PoHymn: A Rustling in the Stagnant … August 1st, 2018

 Jonathots Daily Blog

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Come, My Children

by Jonathan Richard Cring

Come, my children, let us greet

The rumble we hear on the street

Tear down the walls of religious tradition

Take a look at the human condition

Bring the drum, start the beat

 

Then let us dance to the sound

Of understanding spreading around

Love your neighbor is the scheme

Living out Brother Martin’s dream

May the blast of brass abound

 

Jimi arrives with his lick

Jesus comes and heals the sick

Love blends jazz to soul

A song celebration is our goal

 

Who am I in this holy jam?

An honest heart

I am what I am

In a climate of physical fitness

Can I get a spiritual witness?

 

Ease on down in the Muddy Waters

Bring your sisters and your daughters

‘Tis the season for the news

Race escapes into the blues

 

Gospel created the rhythm and rock

Join the festival on our block

Hometown boy is back today

His hair sporting a streak of gray

The shepherd seeking a groovy flock

 

So count your measures and blessings, too

The joyful noise is coming to you

 

This week’s reader is James, who lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, and shares his music, labor, love and ministry to everyone he meets.

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Groomers… October 11, 2013

Jonathots Daily Blog

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Graying baby boomers.

Groomers.

I am, of course, talking about those individuals born between 1946 and 1960, who broke the sound barrier by exploding like an atomic bomb, witnessing the end of segregation and the voting in of the first Catholic President.

They left a footprint on history. Maybe better phrased, they stomped their boots into our consciousness. Even though many people criticize the destination of this generation, it is difficult to challenge the authenticity of their origin. Now their ages range from fifty-three to sixty-seven–just beyond being parents, and still a little young to be the grandparents of adolescents.

Many of them have left the church and politics and are looking for other distractions to fulfill the aching memories of their youthful escapades.

But we need these graying boomers to come back to the church, the political arena, the social maneuvering and the emerging etiquette of our country–to bring the passion of the 1960s into our present age.

There are three things that baby boomers believed which have vanished from our present social climate, leaving us overly concerned about our personal needs and too short-sighted in our world vision. These are the three things the graying boomers, which I call groomers, should reinstate in their children and their budding grandchildren:

1. To question is to care.

I know my parents were annoyed because I would not “leave well enough alone,” as they phrased it, always challenging the ideas around me. Why was I able to do so? Because I was not alone in doing it. I wasn’t a renegade–I was in the flow of a generation which believed that many things were questionable, so therefore, go ahead and do it–question.

2. We can change the world.

Call it idealism or dub it presumption–but the baby boomers, for a season, believed they could affect the temperature of our country and clear out the dark clouds. There was no sitting or “waiting on the world to change.”

3. We’re all brothers and sisters.

The music, the movies, the books and the romance of the time were riddled with the notion of brotherhood and a greater understanding that “it was so groovy, now, that people are finally gettin’ together.”

This trio of ideas is in the genetic makeup of the baby boomers, although it seems to have been lost through years of cynical half-hearted participation. It is ironic that a generation which criticized possessions ended up selling out to them.

But there’s still that seed.

Nowadays someone who questions is viewed as being “a troublemaker.”

We need the groomers to come along and teach the younger folks that it’s all right to peer into the soul of our society and demand better angels.

Likewise, nobody in our age believes we can change the world. So what’s the purpose of personal improvement if your voice is going to be drowned out by the din of repetition?

Groomers need to remind the younger ones of protest, creativity and the power of cooperation. And instead of shrinking our love down to our personal families, it would not hurt for the groomers to remind the world once again that we are the family of man.

Our generation needs to be groomed by those who remember when music was not just downloaded, but taken into the heart.

We could begin this in the church, since we have so many gray-hairs there already. We might as well put ’em to work.

Who knows? It might make them feel young again.

Who knows? They could be the spark of a new revolution.

 

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity

Please contact Jonathan’s agent, Jackie Barnett, at (615) 481-1474, for information about personal appearances or scheduling an event

Fullness: Real … January 27, 2013

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Words come and go.

I remember when saying “groovy” really was groovy. Being declared “hip” was not a replacement for anything. And “far out” was actually the next-door neighbor to “cool.”

So if I can shake your memory to a time when the phrase “keep it real” was considered to be the groovy, hip, far-out, cool phrase of the day–I’m sorry to see that one go.

