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  • These Matters of Faith
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News and Views

That Philippians quotation again? Surely not...

3/2/2019

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8 Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
9 Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.

Round about the same time that I was hearing this from the headmaster at my old school (another club, one that at the time I definitely did not want to be a member of - the one whose members have all this C of E stuff woven through the core of their being - and would actively have done down), I was hearing this from the Smashing Pumpkins:
Goodnight, to every little hour that you sleep tight
May it hold you through the winter of a long night
And keep you from the loneliness of yourself
Heart strung is your heart frayed and empty
Cause it's hard luck, when no one understands your love
It's unsung, and I say
Goodnight, my love, to every hour in every day
​Goodnight, always, to all thats pure that's in your heart 
And, despite what my fifteen-year-old self might have said, they both have a place in whatever I have become as an adult. For the longest time I would have told anyone who would listen that my school experience was relentlessly negative and my redemption came from music (mostly; I refused to read fiction for the most part as a teenager because of hating English lessons). But I feel those verses from Philippians, especially now. It's not just a memory, or a flashback. It is as though they are carved through me, shaping me in a way that, as a teenager, I would have been disappointed with. Well, I'm not a teenager (and haven't been for some time) and though in some ways I'm spectacularly immature, I don't think that my immaturity is anything like what it is to be teenager. The main reason for that is that I think as teenagers and young adults the big thing is to be mature, grown up, have responsibility, the power to make decisions (even stupid ones), be independent. And, later, in (real?) adulthood, those urges that swelled - those needs to be more of an adult than current life circumstances allow - just matter less. 
Perhaps it's the uniquely de-skilling process of having children. The need to draft in those same people who as a teenager I was so keen to cut myself adrift from has been humbling. And the sense of responsibility to another person, even a tiny semi-human degenerate psychopath (or 'toddler', as they are more commonly known), is equally humbling. And thoroughly knackering. Particularly to an un-aerodynamic, ill-tempered baby like mine.  
By way of a further and final point, it's worth saying that I would have been on the same side as Butthead when he's watching the video for Creep by Radiohead. I'd have been saying to Corgan and crew that they better start rocking or I'd really give him something to cry about. Which really tells you all you need to know about me as a teenager...
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    Andy Richardson

    When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
    I summon up remembrance of things past,
    I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
    And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
    Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
    For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
    And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
    And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
    Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
    And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
    The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
    Which I new pay as if not paid before.
    But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
    All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

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