Requiem

requiem

noun
1. a song or hymn of mourning composed or performed as a memorial to a dead person [syn: dirge]
2. a musical setting for a Mass celebrating the dead
3. a Mass celebrated for the dead

In music, a Mass for one or more dead persons, containing biblical passages and prayers for the admission of the dead to heaven. The term has been loosely applied to other musical compositions in honor of the dead. A German Requiem by Johannes Brahms, for example, uses texts from the Bible but is not a Mass.

I'd been warned.

Quite some time ago, a friend recommended the movie "Requiem for a Dream". Well, no, actually she recommended the music from the movie. Me being the obsessive collector type that I am figured I'd hunt down the movie & have had it sitting in my collection for nearly a year now. I'd heard it's a not-so happy movie & so have been waiting for a night where I didn't need to be happy for a while after.... I'd been warned by friends that it's a fairly devastating movie....

...so figured I had time tonight & after making a lovely stir fry sat down to watch the movie in the quiet of my house (roomies are out tonight). i'd braced myself, expecting it to be hard, painful... and had actually maybe overcompensated at the start. For the first half of the movie I'm thinking, where's the carnage? This isn't nearly as bad as people have told me... mostly just beautiful cinematography & characters that you start to really like in their messed up lives.... But the movie just builds & builds. By 70 minutes into the film, I'm trying to find the case so I can figure out how much longer this goes & hoping it will end swiftly & mercifully. At about 85 minutes in, it all goes in the crapper as the tragedy begins to reach conclusion & you watch the 'reaping' of seeds sown, watch lives crumble to bits as the fatal flaws emerge & the steel trap slams shut on these lives... 15 minutes later you reach the end, breathless, broken, watching lives of good people swallowed whole by the quest for significance, for love, for excitement, for a dream.....

I feel very alone right now. I crave the empty house & the roomies return will not solve the ache... I 'absord' in some ways the characters that I watch in movies. Right now I've got 4 peoples eyes & tears floating around in the imagery in my mind... that & the blasted soundtrack - beautiful, haunting, enticing, terrifying, hopeful... my heart & mind, the whispers of prayers reach out across the city tonight... the prayers search for lost souls in need of hope.... the prayers reach back to the past, both praying & thanking God for bringing friends through & bypassing the possibilities of the devastation that could have been.....

I think about the young girl last night, coming out of the movie theatre. She, like many of the rest her age, is dressed in tight clothes & showing off her cleavage. I hear her talking to a friend about calling for a cab & I see her walk back into the theatre & return a few minutes later. A silver car drives up & a door open. Her & a friend climb in & the car leaves.... A friend sees me looking at the girls leaving & comments, "yeah, I remember when I'd leave the theatre & all the pretty girls were actually my age".... but I'm lost in thought, begging, please God, let that be someone she knows in the car. Please let it not just be some guy she met. Help her get home safe....

... talked with a friend today about a lot of things... some of it was about dreams.... both of us have maybe sort of lost dreams we've had. I talked of dreams of being world changers & my friend commented that he couldn't remember ever having a dream like that.... I argued with him about that.... I remember bits & pieces of those dreams... partly 'cause they sounded like mine....

... I have lived a very sheltered life. I know that there is good & bad to this. I feel deeply & so have suffered things of the heart more than I maybe should for someone who has lived a pretty safe, pretty comfortable life.... I'm often theorized that I've felt enough pain to be able to relate, but not enough to debilitate me... there is some way that I am meant to be 'healer'... to bring whatever comfort I've recieved & share it around....

... what is the level of responsibility we take for each other? for our city & nation & planet? In the past I burned out my life trying to 'be there' for people & just flailing at the wind... now I sit more sheltered up in my house, my fortress of solitude & my heart looks out on the world through movies & books.... but where is the place of meeting, of getting dirty, of joining in the dark places to bring light..... do I even want this? What could I do for the four in this movie? What would I have to offer with a greater pull than the coke? There's not enough love in me (though I am connected to the source) to fill their voids of longing & liberate them from dependencies...

Just before Christmas I started seeing how limited my resources are & that's a part of why I joined up with the urban monastery community. I need to look less at me & more at the greater resources of community & ultimately of Christ to be able to change anything... but yet what to change... there are so many injustices & I think I talk more than I do. Dream more than act... Sure I love (more or less - pretty flawed & weak, but maybe a teeny bit) those I encounter, but I fear need, too. Fear being swallowed by it - fear that I'm not enough. That & I'm selfish. I want a life for 'me' - not that it's maybe that impressive of a life, but it's mine. I want friends, time, quiet places for creativity...

...and there is the dichotomy... I think I'd love to stay here in the quiet & live out my days in my quirkiness... but these 'windows' to the outside world open up longing... watching the four in the movie tonight, I take it personal... the same way that on Easter I took the lack of healing for a friend personally... I look out & think that 'my' world is under assault.... & I realize again, that none of this is mine. That even my breath is gift.... I claim nothing.... but it's a different sense of ownership - maybe it's still wrong - but it's this place of stewardship - this thing where you join with the One whose world it is & grieve & cry & ask for deliverance....

Maybe the sane people of the world don't wrestle with this stuff. Maybe others have the balance figured out. Have their 'boundaries' all set well (this after remembering a friend of mine pointing out the 'Boundaries' book in my library - a book given to me because I apparently 'suck' at boundaries. I'm still sort of bitter about the book & haven't really read it - first chapter or two, but yeah)....

... I look again at the mystery of the burning bush, the one that drew Moses in. "I must go & see this, " said Moses, " why is the bush not burnt up?" It was a miraculous sight - a bush all aflame, but yet not utterly consumed, not burnt to ash. How do we live this way? Aflame with the overwhelming ocean depth of God's love, poured into the thimble cup of us.... how does it not burst us wide open? I know we must live 'cracked' (how else does the light seep out), but how can the infinite indwell the finite, how can we love with the capacity that He loves with & not be destroyed by it....

"he that tries to save his life will lose it", says Jesus, "but he that loses his life for My sake shall find it".... I've recently come to embrace the idea that this means that we give up our quest to be 'somebody', that we stop trying to impress the world or prove ourselves to others.... we stop wearing the masks. I've started to embrace the idea that losing your life is to accept the reality of who you are, to walk in the full richness of your being, to live fully in the now, to realize that you are a gem in the crown of God, an arrow hidden in his quiver, the apple of His eye, the beloved of Jesus..... all of these are gifts given, not prizes earned.... death to self means receiving life from God & living in who he's made you to be instead of trying to be someone else that's 'better' than plain little old you....

...maybe this is a perversion of Jesus's words. Maybe it's exactly what he meant - or maybe it's somewhere in between. Time will be the tell... but maybe there is a requiem for each of us.... some song of grace that calls out to the ways we keep trying to destroy ourselves & beckons us to hope & life.... maybe some of us have been lucky enough to hear the requiem playing in the background before the train has jumped the tracks... maybe I'm one of those souls who 'got lucky' & somehow was 'weak' enough to drop my guard & let grace embrace me early in life... but there are so many others who need to hear the music, to listen to the siren song of melody that pulls them back from the edge, that calls from death to life, from hell to heaven.... how do we, how do I, be a people whose words, whose lives leave others unsettled? who are the fragrance of life that entices people to be embraced by grace instead of trying to fix it in their own way......