My first YouTube video - Hear my Prayer duet

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This is my first YouTube video ever.  Not great quality, but I think it still is worth offering.  The audio is a recording I made on my iPhone, of a duet I sang with another choir member, Betsy Wagner.  This is a rehearsal I happened to record. The melody is from an opera "Jocelyn" by Godard.  The original aria is "Oh! ne t'eveille pas" which is commonly known as "Berceuse" or "Lullaby."  This is an arrangement for two singers with inspirational english lyrics.  One of the lines is "I trust in the cover of your wings" and when we first sang it, I did not understand what that meant.  Duh! Later I was on Youtube looking for videos of chicks hatching for my previous post and came across this video of a robin egg hatching, with the mother robin incubating the eggs.  Light dawned over Marblehead... the cover of your wings!  Oh yeah, now I get it!  So I got permission from the youtube user who originally recorded the robin video, and put it with my rehearsal recording.  I think it's kind of funny actually, when the newborn chick is screaming for the mom and the lyric is "lord hear me." Comments/suggestions/ tech advice welcome.  Be kind, I am not a video/audio engineer and have never used these programs before :)

I left in some of the early rehearsal chatter with Betty, our choir director.  She says something like "we are now in performance mode and whatever happens we are going to go forward" and I think that is actually kind of meaningful, because, as they say, life is not a rehearsal.  No matter what happens we have to go onward.

voice in the wilderness

Even in the intense artificiality and commerce and silliness of American Idol, there are moments of honesty and truth and authenticity. This kid, Alex Lambert, is young but I think he "gets it." Sorry to say he did not get enough votes this week, and got released from the show. Click the picture or click here to watch the video of his last performance and the judges' responses.

BREAKING THE SHELL

">I went to a vespers soup and service at the church Wednesday night before choir rehearsal... more of a fellowship discussion, than a real worship event.

I have been finding it all a little overwhelming, trying to think and talk about god and keep all the vocabulary and issues straight, and hearing all the names and ideas of people who've asked the same questions I am asking, and all the answers they have given throughout history.

In a way I had started to feel like, "why bother?" All my questions have been asked before, and answered before, more eloquently than I can ask or answer them.  It's kind of like reinventing the wheel.

But somebody was talking about chickens, and watching eggs hatch.

That got me thinking about chickens when I was supposed to be thinking about god.

How does a chick know it's time to hatch? Nobody comes along and tells it.  Nobody comes along and breaks the shell open for it.  The chick somehow knows it is time to break that shell and join the larger world, and the chick has to figure out how to do that itself, and has to actually start chipping away at that shell from the inside all by itself.  Each chick has to do it on its own.

I'm sure that egg is really spacious at first and comfortable.  But at a certain point it must begin to feel pretty confining.  The chick starts to wake up and sense that there is something outside the egg.  Something it can't directly see or feel or hear or smell... all filtered by the hard shell... but a place outside to join nonetheless.  And that shell must seem pretty smooth and strong and impenetrable at first... but somehow the chick persists and gets out.

So I guess that's me right now.  Yes,billions of chicks have hatched before me.... but I still have to crack my own shell open, if I want to live. No one is really going to come along and do it for me. So I will keep chipping away at it.

(Hah hah... the church is kind of like an incubator... a lot of eggs in a warm place, with a few chicks that hatched early cheeping really loudly... a lot of eggs sitting quietly... a few rocking around.... some cute fuzzy chicks and some really sad looking wet ones... and of course a few that won't hatch at all.... LOL.)

Thank You Roseanne; Marie, Wake Up!

Roseanne Barr posted the following entry at her blog here about her thoughts on the recent suicide of Marie Osmond's son, Michael Blosil.  I don't know if Marie's son was gay or not, and no one may ever know what was truly in his heart, but there's a lot of truth to what Roseanne writes. Roseanne was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and attended the Mormon church from age 3 to 16.

Marie's son was a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, and a Mormon.

Roseanne writes:

"marie osmonds poor gay son killed himself

because he had been told how wrong and how sick he was every day of his life by his church and the people in it. Calling that "depression" is a lie!

Yet the Osmonds still talk lovingly about their church, saying nothing about its extremely anti-gay Crusade. Marie also has a gay daughter! Hey, I want her and all the gay kids in the world to know that they are just fine being gay and that they deserve love and respect instead of insults and rebuke! I have gay people in my family and my circle of friends and I am kicking bigot ass and taking names!

That is how its done in my religion---(I have my own religion that I made up for myself and it is a great religion that actually works and respects facts and not fantasy!)

