CIMARRON RIVER

I hope everyone has a Happy Fathers Day.

I had wanted to write an Oklahoma song since 2007, the Centennial year of Statehood. Only recently did this song come along as part of my ‘Life by Rivers’ collection.  I say it “came along” because that’s the way it happens with the songs I write. It starts with a phrase or an image and the suggestion of a tune and suddenly the lyrics just come tumbling out. I know I’m composing but it all seems more like a gift given and received. I’m grateful. 

 

This one’s for Diana.

 

CIMARRON RIVER

There’s a place that they call Oklahoma

She has been a good friend to me
I made my home where the buffalo roam
In a land where they live to be free

You can see it painted deep in their faces

It’s a love passed from father to son
Like the old man who cried just before he died
And told me what he wanted done

 Chorus:

Bury me by the Cimarron River
Lay me down near my home in the Plains
Where the eagle soars high in a clear blue sky
And wildflowers wait for the rain

Redbuds blossom in springtime

Cool breezes blow in the fall
Come autumn nights under stadium lights
We cheer for our team one and all

Red brothers and sisters before us

Were the ones to give this land its name
And throughout the years and a Trail of Tears
Had the grace and the grit to remain

 Chorus:

Bury me by the Cimarron River…

Folks smile here the first time they meet you

They assume that you’re already friends
They know hard times come to everyone
And they’ll stand by your side to the end

So if you like the wide open spaces

Then this is the place you should be
But lift up your head, it’s like Woody said:
“This land was made for you and me”

 Chorus:

Bury me by the Cimarron River…

© 2015 Dale Petley (Oklahoma City)

PRIMUM NON NOCERE

I have been blessed to have had two Christian Godfathers. The first (and official) one was a barber by trade. The second (unofficial) one did all the training necessary to become a psychiatrist before deciding that his true calling was to be a General Practitioner or as he likes to put it, a family doctor. I couldn’t help thinking how much he looked the part one wintery evening when he showed up years ago at our home wearing his stethoscope around his neck and carrying his little black doctor’s bag. He was making a house call to see my ailing grandmother. If you’re old enough to remember house calls then you might also recall milk delivery and how blueberries used to taste ... but I digress.

My first paying job was in a doctor’s office. I was put in charge of organizing files. Thinking back on it all I now realize my ‘job’ really amounted to a make-work project designed to keep me out of trouble during the relative idleness of summer. Be that as it may I learned many valuable lessons during those months. I came to understand the vital importance of discretion and confidentiality. Mostly though, I was blessed by observing the kindness, care, and compassion with which this beloved physician treated his patients.

Over the years I have found that illness can be a great teacher as well as a powerful catalyst for change. It bursts the bubble of complacency and shatters the illusion of self-sufficiency. It reminds us of our common humanity and shows us how we are all fragile vessels. It can also recall us to the fact that we are a lot less in control than we like to think we are, and that rather than succumbing to the ultimately slavish insistence of being the Captain of our own ship and the Director of our own play, true freedom may be found in surrender to one greater than our small self; one who can restore us to health and sanity.

One of my favorite sayings is ‘Primum non nocere’ – ‘First, do no harm.’ This sums up precisely the sort of conservatism I can get behind for it insists, as Yogi Berra might say, that we avoid improving things worse. And it means more than that. It reminds us that people are not merely problems to be fixed or puzzles to be solved but that their well being is our highest priority.  I have failed woefully over the years in living up to this standard, and yet, I continue in my aspiration to do so. I cannot imagine a better way of celebrating the precious gift of life. It is the way of Asclepius, Hippocrates, Saint Luke the Physician, and my Godfather, a family doctor.

FAITH

We are in the Season of Easter. For those unfamiliar with church festivals Easter is a lot like Christmas, only different. Christmas and Easter are the two major feasts when those who call themselves Christians actually attend church. These are followed by Mothers’ Day and any Sunday when the children’s choir sings.

Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus and Easter celebrates his resurrection, and both events are welcomed by women named Mary who are full of grace. Christmas and Easter alike call us to faith and invite us to see as united what we naturally think of as being separate and divided: shepherds and sheep, masters and servants, Logos/Word and speechless infant, boundlessness and embodiment, eternity and time, the one and the many, the universal and the particular, creator and creation, divinity and humanity, God and man.

 

WHAT IS TRUTH?

 I have been reading Dr. Anthony Esolen’s translation of The Divine Comedy. I enjoy his use of iambic pentameter, and his notes are insightful. I’m always moved by the way Dante is carefully guided by Virgil who I was taught represents the voice of reason in the poem. I’m exactly half-way through, smack-dab in the middle of Purgatory (Canto 17), where our pilgrim author walks “step by step beside the faithful stride” of his instructor. It seems to me a wonderful image of the role of philosophy in the life of the Church.

