others are going out to the movies. It means being misunderstood by friends who do not see what you see, and think your insistence on following this particular echo very silly, especially when you are foregoing so much fun on the way. The price is in the sore muscles, or the physical discomfort of pushing your metabolic conditioning farther than it wants to go, or carrying heavy cameras up mountains to get that one perfect shot of the sunrise. The price is paid in injuries, sickness, boredom, hours and hours of mind-numbing, repetitious practice of the same basic scales and arpeggios over and over again.

So it is with deadlifting. When you rip a 450 Lb. bar off the ground and stand up straight and strong with a primal roar, feeling the steel flexing under the weight, feeling the power and stability from the soles of your feet, through flexed calves, knees straight but not locked, thighs hard as tree trunks under the strain, butt and hips tight, compact and locked, spine perfectly aligned, shoulders upright and sucked into their sockets, with every muscle of chest and back perfectly tensed to hold the posture, arms straight, forearms clenched, and fingers locked around the bar, there is a vitality in the experience that you could never feel without the risk, without the pain. There is more life, in the moment, a tiny expansion of the heart and body’s capacity for being alive. If you pay attention with mind and soul alive, there is food for them as well.

And then the price continues. As we age and get older, injuries become more frequent. Bones and joints become less resilient, muscles less flexible, pain more and more a constant. The abilities that we struggled so long and hard to perfect become harder, shakier, and eventually they slip away. We are left with the mystery of mortality, the loss of everything that we sacrificed so much to achieve, and the question, “Was it worth it?” But this gets into the second question, which I said I was not going to get into.

The point of this blog is simply that if you want to be good at anything, you must be willing to sacrifice. If you want to be great at something, you must sacrifice greatly. These are the beginning rumblings of a much further reaching set of thoughts. Who knows, maybe someday I will write a book. It will have to be a lot more organized than this, though.

The Widow's Mite

They asked me once… No, come to think

It was more than once; Actually when have they not

Asked me? But for the sake of the poem, once,

“Why? Why throw it all away? Why sink

Into oblivion? I mean, you know, you’ve got

It all! Brains, muscle, health. You dunce.

Why let it go?”

                        And I must say…

                                                       I don’t know.

I don’t know what it is that I am letting go

Of, I have let go of quite a bit in my time

Sacrificed time with family,

Time with friends,

Time with books

Time in Church

In my search

With vague frenzied looks

For insufficient ends.

Time in college,

Time at the park,

Around the campfire in dark

And much knowledge

Gained from teachers

And preachers.

Sacrificed time at the end of my life

With my aging wife

Time borrowed against my latter years

In health used up now

And wealth spent on things

I do not even remember. Silver wings

For a meniscal tear

A green hat

For an arthritic back

And a bursa spent upon

Who knows what? Need I go on?

And yet I have been the gainer, through it all,

A certain mental toughness, a confidence

I never had before; a physicality

Beyond the reach of most. My personality

Needed the reality, banality, inanity and all out insanity

Of such a life, to break at length through the dense

Obtuse mind’s self centered wall,

To see what truly matters.

And now, having seen much of places and climes,

Governments and men, through various times

And traded gold for success,

And achieved success and filled my mouth with the whole dusty mess

And chewed and swallowed and soliloquized

On the dry, tasteless, much prized

Dust, and how delicious it would be if only

I could season it with a little more dust…

In short, having become lonely…

At length I can hear

The silent voice in my ear

Deafening me with His love.

“If dust is all you have, then give it to me

Every speck.

Keep not one fleck

For yourself. Then you shall see

How I make much of nought.”

And so, I thought, why not?

Having made a hell of a try

Of this and found it dry,

If He offers me living water for the dust of earth

That forms my frame,

And shapes what fame

I might yet have achieved,

So what? He is to be believed.

And in the end all I have from birth

Is His, to give, to whom he will.

So it is willed,

Where what is willed must stay.

And so you can keep this whole mess

The fame, and fury, and utter pointlessness.

I will give it all for love and fade away,

And thus be filled.

I Will Lift Up My Eyes

I sing the God of all things green and good,

Great and grand and gorgeous, things of wood

Of living things grown close in brotherhood

Of strength and beauty, of oil, wine and food.







I sing the God of stern and solid stone
Severe, austere and snow-capped, standing alone

 Amid their lesser fellows. Of beam and bone

Of earth on which green living things have grown.

I sing the God of reading, writing; the reign
Of rhythm, rhyme, and rectitude; the wax and wane
Of times and seasons; of wisdom slowly gained
In solitude, in book, in pipe, in rain.

