When You Realize Mission Impossible Was Just a TV Show and Give It Up (Bach, James Cleveland, Eduard Schütt, Verdi, Judith Mickelson, Debussy)

There is a sense in which the impossible is easier than the possible ... I thought this realization last week would take me out...

Therefore, Frau Mathews, what you most desire for those not so called and formed like you is and has always been absolutely impossible.

But I didn't die. The Ghost of Musical Greatness Past had a better idea.

Sleep on this for an hour in this Q-Inspired afternoon, Frau Mathews, and outside Q-Inspired, take a week, and live, and walk, and think and sleep on it for seven nights. I am far too old and not handsome enough to be Prince Charming, but you get your beauty sleep all the same, not under a curse but a blessing, until I wake you.

Now, that accidentally inverts the sides of the fourth wall ... since I got my beauty sleep in Q-Inspired in an hour, that would make the non-fiction seven days something like a very active hour's dreaming ... on one day, I walked under cloudy skies, silver-clad and quiet, and it occurred to me: Love is eternal, indeed, and so there comes a time for those who are bound to time to recognize: eternity must handle its own things. Recognizing what is impossible on this side is an open door to appreciate what can only be done through divine action ...

... and in passing through that door, one must change willful yet hopeless effort for humble, prayerful patience ... and here we go with Bach again, telling us to dress up ...

I had to dress my soul up well for the weekend ... quite a lot of it was an absolute nightmare, but I was helped by knowing where my responsibility began and ended. The cessation of effort toward the impossible left more time and energy to meet the expansion of the possible, and all I am responsible for is what is given me to do. All the rest ... I kept getting the lesson ... I must place my hope for all other things in the Lord and walk on...

Finally, the weekend was over ... I was hurt in every way but at last could rest ... I needed a reverie, and discovered a new composer and his lovely music ...

... and at last had time to walk and think, and think and walk... taking rest from all things and people and situations I cannot change in the midst of the beauties of spring as I went about my business.

So lovely were spring's things ... to dream of blue skies covered in cherry blossom clouds...

... and thus, on the fictional side of the fourth wall, to wake up in Q-Inspired time just an hour after the previous week, wrapped up in the voice and embrace of the Ghost of Musical Greatness Past, who had gotten himself situated under this beautiful cherry blossom tree.

"Sanftlich, mein geliebtes Blumenkind ... sanftlich ... ich habe dich."

Gently, my beloved flower child, gently ... I have you -- that last about as near as German can get to the U.S. term, "I got you!"

"I know we had an entire plan for May 1 -- as you know, we German men get a little excited in May, Frau Mathews -- but you are completing your writing of this on April 30, and April has showed itself to you as the cruelest month on its way out. I think that we should stay here in the near meadows of Golden Gate Park a little while and gently walk all that off, and if you are feeling well and strong, then, you know I have a plan."

"I am so glad you are neither a tenor or even a baritone," I teased him, "and although I would love to find a recording of you singing 'Im wunderschönen Monat Mai,' my guess is only Frau Möll ever had that privilege on one hand, and on the other hand, I enjoy the deep wisdom only an ethereal basso profondo can bring to the table."

"With a voice like this, folly is too deep to bear and might even sound too much like truth."

"I noticed in your extant recordings ... never did an evil character survive without you giving away their lies ... when I realized King Phillip was up because he wanted to be in Verdi's Don Carlos, and then checked what he did in the next scene ... that was a shocker, and since then, I have learned the actual history! The whole thing is a lie!"

"Indeed it is, Frau Mathews. Very few people have ever taken the steps you did to determine the facts, but I commend you for following the string all the way out. It is germane to today's discussion."

"Will you sing King Phillip's aria for the purpose?"

"The pathos of Ferruccio Furlanetto, in the original Italian, is more suitable to the lesson at the moment."

I listened intently ... indeed, the overwhelming sense of the king being almost crushed by sorrow and exhaustion fit the true story well.

"Yikes," I said. "I mean, it is bad to the bitter end ... King Phillip lost four wives and more children than I can count, including poor Don Carlos ... between the problems he was born with and what happened after that head injury ... he never had a chance. The only thing King Phillip could do, confronted by the dashing of his personal hopes over and over, was to keep handling the possible and letting God handle the impossible, because he woke up every day needing a miracle and it didn't happen until the fourth child of his fourth wife finally came and survived!"

