The Aged P

When you’re my age you get to go to quite a few 70th birthday celebrations. The other day we went to one where the lady in question is part of a large Scottish Catholic family so we had a ceilidh with lots of reels and jigs. The Lovely Mrs P is a keen dancer whereas I have two left feet but a ceilidh is designed for family fun so the dances were easy to follow.

The food was good and the beer and wine free flowing but eventually one of the lady’s sons presented the toast with a loving speech interlaced with wry humour. The lady herself responded with gracious thanks and then said she was going to read out “Grandma’s Letter of Love”

Now although she does have a sense of humour she is also a deeply religious lady so we were expecting something fairly anodyne. Imagine our surprise when she came out with this…

Dear Friend,

The other day I went up to a local Christian bookstore and saw a “Honk If You Love Jesus“ car sticker. I was feeling particularly excited that day because I had just come from a thrilling choir performance, followed by a thunderous prayer meeting, so I bought the sticker and put it in the corner of my rear window.

Am I glad I did! What an uplifting experience followed!

I was stopped at a red light at some road works, just lost in thought about the Lord and how good He is…and I didn’t notice that the light had changed. It is a good thing someone else loves Jesus because if he hadn’t honked, I’d never have noticed! I found that LOTS of people love Jesus! While I was sitting there, the guy behind started honking like crazy, and then he leaned out of his window and screamed, “For the love of GOD! GO! GO! Jesus Christ, GO!”

What an exuberant cheerleader he was for Jesus! Everyone started honking! I just leaned out of my window and started waving and smiling at all these loving people. I even honked my horn a few times to share in the love. One man obviously mistook me for a lady friend because he called me “Millie Rich”….

I saw another man waving in a funny way with two fingers stuck up in the air. When I asked my teenage grandson in the back seat what that meant, he said that it was a Hawaiian good luck sign or something. Well, I’ve never met anyone from Hawaii, so I leaned out the window and gave him the good luck sign back.

My grandson burst out laughing; why even he was enjoying this religious experience.

A couple of the people were so caught up in the joy of the moment that they got out of their cars and started walking towards me.
I bet they wanted to pray or ask what church I attended, but this is when I noticed the light had changed so I waved and smiled to all my sisters and brothers and drove on through the roadworks.

I noticed I was the only car that got through before the light changed again, and I felt kind of sad that I had to leave them after all the love we had shared, so I slowed the car down, leaned out of the window, and gave them all the Hawaiian good luck sign one last time as I drove away.

Praise the Lord for such wonderful folks!

Love

Grandma

No need to worry – it went down a storm and I immediately ordered another pint of Spitfire to continue the toast….

The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer painted “The Love Letter” around 1670 but the mood is timeless and so appropriate for Valentine’s Day….capturing that glorious moment of surrender to the magic of loving and being loved….

The subject of this painting is love. This is evident in the presence of musical references (the instrument held by the woman and the musical score on the chair in the foreground) which were commonly used as a metaphor for harmony between two people and the letter which the young woman holds, undoubtedly from a loved one whom she speaks of with the servant. The painters of interior scenes often included paintings within paintings to clarify the meaning of the composition. In this case the paintings on the end wall, a landscape with a man and woman and a seascape, undoubtedly refer to the absence of the loved one….

Across 350 years we are in that house. We see their faces and we can almost hear their voices.

That is the power of art….

That is the power of love….

Remember this?

Am I out of sync with this 21st century world when I say the words of that beautiful song still send shivers up and down my spine. In this world of “relationships” rather than marriages, of “partners” instead of husbands/wives, is the sentiment behind it a curious relic of a bygone age?

I wonder.

We live in a society where certain political and commercial cartels appear to have an interest in engulfing our cultural antennae with a constantly recurring tsunami of sexuality until every taboo has been swept aside. So, is there room for that notion of romance – the sheer unbounding sense of exhilaration when a man or a woman wants to be by your side and where sex is merely one manifestation of that sweet surrender of oneself to another?

For many years western popular music proved a reliable and universally acceptable vehicle for expressing the magic of that moment, either via gentle, light hearted joy

…or with the the bittersweet emotion of parting

Sometimes we wanted to broadcast to the whole of mankind that we were together by going anywhere and everywhere arm in arm

On the other hand it could be a more wistful almost ethereal dreamscape where the rest of the world scarcely mattered

Romance could sometimes be a roller coaster of emotion marked by a deep sense of yearning when your other half was elsewhere and all you had was emptiness

A cascade of words could splash the canvas of love with shimmering, vibrant colours of devotion

But a love could also be so deep that being together in itself was sufficient and no words were needed

So do songs like these have no resonance with young (or even old) people today?

I would wager that they do but as a modern music of the underground, the new cultural samizdat, publicly disowned but privately treasured…

…and these words, easily mocked by a corrupt and cynical media, must surely still strike a chord across a million crowded rooms…

Once you have found her,
Never let her go.
Once you have found her,
Never let her go!