Random Paragraphs

October-November 1998

Clipped from Readers’ Digest (? years ago)
MUSICAL COMEDY:

Radio Stations WQXR-AM and -FM in New York distributed a flyer listing the following quotes from grade-school essays on classical music:

Refrain means don't do it. In music its the part you better not sing.

Handel was half German, half Italian and half English. He was rather large.

Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music.

Henry Purcell is a well-known composer few people have heard of.

Aaron Copland is a contemporary composer. It is unusual to be contemporary. Most composers do not live until they are dead.

Music sung by two people at the same time is called a duel.

I know what a sextet is, but I’d rather not say.

Caruso was at first an Italian. Then someone heard his voice and said he would go a long way. And so he came to America.

Formula for Failure: For many years I have been an observer, sometimes participant in the stability and potential of church congregations. Apart from demographic and other factors which cannot be ignored, I have noticed three conditions which prevail in a congregation skidding down the road to fossil inertia or dissolution:

1) An intense loyalty to YESTERDAY,
2) Irrelevant nit-picking or determined ignorance TODAY, and
3) No Vision of TOMORROW.

Midrash: There is a Midrash tale of the ancient wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah which has similarities to the Greek myth of the Procrustean bed. When a traveler arrived, he was placed in an iron bed in the public square. If the man was too short for the bed, his legs and body would be violently stretched until he matched the length of the bed. A tall man would have his legs amputated until he fitted the length of the bed. The rabbis labeled this sin in Sodom and Gomorrah as the sin of conformity. There the wrong-headed citizens insisted that everyone think as they did and act as they did. There could be no differences in Sodom and Gomorrah – no differences of worship or belief or action. That is why these cities were doomed to destruction. (RABBINIC STORIES, William Silverman)

THE ODOR OF SANCTITY:

Edward Gibbon in his DECLINE AND FALL writes of Sylvania, sister of the tyrant, Rufinus (A.D. 396). Sylvania, “who passed her life at Jerusalem, is famous in monastic history. The studious virgin had diligently, and even repeatedly, perused the commentators on the Bible, Origen, Gregory, Basil, etc. to the amount of five million lines. At the age of three score she could boast that she had never washed her hands, face or any part of her whole body, except the tips of her fingers to receive the communion.”

Whew! Sylvania was no role model for “cleanliness is next to godliness.” When she chose to devote her life to solitary, monastic study, she found a way to ensure her privacy and protect her virginity, fer sure.

CHURCH WELCOME MAT: Anne Johnson, in her column “Flotsam and Jetsam” in the Pelican Press, writes: “An Episcopal priest in Maryland has an unusual advertising campaign with a Renaissance-style picture of Jesus’ crucifixion and the message: ‘Of course people with pierced body parts are welcome in our church.’”

My contrarian attitude would query this clergyman, “Does that mean I am LESS welcome if I do not have a ring on my nose, on my tongue, or to my belly-button or some other body-piercing decoration?” Would there be any merit points for a Mennonite black straw hat and untrimmed chin whiskers? Or a tattoo depicting Salome dancing for Herod?

KEEP AT IT!

“This I learned from the shadow of a tree
Which to and fro did sway upon a wall:
Our shadow-selves, our influence may fall
Where we can never be.”

[Editor’s note: CJW credits this poem to A.E. Hausman; however, a search of Google books reveals that this poem is first credited to A. E. Hamilton, in THE UNITARIAN, February 1908. Again, later, as Anna E. Hamilton, in the American Journal of Clinical Medicine, 1923.]

The new employee stood before the paper shredder looking confused. “Need some help?” a secretary walking by, asked.

“Yes,” he replied, “how does this thing work?” “Simple,” she said, taking the fat report from his hand and feeding it into the shredder.

“Thanks, but where do the copies come out?”

ACCEPTANCE:

Act II, Sc. 2, Caesar to Calpurnia,

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”