Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Love and Serve the Lord

The poetical and lyrical qualities of life are associations noticed and captured by others. Depending on who is doing the observing, who is doing the narrating, and who is dong the listening events in our lives can be condensed to strange volumes of moonlight and melancholy, of conformity and cantankerousness. For some each life becomes a textbook, each life becomes a didactic exercise of advice unsolicited, advice unwanted. Life can be described as a collection of quotes, photographs, lists of songs, lists of television shows, lists of celebrities.

Talk of pain, emotional and physical, talk of austerity, emotional and economic, dominates conversations. Philosophy intersects with emotion and directs the attention here and there. Life becomes unfocused while searching for an argument. Being introspective can lead us to God, can lead us to love. Humanity begins with the ordinary, begins with emotion.

The lyrical and the poetical qualities refer to how we live, how we love, how we express ourselves. It is not limited to our grammatical choices, to our verbal utterances. The lyrical and poetical qualities refer to how we love and serve the Lord.

A need for an intimate reality, an intimate relationship with God expresses itself in a reserved, measured form. A hint of sympathy, a desire for empathy create the power of hope, faith, and love.Divine aspiration, divine inspiration can overpower doubt. We simply have to allow ourselves to believe.

The religious soul continues to struggle with moral temptation. The religious soul struggles and strains against the oppressive yolk of popular culture with its permissiveness, violence, racism, sexism, inequalities, injustices. There is sadness, loneliness. The religious soul strains to remind of us of truth, beauty, goodness. The religious soul asks us to think of and then become living examples of humility, charity, obedience, compassion, and mercy. The epitaph of our lives is often composed by the religious soul, leading us to God, leading us to love, leading us to life eternal beyond our fragile, temporary earthly bodies. The tone of our lives reveals the goodness, kindness, holiness within our hearts, within our souls. Being didactic, feeling melancholy becomes a sign, a symbol of our humanity.

We suffer. We conform. We suffer. We say hello. We say farewell. Happiness arrives. Sadness arrives.

We are asked to sacrifice in the name of the Lord. We are asked to Love in the name of God. We are asked to walk in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. We are asked to be introspective, to pray and to love our brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers and all of our neighbors.

Both lyrical and poetical viewpoints provide insights and images that can help us become closer to God. As Christians we sometimes need help discovering God’s beauty, discovering goodness in human beings, discovering truth in the world around us.


No comments:

Post a Comment