Second Sunday of Lent: What Drumbeat? What Path?

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
-Henry David Thoreau


Okay, I better address something this week. Why in the world am I using someone like Thoreau for leading me deeper into the world of Lent? Thoreau was not supportive of Christianity. In fact his “diary” entry for Sunday in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack is more about western religions' faults and hypocrisies. On top of that he is often seen as self-centered, narcissistic, pompous, and hypocritical. An article in New Yorker magazine in 2015 by award-winning author Kathryn Schulz severely criticizes Thoreau.

The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. From that inward fixation flowed a social and political vision that is deeply unsettling. -Link

She goes on to analyze and question how in the world such a person could be so honored and even deified by so many?

I am not here to defend Thoreau. To some extent I agree with Schulz’s general review of him. He was a very strange man in so many ways. In spite of the popularity- and importance- of his ideal of civil disobedience, or his ideal of Walden pond, his arguments as presented do not always hold water, especially in the 21st Century. He was an excellent naturalist and the founding father of so much of what has since been written, but again it may not be all it seems. In many ways he was writing a metaphor, not a strict natural history. But again, we are dealing with the pre-Civil War 19th Century! The world of New England in 1845, which Thoreau presented as the seeming pinnacle of civilization, looks nothing like our world. It is, for me, the principles and directions of his thought that impress me.

As we remember that we are not dealing with a contemporary of ours, so too we should understand that he was not a “wise elder.” Thoreau never made it to being an elder; he died at age 45 of tuberculosis. He was 28 when he moved to Walden, 30 when he left, and 31 when he delivered the lecture that would become Civil Disobedience. In other words he was still a young rebel. He never left that behind.

Which is why I am so impressed by him and why the quote at the top of this post is his legacy for me. He was always marching to a different drummer. I believe that we as Christians should never forget that thought. We should find ways to move our own lives with an attitude of following our own music- or more fittingly for this series- the music of the soul and spirit as we Jesus-followers experience and discover it through Jesus Christ; him crucified and resurrected. Jesus told us that we should learn the ways of the world because he was sending us out

like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. (NRSV)

Part of that, Thoreau would remind us, is to listen for the beat of that different drummer! That is what Lent reminds us. Here is the call of this season for us-

dig deeply, look inside to find the drumbeat of our lives. 

More to the point may be that we are hearing the heartbeat of God when we do so. That heartbeat can be restless. That can make it a heartbeat that animates us, gives us direction and meaning and life. It keeps us moving.

A friend on Facebook posted a challenge to his fellow Baby Boomers last week. He asked what happened to the idealism and hope, the fresh ideas and directions, the radical and revolutionary understandings that propelled so many of us in the 60s and early 70s? Instead we have become “elders” (read: old), often more interested in the status quo than the possibilities of growth and peace, grace and spirit. “Have we lost our soul?” was my personal response. Have we become afraid of our own shadows, or even ashamed of some of the naive and innocent ideals of our youth? As a result have we turned away from asking the hard questions for fear of offending ourselves or others? Have we turned off the drumbeat and simply given up on making the world a better place?

But the word naive comes from deeper roots than that.

1650s, "natural, simple, artless," from French naïve, fem. of naïf, from Old French naif "naive, natural, genuine; just born; foolish, innocent; unspoiled, unworked" (13c.), from Latin nativus "not artificial," also "native, rustic," literally "born, innate, natural" -Link

Maybe we weren’t as “foolish” as some think we were. Maybe we were listening to what is more innate, a more natural way of living. Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond was a similar move. No, he did not leave the world behind and live like a hermit. Far from it. Instead he used that time to dig into his own soul and the spirit of the world around him, to hear the different drummer’s beat for him.

That’s what I am doing this Lent. I am using my faith and my experiences to bring that beat into clearer focus. I am using the wrestling with Thoreau to help me fine-tune my ear for the music and the ways to bring what I still believe as important from my “naive” years into this time and place.

• Where am I turning to hear the beat of God’s drummer?
• How can I pay closer attention to what the Spirit is calling me to do?
• What is the path in front of me that I may need to follow?
• What of my past is valuable to translate into this new century and the next decade of my life?
• How can I leave a trail that others may follow and find their own place in the work of God?

Do not go where the path may lead,

go instead where there is no path

and leave a trail.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Soundtrack of Half a Century

We often speak of the popular music of given eras as providing soundtracks for different generations. Each of us has that particular set of songs or musical artists who define the music of our adolescence. Sitting in Target Center in Minneapolis on May 4 I realized that, even for my cohort, the oldest group of Baby Boomers, that line is too limiting for Paul McCartney and the Beatles. They have provided, together and separately, a soundtrack for at least half a century.

