Philipp, Paul & Johann: Carry It On

I was reading my devotional this morning and saw today was the day the Calendar of Saints for the Lutheran Church commemorates three 17th century hymn writers. For some reason reading that at a quarter to four in the morning (I was up after I'd killed two flies in Jeffrey's room that kept him from getting back to sleep, and it took a while for me to get back to sleep too) got me thinking of the American folk band Peter, Paul and Mary of whom I know very little about besides that name!

Today's title I finessed with the title of a documentary on the latter band.

But many hymns did get their start as folk music, didn't they? Granted, Philipp Nicolai, Paul Gerhardt, and Johann Heermann may have never made the same program that I know of; nonetheless, we can be impressed. And now that passage about Dante from The Story of Mankind comes to mind ... something to work on, knowing more about people than just their names. For my planned NaNo novel "Threnody" beginning next week, I've picked so many people I know born in November


and using their first names, not necessarily their natures, to make a populous world.


Helen. Buddy. Donna. Melissa. Alice. Justin. Elizabeth. David. Michael. Laurie. That's just the first ten I've got here, and I have names for every day of November. On my way to work this morning, I also got an idea for a fight scene on Election Day involving one of my main characters, and his own ambivalence between putting down a villain and fulfilling a promise he'd made -- no playing hero on Election Day! He's a polling place volunteer -- will strain him and his wife a bit. But what doesn't?


Dang, I've missed Daniel and Cindy so much.


Gadgetmaster and Beacon, by other names. Oh don't worry, the whole secret identity thing went out the window with the Sino-American War fought over three years in the mid-2000s and super humans found themselves eligible for drafting into the armed forces of their respective countries. By and large, the War was fought by proxy in most every other country ... at the start of this story, the last gasp of super heroes and super power conflict has died down.


Hallelujah, I can see!

And while I was at my annual eye exam with Dr. Schmidke this morning, I finished Maynard A. Force's 1950 collection Jonah Speaks. It's a collection of forty-seven sermons elucidating ideas on what Jonah and the people around him did right and wrong, in and out of the will of God, on the course of his journey to Nineveh ... we don't know if "and back again" is accurate, for we are left at the end of the Old Testament story with a question. (From Jonah 4:11. Read the book, it's not long.)

Jonah understood then, and was ashamed.

I remember that sentence from another collection of Bible stories I'd read growing up, though I must admit I'm entertaining the idea one sermon suggests -- that Jonah stayed after the people of Nineveh had repented of their sins to teach them God's ways and God called him to task for being so petty and wanting the Assyrian capital wiped out; for understandable reasons, but still petty. If the LORD God isn't the God of the whole human race, then whose is He?


Anyway, my eyes are great. Though seeing the veins of your eye reflected back at you ... ick.


From the author and illustrator who brought you Winnie-the-Pooh -- Disney dropped the hyphens -- comes Prince Rabbit and The Princess Who Could Not Laugh (LOC 66-10328), two stories written by A.A. Milne and illustrated by Mary Shepard that I at first thought were one story, but I was wrong. Funny to see what efforts people and rabbits will go to in order to win a throne or make someone laugh, in almost a Dr. Seuss without the rhymes way.

Now carry on in heaven, like Philipp, Paul & Johann!

David