Love Comes Quickly

Sooner or later
This happens to everyone
To everyone

You can live your life lonely
Heavy as stone
Live your life learning
But working alone
Say this is all you want
Well I don’t believe that it’s true
‘Cause when you least expect it
Waiting round the corner for you

Chorus
Love comes quickly whatever you do
You can’t stop falling in love

You can live a life of luxury
If that’s what you want
Taste forbidden pleasures
Whatever you want
You can fly away
To the end of the world
But where does it get you to
‘Cause just when you least expect it
Just what you least expect

Chorus

I know it sounds ridiculous
But speaking from experience
It may seem romantic
And that’s no defence
Love will always get to you



Pet Shop Boys - Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant



I first heard of Pet Shop Boys in 1988 when I was 10. It was at a school music camp, which is an irony, since I am the world’s most musically untalented person possible. I can’t play any instruments whatsoever, I can't sing, I can’t even read music notes or scores despite having had numerous lessons in it and I disappointed my high school music teachers who'd earmarked me for their special keyboard lessons, and then later, handbell lessons, thinking I had potential. They were so very wrong. Well, at least they showed some faith in me. Anyhow, we were divided up into groups at the music camp and each group was named after a pop group. I have poignant memories of the camp because it was the first time I’d been away from home and I’d begged my mother to allow me to go. My mother was very protective of me as a child and I ached to have been able to go to all those camps and do things like all the other boys were allowed to do – outdoors that is.

However, it wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I rediscovered the Pet Shop Boys, or more like ‘really discovered’ them, I should say. I felt an immediate sense of affinity with many of their songs. Their lyrics were bittersweet, full of tension, melancholic and yet they were both depressing and not depressing to listen to at the same time – probably so given their upbeat tempo. I loved and still love their songs, given my own melancholic, manic-depressive nature (not). I just like being a drama king sometimes. But I couldn’t figure out the fuss over why they were seen as ‘gay’ music.

But gay music or not, music is pretty powerful stuff. Someone once said that the surest way to bring down a nation is through its music. If you can control the music the people listen to, you can control their minds. I can’t remember where I’d read that but I think it’d be fair to say that music is indeed powerful stuff – it can stir up all kinds of emotions in us – it draws out all that which is unsaid in our soul and puts it in sync with our heart and mind.


Pet Shop Boys

Love Comes Quickly was and still is among one of my favourite Pet Shop Boys song. I love its tinge of existential thoughtfulness coupled with its bittersweet portrayal of the realities of life. If you read the lyrics to this song, I think you’ll find there’s an element of truth in it about ‘falling in love’ or at least about being single and falling in love.

This is where I begin plagiarising Al Hsu’s work again. No, not really. I give him all the credit. I just think he’s written some fantastic stuff about singleness (although from a distinctively Christian perspective and aimed at those who’ve embraced Christian spirituality) and I want to share some more of his stuff here. He writes in The Single Issue (pp120-123),

Almost everybody grows up expecting to marry. From childhood, we start envisioning our future mate and dreaming about the future family. We live with the expectation of marriage. Because we plan on having a mate, not to have one implies a sense of loss and incompleteness, leading to feelings of loneliness and failure. But as adulthood continues, we encounter a transition time when we discover that our dreams may have been unrealistic.

“It is not wrong to hope for marriage or to recognise that marriage is a possibility for the future”, Gary Collins says, “but it is not healthy to build our lives around events that are uncertain. Instead, individuals, especially for Christians, must learn both to prepare for the future and to live fully in the present.”

We must recognise that some things in life are more important than whether or not we shall ever marry. We must face the fact that marriage may not be a possibility. When I come to this point I completely hand over my life to God, all my dreams, hopes and desires for a spouse, and tell him that my first priority will be to find my identity in Christ and him alone. This reckoning is a kairos moment – a significant moment in time in which I acknowledge that I am called to live my life fully for Christ regardless of my marital status or sexual orientation (italics mine).

If the desire to marry or couple up (italics mine) is overwhelming, if thoughts of marriage dominate our thinking, and if every person…is viewed as a potential partner, then the desire for marriage has become idolatrous. It is almost a lust for marriage, not unlike a lust for sex. I once read about a man who complained that single women he met stared at his bare ring finger the way men might stare at a woman’s breasts. Much like being seen as a sex object, he felt as if he was being viewed as a ‘marriage object’.