Over the years a number of friends and acquaintances have been to McCartney concerts and reported that it was one of the most amazing concert experiences of their lives. When tickets for the Target Center concert popped up on my Facebook feed the last week of April, I jumped at them. The dream of my lifetime was to see the Beatles in concert. They stopped touring as the Beatles 50 years ago this summer. But here was Sir Paul. Why not?

Personally I was a little worried before the concert started. As the 8:00 starting time approached there were still about 20% of the seats empty. Has Paul lost his following? Are people leaving the Beatles behind. By the time the concert began, though, almost every seat was filled.My guess is that the security lines were too long.

In any case we waited. It was 45 minutes more of what I can only call the worst music experience in a live music setting.

No it wasn't an opening group. It was a techno-beat soundtrack mix of Beatles/McCartney music. It was too loud and far too techno. For a total of over 75 minutes I felt I was being pounded into submission by a relentless beat. (I have never taken the drug Ecstasy, but I think I understand why clubbers do.) I was actually worried that by the time McCartney took the stage I would be so beaten down that I wouldn't enjoy the show.

Yeah, right.

Not a chance.

Here are ten of my pictures from the concert along with some more thoughts. A link to my complete album on Flickr is at the bottom along with a link to the setlist online.

The first seven songs of the set:

A Hard Day's Night
Save Us
Can't Buy Me Love
Letting Go
Temporary Secretary (A real dud in my book. The only one.)
(A Foxy Lady snippet)
I've Got a Feeling
My Valentine (for his current wife, Nancy)

From City Pages review:

If death hung heavy in the air — and constant reminders of John Lennon, George Harrison, Linda McCartney, producer George Martin, and Prince made sure that it did — the mood was still celebratory. We're witnessing pages of rock history come to life, after all, and the knighted, mythic creature performing the songs still seems to believe in their power. The packed crowd of around 19,000 did, too.

Paul mentioned the late great Jimi Hendrix after the Foxy Lady riff and then said he was dedicating the concert to our own late, great Prince. He told of seeing Prince perform at a small cafe this past New Year's Eve. "We saw the new year in together and that was beautiful — God bless you Prince!"

Prince. Minneapolis.
Minneapolis. Prince.
It goes together.

Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five
Here, There and Everywhere
Maybe I'm Amazed (for his late wife, Linda.)
We Can Work It Out

In Spite of All the Danger (The Quarrymen song)
You Won't See Me
Love Me Do (Dedicated to George Martin who died in March)
And I Love Her
Blackbird

The Quarrymen song went back to 1959 when it was Paul, John, and George and "two other guys" that he told us we wouldn't know. He said their nicknames, and everyone laughed. We didn't know them. It was a country-style, skiffle/rock-a-billy song. He even tried to wiggle and jiggle like Elvis. Applause and laughter!

He told a story of George Martin, the Beatles' superlative producer asking Paul to do the singing on "Love Me Do" so John could play the harmonica. Without George Martin, he said, there wouldn't have been the Beatles.

Then there was "Blackbird." He mentioned that they wrote it in solidarity with the people in Little Rock, Arkansas, who were standing up for civil rights. It was a beautiful rendition with appropriate video accompanying him.While singing he was lifted on a hydraulic stage section. A little over done.

Here Today
Queenie Eye
New Song
The Fool on the Hill
Lady Madonna
FourFiveSeconds
   (Rihanna and Kanye West and Paul McCartney cover)
Eleanor Rigby
Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!
Something

 He started "Here Today" by saying it was written to John Lennon. Sadly, he said, it was "a conversation we never had." He urged the audience to say what they needed to say to the people they cared about while they had the chance.

He started "Something," a George Harrison song, by playing it on the ukulele which he said was how George first played it for him. It continued into a guitar slashing of highest quality!

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Band on the Run
Back in the U.S.S.R.
Let It Be
Live and Let Die

To quote the City Pages reviewer:

Paul performing "Let It Be" at the piano is all any music fan could really ask for.

With "U.S.S.R." he told an anecdote about being in Russia and having Russian officials tell him about listening to the Beatles' music. It was one of a number of times that Paul truly made it a personal evening, befitting the tour's title, One on One

"Live and Let Die," the heavy-duty title rocker from the James Bond film, gave us all a start when the pyrotechnics started. Sure, it was over-the-top, but it fit!

Hey Jude

Even as a sing-along, this one still moves across the ages. Take a sad song, and make it better.

