Canticles of the Unhomed

Friday, December 31, 2004

The Beginning of a New Year

So its New Years Eve. Ugh. What does this mean? I have to take stock of the previous year and analyze my failings and successes? Make some resolutions? What if I don't feel emotionally capable of that? Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Well, I have had enough navel-gazing for awhile. I want to curl into a tight ball and pass into oblivion until... I don't know, until things are better?

You know, I like to think I am a fairly self-aware guy, capable of seeing and correcting my own neuroses, for the most part. As I stumble, fall, and get dragged down this path of wretched evolution, kicking and screaming against my will, I am forced to think that I am becoming something. I don't know what, but my faith tells me something is at the end. But sometimes, like right now, I want to give up. I want to drown my sorrows in one of the thousand shallow, band-aid solutions that thousands of people use everyday. Of course I know they don't work and I will only end up more miserable than I already am. And of course I know that I cannot give up, since he that lives within me will not allow it. Romans 14:4 - to his own master a man will stand or fall, and and stand he will, for the Lord will make him stand.

So my hopes for 2005? That is the wrong question to ask me right now.

I was thinnking of Becky from Saskatoon the other day and I came across this song:

Saints and children we have gathered here to hear the sacred story
And I'm glad to bring it to you with my best rhyming and rhythm
'Cause I know the thirsty listen and down to the waters come
And the Holy King of Israel loves me here in America

And if you listen to my songs I hope you hear the water falling
I hope you feel the oceans crashing on the coast of north New England
I wish I could be there just to see them, two summers past I was
And the Holy King of Israel loves me here in America

And if I were a painter I do not know which I'd paint
The calling of the ancient stars or assembling of the saints
And there's so much beauty around us for just two eyes to see
But everywhere I go I'm looking

And once I went to Appalachia for my father he was born there
And I saw the mountains waking with the innocence of children
And my soul is still there with them wrapped in the songs they brought
And the Holy King of Israel loves me here in America

And I've seen by the highways on a million exit ramps
Those two-legged memorials to the laws of happenstance
Waiting for four-wheeled messiahs to take them home again
But I am home anywhere if You are where I am