Sparks from the Fire

I think about truth a lot.  It’s fast becoming my life’s greatest interest – far out-pacing music, money, and the Yankees.  Daily dealings with all the various concepts of the word “Inspirational” seem to focus my life more and more on the spiritual.  I’m not resisting it; in fact, I’m opening up to it.  And it’s certainly opening up to me.

We’re in a spiritual age.  Looking back through history, these ages come in cycles.  This is the next one.  Go into any bookstore.  Books for seekers abound.  Christian music is the one genre of music that has actually grown during this terribly trying time in the music industry.  Oprah announces discussions with Eckhart Tolle on line and millions show up to partake.  Never before has content for seekers been more available.

I study my own religion, but I read voraciously Wayne Dyer, Yogananda, Ram Dass, Spalding’s Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East, Joseph Smith’s Book Of Mormon, The Gospel According to Jesus, Tolle’s A New Earth and on and on.  I like to say, “I’m getting’ it any way I can.”  Truth, that is.

Stop at Judgement; turn right on Truth

One thing strikes me along this road.  Why is it that so many people think they have a corner on truth?  How preposterous to think that the Christians are right and everybody else is wrong – that the Sunnites are better than the Shiites.  There’s gotta be truth to every religion – otherwise, why would people be drawn to it in the first place.

I suggest it’s not religion that separates us, but language.  “The words are different, so the philosophy’s gotta be different” is the mistake we humans make.  And we Christians are some of the worst offenders.  How arrogant to think that only Jesus got it right.  Jesus did get it right, but he wasn’t alone. (more…)

“Thanks be to God,
who gives us the victory
through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

We begin with a joyful celebration of gratitude from First Corinthians.  It is our victory, this rising from the dead.  It is Jesus’ victory over the cross that he bore, but ultimately it is mankind’s victory over the false belief of death.  The way-shower illuminated the truth of life for all mankind and we celebrate on this day.

…a sad supper
taken at the close of day,
in the twilight of a glorious career
with shadows fast falling around;
and this supper closed forever
Jesus’ ritualism
or concessions to matter.

We flash back to probably the most famous meal in the history of mankind where the Master said his goodbyes, not only to his followers, but also to his own illusion of life in the mortal state.  The music turns melancholy befitting the moment.  Mary Baker Eddy’s text from her book Science And Health beautifully sets the tone for the evening of farewells.

She continues…
The final demonstration
of the truth which Jesus taught,
and for which he was crucified,
opened a new era for the world.

No one knew it at the time, but the world had changed.  Now death was no longer the ultimate end to life, but we had an eternal future.  The most feared experience of life, the most eluded event of life on Planet Earth had suddenly become a lie and an event that was simply a transition, not the end.  And so we celebrate this wondrous fact.

“Thanks be to God,
who gives us the victory
through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Then Mrs. Eddy continues again…
Glory be to God,
and peace to the struggling hearts!

Christ hath rolled away the stone
from the door of human hope and faith,
and through the revelation
and demonstration of life in God…

(Christ)
hath elevated them
to possible at-one-ment…

Yes, the stone was the door that was opened and let in the light, the illumination of the truth that death is not real, and is a lie in life.  The revelation first came to Mary and then to Jesus’ disciples as they struggled to accept the concept of this new idea.  The music becomes like a child skipping down the lane lost in the energies and wonder of life.  As each of us accepts this revelation, we become at one with a new mankind, a new spirituality where the old inevitable no longer exists.

And so we proclaim through Mrs. Eddy’s words…
We acknowledge
that the crucifixion of Jesus
and his resurrection
served to uplift faith
to understand eternal Life,
even the allness of Soul, Spirit,
and the nothingness of matter.

Our Master
fully and finally
demonstrated
Divine Science
in his victory over death and the grave.

Here is the spiritual fact set forth.  Here is the meaning of Easter.  Here is the cause for celebration set purposefully in the woodwinds of the orchestra – simply, straight forward, matter of fact.  And so, once again we must celebrate.

“Thanks be to God,
who gives us the victory
through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Then once again Mrs. Eddy reminds us…
The periods of spiritual ascension
are the days and seasons of Mind’s creation,
in which beauty, sublimity,
purity, and holiness —
yea, the divine nature —
appear in man and the universe
never to disappear.

No, there was not just one ascension, only one miracle.  Instead, this was a new world being illuminated for all of us that choose to live it.  This is not an old story retold through the centuries, but a present possibility today.  Now is a period of spiritual ascension.  These are the days and seasons of Mind’s creation.  I choose to walk in this light.  Will you walk with me?  I choose to live in the divine nature.  This doesn’t make me better than anybody else; it is just a choice I choose to make.  I choose to live in the new world where death has no reality.  I choose life instead.  I celebrate this on this day of Easter and every day.

And the pipe organ begins to peel the paint from the walls of the old church and the orchestra fills the rooms of Mind and the timpani and cymbals crash through the barriers of human existence.

“Thanks be to God,
who gives us the victory
through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Allelulia
Allelulia!

This new song, with lyrics from the prose text of Mary Baker Eddy and the Bible, and music by yours truly, will debut to the world Easter Morning broadcast via the Internet from Boston’s First Church of Christ, Scientist.  Sung by their soloist, Julia Wade, and played on its huge and wondrous 4 manual pipe organ by Bryan Ashley, it will also be released on Julia’s new CD, Solos, in early May of 2012.  The CD version will accompany Julia with pipe organ and full orchestra.

