Music Mondays

While there are many songs in Les Mis that stir my soul and give me goosebumps, the two below are in the top five.   The first is the song, One Day More.  It is sung by all the members of the cast about how all their lives are at a cross roads and new chapters were beginning.  I think about the day of my wedding.  I think about graduations.  I think about the times as I was leaving a church and about to begin a new call.  There are momentous moments our hearts tell us, "Pay attention, this is important".  Of course, such significant times can be hard to capture in words all that we are feeling as we face an ending or new beginning.  I look back at the last three months of the current pandemic, we knew that something significant was stirring...we know that life has changed...we know that there is so much pain and suffering - both from those who are grieving the death of a loved one to people who have lost jobs and businesses that have shuttered forever.  In order for hope to be hope ~ you have to stare fiercely at the raw reality of a moment and draw upon something deeper than optimism.  Hope says, "Yes, this pain is true and yes, so is the courage to dream and act in new ways."  In many ways, hope gets lost in the pain of the past and present.  Hope is dismissed as wishful thinking or Pollyanna.  But hope is the inspiration that this day, even if it is just an ordinary Monday, matters and can move us toward God's dream of a world where all the voices and all our stories find harmony.  That is what I hear in this song...enjoy: 

If we are going to hope honestly, we need to process the pain so we can move in new ways.  One of the characters in Les Mis is Eponine.  She is in love with Marius; but Marius loves Cosette.  In classic, love story plot, one heart is bound to be broken.  Such a story is often our story.  We have our first high school crushes who perhaps never knew that we existed.  We have someone we thought was forever, but the relationship breaks down or fall apart.  This is an ode to how lonely we can feel.  It is not just the song of young people, it is the anthem of anyone who has ever grieved regardless of age.  I have heard this lament from all age categories; of people facing divorce to people whose hearts break when a spouse of fifty years passes away.  Humans long for connection.  One of the cruel realities of Coronavirus is that it is dangerous to hug...to stand close...to do all those things we did to feel connection.  We grieve such distance, even as we try to adapt to the new way of connecting with our eyes while wearing masks and standing apart.  This is an anthem to that grief and gives it voice.

I pray both of these in their heartbreak honesty also offer you more than a trace of God's grace, God's love which is there in the valley of the shadow of death/depth of life.  

May God's peace be with you now more than ever.