That’s the space I’m in now, especially, as I deal with mortality/recurrence thoughts.
I’m feeling like I’m tumbling around in that turning contraption the hard rock dudes are playing in, all while Marianne Faithful, adds her haunting vocal stylings, bedecked with a fake monkey, in this organ grinder of an ensemble she has going for her.
“The memory remains.”
Where am I going with this? Well, to Scripture, of course!
That’s the likely through-line from Streisand, to Metallica, to the ancient, eternal Promises…
Forget the former things…
“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”
Isaiah 43:18-19
Right now, let me just be real. I’m a bit irritated by Isaiah 43. It seems to be following me around daily, akin to Marianne Faithful’s vocal underscoring.
Why is that?
Especially, if I’m in this weird place of “taking stock?” Life and death thoughts. Uncertainty as to how much longer I have left?
Why am I being called to forget?
Why Am I being called to consider “a new thing,” especially, if it looks like I’m checking out of here?
Well, now I find myself jumping to the happy party, known as The Book of Revelation.
(Please hang in there with me).
Wipe away every tear…
“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
Revelation 21:4
There will be no more death. No more death found in “the cloud.”
No more death, found in “the way we were.”
No more death, found in heavy metal way of how “the memory remains.”
“The old order of things has passed away.”
Death is not just about literal death, literally, us “passing way.”
It is also about the death, found in those memories, those snapshots, mental photos, those former things that speak to so much nostalgia and history.
Future seems impossible, sometimes, as we are mired in all of that.
Yes, the prospect of literal death can cause us to examine all other deaths in our lives. The things that “were.”
And they have us paying attention, however slightly or violently, to the hope of “the new thing.”
How can there, indeed, be a “new thing,” in the middle of so much “old?”
I’m not sure. But I know it’s possible.
And that segues me to my last ricocheting point…
Audrey Hepburn.
I have not completely lost it.
Cloud. Babs. Metallica.
Of course Audrey Hepburn comes next.
