"Ransom my heart, baby, but don't look back"

Ah, Pat is still lovely and rockin' at 57! She hit her peak in the early '80s, when I was in high school. This video is from a live show in London, Ontario, Canada back in 2007. Despite it being spontaneously shot, the sound is reasonably good. The look and feel of this video reminds me of all the shows at Fairgrounds in Salt Lake. This a good traditio for these late winter days of desolation, one of those it's us against the world, at least for one night, songs. You know the kind from way back, when you'd meet someone, have an intense encounter that seemed to alter the fabric of time/space, then you either acted like you didn't know each other the next day, or you never saw each other again?

Don Giussani asked: "You care a lot for a particular person, but how can you care for that person, how can you feel tenderness towards her, while thinking that tomorrow you may not see her anymore...?" Here's why in those days I was not capable of tenderness, that I was complicit in the cover up: "Only if you perceive the eternity of the companionship with this person, what she brings out in you, is the sign of your relationship with the eternal, only then is the relationship with this person an eternal relationship. Love for this person is eternal love." I am grateful that I have such a companion who brings out in me my relationship with the eternal. It is my prayer daily that I bring out the same in her. It was the eternal, even then during long nights spent looking for something, I didn't know what, beckoning me and now I am able to "proclaim your mighty works for you have called us out of darkness into your own wonderful light" (Preface I for Sundays in Ordinary Time).

Reducing faith to morals blinds us to how passionately God loves us. Increasingly, I come to see morality as descriptive of the life of one who follows Christ by living her/his experience, which means not seeing morality as proscriptive or prescriptive (i.e., you must not do this and you must do that). You have to be honest about your experience, which is not as easy as it sounds. Hence, you need a method.

St. Agatha, the virgin and martyr whose feast is today, gave witness to how tenderness for another is rooted in eternity when she said to Quintianus, "My courage and my thought be so firmly founded upon the firm stone of Jesus Christ, that for no pain it may not be changed; your words be but wind, your promises be but rain, and your menaces be as rivers that pass, and how well that all these things hurtle at the foundement of my courage, yet for that it shall not move"- ora pro nobis!