MattAndJojang's Blog

I am with you always.

Matthew 28:20

A few days ago I read this excerpt from the writings of a scientist:

“For me, and probably for all of us, the concept of a personal, interested god can be appealing, often deeply so. In times of sorrow or despair, I often wonder what it would be like to be able to pray to God… and believe that I was heard, believe that my petition might be answered. When I sing the hymns of faith in Jesus’ love, I am drawn by their intimacy, their allure, their poetry. But in the end such faith is simply not available to me. I can’t do it.”

I felt sad that, although she realized how faith could be a powerful resource in her life, she concluded: “…in the end such faith is simply not available to me. I can’t do it.”

Although I personally struggle with certain aspects of my faith, I am grateful that the seed of faith has been planted in my heart.

My faith has taught me that there is a purpose for everything that happens in my life.

My faith has given me the strength to cope with the difficulties and challenges of life.

My faith has given me the courage to go on during the darkest moments of my life.

Thank you, Lord, for the gift of faith. Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.

- Matt

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

- Wendell Berry

.. because He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…

Luke 4:18

I live in Baguio. And I must say that I love it. I go out to the porch early mornings, watch the sun rise as the fog slowly lifts up from the skies. And I thank God for the cold when I think about how the heat in Manila gives me a headache and I have to hang out in malls and other places that I know are air-conditioned. Because it is intrinsic in man to seek comfort.

Sometimes people visit Matthew and myself at our home to seek our counsel. And it can get uncomfortable because we’re losing out on rest or more time together. And it is intrinsic in man to seek comfort. But we choose to listen, because someone needs our love. Sometimes people approach us who are in dire need. And even if our allowance falls short of our budget at times, we try to share whatever little we have. We meet these challenges every day. But how can we not be generous, when we have a God who was first generous to us?

Indeed, it is intrinsic in man to seek comfort. But it is also intrinsic to give comfort, for we were born to serve.

- Jojang

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, I am my mother after all,” reads a plaque I’ve noticed in store displays. It is meant as a rueful acknowledgment of the inevitability of genetic imprinting in the mother-daughter dance. We turn into some version of our mothers, is the message – never mind whether we want to or not.

In my case, that’s a good thing if it does come to pass. My mother was someone that everybody adored. So far, I’m a little short on the receiving end of the adoration factor, but who knows? It could happen, I guess. I’m open to the possibility – although to be honest, the only “mom” trait I see surfacing recently is the sudden inability to throw out leftovers.

I used to make fun of my mother for saving miniscule amounts of food that didn’t get eaten–a tablespoon of potato salad, a dab of this and that.

“You never know,” she’d shrug when I mocked this practice. “Someone may want it.”

A week later she’d throw it out. Which is pretty much the same cycle observed in my kitchen these days.

When I was in high school I began to realize how lucky I was in the matter of mothers. I had a friend – we’ll call her Beauty for the sake of anonymity – who was by any standard drop-dead gorgeous. Her mother was a holy terror, the likes of which I had never encountered. Beauty was a girl all of us envied – black hair and blue eyes, creamy skin and a perfect body. If that was not enough, she was one of the smartest kids in school, as well as athletically gifted. And she was nice on top of it! None of that seemed to matter to her mother who regularly berated Beauty in my presence and made insane predictions about the hopelessness of her daughter’s future. Indeed it was likely none of us would amount to much, according to her regular rants.

My mother was a good listener, so over the years many of my friends used her as a sounding board. Even when I went through snitty bouts of teenage rebellion, it was hard to maintain a decent level of resentment against her, especially after I was exposed to truly awful models of maternal behavior. In college I met girls whose mothers were ice queens incapable of expressing affection or drama queens in constant emotional overdrive.

As Mother’s Day approaches I can’t say that my mom is any more present in my thoughts than at other times. She’s always there, but I wish she could join us for a family gathering. She’d be so proud of her grandsons and take such delight in her great-granddaughter.

And I would take the opportunity – as I probably did not, often enough – to tell her what a great mother she was.

- Colleen Kerry Warren

I was going through a really difficult time around the autumn of 1968. It was late in the Beatles’ career and we had begun making a new album, a follow-up to the “White Album.” As a group we were starting to have problems. I think I was sensing the Beatles were breaking up, so I was staying up late at night, drinking, doing drugs, clubbing, the way a lot of people were at the time. I was really living and playing hard.

The other guys were all living out in the country with their partners, but I was still a bachelor in London with my own house in St. John’s Wood. And that was kind of at the back of my mind also, that maybe it was about time I found someone, because it was before I got together with Linda.

So, I was exhausted! Some nights I’d go to bed and my head would just flop on the pillow; and when I’d wake up I’d have difficulty pulling it off, thinking, “Good job I woke up just then or I might have suffocated.”

Then one night, somewhere between deep sleep and insomnia, I had the most comforting dream about my mother, who died when I was only 14. She had been a nurse, my mum, and very hardworking, because she wanted the best for us. We weren’t a well-off family- we didn’t have a car, we just about had a television – so both of my parents went out to work, and Mum contributed a good half to the family income. At night when she came home, she would cook, so we didn’t have a lot of time with each other. But she was just a very comforting presence in my life. And when she died, one of the difficulties I had, as the years went by, was that I couldn’t recall her face so easily. That’s how it is for everyone, I think. As each day goes by, you just can’t bring their face into your mind, you have to use photographs and reminders like that.

So in this dream twelve years later, my mother appeared, and there was her face, completely clear, particularly her eyes, and she said to me very gently, very reassuringly: “Let it be.”

It was lovely. I woke up with a great feeling. It was really like she had visited me at this very difficult point in my life and gave me this message: Be gentle, don’t fight things, just try and go with the flow and it will all work out.

So, being a musician, I went right over to the piano and started writing a song: “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me”… Mary was my mother’s name… “Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.” There will be an answer, let it be.” It didn’t take long. I wrote the main body of it in one go, and then the subsequent verses developed from there: “When all the broken-hearted people living in the world agree, there will be an answer, let it be.”

I thought it was special, so I played it to the guys and ’round a lot of people, and later it also became the title of the album, because it had so much value to me, and because it just seemed definitive, those three little syllables. Plus, when something happens like that, as if by magic, I think it has a resonance that other people notice too.

Not very long after the dream, I got together with Linda, which was the saving of me. And it was as if my mum had sent her, you could say.

The song is also one of the first things Linda and I ever did together musically. We went over to Abbey Road Studios one day, where the recording sessions were in place. I lived nearby and often used to just drop in when I knew an engineer would be there and do little bits on my own. And I just thought, “Oh it would be good to try harmony in mind, and although Linda wasn’t a professional singer, I’d heard her sing around the house, and knew she could hold a note and sing that high.

So she tried it, and it worked and it stayed on the record. You can hear it to this day.

These days, the song has become almost like a hymn. We sang it at Linda’s memorial service. And after September 11 the radio played it a lot, which made it the obvious choice for me to sing when I did the benefit concert in New York City. Even before September 11th, people used to lean out of cars and trucks and say, “Yo, Paul, let it be.”

So those words are really very special to me, because not only did my mum come to me in a dream and reassure me with them at a very difficult time in my life – and sure enough, things did get better after that – but also, in putting them into a song, and recording it with the Beatles, it became a comforting, healing statement for other people too.

- Paul McCartney