Gerald Lund one of the ex church apostles has three gay kids himself. 

Yet, even though the people they say they love the most in all of their public displays and speeches (THEIR KIDS AND FAMILY!!) are gay,-- their own children,for crying out loud- these people cannot find the christian decency and compassion within themselves to stop their hypocritical gay bashing!!

How sickening. I know so many mormon kids who were gay and committed suicide, and I just cannot and will not stay quiet in order to not offend bigots anymore. It is all so terribly depressing. 

Marie please don't talk about how your faith in your church has helped you get through this one! Please get some integrity and tell that church of yours that you will leave it and stop giving it ten percent of your money if they don't stop trying to destroy your kids' and all gay people's civil rights and dreams and hopes!!

G-d is trying to use you for something good and this is your opportunity! Your church is wrong and on the wrong wrong wrong side of things! Get as vocal about that as you are about your diet. G-d bless you too, Marie. 

Take a hard look at the facts now as you use this very sad time for introspection, healing growth and prayer, and become a strong symbol for loving mothers who make no apologies for hatred against their own kids!"


 Thank you Roseanne. 


In  Marie Osmond's defense, I have read that she is supportive of her lesbian daughter and has made statements in defense of gay rights.  But as a second son who is gay, I learned the hard way that when an older kid in a family comes out, the parents may be openly supportive to that child, but still, the younger kids in the family often see a more complete picture of the full spectrum of their parents' reactions "behind the scenes," and this can prevent the younger kids from being honest about themselves for a very long time. The younger kids see the tears and anguish and the secrecy and shame that the parents, to their credit, may try to hide from the older gay kid. This was my experience. My parents did their best to accept their older gay son, but I knew they really wanted me to be the straight son, so I tried to be that straight son, and to change, until I felt like I was walking around separated from the world by a thick sheet of glass.  In fleeting moments, I considered suicide and running away, but luckily I slowly found the courage to be honest, first to myself, and gradually to others.  I write "luckily" but maybe it was the "grace of god" as in "there but for the grace of god go I."


So Marie Osmond may be supportive of gay rights, but she is still a Mormon. Marie, at a certain point you have to draw the line and stop supporting bigoted organizations.  I have two gay friends who continue to attend and support the Catholic Church with their time, skills, and money.  I cannot understand this, when there are other churches that welcome open and honest gays. Wake up!


Here is a resource for gay mormons called Affirmation, providing a direct contact for support if you are in crisis, a suicide memorial and other suicide prevention links .

Keep it Simple, says the choir

I've gotten some great comments, both online and off-line, from choir members, since I invited them to read my new blog.  Two of them have reminded me to keep it simple.

One lady, said, "I don't get into all this navel-gazing. I never have. I don't understand it."  Then later at a vespers supper discussing recent tragedies in Haiti and Chile, and how we react to those who hold god responsible for such earthly tragedies, she offered another pearl of wisdom:  "Why ask why?  It just is.  Deal with it."  I thought these were really very wise comments, the type you would get from a buddhist monk after exhausting yourself climbing to the top of a mountain to ask the meaning of life.

Another woman, who I was shocked to discover is 82 years old, when I could have believed she was in her 60's, told me in so many words that, of course, we can't know god, so that's why he sent Jesus, to be the human embodiment of god on earth, and if you want to know god as much as a human being can, all you have to do is follow Jesus.  So that makes the path very simple and manageable, too.

I still am not comfortable believing that Jesus is the ONLY embodiment of god on earth, though, and the only way.  Maybe it's a good idea to keep the focus manageable, though, and target on just one faith.

And then I am reminded of one of my favorite teachers at Andover, my chemistry teacher Elaine Anderson.  I had not taken any chemistry before I began her class, so I had a bit of a learning curve to catch up with other students.  I just couldn't "get it" in the beginning...much the way I remember struggling in second grade to master the concept of borrowing ten from one column, when you needed to subtract from a number that was smaller.

So she came to me, and she said, "you know, Ian, I went and looked up your test scores at the admissions office, and you're not dumb, so why don't we do some tutoring outside of class."  And through that we struck up a friendship, and sure enough, it just took me a little time to "get it," and once I "got it" I had no problem excelling in the rest of her class.

