"life is simple: it's either cherry red, or midnight blue"

There is a lengthy post I put some work into this week with the idea that I would complete and post it today, but that isn't going to happen.

Memory, memorare, remembrance, mimesis... This morning I awoke remembering how hearing Lou Gramm's song Midnight Blue on the radio while driving to various places last night, all the while seriously considering just finding a bar, with which there is nothing wrong in and of itself, but Lou's song broke me out of the morass I was in. This song enabled me to breathe and helped flood me with a sense a gratitude- two things I had been unable to do all week. It's difficult to describe my mindset at such times. Suffice it to say that the sickly sentimentality of this pre-Christmas season has always caused me to react viscerally because there is so much pretense. As I get older, I can see that this pretense, at least to some extent, is a form of longing, but this is a progression that I suspect I will never fully realize, at least not on my own. Anyway, this morning, while thinking back on this, I suddenly remembered that REM covered this great song. So, prompted to start looking, it was gratifying to discover a live cover REM did way back in 1987.

Ain't got no regrets
And I ain't losin' track of
Which way I'm going
I ain't gonna double back, no
Don't want no miss play
Put on no display
An angel no
But I know my way
Oh yeah, oh oh, oh oh

I'm thinking a song a day over the course of the seven days of the O Antiphons because this seems to be the way I am attentive right now. It just goes to show that our God is a God of surprises, otherwise why would the Davidic king be born to an unwed couple in a cowshed and hail from Nazareth? As Nathaniel queried, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" To which Philip responded, "Come and see."

Because of who we are and what we have experienced, for some of us life is often midnight blue, which is why I pray today that the Lord will come to redeem us with His outstretched arm and paint our hearts cherry red; replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh, like His own human heart. After all you have to have a heart in order for it be a Sacred Heart!

As the Holy Father reminded us in his Christmas Urbi et Orbi message back in 2006- "Christ does not save us from our humanity, but through it; he does not save us from the world, but came into the world, so that through him the world might be saved" (cf. Jn 3:17). This is why we experience our redemption when and where least expect it; we can't just conjure it up, which is precisely what we try to do through our sentimentalism, which is what makes it so tedious, not to mention odious. So, I offer Midnight Blue today in something of the spirit of the Song of Songs. Indeed, I live in the hope that "there's gonna come a day" when He'll "be back again." Maranatha!

I'm thinking that in addition to Knockin', you just might have to know Midnight Blue to be in the band.

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel, qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento