MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE AND MUSIC

 I did this because I was thinking about the mystery of language and music the other day.  It's not a big mystery, I guess, but I do think about it now and then.  I wonder if there is a language technician somewhere in the world that I am going to meet one day.  During our conversation, that individual will be able to take the mystery about which I am going to write, out of my life.  During our conversation, the mystery will be turned into complete intellectual understanding.
Consider the different sounds of languages.  Consider that there are languages with practically no hills and valleys in their accentuation.  These are the languages where you can never put the accent on the wrong syllable.  Then there are languages where the accents add a lot to the meaning of the words spoken.  There are languages that have a lot of twisted tongue involvement.  Some have accents and tones too.  Some need to have the speaker put some throat stops into the sections of certain words.  I suppose I could go on, but I trust  that by now you get the point.  It is an introduction to the mystery of language and music.  It struck me the other day that although there are some languages that to some people may sound strange, and even unpleasant to hear, some languages come across as fluid and pleasant to the ear.  Even to the person to whom they mean absolutely nothing.  Now, after all that, I ask, <Why is it that every language has the ability to produce sweet music?>  Good grief, even the German language has sweet music, much of it admired internationally.  We've all heard the famous World War II bar song about Lily Marlene, right?  Oh, and by the way there is also a very sweet bar song that came out of Japan during that self-same war.  What about the famous Tagalog song, Dahil Sa iyo [Because of You].  What about Olivia Newton John?  Or the Beatles? Or Tom Jones?  Did you ever hear them speak during an interview?  What happens to their Cockney when they sing?  What about Celine Dion, my almost relative?  Or, for those of you old enough to remember, what about Maurice Chevalier?  
You all know that there has to be a mystery there somewhere.  It struck me the other night because I was listening to the National Public Radio station and the featured music was Norwegian love songs.  I was blown away.  Such sweetness!  I couldn't understand a word, but I was floating in air.  It struck me then that I would perhaps never understand what was happening, but as long as it was so beautiful, I would continue believing in it.
That's the way it is with mysteries.  As long as you enjoy them, you don't have to understand them.  We are surrounded by many such realities.  Some we embrace, some we reject.  Some attract us because of their ability to draw us into thinking that we would unlock them someday.  Some draw us to them because we like them just for what they are.  We feel no need to understand them as long as we can continue to enjoy them.  One way or the other, and maybe some more in between, I think that it is a good thing that I don't understand every little and big thing that accompanies me through life.  Not only would that make it impossible for you to live with me, it would be impossible for ME to live with ME.  Now that you know that about me, you have no reason to cry at my funeral.  If you did, THAT would be a mystery.

CAN A SONG LAST MORE THAN 100 YEARS?

The answer is yes.  I know some and you know some too.  We know them and they are not classified as "classical music."  Let me give you a couple of examples from1905.  Easy ones:
In the Shade of the Old AppleTree;
In My Merry Oldsmobile;
Give my Regards to Broadway.  
I picked 1905 but I could  have started in 1900 and worked my way up to 1911 for the 100 mark.  But enough is enough.  The mystery is that some things catch our attention as a community and some don't.  All the more mysterious is the fact that some of the realities that we carry around with us now were not all that powerful when they first started out.  Why?  No one knows.
I know this about music, but some of you are perhaps in touch with the mystery of why some movies just won't go away.  We call them "cult" movies.  I'm rather happy that we don't use that word for some of our favorite music.
I suppose that there is a broader question as well.  It may sound like this, "Is this longevity a mark of perfection that this music has that the rest does not?"  I think that this philosophical question will not occupy much space for very long between my ears.  Nor between yours, and I don't blame you.
It is not just music.  Automobiles fall into this category too.  The Ford Mustang and the Chevy's of the '50's.  When I first arrived in California some 40 years ago, these old cars were very numerous.  They still are, relatively speaking.  But the question is, why these?  The Mustang, for one, is not an especially outstanding piece of machinery.  That matters not.  It is the object of deep affection and respect for many aficionados.  That's all it takes.  So, the mystery remains, and the areas of human endeavor that it occupies are many. look around.  Have some fun picking out your favorite "What's so great about that?" oldie but goodie.  Me, I enjoy trying to figure out the Voice from the Kitchen.  Now that is a DEEP mystery!
 

DO YOU REMEMBER HIM? HER? THEM? IT?

The past sometimes gets to be the present.  I have been having throw-back thoughts a lot lately and I have to smile at so many of them because they are downright pleasant.  Most of them have been about people, but in order to get the point across and get past the scantily clad females on Google, I chose to show a 1949 Hudson Wasp.  I won't bore you with how scantily clad can possibly be a logo for nostalgia.  But, I guess, on Google, when in doubt, slide anything into the open space.  Enough of that, already!
I'm sure so many of you think of people you knew when you were in school.  Since the names of the people I think of don't mean much, if anything to you, I'll just describe the characteristics that make them easy to remember.  So, the other day it was the girl in kindergarten who didn't stop crying for a week.  I remember her because she was very plain, and never got to be anything but "plain" as she grew up.  It took her a week to get over her separation anxiety and she lived a mere 100 yards away from the school.  She had a strange name, for us, since we didn't know Italian then.  Her name was Bella.  [With apologies to Antonio Phaneuf, my first cousin/quasi brother]  I think of him a lot.  Mainly I think of what he looked like when he was 17, and not 87!  I also think a lot about a bunch of cousins and quasi cousins that I went to school with.  They were a great bunch but I never grew up around them and the only influence they had on my development was the contact that we had in school.  We lived rather far apart, and they were second and third degree cousins, so we didn't have them in our lives at the first degree level, if you get my drift.  But I think of them a lot, and have been carrying them around in my head for about a month now.  [The Durand family, for those of you who know]  I think a lot about the first classmate of ours who died.  He was less than 20 if I remember correctly, and he died of natural causes, rather than of street violence or automobile accident.  He was followed by the classmate who had hydrocephalus [His cranium was enlarged due to poor drainage of fluid back into his system]  He had a hard time walking and he had a difficult time learning how to write.  He did surpass the first person to die by some years.  I have been thinking of my father's uncle Theo.  He is the person who had the gift of stopping bleeding.  He didn't have to touch the person.  All he had to do is to pray for the bleeding to stop, and it did.  He came to the United States one time [from Canada].  He was a huge human being.  A gentle giant with a booming laugh.  That was it.  I saw him twice for a total of 3 or 4 hours.  Never saw him again except in my mind, often.  Mainly I remember asking  myself what good was it to stop blood when the far away people like us couldn't reach him anyway?  I was not sassy enough in my childhood to ask him, but I was thinking of it, a lot.
As you know, I could go on about this for a long time.  But I won't.  I'm putting this before you to invite you to marvel at the wonder of our memory and the ability that we have to make the past vividly present in our lives.  I suppose that this too falls into the category of epistemology.  You remember that,right?  There are these moments in our lives when I think we have to stop and admire the mystery of what we are.  Not the mystery that we don't know, but the mystery that we believe in.  It is in this belief that we nurture the conviction of the truth about what we come to know about ourselves and about the rest of the humans with whom we live and by whom we are surrounded every day.  Now that I think of it, a 1949 Hudson with "step down into it" technology is a rather weak symbol of what I really wanted to express today.  But somehow it is better than the alternatives among which I made the choice.

HERE'S HOWE -- THE AIRPLANE'S SHADOW

HOW FAST IS IT GOING?