Richard Foster calls this kind of ‘reckoning’ – this living sacrifice experience ‘relinquishment’. The way of relinquishment is the movement from ‘my will be done’ to ‘not my will, but yours’. This process involves struggle, because it is difficult to give up those desires and dreams that are so dear to us. But this is just the process. Foster says, “Struggle is important because the Prayer of Relinquishment is Christian prayer and not fatalism. We do not resign ourselves to fate… We are not locked into a preset, determinist future. Ours is an open, not a closed universe. We are ‘co-labourers with God’, as the apostle Paul put it – working with God to determine the outcome of events. Therefore our prayer efforts are a genuine give and take, a true dialogue with God – and a true struggle.”

Reckoning and relinquishment do not mean that we lose all that we have ever hoped for in life. Foster reminds us, “We are dealing with crucifixion of the will, not the obliteration of the will. Crucifixion always has resurrection tied to it.” Death is a central theme in Christian theology only because it prepares the way for the glory of the resurrection. God allows us to continue living after the reckoning point because people who are fully committed to him can be the most productive for the cause of Christ.

But relinquishment is not a state at which we arrive suddenly, nor once and for all. It is a slow pilgrimage, and there are many stumblings and bruisings along the way. And such a reckoning isn’t only for singles. All followers of Jesus (words mine), regardless of their marital or relationship status (italics mine) need to come to the point where they place God as the top priority in their lives.

The late Walter Trobisch wisely wrote, “The art of giving up, of renouncing, is also the secret of happiness in a person’s life. To give up one’s self is as important for a single person as it is for one who is married. Those who learn this art will never be lonesome, even if they are single. Those who don’t will always be lonesome, even though they are married.”

Yes, it may be true that “love comes quickly whatever you do” and that “you just can’t stop falling in love”. And if and when that happens to me again, I sure hope I’ll remember to hold on tight during the roller coaster ride.

The Beauty Myth

Source: www.deanmorriscards.co.uk

When a couple of colleagues and I caught up for lunch in St Kilda one sunny winter afternoon several weeks back, we came across a series of cards in a shop on Acland Street. My colleague actually spotted them first and when I was shown them, I too had a chuckle. Before long, I found myself searching for the other cards on the rack and was chuckling hard at some of the other ones there as well.

The card I saw is the one above. I don’t know if people would find it funny but I certainly found it humorous. But underlying its humour and the card designer’s ability to make fun of his family (the photos on the cards were gleaned from family photo albums) is a rather unfortunate reality in life, a reality that often values the external and temporary over above what is inside a person and that which is eternal, a reality that has the potential to ‘elevate’ some while ‘crushing’ others simply based on their physical appearances.

I’m talking about physical beauty and looks. I got into a discussion with a mate of mine recently about physical appearances and looks when I gave him a lift home. He made a rather forthright comment about how he thought it was a load of bull when the Church teaches that looks aren’t important. I replied that that was true in a way: that looks aren’t indeed that important when viewed in light of eternity when our lives on earth are over, to which he replied something to the effect of, “But we live in the present.”

As I drove away from my friend’s place after dropping him off, what he said kept ringing in my ears for the rest of that week.

But as I searched through the Bible, what became evident to me was that there were people who were known for their beauty and attractiveness. King David of ancient Israel saw how very beautiful Bathsheba was and lusted after her and eventually plotted to have her husband murdered so that he could marry her (2 Samuel 11:1-26). The two lovers in the Song of Songs (a book in the Bible) spoke of each other’s physical features so passionately and sensually that reading it would make some of us blush. Queen Esther of ancient Persia who saved the exiled Jews in Persia from annihilation was noted for her beauty “in form and features” (Esther 1: 7).

While what constitutes ‘beauty’ can and does vary from culture to culture, studies have shown that even babies tend to look at or stare longer at photographs of people deemed also as ‘attractive’ by adults themselves than they would at photographs of ‘not-so-attractive-looking’ people.

