God Is Alive

But There is More Than Magic Afoot

Dear readers, I suffer from an illness that is actually part of a major pandemic that is far more dangerous than H1N1. I regret to say that it is highly contagious. I have given it to my children, and have shared it with others that I encounter. I suffer from Stubbornness. Even though I have been inoculated against it, I have a free will, and so it lurks in the shadows and jumps on my back too often for me to be able to say I have been healed of it.

It shows up in subtle and not so subtle ways. The non subtle is when I open my mouth, and don't get my foot in it fast enough, so that people hear dumb things coming from it. When I write my blog, it can happen too, when I don't think before I write. Or when I respond to email. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

A friend, who is becoming a dear friend, in no small measure because he has called me to account a couple of times over some of my stubbornness that has reflected itself in emails particularly, invited me to listen to a song that he really likes recently.

The song was God is Alive, Magic is Afoot. It is sung by Buffy Saint Marie, and is from a poem by Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen is a seeker. You can read it in his poems.

But in this one, I got stuck on the "Magic is Afoot" part. The stubborn part of me said this is not right, and in a certain context that is correct. I struggled with this for several days, knowing that there was something deeper going on that I just could not grasp for the moment.

Finally, it came to me, and broke through the stubbornness. Magic is, in this case, just another word for the Holy Spirit. God is Alive, and His Holy Spirit is Afoot. So, I got stuck on a word, and missed the context, and therefor the real deeper meaning.

That inevitably brings me back to the words of Jesus:

For he who is not against us is for us. Mk 9:40

Duh!! Anyway, you can watch a video of Buffy singing this song from you tube below. Try not to be as stubborn as I was initially.