My kids know I’m a big Bruce Springsteen fan, so I was pleased when my daughter Laura gave me his latest album, “Wrecking Ball.”  It’s terrific.  Several songs fortify the Boss’s reputation as the greatest Catholic poet of our time.  My favorite is “We Are Alive.”

We are alive
Oh, and though we lie alone here in the dark
Our souls will rise to carry the fire and light the spark
To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart.

I couldn’t find a video of a live performance that I could recommend, so we’ll have to settle for the sound track with a poster.  Lyrics here.  Click here to watch it on YouTube.

My daughter Laura turned me on to the British band Mumford and Sons. They’re something special. “After the Storm” speaks of longing for God, and the hope that love will triumph:

And there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

The lyrics (most of them, anyway) are part of the video, but you can read them all here.  If you like this song, listen to “Roll Away Your Stone.”

(Click here to watch the video on YouTube.)

Some time ago I featured the Natalie Merchant song “Wonder” in our occasional “Best Ignatian Songs” feature. Here is another. It’s a setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child.”

The song is in the middle of a concert Merchant gave at a TED conference. Go to the 16 minute, 23 second point in the video. The poem is very lovely and very sad. It’s a good idea to read the poem while you listen to Merchant sing it. You’ll find it here.  Click here to watch the video on YouTube. (H/T to Tom Beaudoin.)

This is the second time  “Gabriel’s Oboe” has appeared in our occasional “Best Ignatian Songs” feature.  (The first time is here.)   The occasion is the opening of a musical based on the movie “The Mission,” a great film inspired by the Jesuit missions in South America in the eighteenth century.  The musical opened this week in Seoul.  It will go on world tour to China, Japan, Italy, and New York.

“Gabriel’s Oboe” was an instrumental piece in the movie.  Here, Daniele Gatti sings it.  (If you can’t see the video, click here.)

Years ago, I gave up on Advent. It was hard to maintain the Advent frame of mind (quiet longing for the coming of Christ) in the midst of the Christmas tumult, which seems to get started around Columbus Day.  I remember listening to a priest one Sunday urging us to take Advent seriously by waiting until Christmas Eve to put up the tree and other decorations.  You don’t live in my world Father, I sniffed, not for the first time at something I heard from the pulpit.

But that was then. Now my wife and I live in a home without children.  Advent candles, prayers at dinner, and a certain simplicity and restraint in lifestyle become more possible.  More desirable, really, because I think about the season differently.

Advent is sensual.  It’s a season of barren trees and cold hands and darkness that falls earlier every day.  We put away the patio furniture, caulk the windows, and retreat indoors.  It’s a season of light—burning logs in the fireplace, candles in the Advent wreath, gossamer white lights in the trees along Main Street.

Advent breaks down the walls between the sacred and the secular.  Yes, Christmas is a gaudy, often tasteless, commercial festival, but the core of it is family and gift-giving and music and food and happy celebration, and the core of all that is the coming of Christ into a cold, dark world.  It’s delightful to anticipate all that.  So let’s light the Advent candles and say the prayers and sing the songs.  Christ is coming.

(If you can’t see the video, click here.)

As I get ready for Thanksgiving Day I’m thinking of Speedy, “a thrill seeker in the world of project gangbanging,” as the Jesuit Greg Boyle describes him in his terrific book Tattoos on the Heart.  Speedy hailed from a broken family, left the gangs, worked his way out of the projects, and made a life.

One day, Speedy tells Greg about how he encourages his three children to read. They go to Barnes & Noble after Mass every Sunday and read for two hours.  “They be havin’ comfortable chairs at Barnes & Noble,” he says.  Then Speedy chokes up, talking about how proud he is, watching his children read.  “You’ve got a good life,” Greg tells him, and Speedy’s tears flow.

So I think of Speedy, whom I don’t know, and many people I do know, who have overcome terrible obstacles to have good lives.  They are the people Natalie Merchant sings about in “Life Is Sweet.”  (Full lyrics here.   If you can’t see the video, click here.)

They told you life is hard
Misery from the start, it’s dull
It’s slow, it’s painful
But I tell you life is sweet
In spite of the misery
There’s so much more, be grateful

We’ve been very serious on dotMagis this week. Let’s lighten up on Friday. Kick back, relax, and listen to the greatest song by the greatest singer of all. (Click here if you can’t see the video.)

A friend of mine, whose son was born with Down Syndrome, turned me on to Natalie Merchant’s song “Wonder.” I think it’s a song especially about disabled children,  but it applies to all children.  Maybe that’s why it came to mind today, when my wife and I are in New York visiting two of my kids. 

O, I believe
Fate smiled and destiny
Laughed as she came to my cradle
Know this child will be able
Laughed as she came to my mother
Know this child will not suffer
Laughed as my body she lifted
Know this child will be gifted
With love, with patience and with faith
She’ll make her way

Full lyrics here.  They’re worth reading.

John Predmore, SJ, says that Jim Croce’s classic ballad “I Got a Name” “best reflects the events in my life that have led me to trust more fully in God.” He says that the lyrics extol Ignatian freedom.

And I’m gonna go there free
Like the fool I am and I’ll always be
I’ve got a dream, I’ve got a dream
They can change their minds but they can’t change me
I’ve got a dream, I’ve got a dream.

Full lyrics here.  Here is Jim Croce singing the song in 1973.  I love the 70s hair, the bell-bottom jeans, the acoustic guitars, the nostalgia.

The Best Ignatian Song feature of this blog has been on the shelf for some months.  I’ve dusted it off to feature the “String Quartet No. 1: Good Friday Meditation” by Andrew Leonard, a recent Boston College graduate who is spending the summer with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.  Leonard, a pre-med and music major, says the piece was inspired by his experiences in the BC Urban Immersion volunteer program.

Listen to the piece here.  It’s performed by the Hawthorne String Quartet, resident at Boston College.

(Here is another BC music group, playing a very different kind of music.)

When I listened to Leonard’s quartet, I thought it sounded familiar.  Sure enough, it’s influenced by the third movement of Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, Opus 132, one of the most moving pieces of music I know.  Beethoven wrote it after recovering from a near-fatal illness.  He titled the third movement “A Convalescent’s Holy Song of Thanksgiving to the Divinity.”  Listen to part of it in this video.