I sing the God of doe and deer, of dove

Direct, diverse, diffuse, below and above

And in, around and through, like hand in glove,

In sunsets, stars and blazing sun in grove

In city, in time alone, in still and move

And in all things, 

                        I sing

                                 The God of Love!

Deep Roots

"As to this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful searches and inquiries, seeking to know what person or time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as He predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves, but you, in these things which now have been announced to you." 1 Peter 1:10-12a

"Truly I say to you, among those born of women there has not arisen anyone greater than John the Baptist! Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." Matthew 11:11

"Ryan, you do realize that you can't impress God, right?" Fr. Matthew Pawlikowski, LTC(Ch) U. S. Army 

Ever since I was a kid I dreamed of doing great things. My head was filled with stories of knights in armor, kings, saints, explorers, sages, writers. I have always dreamed of leaving my mark on the world, hopefully for the better. I did not want to be average. I wanted my name to be known and to influence the lives of hundreds of people, or thousands. These dreams have taken a multitude of shapes and have led me to do extraordinary things. They led me to sacrifice a decade of my life to the military with ruthless single-mindedness. The caused me to spend my life trying to build myself up into a warrior and a scholar, in the hopes that when the opportunity came, I would be ready to step up to the plate. 

These dreams all have one thing in common. None of them have come true. I find myself in the odd position of having spent my life thus far chasing the means, and being (it seems) no closer to the ends than I ever was. The means fail to satisfy, as they inevitably must, and I, like everyone from time to time, am left with a feeling that I am wasting my life and my gifts. 

At times like this, you need someone who loves you, because she (assuming that it is in fact a she, although a he could do it in a pinch, though not in the same way) will see you more clearly than you can see yourself. If she is close to God, she will be able to give you just a tiny glimpse of how God sees you also, which is the only point of view that really matters in the end.

She will point out that no life is wasted that is lived with love; that ultimately it is up to God to put a value on your life, not you; and that simply because you cannot see the fruit of your actions, that does not mean that they are not or will not bear fruit. 

She will remind you of the great cathedrals, like Notre Dame, which took ninety years to build from 1160-1250, and even when the main construction was finished in 1250, remodeling and other building processes on smaller elements continued for almost another hundred years. The men who broke their backs and spent the the strength of their youth laying the foundations of this magnificent act of worship, never saw its completion. They were long since dead, having left behind a solid base to build upon and strong sons to build upon it. They left millions of tons of rock in the ground, and the Rock of faith in the hearts of the next generation. Even that generation would not live long to enjoy the completed cathedral. Ninety years is a long time. Three generations of men could put in thirty good years of labor on that one building before any of them would see it completed. Did the old gaffer who spent his entire life putting tons of anonymous gravel into an oddly shaped pit by hand, waste that life?

I took a trip to about a year ago to give a talk at John Paul the Great Academy in Lafeyette, LA. The school is housed in an old monastery that the school purchased in a miracle $10,000,000.00 fund raising campaign last summer. The grounds and building are beautiful, old, immaculately kept by volunteers without pay, the perfect venue for a classical Catholic education. The school was established by local Catholic families who simply wanted an alternative to the larger and more expensive parochial schools, or the public schools. They put a lot of time and effort into making this school a thriving organization. It is not an exaggeration to say that they offered up their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor," to providing a worthy education for their children.

One of the things that most struck me about the school grounds, one of its most amazing features, are the trees. (Just so you know, I love trees!) The grounds of JPG Academy are full of gorgeous old oak trees, all well over a hundred years old.

This one was my favorite!

 
The trees are a great metaphor for the school itself, especially the trees that line the front drive. They were originally planted back at the turn of the century, and then ten or twelve years later dug up and moved again to make the lane wider to accommodate automobiles. Now, over a hundred years later, they shade the drive up from the road to the school building. The contrast is unreal. You turn off of a fairly busy country highway, which was baking in the August Louisiana sunshine when I was there, and find yourself in a long, quiet, cool, peaceful tunnel. The tunnel leads you gently away from the noise of traffic and the heat of the exposed highway into the school grounds, and the great old stone building, and the shade of ancient trees, and the sounds of children's laughter. 

Some man saw all of that, or perhaps only part of it (he probably did not foresee it being a school) and he designed and commissioned the driveway. He chose trees of good stock and set their roots in good soil. His successors tended those trees, as just one of their many responsibilities, keeping the Spanish moth and diseases in check, weeding around them, keeping the lawns, maintaining the pavement, cutting back the ivy when it showed up. They did not see the drive as I saw it.

