Saturday, September 08, 2007

Tigers and Hokies together -- win, lose or draw

In our Catholic tradition, the faithful receive ashes on their foreheads each Ash Wednesday to remind us of an important thing -- kind of a divine reality check.

It comes as the sooty sign of the cross is made upon our heads: "Remember, man, you are dust and to dust you will return." That, my friends, is perspective.

With that beginning-of-Lent perspective, we realize that what we do between dust and dust is what defines us. And realizing that no matter how big a shot we become, that no matter how smart, or cool, or mighty we think we might be now, we're still going to end up a pile of dust in the ground . . . well, that ought to have an impact on how we define ourselves.

The consequences are, shall we say, grave.

AND THAT'S WHAT one hopes folks keep in mind when it comes to the games we play. Like football.

Football is fun. Football is a great thing. And there's nothing like Southeastern Conference football.

But it's just football. Football, in the long run, doesn't have much to do with how we define ourselves between the dust . . . and the dust. At least the winning and losing part of football has little to do with the story between the dust.

How much in perspective we keep football -- how we treat one another as we cheer on our favorite teams -- however, does have something to do with the writing in the dust of our lives.

I'M REMINDED OF THIS because my LSU Tigers are playing Virginia Tech tonight at Tiger Stadium, which isn't the most hospitable environment for visiting teams -- or their fans. And I'm fine with that, within reason, inside the stadium for the 60 minutes of the football game.

But when you consider that many LSU and Hokie fans have come to know a lot about the "dust to dust" thing recently, you'd hope that folks would have a grasp on the whole matter of perspective -- and a keen sense that what divides us as LSU or Tech fans is minuscule compared to what binds us as brothers and sisters . . . and, one would hope, good neighbors.

IN THAT LIGHT, I'm reposting the Virginia Tech memorial episode of the Revolution 21 podcast as an additional, special presentation this week. I think it will remind us all of some things that we never should have forgotten.

For one thing, that life often is a vale of tears. And it is how we treat one another in that vale of tears -- and as we find our way out of our particular vales of tears -- that's a big part of what we write about ourselves in the Book of Life.

In closing, here's my original descriptive post about the VT memorial edition of the Revolution 21 podcast:

WE ALL KNOW what this episode of the Revolution 21 podcast is about . . . what it had to be about. We cannot overcome the horror that lurks among us if we do not confront it. We must grieve for its victims and celebrate the light of the world -- and those souls' light in this world -- so that the darkness triumphs not.

Trouble is, I've had a hard time motivating myself to do the program this go 'round. One of the elements of this program is me talking . . . at least occasionally. It's a basic ingredient of human interaction, given that I can't shake your hand across cyberspace or give you a hug . .. particularly when we're all hurting to one degree or another.

But the deal is . . . what the hell can I say? In a very real way, words fail. Utterly.

Words cannot capture the groaning of broken hearts.

Words fail.

I THOUGHT ABOUT speaking of how the great failure of our age -- the great failure of most of human history -- is our failure to solve many pressing crises without somebody (or many somebodies) ending up dead.

I'm sure you can name any number of things for which our miserable "fix" is kill, kill, kill. And now, we have a crazed college student killing 32 innocents in what seemed, in his deranged mind, to be a fitting coda to a tortured and miserable existence.

And on it goes, with nothing seeming to break our addiction to violence, revenge and death.

WHILE I THINK THERE'S TRUTH in what I intended to say, what I intended to say is also pretty obvious. And while obviousness might be tolerable here in writing about the podcast, my blathering obviousness hardly would contribute to a fitting memorial to the lives -- the shining futures and the future generations -- we've lost this awful week in the Year of Our Lord 2007.

So I decided to shut up, restricting my poor insights to the Pod-O-Matic and Blogspot domains. In the show this week, the music and the context will speak for itself.

And I pray it will be worthy of the departed we grieve today. May God rest them, every one.

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