Similarly, there is no denying that physical attributes certainly do often play a role in producing the spark that causes two people to become attracted to each other too in many cases (though not all – I have known a couple where one thought of the other as terribly unattractive when they first saw each other).

So it seems like looks are important. But where the problem lies then, I think, is to what extent do we value, elevate and perhaps even idolise beauty (in the form of ‘looks’) in people? I don’t have a problem when I see a beautiful woman or a good-looking man and calling it like it is. But beauty and good looks in themselves do not necessarily constitute value, self-worth or even dignity. I think we all know that deep down but yet, so often, I still get sucked into thinking that if only I looked this way or that way, I would be happier. But that’s when I could not be further from the real truth.

We give beauty and good looks value only to the extent that we allow ourselves to believe that that is what gives an individual worth, dignity and value and forget that they are valuable instead because they are made in the image of the Creator. It is one thing to see that a person has been blessed with good looks, it is quite another to believe that they are more worthy of our time than say a person with a cleft lip.


John Merrick (1862 - 1890)

This then brings to my mind the story of John (Joseph) Merrick, or more commonly known to most people as the ‘Elephant Man’. Philip Yancey talks about John Merrick extensively in a chapter in his book, Rumours of Another World. What I read about John Merrick moved me immensely and I want to share in detail, albeit by paraphrasing, what Yancey’s written in his book about him. Yancey considers Merrick to have been possibly one of the ugliest humans to have ever lived; having had a disorder called neurofibromatosis that gradually turned him into a human freak from the earliest years of childhood.

At a young age, he was abandoned by his family and sent away. At fourteen, a carnival showman found him and used him for making money by making him into a freak show. People would pay a few pennies to look and gawk at him in his cage until one day, a London surgeon by the name of Frederick Treves, decided to take a peek.

He saw a creature huddled next to a Bunsen burner for warmth, lit by the faint blue light of the gas jet. And as if giving orders to a dog, the showman yelled, "Stand up!" The creature arose and let the blanket fall to the ground, revealing to Treves “the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen." p192

Not only was he visually repulsive, a sickening stench emanated from the fungous skin growths on Merrick as well. And so, Dr Treves arranged to have John Merrick examined in his hospital but because of mouth deformities, he spoke in unintelligible mutters and Treves erroneously judged him an imbecile. Treves gave Merrick his card and returned him to the showman. The carnival was raided the next day and Treves assumed he would never see Merrick again. And so, for two more years, John Merrick lived the life of an outcast, housed like a circus animal. When Belgian authorities shut down the carnival for good, Merrick was shipped back to London by his keeper.

Passengers tormented him throughout the journey to London until he was rescued by policemen upon arrival. Taken to an unused waiting room where he sank into a heap in a dark corner, he had only one ray of hope – the card of Dr Treves, which he had kept in a pocket for two years.

Treves responded to the police summons and found Merrick huddled whimpering in a corner and took him back to the hospital. Merrick had had nothing to eat or drink since leaving Belgium and Treves ordered some food from the hospital cafeteria. But the nurse who delivered it, unprepared for such a sight, screamed, dropped the tray and fled from the room.

Over time, the hospital staff got used to Merrick and daily baths eliminated the stench. With practise, Treves learned to understand Merrick’s speech and found much to his surprise that Merrick was actually literate and was in fact a voracious reader. He’d studied the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and knew the works of both Shakespeare and Jane Austen.

And it mystified Treves that someone like Merrick, robbed of childhood, treated like a wild beast, exploited, with not a single memory of pleasure, a creature reviled and void of hope, could survive and yet still emerge with such an agreeable disposition. Of Merrick, Treves said he was gentle, affectionate and lovable, without a grievance and without an unkind word for anyone. Neither did he complain nor deplore his ruined life or resent the treatment he’d suffered at the hands of his keepers.

At first, Merrick meekly inquired whether he could enter an asylum for the blind as he’d read about such places and longed to live among people who could not stare at him. But gradually Treves and the hospital staff earned his trust and a hospital attic room became the Elephant Man’s home.