And I did not see it as God sees it. But God does, and that is all that matters.

Greatness is worth striving for, as is renown and influence and changing the world. All of these are good to aspire to, mostly so that you will learn faster that they are illusions, and the only greatness that matters is the greatness of doing God's will, doing the work that He gives you to do, and doing it well, forgetting about yourself and your own glory and simply looking at Him.

He is all that matters.

The Adventure Worth Having

In my last two posts I talked about home, and what home is to me. Home to me is people, or a Catholic Church (which is really a Person). I do not miss places. I enjoy them when I am there. No matter how long I am there I find them beautiful, and no matter how long I am in different places I don’t miss the old ones. Perhaps because there is so much to discover in any one place, and perhaps because I try to enjoy everything I am presented with, I am always too busy enjoying my current place to miss my old place.

One interesting result of this way of thinking of place is that it radically (in the old sense radix: root; from the roots up) shapes my idea of adventure. To most people going somewhere they have never been before is an adventure, in and of itself. The very idea of seeing something new is exciting to most people, or terrifying, or inconvenient as the case may be, but certainly the novelty of a place they have never seen before is one of the key features of that place. 

For me this is less true. It is true that I enjoy seeing new things, but no more than I enjoy enjoying old things. For this reason I consider it a very good thing that my job has forced me to go to new places and see new things. It has greatly broadened my mind and sharpened my mental and emotional appetite for beauty. It is a good thing, not because I would dislike the idea of traveling if I were not forced to, but because without that impetus I would probably be too busy just being wherever I was or doing whatever I was doing.

Simply going somewhere is not an adventure for me.

Neither is adrenaline. I have experienced my share of adrenaline. I have hunted IED’s with a knife and handheld mine detector. I have witnessed IED’s blowing up a mere vehicle length from me. I have been shot at with rockets. I have jumped out of airplanes. I have practiced martial arts and fought in full contact tournaments. I have blown things up, fired thousands of rounds until simply pulling the trigger was a chore, and broken into rooms with live bullets flying feet from my head. I have cross country skied into back country mountain passes and downhilled across miles of untouched powder (rather clumsily, I might add; my skiing skills are not the best. I have navigated across miles of wilderness alone with a map and compass. some of these things were fun in their own way, or terrifying, or merely a dreadful bother, depending on my mood at the time. All were thrills, at least at first.

None of them have satisfied me. Not one of them provides a strong enough reason to keep doing what I am doing, which is part of why I am getting out of the Army at the end of this enlistment. Thrill is not a reason for existing. An adventure ought to have a purpose, and only one purpose have I found that still seems meaningful to me. It is not “America’s Interests.”

It is not that I consider all of those “adventures” worthless. Each one served its purpose, although it was not necessarily the purpose I or anyone else thought it served at the time. I have grown from each one. I have succeeded where I expected only failure, and excelled when by all rights I should have flunked. I have also failed when I expected only success. I have met my limitations and surpassed them, met them again and been utterly crushed and unable to go one step further. I have cried out for help in desperation and been answered out of marvelous darkness. These are good experiences, I think, for any man to have in his younger days.

If nothing else they have given me this perspective, that I have tried them and found them wanting. At twenty-eight years old I can say confidently that love is the only adventure worthwhile. Love of God, first and foremost, and then love of everyone that He loves. Love is the only purpose that still seems meaningful to me.

But lo and behold! Love is meaningful, and for its sake and by its light every other thing is meaningful. Everything is an adventure. Everything is worthwhile and beautiful when done with that love.

That seems to me to be something worth learning.

The Good Life

Sit for a bit and rest between sets and I

Will share with you what you already hear

In the creaking, cracking, groaning of my knees

At full flexion, the bottom of the squat or swing

Of the ugly metal ball. With every rep they sigh

And cry

The price

Of life, lived to the full. Loud and clear

Like hawkers in the flea markets, peddling their fleas

My swings sell the idea of strength, but sing

Also of the cost, in the creaking that you hear

So clear.

I fear

I am mere mortal. I feel the changing breeze

In my hips and knees and ankles, at twenty-seven.

If even this life I cannot stand to fill;

And spend my life like water, how much harder still

The greater life poured out on me in Heaven.

I buy this fleeting strength with future pain,

But gain

A strength that will not wane.

I will not hide my capital in the earth,

But burn it out for every bit I am worth

And hope to see it returned to me again

A hundred fold, shaken, tamped full measure

Running over with resurrected treasure. 


The Glory of God is Man Fully Alive! Alleluia!