What the World Needs Now
Yours truly as a youth didn’t much care for popular music; weird even then, I enjoyed the likes of Beethoven. But some popular songs sink into the brain without trying to listen to them. Those songs are everywhere; their music is easy to grasp; they worm their way into the memory.
Sort of. Recently I found an old song running through my head, and I have no idea what brought it to mind. It opens: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love.” The next line, in my memory, runs: “It’s the only thing that there’s not too little of.” And I thought, that doesn’t make sense! If there’s not too little of love, then there is enough of it. So why is it needed?
So I googled the thing, and found (as you, dear reader, probably already know) that the word “not” is a mis-memory. The correct line is: “It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.” That makes a bit more sense, although I think there are other things that we could use more of (truth, say).
What was my memory doing? I wonder if, subconsciously, I changed that word 50 years ago so that the song would be nonsense, as if I had a desire to mess up the song.
And if my mind can do something like that with a popular ditty, what else do I twist to my liking? I don’t know if it’s what the world needs, but I certainly need more humility about the things I remember! T. S. Eliot says that the wisdom of old men is overrated. Instead, we should be talking about humility. “Humility is endless.”
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Out & About. “Walking the Camino: How and Why.” Sunday, October 27, the fall theology lecture. As I did two years ago, I walked again this year a thousand-year-old route of about 450 miles, ending at Santiago de Compostela in northwest Spain. My lecture will face two questions that many people have asked me. First, what are the practicalities of making this walk? Do you need permission? What sort of preparation do you need? (and so forth). Second, why walk to a place that claims to be the burial place of a saint? Isn’t God everywhere? What is the connection of holy places to our nature as animals that walk? Bishop Sumner will offer a response; there will be time for questions; there will be a reception. 5 p.m. in the Great Hall at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, Dallas.
The next “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will be on Sun., Nov. 10, on Charis in the World of Wonders by Marly Youmans; at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s (in Garrett Hall, 2nd floor). Youmans is a Christian writing good fiction and good poetry who is part also of the movement to revive art and culture. The novel is introduced thusly: Charis clambers “into the branches of a tree” fleeing “flaming arrows and massacre. She will need to struggle for survival: to scour the wilderness for shelter, to strive and seek for a new family and a setting where she can belong. Her unmarked way is costly and hard. For Charis, the world outside the window of home is a maze of hazards. And even if she survives the wilds, it is no simple matter to discover and nest among her own kind—the godly, those called Puritans by others.” And yet there is the world of wonders.