"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the graves with the song still in them..." Henry David Thoreau.
Henry David Thoreau - a writer who's words speak so profoundly he is labelled a "Philosopher", who created a book so influential an entire field of human endeavor and study resulted. Henry David Thoreau was the American who launched an army of believers now called "Naturalists."
I love the name of his seminal book, "Walden Pond" or "Life in the Woods". It is inspiring to me that a simple and slim volume, a small pile of ordinary words, has illuminated our American world and inspired generations of people trying to capture, embrace, define and protect that which Thoreau captured and shared as what was fundamentally, a necessary escape from the circumstances of urban life.
Just a little pile of words - and he turned retreat and failure into a new religion of man's relationship with the natural world. There is no greater measure of a man's footprint on this world than how he responds to a crisis and continues to uplift and serve his fellow man.
Henry David Thoreau is a small, dead man who stands tall today as a giant of literature and human thought. If there is such a thing as human immortality, he is immortal, and for good reason.
He cared. As a wordsmith, he used the tools he had to forge a better, more aware and healthier world.
Words have meaning - and as a person who so often is pointed out as having a strange and in some ways very uncomfortable personal style of living the inner life on the outside of self, I can tell you that having a commitment to share the tools and skills I have is the hunger that makes me who and what I am.
I love words.
You need to know something - "word" is a noun, and a word is a thing that converts thought, experience and this abundance of "things" that give sense to reality, and weave our collected knowledge and experience into the fabric of coherent thought.
To understand what this is, scholars have long sought to understand how words matter and what they represent in a tangible way to the human species. It was perhaps best codified a few generations ago by linguists and human communications experts: One of my favorite concepts that digs deep into this tough, not easily defined relationship between man and words is The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
"If you don't know the words, you can't think the thoughts"
Words are the ingredients of the rich and personal soup that we call thought. Words are how we express understanding and coherent shared understanding of both the created and natural world.
Words - they define reality.
Self awareness is a mechanism within all people - indeed within all sentient creatures.
The challenge is, as a species, as a collected community of human beings, it would appear that there is some as yet unlabeled tendency to perceive silence... as an appropriate response to our growing sense of maturity.
Mature adult minds, minds that have collected and parsed childhood and ongoing experience into hopes, dreams, anticipation and as yet unrealized achievements in both the material and inner worlds in which we choose to apply effort and attempt to induce changes - one word that fits this process is "aspirations."
For example myself - due to the freedoms I enjoy as a robust and vital person, still choosing to learn and grow in human awareness and abilities, I aspire to project my own personal hunger to share my strengths and hungers for human spiritual awareness in a world of limited choices and necessary resources in a way that might take the best of me, the best of who and what I am, and share it with the world.
I am a person who knows that we cannot assume nor embrace the differences I witness during my daily walk of life without recognizing that some people are having a good day - and some people are under the pressures of life without a clear method or path to the warm sunshine of comfortably wrestling the grizzly bear of fate without fear.
Fear - Fear is always the enemy of the soul. A person running in panic away from a disaster or a real or imagined threat to inner peace has to first and always know one thing - a critically important thing:
"What is it I am running from, or what safe-harbor am I running toward?"
"What is it that I am afraid I might lose if I cannot get away from this situation intact?"
"Why?"
"Why am I frightened?" "What about this moment is pounding on me like a hammer and potentially changing the shape of my reality and the context of who and what I am."
"I care deeply - but why does this matter?"
"Danger - real and present danger, has triggered a fight or flight response!"
"How can I address this crisis, and what important part of who I am is actually under threat?"
Let us simplify. "Who am I, and why does this matter so much?"
Jesus of Nazareth said - through words and living example, "Love one another as you would love yourself."
One of the things I'm constantly aware of is that the difficult part of that commandment, what I suppose I might label "Christ's recipe for being a Messiah", the difficult and sometimes impossible element in that blend of words with our daily lives is the second part.
How do we express in a functional way Christ's love for mankind?