Easter is only and ultimately about the resurrection.  The rest of the story is the old picture.  We welcome in the new!

I’ve always loved Christmas songs.  Who hasn’t?  They are iconic references and symbols of one of, for most of us, one of the real highlights of childhood – and then we get to repeat it all in a slightly different fashion as parents years later.  These songs take us through these enchanting times and play in the background like a movie score.

Previous to this month I had only ever written one Christmas song – a song recorded by the Jenny Burton Experience called Christmas In My Soul.  They say, in the music business, that the month of June is the month to write and begin one’s Christmas album, the preparation of such to be around 5-6 months.  Who can write Christmas songs in June?  What a silly notion.

This year the Missus has come up short in her search for the perfect Christmas song for her Christmas Day performance in church.  She had decided to employ a terrific Boston harpist and together with her organist, Bryan Ashley, keep it small and delicate in accordance with the spiritual implications of the morning.  Last year she used a brass quintet plus the church four manual pipe organ and blew the roof off, so this year she wanted to do something completely different.

But no song came to mind to fit the criteria.

While watching her go through her turmoil, I happened to mention one day several weeks ago that perhaps I could write one for her.  This was said in a fit of compassion for her plight while I was in the middle of the mad dash of the final throes of my own CD, Goin’ Home.

Seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, she grabbed at the offer and signed me up.  At first I thought, “Oh no, what have I gotten myself into?”  Where would I ever find the time to do this? (more…)

It will come as no surprise to anyone that Inspirational music comes to us as a result of thinking.  Before it is expressed through the fingers or gets jotted down at the end of a pencil, it first originates in mind.  I’ve learned, as a composer, that when I’m stuck and the music is not pouring forth, to take my hands off the keyboard and let mind imagine it first.

This always works.  It works because I’m going back to the root of creativity – mind.  I’ve always said that my best work comes through me figuring that the best ideas come from God or a higher power or source, but the portal that the ideas come through is mind.  Perhaps they don’t originate in mind or brain, but they exist somewhere out there or ‘in there’ already and we’re just here to provide the portal.

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One of my favorite things to contemplate is a statement by one of my heroes, Albert Einstein, who said that something isn’t there and so we see it, but rather, we see it and so it is there.  This got me to thinking.  I realized that he was really saying that as we think it, it appears.

So we create our world in our minds.  This goes for the physical world as well as our imaginative world.  And on second thought, this goes for each of us as well.

I’ve always found this to be a pretty mind-boggling concept, but not really when one considers the world of our dreams.  When in that mental state, the world around us seems as real as the world around us in our waking state.  Then there’s the awakened state that most spiritual leaders often speak of – that which we are working to attain in this life on Planet Earth.  Three states of thinking: Dreams, Waking and Awakened.

“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state?” – Plato

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Christmas in Central Park

Christmas in NYC!  There’s nothing quite like it.  Truly beautiful, but sometimes a bit too much about Santa and not enough about Jesus.  Each year I go back to the same moment years ago when I first wrote this song to try to rediscover the essence of Christmas.

I’ll share it with you now:

Christmas In My Soul

Music and lyrics by Peter Link

It looks as though

There won’t be snow on Christmas

And the holly and the mistletoe

Were sold out long ago

The midtown rush was just a little too much

And this year Santa and his reindeer

Never left the pole

Suddenly it just don’t seem like Christmas

Suddenly it don’t seem so natural

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In the long run, what does it matter?  Christianity’s biggest split seems to me to be was he or wasn’t he.  Was Jesus God?  Just doesn’t make sense.  To me it seems like he was not.

Don’t mean to stir up a hornet’s nest here (or maybe I do), but I think a ton of people here got it wrong.

For my money, Jesus was the way-shower, the exemplar.  He was sent here to be an example for us on the subject of how to live our lives.  He was a human being just like us and that was the point.  He showed us our potential – what we could be if we knew what he knew and practiced what he practiced.

He taught us how to think, how to treat our fellow man, how to heal, how to live.

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I believe it was in The Universe and Dr. Einstein by Lincoln Barnett that Albert Einstein said, “We think that an object is there and so we see it, but rather, the truth is, we see it and so it is there.”  I paraphrase this quote, but it’s a startling concept that has stuck with me for years since I read it.

Einstein

I’ve always been fascinated with this wonderful little man with the big mind.  He turned the world’s perception of ‘things’ inside out on so many levels.  I have read or struggled to read many of the books about him over my lifetime and though I nearly always get my mind blown by some historic revelation that he had, most of the time I’m frustrated because I can’t keep up with the mathematics.

But this one idea has always stuck with me — that what we perceive to be true about matter is, in fact, false.  It’s not that we see something because it’s there, but rather, it’s there because we see it.

So we’re each making this all up, this material existence.  This revelation by one of our foremost thinkers and physicists has been supported in so many ways by other great thinkers like Guatama Buddha, Lao-Tsu and Jesus over the centuries and now the discoveries in quantum physics also support the idea that we are living this life experience in an illusion that is being made up in our mortal minds.

I love to contemplate this stunning consideration and laugh at its consequences.  I am making this all up – all that I experience through the five physical senses.  What I see, what I hear, what I taste, what I smell, what I feel with my hands and body.  How does one even get out of bed in the morning?  What are we to do with this?

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