Another Footnote: Song

When we’re in love, we sing!

We don’t sing only when we’re in love. Though we do sing then. You lie there, smiling at the ceiling. After a while, you get up: it’s morning, and past. You go downstairs, look absently into the refrigerator. You lean out the back door, blinking into the sun. You’re humming. Your heart is full.

But all kinds of things fill our hearts. Consider: “The struggle itself . . . is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus). Maybe he’s singing Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang”: Hoo! Ah! Hoo! Ah! Is he singing because labor is grace—the struggle itself—or because song brings grace to the labor.

But Camus? And grace? Wait a minute!

True. Camus may imagine a world without God. At least, he imagines an absurd world—without meaning. But we are separating grace and meaning (not to mention thinking about natural rather than saving grace). Besides the full heart comes from something other than “meaning.”

Whatever that means.

It means that joy happens (by grace). We don’t think about what our joy means until later. We just sing: “I cannot keep from singing.” Or, “Who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp? Who put the ram in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong?”

Rick