My Favorite Hymn (also the reason I don't go to church)

Dear wife I found a model church
And worshipped there today
It made me think of the good old times
Before my hair was gray

The meeting house was finer built
Than they were years ago
But I found out when I went in
It was not built for show

The sexton did not sit me down
Away back by the door
He knew that I was old and deaf
And saw that I was poor

He must have been a Christian man
He led me boldly through
The long aisle of that crowded church
To find a pleasant pew

I wish you'd heard the singing, wife
it had the old town ring
The preacher said with trumpet voice
Let all the people sing

Oh Coronation was the tune
The music upward roared
I thought I heard the angel choir
Strike on their harps of gold

I tell you wife it did me good
To sing those hymns once more
I felt just like some wrecked marine
Who gets a glimpse of shore

It made want to lay aside
This weather beaten form
And anchor in that blessed port
Forever from the storm

Dear wife the toil will soon be o'er
The victory soon be won
The shining strand is just ahead
Our race is nearly run

We're near to Canaan's happy shore
Our hopes are bright and fair
Thank God we'll never sin again
There'll be no sorrow there

There'll be no sorrow there
In heaven above
Where all is love
There'll be no sorrow there

Ernest Becker on depression

The ego, after all strives to create a continuity of integrated experience. As [Erik] Erickson's work shows so eloquently, the identity is a painstakingly fashioned work of art. It is symbolically constructed, continually refashioned, never complete. The individual can be compared to a movie director who is saddled with a lifetime job of staging a plot, the outcome of which he never knows. Indeed, he never knows what will happen in the very next scene, but he must strive to give the whole thing credibility and self-consistency. This he can only accomplish by reworking the previous material as new events joggle his creation. When one gets down to the last twenty years of a life drama, it becomes more and more difficult to justify abrupt changes in continuity: there is too much preceding plot for it to be re-manipulated with ease. Whole portions cannot be re-interpreted with credibility, much less re-staged. Hence, if the continuity is radically undermined, the individual grasps at whatever straws his ingenuity can muster. No movie director would accept such an assignment, yet each individual is burdened with this ultimately and perilously creative task. The remark that an individual cannot know if his life has been satisfactory until the moment before he expires then becomes understandable. Life is symbolically re-appraisable until its very last second. The proverbial drowning man who passes his life in review is merely exercising the last impulsion of the reclaiming artist. Ernest Becker - "Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Depression"

What Would Andy Do?

In my life as a child, long before WWJD, (What would Jesus Do?) was WWAD. He always kept the Barney Fife's of the world in line without beating them up as bad people. He added such a balanced sense of love and justice to his world. How much better off would we all be if we had been treated like Andy treated those in his town. The world needs laws, but we really need them enforced with the love of a Sheriff who let's the town drunk sleep in the jail cell by leaving the key within reaching distance, and who, as a single father, cared nothing more than to love his son by teaching him life lessons and always listening with awe to every single one of Opie's stories. There's nothing like a real man when you see it, and for me, even though Andy was just a character written into a script, he gave me as a child my first real sense of how to be in a world full of characters like the ones in Mayberry. I really just wanna go to Mayberry when I die, not heaven. It was so much more than just a TV show because we made it so much more. To see what TV has become is as sad as the death of one of its great artist. Goodbye Sheriff Taylor.