I know I just recently wrote a music log post. And I don't usually do them in quick succession. Not to mention, I don't usually write posts on Sundays. But ever since I heard a wonderful rendition of Dan Schutte's “You Are Near” in the televised Mass I was watching, I have been wanting to do a Sunday Music Log post. What was holding me back, was finding a similar rendition of the song that I could share online. I couldn't find one, so I sort of gave up on the idea.
Then in today's Mass, Dave and Lauren Moore, the couple who sings in the televised Sunday Masses that I watch, sang a beautiful rendition of “I Am The Bread Of Life”. Once again I was filled with this urge to write a Sunday Music Log post. I went on to the Catholic Diocese of Dallas website to find a way to contact the diocese. I wanted to ask them if they have recorded videos of the songs that Dave and Lauren Moore sang in Mass. It turns out, the diocese has a YouTube channel where they uploaded recordings of the televised Masses I've been watching. Within those videos are the exact rendition of the songs that I watched, and now want to share.
So, first up is this beautiful rendition of Dan Schutte's “You Are Near”. The song starts at around the 48:22 mark.
This song brings back good memories. Memories of me as a kid singing it in Mass at school. Memories of me playing the guitar, while our group of altar servers sang this song in Mass. It's such a beautiful song with beautiful lyrics, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
Where can I run from your love?
If I climb to the heavens you are there
If I fly to the sunrise
Or sail beyond the sea
Still I’d find you there
O Lord, I know you are near
Standing always at my side
You guard me from the foe
And you lead me in ways everlasting
Walking is increasingly mediated by technological gadgets worn on wrists or gripped in hands. We spend an increasing amount of time ‘screening’ the world – taking in most of life through a contracted frame that captures objects of immediate interest. To live with eyes on the screen is to be attached, stuck in the frame, taking in what is presented to us and re-presented to us again. But representation – even in fine-grained pixilation – is not experience. To experience is to perceive. When we look at a screen, we might see something, but we don’t perceive. To live life through representations is to live passively, to receive rather than to experience.
I am so grateful that I discovered the IndieWeb. Owning my content and posting my thoughts on my own site instead of a silo like Twitter gives me real freedom. I can decide how my thoughts are displayed (I like to make them available to everyone without advertising), I can edit them and they stay available for as long as I want.
People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason why the world is in chaos is because things are being loved and people are being used.
It's a rather gloomy Friday. But I welcome the cooler temperatures, if only to get away from the Texas summer heat. Time for another music log then. Today's music log features rock covers of some popular hits.
Note that I'm trying something new in this music log. In addition to the embedded YouTube videos, I also added song links. This gives readers more options to listen or even purchase a song. They are not affiliate links. I do not get paid whatsoever if you decide to click on one of those links. I just thought of adding them to support the artists.
First up is “Mirrors” by Our Last Night. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the band Our Last Night makes some of the best rock covers I've heard. This is no exception. This a great rock cover of Justin Timberlake's hit song “Mirrors”.
It was a particular joy for me to visit the sites associated with St. Ignatius of Loyola on a recent film trip. But the most moving locale was a little church in Manresa built around the cave where the young Ignatius spent about nine months preparing himself spiritually for his life’s work. What he learned at Manresa is that our attachments to various created goods—money, power, pleasure, and honor—stand in the way of our responding to God’s will for us.
~ Bishop Barron
A really good homily that talks about the practice of “Agere Contra”, which means “To act against”. I believe that you can apply “Agere Contra” to most things in life. You don't have to be religious to practice it. For instance, I can see the practice of “Agere Contra” being very effective against social media and smartphone addiction.
This experiment is all about trying to reduce my smartphone usage at home with the use of an Apple Watch. Yes, I know it sounds ironic — trying to reduce usage of one gadget, with the use of another gadget. But let me try to explain where I'm coming from.
One of the best things about working from home, is being able to eat with my kids at the dinner table. When I'm working from home though, I'm always worried about time that I spend away from my desk. What if my boss wants me to join a call? What if I was supposed to join a meeting? This is why I've resorted to carrying my phone around whenever I'm eating with my kids, or helping Coney out with Baby Caleb.
Carrying my phone around the house has renewed my itch to use it. Like when I'm at the dinner table, or by the bathroom door while potty training Davin, or when I'm carrying Baby Caleb around to give Coney a breather. It's all too easy to just pull it out and fire up the Feedly, Micro.blog or DuckDuckGo app. As you can see, it is not ideal to have my phone with me around the house. Also, how I am supposed to tell Davin to not bring his iPad to the dinner table, when I'm always bringing my phone around for lunch?
Great read on the definitions of love and mercy, and how both could affect our society.
The picture of a society without mercy reminds me of something I heard about mercy defined linguistically. The Hebrew word associates the experience with pregnancy. Mercy is like being pregnant. “Bearing with” the other in mercy requires genuine selflessness.
That's a wonderful description of mercy.
“Others are out there” means that mercy requires love as defined by Iris Murdoch. She says, “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than yourself is real.” Love initiates and invites mercy
I've come to a similar conclusion. If love is “willing the good of others” as Bishop Barron so often says, then there cannot be mercy without love. So, for our society to be merciful, we must first love each other. Only then will mercy manifest itself.
I encourage you to be conscious of the fact that the electronic/digital world is not really a natural world. It might be becoming our new norm, especially in the current pandemic. But we should always make a point to step away from these unnatural options.
Instead, take a hike, view the night sky, listen to live music, breathe the fresh air.
This was a good read. And to his point, I never even thought about that. How much time do we spend at night browsing or living on the internet? I'm guilty of this too, what with the multiple blogs and websites that I try to keep up with at night. The time we spend at nights living on the internet, means time spent not living in the natural world. Something to think about that.
As Seneca points out, “We are not given a short life, but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it.” A minute is long if you know how to use it. A week is plenty of time if you don’t waste it.
I thought this was an extremely good read. If you are a fan of Stoicism, you'll find much to like here. And even if you are not a fan, there is still so much good information here. The kind that you could use right away.
Reading this has made me interested in finding out more about Seneca and Marcus Aurelius. From the quotes I've read on Seneca, he seems to be this old guy full of common-sense wisdom that he imparts in sometimes hilarious fashion. Marcus Aurelius on the other hand, was like this serious, principled and disciplined authority figure. Figures, he was only emperor of Rome at some point in time.
As one of my college professors used to say, “Giving is not giving until it hurts.” This story is a good example of that. But more than that, I think this is also an example of God knowing what we need, way before we even realize it.
Was it purely coincidence that the scarf was where it was at that exact moment in time? Hmm maybe.
But what if it wasn't? If it wasn't, then it is like the author says. It was God showing up in a scarf to comfort him and help him deal with his loss. I think this is an amazing story if that was the case.
Lastly, some sort of realization. If it was me in the author's situation, I'm not sure that I would have been generous enough to give the scarf away. But I think that's an indication of how attached I am to personal and material things in this world. Something I need to work on then.
This post is Day 43 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.
If you’re one of these people, opening a book might have become something to do when you haven’t got anything else going on, which is almost never. It’s as if you decided at some point, likely without conscious thought, that even though you love books, book reading is effectively the least important thing in your life – you’ll squeeze it in, if you can.
I have a feeling that a lot of it has to do with the smartphones in our pockets. At least, that's what I struggle with from time to time.