Old Friends: Musings on Living and Dying Well

Can you imagine us years from today

Sharing a park bench quietly?

How terribly strange to be seventy!

For someone younger than thirty, Paul Simon waxed quite philosophical when he penned these words more than forty years ago. He now gets to experience firsthand the answer to his rhetorical question as he turns seventy this year. Oddly enough, seventy doesn’t seem that old anymore, perhaps due to increased life expectancy. They say that the fifties of today are like the thirties of yesteryear, so perhaps seventy is equivalent to fifty. It is all a matter of perspective, particularly as the baby boomer generation is getting on in years.

Love and Death in Sicily

Both of my parents were born in a small village called Torre Faro (“lighthouse”), which is situated on the very northeast corner of Sicily, right across from the Italian mainland, where the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas converge into the Strait of Messina. Like many of the town’s long time residents, both sides of my family hail from a long line of fishermen.

Dueling Love Songs from the Amalfi Coast

During my all too brief trip to Italy this summer, I was able to spend a day on the Amalfi coast and enjoy its breathtaking scenery. Sorrento is probably the best known town on the Amalfi Coast (also known as the Sorrentine Peninsula), having been immortalized by the Neapolitan classic love song, Torna a Surriento. The song is well known internationally, has been translated into English (Come Back to Sorrento) and at one point even inspired a hilarious parody by Allan Sherman.

Alla Luce del Sole

I don’t know much about Josh Groban, but I certainly enjoy his music. The man definitely has talent.

I guess he can best be described as an American Andrea Bocelli, lending a classical style and a tenor voice to a broad variety of musical genres. Some are just sappy love songs, the typical boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, please don’t-leave-me type of songs, but even these have a certain grace, dignity and class thanks to Groban’s commanding voice and classical accompaniment. The fact that many of his songs are sung in flawless Italian or Spanish further broadens their appeal.

While I am not sure of his religious background, a number of his songs seem decidedly Christian, such as his rendition of Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring or You Raise Me Up (Though the latter doesn’t explicitly mention Jesus.) Others , such as Remember When It Rained (one of my favorites) are even less overtly Christian, but they have all the markings of a believer’s prayer.

Talkin' 'bout my generation!

Though I was born a little late for it, I consider myself a child of the sixties. I imbibed the culture and the music from my older brothers, and even from my dad, whose negative experiences growing up in fascist Italy caused him to be sympathetic to a generation that questioned authority, and particularly a generation that opposed the war in Vietnam. Though my brothers and I were otherwise raised to be pretty straight-laced kids that otherwise steered clear of the uglier side of the sixties generation, and even as I have since rejected much of the political ideology in favor of common sense conservatism (i.e., I grew up.), there is much about the sixties that causes me to look back nostalgically. If nothing else, I still love the music.

Miserere: A Sinner’s Prayer Set to Contemporary Music

The sinner’s prayer is as old as Christianity itself. It can be as simple as the lines in the parable told by Jesus in the 18th chapter of Luke, where He commended a despised tax collector for uttering the simple words: “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” A variation of the prayer has been repeated since the dawn of the Church every Sunday in liturgical masses, be they in Latin or in the vernacular:

If spoken in sincerity from the heart, such a prayer is indeed salvific. Of course, the danger of its repetition Sunday after Sunday is that it easily becomes formulaic and loses its meaning, even though the “Miserere”, as this portion of the liturgy has come to be known, is unsurpassed in its simplicity, beauty and truth.

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.

And yet the prayer has a way of taking on a life of its own, even breaking forth into contemporary pop culture and music, which otherwise seldom makes room for the sacred. An example is the song Miserere, composed by Italian artist Zucchero Fornaciari (known simply as “Zucchero”), with alternate English lyrics written by U2’s Bono.