I know little about the character of the Church around the globe since my entire Christian journey, such as it is, has taken place in Canada and the United States. Even here I am unable, or at least unwilling, to make sweeping generalizations about the nature of North American Christianity. It would be easy, for example, to characterize fundamentalism in America as being anti-rational, but such a view fails to grasp the fullness of the situation. Our so-called Fundamentalist Christians don’t hate reason; they simply fail to see that their religious faith is accountable to it. Belief is regarded as essentially personal and entirely a matter of the will. Philosophy, largely pragmatic and analytical, is seen by some as a useful discipline in seeking clarity regarding social, ethical concerns. However, there is in most minds a wall of separation between one’s personal faith and the world of things which can be studied objectively. Science and philosophy are understood as belonging in the latter category. The disconnect remains. People who harvest fuel from dinosaur bones for a living go to church where they believe the earth is just 10,000 years old, and they’re fine with that, just as they’re fine with proclaiming Jesus is Lord while advocating social Darwinism. 

That some people bristle at the prospect of being bridled by sweet reason is of course nothing new. We can find anti-philosophical tendencies in most faith-traditions. What I find more distressing is the prospect of a philosophical religion which does not love wisdom. This travesty happens when religion seeks to use philosophy, treating it as a tool, not a guide. We want answers, and philosophy is useful insofar as it provides them. Religious types armed with a philosophy of answers are mostly concerned with the moral realm where they seek to help society by crafting stupid, destructive new laws. And although they might find philosophy useful in this endeavor they don’t much care for philosophers; they ask too many questions. Philosophers love wisdom and follow wherever she leads. That’s dangerous.

For me the relation of faith and reason amounts to answering a simple question: when do I decide not to follow the truth? Do I forsake the truth when it becomes unpleasant or inconvenient? Do I tell wisdom to take a hike when it costs too much? We are in Lent and so it seems like the right time to recall that Pontius Pilate faced a similar question, and his answer was to condemn the only perfectly innocent man he’d ever met.

SAINTE-ANNE-DE-BEAUMONT

Happy Feast of St. Anne!

 

While on holiday last year in Canada (New Brunswick) I went for a drive through Memramcook to Beaumont. It’s all very beautiful and on the way you pass through Belliveau Orchards with their wonderful apple trees. Much of the land across the Petitcodiac River from Beaumont was settled in the mid-1700s by German immigrants. There is an old story passed down in the Steeves (Stieff) family about how shortly after their ancestors arrived a Mr. Belliveau crossed the river in his canoe and helped the newcomers with useful, life-sustaining information and advice, one farmer to another, French and German, human to human.

 At Beaumont is Sainte-Anne-de-Beaumont Chapel built in 1842. As well as being beloved of the Acadians St. Anne is the Patron Saint of the Mi'kmaq (Lnu) people, and the chapel was used by members of the First Nations Reserve as well as the French who lived peacefully alongside them. It’s a lovely place and it’s where I wrote this song.

 

 

IN THE PLACE

 

Hey there, are you awake yet?
When you’re done hogging the blanket
Let’s go watch the dawn begin the day
Later, when we get the lawn mowed
We’ll take a drive down the old road
To where the river runs into the Bay
We’ll have a thermos full of hot tea
We’ll enjoy the quiet and the view
We won’t care about the weather
As long as we’re together
In the place
Where we first said I love you

 

Say there, do you remember?
That day back in December
It snowed so hard we couldn’t see across the street
We ate bread and molasses
And watched the storm as it passed us
And made a little fire to warm our feet
The sun came out and the world was covered over
With snow that was so clean and crisp and new
The cold wind made me shiver
Just like that day by the river
In the place
Where we first said I love you

 

Well now, you know what I’m wishing?
That we soon can go fishing
When the ice breaks on the river in the spring
We’ll go when the fish are biting
To a place so inviting
It stirs my soul and makes me want to sing
The beauty of the woods always reminds us
There is still so much living left to do
There is joy all around us
Just like the day that it found us
In the place
Where we first said I love you

 

© 2013, Dale Petley (Beaumont, N.B.)

BOB & CAROL & TED & THECLA

“I think of life as a cosmic joke, which keeps getting bigger all the time. But I've learned tolerance and maybe affection for the Chasidim. They are real people, who can see light in the darkest things.”