Sorry for being late.  I have to tell you a secret: I was working at a gainful project.  Can you imagine that?  It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, I have to drop a lot of things to make sure that the gain is full, or as full as possible, anyway.  The other part of the secret is that I was also busy composing responses to a person who had submitted three responses to one of our catechetical blogs entitled, "Catholic Q & A with Father Mike."  The comments came back, not as answers to our questions, but as challenges and more questions about our Catholic faith.  So naturally, since I am the Theology Editor of the magazine I had the joy and duty to respond to the person who composed the comments and for the enlightenment of those who would eventually read them.  Father Mike is a celebrity and he doesn't have time.  We 100 year old grunts are the warriors in these battles.  So now that you know more about my personal life than you ever wanted to know.  Let me tell you some more about it.  This is more autobiographical and light hearted than the first part.
When I was a boy, a younger boy than I am presently, EFR Dion would bring home the Sunday editions of two New York Newspapers every weekend.  No, not the Times.  I remember one as being the Mirror and I forget the other.  It was always interesting to read these papers because they had a wonderful line-up of cartoons.  Let me try to remember a few.  Henry (Carl Andersen); Terry and the Pirates (I've got the guy's name on the tip of my tongue...); Little Orphan Annie; The Katzenjammer Kids; Superman; Blondie; Dick Tracy; Nancy; Pogo and a couple more that I can't remember.  There was one about a caveman but I can't recall the title, and finally don't forget Joe Palooka.  It was a lot of fun reading these items.  There was also a semi-glossy magazine in one of the papers and outside of the pictures, I didn't pay too much attention to the content.  There was however one section that I learned to appreciate and never really missed.  It was so intellectually satisfying.  So much so that I have forgotten everything that I ever learned there except for two things.  Yup, all of two.  The first one was easy and I remember feeling that I knew the answer even before reading it, but rather than to try to answer it form my own resources, I read the answer anyway and got this reaction that we all know so well, "I knew that!"  The question? "If you wanted to always walk in the same direction around the earth, in which direction would you choose to walk?"  See, you know the answer to that and perhaps have known it for many years.
The second one is a little trickier and believe it or not, I really did not understand the answer as it was written in the newspaper.  Being a simple tyke of perhaps 10 or 11, I guess that my puzzlement would be understandable.  "Does and airplane's shadow travel at the same speed as the airplane?"  Now that, my friends was a mystery to me.  All the more so that the answer started of with, "It all depends..."  I think that it was then that the curtains came down over my brain and I lost it.  I tried to understand it but could not.  For some inexplicable reason, I never asked EFR Dion for an explanation.  I decided, out of a sense of pride?, that I would solve this one myself.
You know that it took longer than a day.  It took longer than a month.  It actually took years.  In order to protect the innocent, I won't say how many years. Here's how it happened.  I was in the car with EFR Dion and we were going to pick up MJT Dion, his Voice from the Kitchen.  She was coming out of the hospital with my second brother.  We were driving up to what we used to call "The perpendicular parking" space.  Nose to the building, rear to the sun.  There was our shadow on the building.  We were moving and it was not.  Wow, I thought I had it.  I had to test it.  I kept it to myself.  This was too good.  I tested and tested but was never satisfied with my experiences.  The profile of an automobile is too low to get good shadow extension, so the experimentation was taking a long time before bearing any solid fruit.  Then came time to go back to school.  That was to be the key of the latching on to the truth.  The high profile of the bus and the low sun early in the morning were a perfect lab for me to try out my senses.  For the fifteen minutes that I was on the bus, I marveled at the way the shadow would jump from one building to the next at the speed of light while bus was crawling along the street.  I had it.  It was, and still is,  all in the angle.  Ya know what?  That night EFR Dion got an earful!

MYSTERY, SHERLOCK HOLMES, 007, CSI, ALGEBRA, OR GOD?

Mystery is a great word. It is word that carries a lot of baggage and it gets heavier as you grow in age with it.  I grew up at a time when the rites of the Catholic Church, especially the Mass were called "The Sacred Mysteries."  When I was young, I thought that that was so cool.  After a while though, that expression went away and we referred to the rites, the rubrics, the sacrifice, the sacraments, etc.  That was OK but mystery was a word that I wished would have stuck around a little longer in our Catholic vocabulary.
For a while there, it did make an occasional appearance when you would hear someone say, "We believe that, but it is a mystery that we don't understand."  That usually was the end of the discussion. But then, like so many of us do, I grew older (notice not "up" but "older") and I did learn some things.  I learned that there are some people who thrive on "mysteries" because they feel that the more they know about something that others do not know, they are better than the rest.  It gets to be a religion with some, and even with some Christians and Catholics too.  Some religious people will only tell what they think is a high form of human knowledge about the divine, to certain "initiates" who have passed certain hurdles in society.  Some people think that the more you know about mysterious things, the more divine you become.  The intriguing dimension of this is that Catholics fall into this trap all the time.  Yes, even priests and bishops.
Now, I am not a holy guy.  Trust me, that is not a mystery.  The real mystery about me is, "the good die young, so why am I still here?"  It's a good thing that no one here on earth can figure that out.  What I want to say is that this "the more I know the more divine I become" is a very insidious attitude.  We like to think that what we know about the mysteries of our faith makes us more divine.  That is wrong thinking.  The secret of our lives and the direction that God and His Son, Jesus all together with each other and the Holy Spirit give us is that we must strive to become as close to perfect human beings as we can.  God knows that He has to help us do that.  His great love is what we need to tap into to strive on that path.  The more we do that, the more we will come to understand about Him.  The more we understand about Him the more we will be convinced that it is not we who strive to become divine, it is He who by making Himself human makes it possible for us to aspire to human perfection so as to spend the rest of eternity with Him.  For me the great mystery is, "what we have the most in common with God is our humanity."  Keep that in mind the next time you take Communion.