It wasn’t “BE real” or even “GET real,” but rather, doffed its tiny beanie of popularity to the fact that we have a job–to KEEP it real. It is really quite natural to do so if you understand all of your parts and instead of using them against one another, you form them into a team. After all, teaching human beings that we have a warring nature which is always trying to bring us down and keep us from our better selves may be the fad of the day, but it traps us in our inadequacies and fears instead of throwing us a rope to pull ourselves out of the pit of hell.

Let’s just take what we’ve learned over the past few days. (If you haven’t learned anything, let’s just take what I’ve said.) It begins with emotions–allowing ourselves to feel. We get the ball rolling by giving ourselves a permission slip to be touched by infirmities–both your own and others and admitting that we get tempted like everybody else. Is there anything more annoying than the wanker who always says, “I never feel that way…” or “Chocolate chip cookies? Ooh. They’re too sweet.” (Somehow or another, I think God just forgives us for silently plotting his death.) Everything begins with “feel.”

It is only then that we are prepared to kneel without being forced to do so or repeating what everybody is doing in a line at the altar. We kneel to worship. What do we worship? Spirit and truth. Candidly, there is much to consider spiritually which I will NEVER pursue because I just don’t find it of any earthly use. This may limit my after-life education, but I guess I don’t mind picking up a few extra classes in heaven, since I have all of eternity to complete my degree. Things that touch our soul should have spirit and truth. If they’re spiritual they’re going to be truthful; and if they’re truthful, you will find some spirituality in them.

So after we spend some time feeling and kneeling, we’re ready to move up to the penthouse, the human brain, and set in motion some healing. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that my upbringing, schooling and adolescence left behind some pretty huge mind-scars. I did get my mind blown several times–and not in a good way. I need some healing–or I will start thinking I know everything I need to know and cease to learn what will actually make me smarter and easier to get along with.

Unfortunately, as we discussed, our thinkers are not learning and our learners are not thinking. You get healed when you realize that the gray matter located in your cranium is not only supposed to think, pumping out what it knows, but also start learning what is being pumped out by what other people think.

What a great journey so far–we let ourselves feel instead of hiding behind bad moods, calling them “a poor night’s sleep.” We let ourselves kneel by taking spirit and truth into our lives as worship instead of grabbing off the fast food menu of religion with a crust of bread and a sip of wine. This allows us to renew our minds and gives that magnificent human computer the opportunity to think and learn, which heals us.

Then we’re ready to go out and deal with the world and DO AS: do the things we dream to do but perform them as if we were our own customer–give quality to our actions equivalent to our own standards. Then, instead of complaining about our lot, we deal with it. We realize that preparing is much more important than planning.

Having the right attitude when you show up makes it so much easier to change when your goals are rejected at the door. Suddenly we develop a reputation for being real. We start hearing folks say, “You’re just so real…” They tender stories us about individuals they know who are “so fake.” And all we’ve done to get this magnitude of appreciation is ask our little shift of workers, which show up at our human factory every day, to unite together in a common cause instead of pretending that each one of them owns the company.

• Feel
• Kneel
• Heal
• Deal
• And then, keep it real

You’ve reached the fullness.

There you go. Try it out and if it doesn’t work for you, realize that I’m just me. There is no money-back guarantee–because you didn’t give me any money. But if it does work, share it with somebody else and let’s see if we can’t free ourselves from the blandness that just seems to welcome insanity.

P.S.  Happy fourteenth birthday to my granddaughter, Isabella.

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity

Missing Ingredient … July 24, 2012

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It was named Chicken Groovy.

Many years ago, Ben and Josey invited Dollie and me over to partake in a new delicacy they had come up with from their own imaginations.  Chicken Groovy.(For those of you born after the invasion of the bell bottom, groovy means something really fine or absolutely sublime.) Continuing my story, Ben and Josey

English: Logo of the Groovy project (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

requested that we bring three pounds of fresh boneless and skinless chicken breasts to the party–and they would do the rest. So I went to the store, picked up the meat and we headed over to their house with our recently deceased, disassembled birds.The evening started out terrific. Music was playing, giddiness was in the air, conversation was rich … when suddenly Ben came out of the kitchen, horror written all over his face, asking Josey where… Well, I forget what was missing. Some sort of spice. It could have been parsley, sage, rosemary or thyme. It became obvious that Josey had forgotten to pick up this particular ingredient at the store. Ben was devastated and informed everyone that the evening was ruined because the meal couldn’t be completed due to the absence of this mystery spice from the East.

