Day by day, oh, dear Lord, three things I pray
To see thee more clearly
Love thee more dearly
Follow thee more nearly, day by day
-Godspell, 1971 (Stephen Schwartz, with a hat tip to St. Richard of Chichester)
Here at my desk before we open, again, as I prepare for this trial on Monday.
And it's storming outside. Of course.
P says the water in the Gulf is 88 degrees right now, too warm, a catalyst for violent electrical storms that have rolled across the central panhandle for the last couple days, a harbinger of trouble as October draws nearer. But beautiful and awful (in the biblical sense) to watch, especially at night.
I've avoided the news lately as a mental prophylactic, already with too much on my mind and my plate. Those around me here approve of all the things plastered across the front page, of the insurrection and book burning and the stripping away of someone else's civil rights and voting rights and personal autonomy. I can't walk around in a rage, so I just try to look away.
But this piece caught my eye, and left me in tears at the utter pathos wrapped in a gauze of bureaucratic banality. Just as Hannah Arendt said it would be.
Read the actual opinion, and in particular Scott Makar's thoughtful concurrence and dissent, and you'll sit down and cry with me. Or not. Maybe you're okay with this.
A seventeen year old, a child, living in foster care, a high school dropout, files a hand-drafted petition begging a trial judge to allow her to get an abortion without having to notify her parents (what parents? She's in foster care), and the sympathetic trial judge basically says the legislature has tied her hands because the child vacillated a little as she wrestled with the consequences of her choice (what thoughtful person would not?), and therefore failed to satisfy the court by "clear and convincing evidence" that she was mature enough to make the decision on her own. She can always try again, that is, until she can't because the wheels of gestation surge past the wheels of justice, and the fetus is too far along. The very proceeding is an obscenity. We all should be ashamed.
And if you're not, well, screw you.
Okay, now that I got that out of my system, let's move on to theology. Specifically, my encounter with "Day By Day", the one hit song from the musical Godspell, released all the way back in 1971.
Spotify washed this one over my brooding soul this morning as I left the gym. It was a tonic.
The musical is loosely based on the Gospel of Matthew, with pieces built around Jesus's parables. It has a very hippie feel to it, although it's not the vapid feel-good religion of the modern megachurch. The hard edge of the Jesus depicted in Matthew survives, even as he shows grace to Judas and in the end reveals an eschatology in which it all turns out okay (well, sort of, insofar as there's not really a resurrection here).
The music tickled a couple synapses for me. You see, my mother had this album at our home on Lee Ann Drive when I was eight or nine, and we went through a time when she listened to it along with Jesus Christ Superstar, Hair, and all of her other folk-liberal stuff that played through the house before Dad came home from his business trips and the house filled with cigarette smoke and Charlie Rich.
Even back then I could feel a tug toward the music and the message (Godspell and Charlie Rich, as I think of it), like I was hearing some truth that was just beyond my perception. That was before my foray into religion decades later, culminating in the end of my "religious phase", as Jack Crabbe put it in Little Big Man.
If the message of Godspell were alive today, I'd stick my toe back in the water. Maybe. But my own mother church and I have had our falling out, and pretty much every other faith tradition I've encountered strikes this cynical old man as repellant. Better off to stick with existentialism, John Prine, Elbert Hubbard, and Marcus Aurelius.
Meanwhile, I'm living the experience of Santiago in the Old Man and the Sea, as a contingent fee case finally paid after over four years of frustration and work and worry, and the sharks have begun feverishly tearing into the marlin they didn't shed a bead of sweat to catch. Law partners and clients have started sullenly asking where's their cut, proposing that I give back part of the fee because it would be "fair" to them.
But I'm an old misanthrope who's not had the chance to lead a normal work life for twenty-five years, health and vigor ebbing away under the weight of other peoples' problems. Why should I discount the price of this chunk of my life for folks who did nothing to earn what they're seeking?
I guess I need add Ayn Rand to the pantheon of my new religion.
Today I'll work solely on trial prep, with a break after lunch for a rather consequential hearing at which the judge will decide which issues will actually be tried and which he'll dispose of as a matter of law. The other side is burying me in motions and exhibits and otherwise trying to make trial prep more difficult, because they're two or three deep and I'm David with his slingshot. It's how the game is played. But I'm getting too old for this.
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