It’s Holy Saturday.

There was a time when songs like this would fill my soul with a sense of despair and emptiness, anticipating The Great Vigil of Easter at the Church of the Advent and the Feast of the Resurrection. God and Church seemed close and intertwined with each other, and I felt not just a part of it, but – especially during my time at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary – in some ways touched and blessed.

Today I found myself gravitating to this great tune. (It’s a song, BTW, I’d like to have played after my passing – yo, Dave, pay attention to this! ) It’s one of my favorite top two-three songs of all time, full and gorgeous, Spector-esque, yet filled with both melancholy and a sense of longing of times past and gone forever. Laugh all you want, but it makes me cry every time I hear it.

Some might say how the mighty have fallen. As far as I’m concerned, things are no better or worse now than they were then. They’re just different, as I am different. Nothing is as it was, everything has gone to shit, and I’m nothing but a dinosaur roaming an unfamiliar landscape until its inevitable extinction. But perhaps that’s the way it always was. I always thought that Rolling Stones classic was about some posh bird; now I hear it and think Mick and Keith were writing about folks like me. Oh well, better to simply be here now and try to forget about everything and anything else.

Say, a man could do worse than to have all the tunes linked on this post played after my passing. It’s like they’re life songs. My life songs.

I should have been a monk.

BTW, lots of folks are criticizing the current Pope for what he said, but I think he got it right. I’ve never believed Hell as a physical, eternal torment of the soul; what loving and compassionate God would allow such a thing? But I do believe in the concept of Hell as the absence of God and the eternal casting out of the soul from the love and light of God’s eternal love and care. As in death as true death. You’re gone. Poof. The eternal separation of the soul from the eternal light and love of God. Wouldn’t that be considered chilling enough?