When Love Meets Dust

It wasn't lost on me that Valentine's Day, our oft saccharine feast day, lands on the least sweet (apparently) day of the Christian calendar. During an Ash Wednesday service your forehead is marked with ash and the priest says "remember you are dust and to dust you shall return" ... a stark contrast to teddy bears and sugar.

As a songwriter, I sat with this apparent contradiction and let it stew until this song came out. Fr Ron Rolheiser, OMI 's book The Holy Longing, helped to inspire the song as the first verse is loosely based on Janis Joplin, the second on Princess Diana and the third on Mother Teresa.

As you sit and listen, I ask that you entrain your ear to hear at a poetic level. Poetry is being threatened, I feel, sometimes as much by us progressives as right wing fanatics. For instance, when I use the term "lust" in verse two, don't literalize the word. To do so is to split the issue and the whole point to the song is to suggest it all comes from the same place.

Spend time with what it might mean to you.

It could mean simply the mimetic theory Rene Girard spoke of.

It could mean that we don't listen to a friend without applying what they are saying to how it can positively effect our own life.

It could mean we are discontented and insatiable.

It could mean many things, including out of control sexual fire. Just don't read this as an over-simplified slam against the sexual revolution ;)

The point is, is that it might be more helpful to ask the question: is lust simply an immature perversion of Holy fire? Not separate, but one and the same, only lacking wisdom and guidance?

Also, it might be helpful to remember Meister Eckhart's words: "if the soul can be free from all selfishness, it can shine like the uncreated God who made it." The tricky part is that right when the ego is trying to be in control of "being selfless" is perhaps when we need a nice holiday or at least to go for a walk.

And... the last verse is not a "case for chastity"... love can meet dust quite beautifully in a relationship.

We have been entrained to separate, separate, separate. Let's try not to do that as we listen and see what happens!

[laurah]

When Love meets dust...what a beautiful way to describe our creation-the unique intertwining of eternal Love and matter....existing within us, and as us, always, in this life and then beyond...when the dust is scattered into the wind! Wow! Thank you for sharing!!!

[zanthur]

I think this song is poetically, lyrically, musically, emotionally and spiritually beautiful! This song is touched by God! Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah has a similar resonance of truth and depth! This song will touch hearts on down through the ages! Thankyou for sharing it with the world.

[kurtklingbeil]

I was reminded of Scott Cook's Tangle of Souls
"stardust and the will to live is all there is to me"

[monkey]

Life or Knowledge
There are a thousand questions that at times come up, and the attempt to answer them becomes a weariness and a burden. It is because you have forgotten you are in Christ, whom God has made to be your wisdom. Let it be your first care to abide in Him in undivided fervent devotion of heart: when the heart and the life are right, rooted in Christ, knowledge will come in such measure as Christ's own wisdom sees meet. And without such abiding in Christ, the knowledge does not really profit, but is often most hurtful. The soul satisfies itself with thoughts which are but the forms and images of truth, without receiving the truth itself in its power. God's way is ever to give us, even though it be but as a seed, the thing itself, the life and the power, and then the knowledge. Man seeks the knowledge first, and often, alas! never gets beyond it. God gives us Christ, and in Him hid the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. O let us be content to possess Christ, to dwell in Him, to make Him our life, and only in a deeper searching into Him, to search and find the knowledge we desire. Such knowledge is life indeed. (Abide in Christ, Andrew Murray)