That in itself would have been enough “over-wrought” for me, but the failure to acquire the purchase from the grocery store led Ben and Josey into a deep discussion–in front of us–about many of their internal problems. I was fine when they were discussing the poor choice of a couch in the living room. I remained silent when she expressed her displeasure over him leaving the toilet seat up. But when the conversation moved into frustrations about bedroom technique, I decided it was time for me to get to my feet and do something.

So I grabbed the chicken, a salt shaker and headed off to the kitchen, acquired a frying pan and started to make my own evolution of Chicken Groovy. (By this time, honestly, any chicken or food whatsoever would have been groovy.) Ben and Josey were a bit shocked by my presumption but didn’t sense that they would be able to stop my progress, so I cooked up the chicken and we ate it. They were a bit disgruntled because it wasn’t REALLY Chicken Groovy, but we finished the food and left.

I never forgot that night. It amazed me how quickly we went from being contented individuals to completely enraged and argumentative, simply because there was a missing ingredient. There wasn’t even a discussion on how we could improvise with something else. After all, catsup covers a multitude of inadequacies.

The trouble is, when people want things to be perfect, they convince themselves that the key to that perfection is in surrounding themselves with the elements. Big mistake.

In like manner, I was born a twelve-and-a-half pound glob of pink, hairless “homely.” Since then, I have only added poundage to that perplexity. Somewhere along the way, though, I received a calling in my heart to use my talent to try to enrich my own life and touch the borders of the human beings around me. Honestly, I wasn’t visually suited for that, for human beings are notorious for looking on the outward appearance instead of the heart. I had a missing ingredient. But I chose to ignore it. I placed myself in the vulnerable position of being criticized initially for the possibility of being a blessing later.

About ten years ago, my knees and legs started wishing to retire. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) my mind, heart and spirit were not ready to play shuffleboard. So I find myself touring around the country, daily convincing my lower extremities to participate as they reluctantly joined the quest like a grumpy old man complaining about the available choices at a Tex-Mex restaurant.

I have a missing ingredient to being a traveler–my legs don’t work very well. I suppose there are folks who would use that as an excuse, or even as a sign from God, to cease peddaling. I just find it a humorous diversion to a necessary mission. This is why I am of a firm belief that life really boils down to one of two choices:

1. Am I going to wait for all the ingredients to arrive so I can pursue the recipe of my desire and complete it to my own satisfaction?

2. Am I going to ignore the lack of possibilities available to me and try to piece together something that resembles my desires with what has been provided?

Isn’t that it? The first group spends most of their time explaining why they don’t do things; the second group never offers an explanation, even though you might wonder how they have achieved as much as they have, considering the lack.

I guess the question I should have asked Ben and Josey that fateful night was, “Which came first–the chicken or the groovy?” Is the chicken made groovy because you have found a particular gravy to make chicken palatable? Or is the groovy made possible because the chicken, itself, is hard to screw up?

It’s a big question, folks–one we all must answer. Otherwise, we will spend most of our lives on the sidelines with a very good discourse to share about why we never did what we really wanted to do. We can cite family responsibility, minimal funding, health issues, a dearth of breaks, and even insist that perhaps it was never the will of God. But the truth of the matter is, there was some missing ingredient we thought was necessary in order to make our particular goal a reality, and we chose to sit out the contest instead of using what was available.

Here’s my philosophy–I’m going to go ahead and plant, hoping that somebody else comes along and waters, believing in my heart that God will actually get off of His throne and give us some increase.

I will continue to pursue my vision out of stubbornness, willingness, humility and a bit of silliness, if you don’t mind. You more mature folks may wish to wait for the next bus, the next opportunity, the next splitting of the sky or Halley’s Comet, for that matter. But no one lies on his death-bed and says, “Gee whiz, I shouldn’t have tried that …”

Do yourself a favor–once you resolve who you are and who God is and how the two of you are going to get along, go ahead and solve two other questions:

1. What am I going to do today that resembles my dream?

2. How much good cheer am I willing to use when things just refuse to work out the way I planned?

This is the key. It is the way to keep things groovy. Otherwise, you end up just being chicken.

   

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