Merrick had owned little if any possessions and spoke adoringly of women, even though every woman had treated him with scorn and as an object of loathing. But Treves persuaded a young and pretty widow friend of his to meet Merrick and to treat him as a human being. And she did just that, smiling at him, wishing him good morning and shaking his hand. The effect that had on Merrick wasn’t quite what Treves had expected. As Merrick let go of her hand, he bent his head on his knees and sobbed until Treves thought he would never cease. Merrick told Treves later that that was the first woman who had ever smiled at him, the first woman, in the whole of his life who had shaken hands with him.

And from that day on, Merrick began to slowly transform, from a hunted freak show animal into a man. Treves gradually also introduced him to other pleasures of life from theatre plays to trips to the countryside.

After four years of happiness, the only happiness Merrick had ever known, he died in his sleep in 1890 aged 27. The few scraps of writing Merrick left behind showed that he managed to find deep solace in his faith, a faith that gathers together outcasts. And all those who had met Merrick went away marvelled that such a pure and gentle soul and such a heart could live inside that hideous exterior.

For Philip Yancey and also for me, the Elephant Man is an example of the divide between winners and losers. As Yancey puts it

"The beautiful have always enjoyed rewards beyond the reach of the ugly, the strong have always dominated the weak; a small number of rich have always lived at the expense of the poor. But (italics mine) against that reality, God’s kingdom flies a flag of divine opposition." p197

Are looks important? Yes, I guess looks are important to a certain extent in the present moment. But as another friend also reminded me, "Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder." And I still strongly believe that the level of importance we give to looks and physical beauty ought to be always held in check and in perspective by a bigger picture of God’s kingdom, one that places value and worth not in one’s exterior but on things unseen. Yancey says

"With gratitude, I accept the beauty of supermodels as one of (italics mine) God’s gifts. God is, after all, the creator and sustainer of all good things on this earth. At the same time, I ask that my eyes be opened to a different kind of beauty, one that lies beneath the surface, as manifest in the Elephant Man." p200

And, oh, my colleagues and I ended buying the above card for my manager’s birthday. She, too, chuckled when she saw it.

My Alternative Lifestyle

It's a love that has wings, a countercultural calling that turns restraint into liberation. Ron Belgau.

My eyebrows furrowed with curiosity when I saw the article’s title (see above). It certainly caught my attention. Never mind the fact that the article was written by someone I know, which was why I wanted to read it in the first place, but the title certainly piqued my curiosity even further.

Ron Belgau, my friend who wrote it, hardly seemed to me in my mind the kind of person you’d associate with those living an ‘alternative’ lifestyle. Ron – alternative? Is the Pope a Mormon? But of course, that depends on what your notion of an ‘alternative’ lifestyle is.

Also published in a print version of the Notre Dame Magazine in the USA, the article is essentially about his story, albeit briefly: about his love of planes, of flying and anything aeronautical, about two of his friends – one current, one in the distant past, about his journey from being a non-Catholic making fun of Catholic sexual ethics and a hopeful gay rights activist to instead, a practising Catholic, from being someone who was falling for another guy yet again for the umpteenth time into someone who is committed to a somewhat ‘unpopular’ and ‘non-mainstream’ way of life. As Ron writes of himself during his younger years -

“An educated, postmodern person would no more become a Catholic than he would join the Flat Earth Society.”

But, as Ron puts it, "God has a way of throwing curveballs" - because he has since gone from being a non-Catholic to a practising one.



Ron and Mark doing pre-flight checks


Ron begins his story in My Alternative Lifestyle with him doing the pre-flight checks on a Cessna. And I am pleased to post the above photo taken of Ron and Mark doing exactly just that, when they took me on an island-hopping trip (well, intra-island, in any case, from memory) around the San Juan Islands when I visited Ron in the USA last year.

I’ve been on helicopters, Cessnas, Fokkers, Airbus planes, and Boeing planes of all varied shapes and sizes just to name a few. And you’d think I’d be used to flying. And in a way, I am used to flying. And I don’t mind it at all and I do enjoy flying so long as I don’t get queasy or airsick, which, unfortunately, I did, during the flight to the San Juan Islands. But that is another story which doesn’t need telling.

Without further ado, click here to take you to Ron Belgau’s article My Alternative Lifestyle if you're interested in finding out more about his story.