Encores:
Yesterday

In many ways the most moving moment of the show for this old Beatles' fan was the opening encore number- Paul's acoustic rendition of "Yesterday." It kept its power with the strings being added through the miracle of electronic keyboard. As Wikipedia reminds us, "Yesterday":

remains popular today with more than 2,200 cover versions and is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music. "Yesterday" was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and listeners and was also voted the No. 1 pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine the following year.

The song was released as my senior year in high school began in September 1965. Hearing Paul sing it in May 2016 was nothing short of a spiritual connection across this half-century. The lighting, as I looked at it, started at that small moment in time, the spot on the stage, in 1965 and spread out into today. I know the lights were pointing down, but the meaning of the lights seemed to me a metaphor for the song itself, rising from that spot into its place in popular music history.

Hi, Hi, Hi
Let's Go Crazy (Prince cover)

He followed that short cover with a statement in honor of Prince.

He's your guy.

Birthday
Golden Slumbers
Carry That Weight

The End

And in the end, the love you take

is equal to the love you make.

Okay- I was prepared to be disappointed. The techno-crap before the concert did not do justice to the evening. I tried to keep my expectations as low as possible even though in my mind I kept saying, "I'm going to see one of the Beatles. My God, really! The Beatles!" I never expected to see any of them in live concert. After seeing my personal idol Herb Alpert last fall I knew that the older group of my generation's music can still do their thing. Alpert was 80 at the time. McCartney turns 74 next month. John and George are gone. But a 73-year old McCartney? Does he still have it?

Well, expectations are meant to be lived up to more often than they are broken. The initial reality of seeing Paul there, in person, playing those songs gave way to the joy and celebration of these past 50 years of his music- my music- our music. He looked older and had a sense of maintaining his energy while letting it out as appropriate for what he does today. He sounded like he had a cold and had some difficulty making the full range of the older vocals. But, as the accomplished performer he is, he made that part of the awe of the show.

He can still do it. He can still make these songs real and alive. There were, at times, even signs of the old Beatles' smart-alack attitude as he yelled back and forth with fans in the audience or gave the audience that old, much younger, Paul McCartney grin. I am grateful, by the way, for the large projection screens that allowed everyone to see and react to him, in person, almost one on one. The Beatles started the use of patterns and psychedelic images in some of their videos, so that felt like a good way to add to the overall ambience of the show.

The show itself was about two hours and forty-five minutes- with no breaks! He started and never stopped. He played three dozen songs. Acoustic. Classic Rock. Beatles songs. The audience was with him from the word "Go!" While tending to be a lot of Boomers, the crowd covered at least three generations. Sir Paul himself predates the Boomers who are starting to turn 70 years old this year.

Seventy!

And right there, on the stage was one of our icons. It didn't make me feel younger- or older, actually. It was more of a celebration of our 50+ years together with the music. It reminded us of the innocence of our youth and young adulthood. It reminded us of the ups and downs of life with loss and death always hanging around. Yet in the end the loss and death do not win.

The music does.

And we are better for it.

Thanks, Paul. It was a joy being with you. One on one, with 19,000 of your closest friends.

Click below for complete album of my pictures.

Paul McCartney Pictures Album

May 4, 2016

Target Center

Setlist

A Comedian With a Heart

We just finished listening to Martin Short's moving memoir, I Must Say: My Life As a Humble Comedy Legend, on our trip home. I am glad, first of all, that we did the audio book version with Short himself doing the reading. That way we got the "real deal" of Short's characters and own way of presenting his story.

Two things stand out in my mind about the book. First, it gives a down-to-earth view of celebrities that we see often- Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, Paul Shaffer, Bill Murray, Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn and Short himself. As Short tells his story and these friends of his show up, we find that they are just every-day people in their own world. While they may be in a whole different culture than most of us, within their culture and relationships they do the same things as we do. They sit on balconies and look at the ocean, on the porch of a cabin and watch the water on the lake. They go to the doctors and have fun times together. They call each other up on the phone and go shopping.

They also have the pains of life that we all have. Which is the second outstanding element of Short's memoir- he lays bear the pain of his life. His brother's sudden death while Short was a teenager, the death of his mother, the father who was like so many other fathers of the 50s and 60s and finally, the death of his wife of 36 years in 2010. His reflections on these events go deep into the ins and outs of being human and coping with life. They speak of the heart- and to the heart. He doesn't sugar-coat them not give glib answers. You can tell that through a lifetime of deaths in his life, he has wrestled with what the meanings are- for him.

