Soulful Muse

The minister sits down with his yellow pad, black and red pens next to the Bible he’s possessed for years and behind him are rows of biblical commentary books carefully shelved in his study on a lonely, dark Thursday night.

“Ah, what is the message this Sunday?” he says to himself.  The ease and convenience of being alone when composing thoughts to be proclaimed four days later to a large group.

How much energy is needlessly expended by the minister who rarely asks the simple question, “What do they hear?”  The minister is so concerned with scriptural references and that exact quote.  “Was it verse 5 or 6, I can’t remember,” says the black and red penned minister.

What do they hear?  You know who they are, they are “They.”  Those folks sitting quietly in front of him who are living and breathing and assembling in this house of God with as many feelings and experiences as there are occupants during that Sunday morning service.  (Cue “Eleanor Rigby.”)

Preachers do not know what parishioners hear because they are hearing and seeing things that cannot be recorded on a yellow pad with two pens.  Some preachers don’t care because they believe that this acquiesced congregation needs to hear this.  (It’s “for their own good,” he’d muse.)  Others preachers may feel relived when the labored sermon is over and take a deep breath and say to themselves, “I’m glad that’s done with,” (along with the congregation’s full agreement.)

It prompts me to think about my own preaching and to ask myself, “What do these people actually hear?”  And equally important in this visual age, “What do these people see?”  As the means to an end, do I seem as unhappy to be standing in front of them as they are in having to listen to my carefully chosen, but lost worn-out words?  “Do I look tired to them?” as though I’ve been working too hard when I haven’t?

A woman stopped me after Mass a while back and said, “I don’t agree with most of what you say but you are so happy.”  What did she see?  What did she hear?  What happened that Sunday when I put down the yellow pad and threw away the two pens?

My mother wanted Frank for my name but my dad insisted on Tom.  I’m glad that he won.  It’s hard to be frank and serious when an abundance of humor in our world is always needed.

It begins with yourself and it is the healthy ability to muse over things you consider imminently important but in reality are just passing inconveniences.  This just can’t be good for your heart when the minor stuff stuffs up your life.

I like to think of myself as having a life perspective that neither begins nor ends with me.  It is a warning that always takes me away from myself and into the situations and lives of people around me.  My enjoyment is triggering a quick smile or unleashing a deep laughter.  The sounds it creates can warm the cockles of anyone.  (What are cockles anyway?  The dictionary says an “edible, burrowing bivalve mollusk with a strong ribbed shell.”  Its relationship to warmth eludes me.)

Puns are the silliest of humorous elocution.  I rarely use them.  People reduce themselves when using them.  Those forced to hear puns seem to be either amused or annoyed by them.

The special laughing release is reserved for irony.  It starts with a deep-felt roar in your stomach and then quickly moves its way to a rousing laughter that only puns can envy.  You can try to stop it but you can’t, it only take seconds before it happens.

Our lives are full of ironies that lie in wait until a connection between that and what this should be is made.  Once that connection is connected and shared is the time when jollification begins.  Priests, as I’m sure many others, take their professions much too seriously and at their own peril.  The world did not begin with me nor will will end with my wise and carefully chosen words.  The ironic part of my profession rests in its irony and I often laugh about it to myself.  (I’m quite thankful for that.)

We like to imagine ourselves as stable, consistent, in-control folks when realities are strewn with confusion, misunderstandings and misconceptions.  We can only laugh it up to our own limited and, often times, senseless lives.  The biggest laughs I receive arise from irony and its attempt to connect to the unconnected.

A friend asked me how she could be funnier in the classroom.  I smiled to her and wondered how you teach humor, how do you teach irony.  (I find that it’s ironic, in itself.)

An observation made at a funeral, of all places, can lighten depression and express our own mortality while grieving the loss of a good friend.  A sly remark can switch a meeting that is going nowhere back to the matters at hand.  An off handed thought can liberate an awkward moment between two strangers.

It’s been said that for every tragedy Shakespeare wrote, he wrote a comedy.  What a better summation for our planned and organized and surprisingly spontaneous journey through life.

So please let me be Frank with you in saying that my name is Tom and it’ll never change; Foolerary is the family name.

Like it or not, we are all compared to someone else and often found wanting.  The person you replace at work suddenly becomes a wonderful and enduring employee.  (Then why was she fired?!)  The previous teacher who gave a student a “C” is now promoted to a “great teacher,” when the day you arrive.  You replace a priest who puts Bing Crosby to shame and you’re asked to be better than him.  (It’s not easy playing basketball in the morning with the youth and visiting the nursing homes in the afternoon without something smelling.)

For us kids it was “The Schroeders,” our four cousins who lived 45 minutes away which in the 50’s was a trip to be carefully planned for.  We barely saw them which made them, well, perfect children compared to the five of us local kids.  “Why aren’t you like the Schroeders?” my grandmother would often announce as though she knew them better than we did.  We didn’t know how to be like them since we rarely saw them which makes for a perfect expectation of a never reaching perfection.  Our mother would even mimic her mother’s words but we were too young to know that our mother saw our cousins the same way her mother did.

During our seldom visits to their 45-minute-away home, it never struck us to examine their behavior to duplicate or to search their closets for clues of perfection.  We just had fun with them and then returned to our imperfect home.

Measuring up to anyone’s expectations is a feat in itself.  I don’t envy anyone who assumes that task since I’ve tried in earlier years and soon abandoned those unreal expectations.  If your perfection-goal was a sibling then you’re really out of luck.  Now you not only cannot achieve his/her perfection but you have to live with it.  There have been songs of defiance that I’ve enjoyed, “My Way,” “I’ve Got to Be Me” and “I Am What I Am” but there is nothing defiant in discovering and embracing your own self, as imperfect as it may be (or compared to others).

Unseen and imagined, everything is perfect.  What is lived and muddled through is what provides and ensures peace of mind.  I’ve always like “The Schroeders,” but I never wanted to be like them.