My name is Tony. Actually, my name is Anthony Joseph Rosati - I am named after my great-grandmother Antonia whom I never met but everyone seemed to love very much and my Grandpa Joe from whom my father also took his middle name. I am a perfectionist which means I think about a lot of things but also that I am afraid to fail. This will be a blog about failing. It will also be a blog about loving because I am trying very hard to love you because I believe very much so that this is what God wants me to do. I love God but not as much as he loves me but I am trying at this too. There are many things that I do not understand about God and about you and some of those things I would like to know better but others I have reserved to remaining in the awe of their mystery and only worrying about occasionally. This will be a blog about figuring things out sometimes. At the moment at hand, this is a blog about beginnings, and I think it should set the tone for what might come and I have a good story that might encompass a good deal of those things.
I spent the summer after my senior year of high school living a hyper-romanticized dream. I believed in the conquering power of love and thought that music was love's greatest ally. I smoked a lot of pot and thought that pot was music's greatest ally. The general state of the world around me was a source of great angst and only my closest friends and I seemed to sense what was really going on. Meanwhile the rest of the world wandered around, listening to their popular music, watching their televisions, making their money and being generally numb to existence around them. Sad people made me sad. Stupid people made me angry, but we, with our hearts and our guitars, were going to show them that love was all and help them open their eyes. Revolution. Of course I put flowers in my hair. I still do.
Really though, we had starry eyes and we were sad about the world (and for good reason, I'd say) and in love with music and our feelings were real if not slightly self-righteous and romanticized but God forgive me if I ever look at someone with hope in their eyes and write them off as young and naive. I have learned much in the six years since, but, as a wise old wizard once said, “Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young….”
All of this is only background though for the story I wish to tell. In mentioning that summer long since past, it is also important to note that I was involved in a pseudo-romance with a girl named Zoe. Some months earlier, Zoe and her boyfriend/guitar player extraordinaire Aaron had smashed our hopes of saving the world as the messianic musical ensemble then known as The Nameless Project by declaring that they were "leaving the band" - reason being that both Aaron and Zoe were raised as Christians, and though they had not been living as such for the past several years, they were returning to this faith and felt that our views and goals for life were no longer compatible. This of course met with fury and a good deal of angst on the remaining half of myself and charismatic front-man Nathan - mostly that their silly religious notions and their petty god were smashing this really great thing that we had going, and we certainly weren't able to go on without them. There were other aspects to this (probably even more responsible than what was mentioned above), but still, this isn't the story I want to be telling... Onward.
Things happened and Zoe and Aaron are no longer together and now Zoe and I happen to be spending a good deal of time together. I described the relationship above as pseudo-romantic because I was into her far more than I was willing to admit to her or myself and there was no actual romance involved in the relationship aside from strictly platonic, late-night adventures of the sort that ooze what one hopes might be romance and that leave you thinking about them long after you get into bed and throughout most of the following day. I do believe that this is noteworthy for the progression of my tale, if only for context.
Often accompanying these escapades would be conversations of a spiritual nature. One night at my parent’s new and yet-to-be-furnished house, I asked her whether or not she thought that I was going to hell. This doozy was handled deftly and I only wish I could remember what she said, but I do remember being quite unoffended by her response. In continuing deftness, she then excused herself for the evening, citing the fact that she was performing a song she had written (she had just set Psalm 51 to music) at church the following morning. Very casually she said I'd be welcomed to come if I wanted. I accepted in an equally casual manner and we parted ways. I was dog-sitting at Nathan's parent's house at the time, so the rest of my night consisted in getting high and then attempting to sleep on a couch while trying to pretend that an offensively friendly, tennis-ball-wielding golden retriever who momentarily responded to the name Spencer was not hovering inches away from my face, trembling violently in hopes that maybe, whether in anger, disgust or pity, I just might acknowledge his slobbery presence.
Of course I woke up late and had no time to return to my home and brush my teeth or anything like that and I found myself debating whether or not I should even go, but, for whatever reason, I decided, stink-mouth and all, to carry on. In the parking lot I was trying to remember the last time I'd been to a church but couldn’t come up with anything solid. Inside, it was far different from St. Paul's or some of the other Catholic churches I'd been to for weddings or funerals. I was immediately unsettled by the warmth with which everyone that I came across greeted me. There was a noticeable glimmer in their eyes and I specifically remember Yvonne Peters welcoming me with such a genuine light and care that I didn't really know what to do. Shortly after my arrival, Zoe left her seat and headed for the stage, along with her sister Chloe whom I'd spoken with on several occasions before and knew well enough. Zoe began to play her song and Chloe, who was a dancer, had choreographed a dance to accompany the music. I had never been one to care for dancing or watching dancing or dancing myself but I became completely unaware of anything except for Chloe - more specifically the expression she wore on her face.