As we were driving listening to the last sections of the book about his wife's death, my wife and I found ourselves crying. He doesn't play the emotions, he simply tells the story and his reactions. We could not stay dry-eyed. Short is of our generation, of course, and we are soon to celebrate 43 years together. The deep loss of the death of a spouse is not something to avoid. As Short presents it, when it happens, it will hurt, deeply and forever, but these difficult times are difficult because we have had a good life together.

While not one to regularly listen to audio books, I highly recommend this one instead of just reading it. You will get Martin Short at his best and most human.

A Video of the Month: August 2014

Six Weeks

For the past several months I have been posting periodically about the change in my life that will be starting in December. Six weeks from today will be the first day I will NOT have a "full-time" job since, well, I guess it's about 40 years now. On Wednesday December 4 I will switch to a part-time employee as I make the first step of a transition to "retirement" sometime in the next year.

Pieces of the reality of it have begun to settle in, especially as it is now in that 6-week range. I have been talking with my supervisor about clearing out my office space, taking books home, letting people take some of them, pulling the pictures from the walls. Within a few weeks I will no longer be one of the primary group counselors of the program we have been developing for the past 14 or so months.

Six weeks from today I will not have to get up and go to "work" five days a week. Just two, sometimes three as a supplemental.

Reality, even hoped for and planned for reality, can be scary.

Which is why I have been doing some thinking, planning, talking, praying, coaching. In the midst of this I have been led to a book, The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years after 50 by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot. In her research and interviewing she discovered the revolutionary cultural shift that has been taking place with those of us who used to be called "Senior Citizens" or, before that, the elderly. In the early years of my generation, the elderly DID include people my current age. The Golden Years were already looking tarnished for many. Come to age 65 and you were ready for the "Old Folks' Home."

Oh, how that has changed!

Even the first stage of this revolution, "Retirement Communities" where older people went to sit and play away their final years away from the distractions of young people (i.e. my generation). Oops. Gerontology is now outdated. We aren't riding into some Sun City Sunset. At least not in the ways many saw it 40 years ago. Yes, many of us are "retiring" from our careers, the jobs or callings that have given us pleasure as well as opportunity. But we want something different now.

We want to continue to be useful, but we want to discover new ways to use what we have been given. We want to continue to explore and dig, and relate and learn new things. We want to right wrongs we gave up working on. We want to leave a legacy while still learning new things. Life is too short to sit around the pool and sip lemonade. Sure we will do that, too. But there are books and stories to be written. There are pictures to take and videos to produce. There are bands to play in and music to be discovered. There are people to be mentor- and people still to mentor us in things we have been waiting for.

In short, life is still happening. Or, in the language we might have used 45 years ago-

Life is a-happenin', man.

No, it doesn't start in six weeks for me. It is just a continuation of a lifelong pursuit of life and all it can offer to me- and then to others.

As always, I'll keep you posted.

Two Months Left

As I said a month or so ago, I will be making my first major step toward retirement later this year. To be exact, it will be exactly two months from today, December 3, that I will have my last day of full-time employment. That week I will switch to a .4 full-time equivalent. As I said back then, my list of things I am thinking about and exploring includes:

• Free-lance writing
• Training as a group fitness instructor
• Learning some music theory and composition
• Finishing several short stories that have been percolating for a while
• Doing some real video work
• Practicing my trumpet more
• Picking up the guitar again and looking at some bluegrass opportunities
• Reading
• Improving my Spanish comprehension

I came up with the idea of calling this my third career, or more "poetically", Career Three. That of course came from the book listed over there in my book list, The Third Chapter. A remarkable book that has been giving me some good insights and directions to start with in these preparation months. It also comes from the fact that in my adult working life I have been successful in two careers. The first lasted 30 years, the second 20 (with 10 years of overlap.) I am seeing retirement as a new career. Hence the part-time transition from my current full-time work to whatever retirement looks like probably by this time in 2014.

Not wanting to just come screeching into December, I have been doing some work with a wellness coach. He has been asking me the tough questions and prodding me to find some answers. He asked me in our first session how I make big decisions. My answer was that I gather information and then go with my intuition.

I have been finding, however, that this was not quite true. There is more than just letting the information settle waiting to see what rises to the top. I do, what my wife calls "twirling all these things around" and seeing what happens. I can spend a lot of time twirling and spinning.

Earlier this week I mentioned this to my coach again and he said that it sounds like a centrifuge. What's important will come whirling out to visibility. I liked that image. It has a research and "scientific" feel to it. I'm not just floundering along, I'm doing the work needed to make the next career a good one that is fun and meaningful.

As I move along, I will surely be reflecting here about it.