I was doing my nightly bedtime reading of the Vatican 2 documents, which I find soothing and conducive to harmonious alpha waves, when I stumbled across this strikingly poetic passage that just begged to be read aloud. I therefore had Maria read it to me after she finished the dishes and put my kids down for the night. She has a lovely voice and a lilting Latin rhythm to her reading. I didn’t even hear her leave to go home to her own family. The last I did hear was this beautiful passage:
“It is in accordance with their dignity as persons-that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility-that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth, once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth. However, men cannot discharge these obligations in a manner in keeping with their own nature unless they enjoy immunity from external coercion as well as psychological freedom. Therefore the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective disposition of the person, but in his very nature. In consequence, the right to this immunity continues to exist even in those who do not live up to their obligation of seeking the truth and adhering to it and the exercise of this right is not to be impeded, provided that just public order be observed.”
It was fresh in my mind when I woke the next morning. It had stirred some memory of poesy in me, of the soul immersing variety. I had a particular quote in mind, a lost stanza, as it were, I needed before proceeding with my prosaic diurnal duties.
I called a Monsignor with whom I have been close friends for many years. He recommended contacting his own son, a bright artistic lad we had both come to know soon after the revelatory paternity test. “Well, Tom, he’s what I’d call a Scholar of the Life Lived,” said my friend cryptically. So I took his advice and rang J__ up on the phone.
I read parts of the inspiring document and he chuckled, “I’ve got the poem you’re looking for.” And he did. Here it is:
“In me you see a man alone. Held by the habit of being on his own. A man who listens to the trembling of the trees. With sentimental ease. In me you see a man alone. Behind the wall he’s learned to call his home. A man who still goes walking in the rain. Expecting love again. A man not lonely. Except when the dark comes on. A man learning to live with, memories of midnights, that fell apart at dawn. In me you see a man alone. Drinking up Sundays and spending them alone. A man who knows love is seldom what it seems. Just other people’s dreams…”
From Frank Sinatra’s gorgeous, deep, and extremely devotional album of the same name.
I hummed the melody through my long public transit commute to the office. Even beatboxed it a bit to myself, the silent solo of my life’s own unique drumbeat. People ask me how I remain on such an even keel, never losing my temper or, seemingly, my way, despite the temptations of disagreements at work or in politics. I can be alone, unruffled by the petty maelstroms of others, quite unresponsive to them on any secular level, because that is MY freedom of religion and Vatican 2 tells me so. With a little boost from the Chairman of the Board himself, now in his own appointed place in God’s kingdom. And so I give my thanks for the me I’m free to be:
“Deus, cuius misericordiae non est numerus, et bonitatis infinitus est thesaurus: piissimae majestati tuae pro collatis donis gratias agimus, tuam semper clementiam exorantes…”
Amen.