Paul Mazursky (April 25, 1930 – June 30, 2014)

 When I think about the earliest Christians I’m inspired by their joy. They were joyful in ways that did not depend on events and circumstances. They were joyful in trials and tribulations. They wrote things like: We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything. In John’s Gospel Jesus says, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” In his first Epistle St. John declares, “We write these things unto you so that our joy may be complete.” St. Paul called his brothers and sisters in Philippi to be joyful, using the words ‘joy’ and ‘rejoice’ repeatedly, and famously proclaiming “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again, I say rejoice.”

The joy of the earliest Christians was not caused by self-satisfaction over accomplishments but was simply the way that they were learning to be in Christ. They believed that they had died. They also believed that they had been born again and that the life they now lived was utterly identified with Christ. Sometimes they took on a new name as a new creature in Christ. Moreover they saw themselves as one body in Christ so much so that they held their goods in common. They saw their oneness not as some flimsy, ethereal, longed-for-yet-never-realized condition but as the fundamental reality of creation. Your early-church Bob, Carol, Ted, and Thecla understood that they were married to Christ and in Christ were one body. In chaste virginity, a Thecla, for example, was not seeking isolation but deeper fellowship. Even when she went to live in a cave she knew she was never truly alone but always moving into closer communion in the Body of Christ.

The unity consciousness of the earliest Christians was no regression to a childlike, pre-personal, oceanic feeling of oneness. They were not blurring distinctions and ignoring real contrasts in favor of a hazy, lazy, vague unwillingness to engage the world. That’s just self-protective avoidance, and avoidance is merely a veiled form of aggression which is why it turns hateful so quickly.

Attempts to manufacture such a sense of unity often are destructive of nature and tend to reduce human beings to concepts and abstractions. Only love can truly celebrate unity while not obliterating diversity. Love bears witness to unity while celebrating its own nature within all the glorious, scandalous particularity of life. We do not make unity, but simply let go of the obstacles keeping us from realizing it. Unity, like love, is the very nature of things. If we do not realize and ‘see’ the unity of life it is only because we are turned away from it to an image of our self and this makes us afraid of love because real love is self-emptying. It is joyful, though, and eternal, and it leads us to see light even in the darkest things.

DOWN MAIN STREET

Two enduring influences in my life have been Main Street in Moncton, New Brunswick, and the Petitcodiac River which runs alongside it. I am blessed to have grown up in a place where we could shop, visit City Hall, conduct business, go to the movies, enjoy a good meal, get a drink, have a haircut, be measured for a suit, do our banking, and watch the Santa Claus Parade without ever having to leave Main Street. Today the people of Moncton work diligently at maintaining a Main Street that is vibrant and alive. Because of their efforts much of what was said above is still true. In fact, it is now even a better place to go out for an evening of music and entertainment than it was in the old days. I remember a time when things did not look so promising but Monctonians decided to work purposefully at keeping Main Street as the vital heart of the city.

The fact that the residents of Moncton attend to Main Street as a center of activity speaks to their recognition of the importance of community. After all, one of the city’s oldest buildings is the Free Meeting House constructed in 1821 so that people of all faiths would have a place to pray. Moncton is a city where the Mayor and Members of Council, the Police Chief, the Fire Chief, Members of the Judiciary, and assorted other dignitaries joined residents from all walks of life to pack a large Catholic church for the funeral of a homeless man who had severe psychological disorders and crippling addictions, and who used to spend most of his winters incarcerated. I remember him from when I was a child. He was a fixture; part of the landscape; a character in a city full of them. He was written about in the newspaper by a friendly and compassionate reporter. Readers felt like they knew him. When I heard about his impressive funeral mass it surprised me for a moment, but then I thought that this was somehow typical of Moncton.

Sometimes it takes unspeakable tragedy to bring people together. Folks will remark on the uniqueness of such times and how out of character it all seems. To my mind, though, Moncton has demonstrated time and again the resolve to foster a strong sense of community that does not depend on circumstances and events, tragic or otherwise; a sense of belonging together as the tides of life come and go, both giving and taking away. It is a city shaped by a tidal river which even at its lowest never fails in its promise to rise again.

DOWN MAIN STREET

The first time that we met was down on Main Street

You said, “You got here fresh from the U. S., eh?”
You laughed at my stupid joke about your accent
Then we watched the tide take the river away

 

We ate at the first place we found open for coffee
You laughed when I tried to describe a poutine râpée
You told me all your dreams for the future
Then we watched the tide take the river away

 

Now surfers ride the tidal bore of the river
Where they built so many ships back in the day
Schooners and steamers would come to deliver molasses
Then ride out of town before the tide took the river away

 

Let’s do the dishes then take a walk down Main Street
To the spot where we met thirty years ago today
We’ll toast the past and smile toward the future
And watch the tide take the river away

 

© 2013 Dale Petley (Moncton)