But anyway, one thing I learned about her outside of class, was that she was a born again Christian.  I was really surprised that a scientist, a chemist, studying the scientific method, and using mathematics to describe the chemical interactions and behavior of the physical world at the molecular level, could also believe so passionately in Jesus and god.  So I asked her about it.  She told me, "well, it just happened to me... I was driving along on the highway in my car, alone, on the southeast expressway returning to Andover from Boston, and all of a sudden, I realized there was someone in the passenger seat, and it was Jesus.  And we talked, and we still talk."  How could I argue with that?  It wasn't that she'd devised some complicated philosophy or studied theology for years, and weighed the pros and cons of every religion.... it was just that suddenly one day, Jesus appeared in the passenger seat of her car, and they had a conversation while she was driving, and so of course she was a follower and believer of his now.  Very simple.

Then when I was applying to college, she asked if she could pray for me, and I said yes, and we went to the chapel, and she prayed for my college admissions.  But that's another story!

The picture above shows a Hubble image of the collision of gases near an exploding star.  You can read more about it here

Can Elephants Hear Our Prayers ?

Aristotle once said the elephant is "the beast which passeth all others in wit and mind,"according to Wikipedia. They're one of the few creatures that recognizes itself in a mirror. We knew they were highly intelligent and social. But there's a lot more to learn about elephants. For example, they are one of the only animals whose brains share a certain type of nerve cell with humans and whales, a very long type of neuron that some associate with language skills.

And just in the last few years, an animal researcher named Katy Payne, who also studied the songs of great whales, observed from watching elephants at the zoo, that in there is a lot more going on with elephants than we had recognized.  We knew they heard things with their ears; that was obvious.  But Payne also saw elephants carefully positioning three feet while lifting the fourth, and sometimes laying their trunk on the ground as well.  From this she discovered, that in addition to hearing with their ears, they also hear with their drum-like feet and their sensitive trunk (containing from 40,000 to 100,000 muscles just in the trunk alone), and communicate with each other in a subsonic range that we knew nothing about.  They listen in this range of sound, outside our own hearing, using their feet and trunk.  This type of sound can carry through the ground up to 10 kilometers, so even distant elephants can still be in close communication. Yet people standing alongside the elephants have no idea this whole conversation is taking place in the ground beneath their feet.

Last night I read a blog entry called Creation Begins at Home written by a good friend of the Federated Church, writing as Leanderthal.  He refers the reader to a story by Robert Lanza MD which deals with a rather complicated theory of biocentrism. From what I could grasp of this theory, it has to do with how we can understand the universe, when we're stuck experiencing it with only our limited senses and corresponding beliefs in "what is real."

We see only a tiny spectrum of light, which we casually call "visible light," but that more accurately should be termed "human-visible light," because many other creatures do see outside this narrow spectrum.  Honey bees have receptors for ultraviolet, green, and blue receptors.  They can see ultraviolet light.  And correspondingly, some flowers have designs that are only visible in the ultraviolet spectrum. This flower picture at right shows what we see, compared to what a bee sees.

Invisible communication is all around us.  Apparently even trees are communicating to each other... when one tree is attacked by a pest it may sound an alarm by releasing certain chemical signals that encourage nearby trees to react defensively, even before the pest has reached them.  Larry Gedney writes in Alaska Science forum that it is not clear whether the trees are actively talking or just passively listening, but nonetheless concludes, "...the odd but pleasing possibility that plants can communicate delight[s] the public imagination."

We certainly were unaware that trees were communicating with each other, much like we failed to see that elephants were listening with their feet and trunks, and that bees and flowers had a an entirely hidden communication in the ultraviolet spectrum.  We can't hear it, smell it, or see it, but it is there nonetheless. Numerous examples abound... how about the migratory birds that can sense the earth's magnetic field?

So this leads me to ESP or "extra sensory perception."  Perception of things beyond our normal sensory range. We only sense a tiny fraction of what is going on around us... tiny windows that we peer out through, to the true world.  Apparently the true world is a chaos of vibration-- of vibrating atoms, light particles, sound waves... and we make sense of this by sharply limiting what we experience.

Yet isn't it likely that occasionally we get flashes or brushes of all the other unseen or unheard "goings-on" around us?  That from time to time we are almost able to sense something outside our normal range, but dismiss this sensation outright because of our unfamiliarity or lack of ability to process and decode this information?

Could this be another way to look at prayer? Is prayer really an attempt to recognize, mesh with, listen to... and perhaps even influence another power in the universe that we only are able to occasionally brush against, and rarely able to comprehend or "see" ... but maybe just often enough that we suspect there is something there?  Is it a way of centering and quieting our thoughts to help us become more open and communicative with some other vibration passing in and around us? Is it a communication that can travel unimagined distances, like the elephants listening across a wide savannah?

Who else can hear our prayers?  Whose eyes, ears, feet, or trunks are better developed than ours for this type of communication?  Are the elephants listening?