First we begin with humility - with all our education and effort to know the life and message of Jesus' existence, no person is qualified to define that special and energetic force (a force that still has power today - 2100 years after the Ascension of our prophesied "Savior"),
That special and energetic source of power and spiritual wisdom that is Christ's all embracing love for humanity. What an achievement - a human being who projected love so profound the stories are still told and are so simple that we use them to teach, preach and define the boundaries of good and evil.
It wouldn't matter however, without at least a few examples all people can embrace and experience as a tangible example of "Love done Right."
I have a friend Anne - she is an ordinary person, but very special in the way she is open about who she is, and who she is not.
She is a person who values love - and fiercely protects those things from risk, from harm, from outside or internal forces of change that might tear that love asunder. She does these things with a skill and intensity that absolutely creates a sense of shared purpose, and respect for her as a mature and yes, righteous human being.
The kind of lady you hope is teaching your grandchildren. The kind of lady you hope is nearby if there is a bad accident or a terrible storm or disaster. The kind of person you would confidently put "in charge" whether it was a daycare with a sick caregiver or a disaster relief effort involving an entire island after a hurricane.
Hurricanes.
If you've not yet been in the eye of the storm, had a moment of the bewildering sense of helplessness that accompanies living through a weather event that quite literally, is trying to kill you - you are missing something really educational and life-altering.
If you've ever lived through a bad storm - a storm where you were exposed, vulnerable and caught in the bewildering force that is our natural world, you know what I'm trying to say. Words are inadequate to describe how small, how helpless, how naked and alone you feel when a tornado is 100 yards away and the wind is threatening to tear your clothes off your back.
The rain is like a solid wall of water, you struggle for breath, sleet and grass clippings and small pebbles and hailstones the size of golf balls are just beating you into a fetal position.... So helpless you freeze in place behind or under whatever useless shelter you've been able to reach - that is a moment for prayer.
OH what prayers those are... prayers that leap from you like anguished cries from a two year old at the store who just realized he is lost and perhaps for the first time since birth, alone.
You plead and scream and cry, for your Mother.
Christ's love - a Mother's all embracing love.
Without selfish limits, without judgement, with nothing but a fierce desire to nurture and protect, that boy cascades from the hell of loneliness and terror and with tears streaming, runs, no leaps, into those protective arms. Her smell is the smell of home, her warmth is tangible, real and instantly tells that child he has made it back - from a harsh cold alien world, he has made it home.
I am John Edward Charles Hubertz of Fort Wayne Indiana. I am a Hoosier, born and bred, corn-fat and corn fed.
Indiana is my home, and I am a very lucky man. Some places and some experiences are so rich with meaning they can only be expressed in art. Nothing but art, the music of the soul, is rich and colorful enough to speak the truth of love.
So, let us turn to the song of my sacred land - The State Song of Indiana is "On the Banks of the Wabash far Away."
On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away[27]
(Verse)
Round my Indiana homestead wave the cornfields,
In the distance loom the woodlands clear and cool.
Oftentimes my thoughts revert to scenes of childhood,
Where I first received my lessons, nature's school.
But one thing there is missing from the picture,
Without her face it seems so incomplete.
I long to see my mother in the doorway,
As she stood there years ago, her boy to greet.
(Chorus)
Oh, the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash,
From the fields there comes the breath of newmown hay.
Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming,
On the banks of the Wabash, far away.
(Verse)
Many years have passed since I strolled by the river,
Arm in arm, with sweetheart Mary by my side,
It was there I tried to tell her that I loved her,
It was there I begged of her to be my bride.
Long years have passed since I strolled thro' the churchyard.
She's sleeping there, my angel, Mary dear,
I loved her, but she thought I didn't mean it,
Still I'd give my future were she only here.
This lovely American ballad by a Hoosier songwriter named Paul Dresser, it was adopted in 1913 (a time of turbulent change - as horses were replaced by cars and the economy staggered into a war economy). Adopted by the Indiana General Assembly, it is a poem of fond remembrance for a simpler time, a rural life and the sweet memories of youth in one of the most beautiful and fruitful locations in the world.
Christ's love - and the living example of a new friend, Anne. Don't be greedy with your need, your fears and the desperation we all feel. Be Christ - and reach out to the world with the simple honesty of the child within. We all need to feel the loving embrace, of love.
Peace be with you.