This is why I took the little detour above to explain about my romantic notions of love and music. I'd spent much of my senior year of high school and all of that summer wondering why humankind was so completely effed up and sad and cruel and awful. I knew there were good things, beautiful things even, and a lot of them, and these things somehow seemed to make it all worthwhile. And I don’t mean nature, which yes, definitely is beautiful, but not the sort of beauty that restores your faith in humanity. I tried to read At Waldon Pond in high school and couldn’t bear to finish it I was so bored – no, I mean art, human creation… if someone from this ugly race could show me something of value in itself and those around it, could turn it’s pain into something unspeakably gorgeous, that was hopeful… and yet, most everyone I admired and believed to be doing this very thing and seeing the same things I was seeing didn't, in fact, end up saving the world or even transcending it but instead they were all dead from drugs or suicide or lost in some drunken stupor or angry and bitter and ultimately just sad. My hero all through middle school was Kurt Cobain. Then it was Trent Reznor (who probably isn’t known so much for how beautifully he depicts the world, but still…) - then in my senior year I started to really get into Jack Keruac who I later learned had died of heart failure, drunk in a lazy boy at his mother's house... I couldn't understand this at all. There was some nameless fear that these artists and livers of life could simply not overcome - these people who inspired me and gave me hope for the goodness in the world... they were missing it. I knew the world was beautiful, I could see it all around me, so why was everything still so sad?
Which leads me back once more to the tale at hand – back to that church building on Karl Rd, back to Psalm 51 being played by a girl who I thought I was in love with, but ultimately, back to Chloe and that expression on her face. Their was nothing else in the world at that moment except for her expression – it pierced me to the absolute core of my being and the day that I can put it into words and convey even the slightest likeness of this expression is the day that I will consider myself a satisfactory writer. Until then, I will say that it was the perfect summation of what my heart had been searching for – love, yes, love was there blanketing everything, but, more noticeably, there was grief – an ache that was the ache of the world. It was a pure sorrow that made me feel as though before this moment I had never actually known what the word sorrow meant. The most effecting and confusing component of all though was the undeniable sign of gratitude. Gratitude? For what? Everything around me sucked and life was cruel and people were ignorant and mean and starving and killing each other… why did my heart recognize in this pained and weary gratitude the perfect expression of what it was pining for? And it wasn’t so much that love, as I first asserted, was covering over all of these things, but more like all of these things combined, along with some other nameless qualities, amounted to love, or rather I recognized that these things together were love. This is what, without a doubt, the love that I had claimed to believe in so deeply actually consisted of, and this reality was utterly heartbreaking for some reason.
I wept. I wept silently and from my very soul. A question had lodged itself in my mind and every time I tried to calm myself, the question would restate itself and I could do nothing but weep in the face of it -“why does love hurt?” It seems somewhat trite now and I can look at this question with the objectivity that most anyone else would. I can even venture a guess, and more particularly, it’s one of the questions that I am most interested in pursuing on this blog, but at the time it was not a question at all to be pondered, not some problem to be understood and solved or hypothesized over – it was a literal presence, it was the crucified son of God himself, the living word, the man of sorrows confronting me and my rebellion with that great and grief-stricken love with which he loved me and in the gesture of his open arms I saw the friend who did nothing but love me, who I wounded, over and over and intentionally, and still, with that heartbroken smile, continued to extend his hand to me – I saw all of the times I’d hurt those around me and been directly responsible for the ugliness of the world… me guilty of the wretchedness, the suffering, the sorrow in the world – and yet I saw all of these awful things I’d done not before, as a barrier, but within his still open arms. They were covered, contained, not disregard or ignored – they were very real, they were very painful, but they were not in the way. I knew nothing of theology, I had never read “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13), nor did I even really know that this was Jesus Christ calling to me, but I knew that this was love before me and I knew that I didn’t belong here, and yet somehow, by no doing of my own, it was ok that I was here, it was good that I was here and it was not only what I truly wanted but also what whoever was responsible for bringing me here wanted as well.
Beginnings – new ones. This is the story of Jesus making himself known to me and me saying, yes Lord, I believe. Weeks of struggle ensued, but I believe. Sometimes I don’t, but I believe. “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) Things still hurt, and they still don’t make sense all of the time, but they do – There is a God who loves us and there is a God who we turned our backs on and there have been serious repercussions for this action, but there is a God who loves us still and there is a God who made a way back to himself. This whole thing is fraught with love and pain and it is true and beautifully, mercifully so. Simone Weil says “The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it” – our actions are irrevocable, but love covers over a multitude of sins and this at a price, that of the life of he who loves us, but it is a price that for whatever reason, he deemed us worthy of. Praise him.