"That is what I wanted you to see about the real King Phillip -- not at all what you would consider a good man, though some better than Verdi has him -- but still, we can understand him as persevering, even through what needed to be done regarding his only beloved son at that time. When Verdi sets it to music that the Grand Inquisitor said, 'God gave His Son!' it is monstrous in that context because the murder of Don Carlos is being planned ... but in real life, King Phillip did have to deny his son the throne to save Spain, and confine him for the rest of his life.

"Imagine, Frau Mathews, the long agony ... to have prayed that the boy be healed of his early ailments ... when he fell and was so severely injured, to pray that he would survive and be given the desired answer, only for one's son to become even more unfit to rule. There came a day when King Phillip had to accept the impossible and embrace the possible, in a way that trumps stage drama."

"I'm sure if I had to get into a suit of armor and go take my son to confinement myself, I'd be ready to rest in the Escurial," I said. "You can't make that kind of horror up."

"And yet, King Phillip lived to be 71 years old, Frau Mathews, and in the 1500s, that was ancient. Sometimes, all there is just to keep going."

"I close our consideration of King Phillip with the comment that if a man is considered very great in his world, often what he must endure to keep him human to himself is also very great. The more inclined to pride you are, the more intense the circumstances will be to assist you in humility."

"You are such a soft-spoken basso profondo," I said, and laughed. "It definitely pays not to cultivate pride. Life has pains enough, but then when you get to that level, yikes."

"It is a great blessing to you, Frau Mathews, that you have learned and are deepening in your learning of cultivating humility. The fact that you endured this weekend and did not allow circumstances and your resulting emotions to overwhelm you is excellent evidence ... you focused on the possible, because you had already learned: the impossible is God's province alone."

"King Phillip's great aria actually says that," I said. "He wishes that the crown could give him the ability to see into the hearts of men, but he acknowledges that is reserved for God alone."

"And had he read as much as you have, he would have spared himself the rest of the missteps of that opera, knowing it was vain for him to sit up late and eat the bread of sorrows."

"Because God gives His beloved sleep," I said, "the Escurial not required, either -- thus it is written in the Psalms."

"And thus it is, on my side of the fourth wall, there was no need to wake you until I had carried you here ... I observed your nightmares going by, but they went by, only as long as their necessity."

"Plenty long enough, but you are right; I have done what was necessary for me to do, and the rest I have left in the Blessed Hand ... and come out to be healed among blessings only that Hand can provide."

"Your wisdom, Frau Mathews, is ever increasing."

"Tell me this, mein geliebtes Blumenkind. What surprised you the most in the things you experienced this weekend?"

I thought about this and sighed.

"The thing that makes Don Giovanni such a tragedy. Folks will have all good available to them and fumble it over something that is going to be taken away from them anyway or is already lost, and then be surprised when they descend into hell. To a point I understand why people sometimes mistreat me in their insecurities ... but when it gets to the point of people sitting there just fumbling every good thing in the circle ... to the point in which thousands and millions of dollars are in the loop ... I mean, I can't even better some of these folks' conditions if I tried -- I can't even get them past $10 worth of hurdles, so OF COURSE, thousands and millions aren't even in play for them. I hurt for myself, having weathered three attacks, but I can deal with that. I play defense very well. But I hurt for them more, because I see they are willfully lost, and the consequences of the errors of their ways are waiting on them like the demons are just below the stage in your performance of Commendatore at the Met, just waiting on time to run out and for you to hit that D2."

"You know it, and they do not," he said. "It is a terrible position to be in when you see that they are resisting the knowledge of both better and worse, when you see that they are blind to and will hurt you for trying to show them anything that will not enact whatever they want ... and when you love them, still, and you know the eternal stakes, but you also know you can go no further."

He paused a long moment, and then sighed.

"We are past Marke's lament, Frau Mathews, and even past Mozart's Commendatore -- even past all I could do with both. We will have to go far higher than that, and in doing so, find a singer and composer of greater humility, though the song is very beautiful in setting the last and greatest of all of Scripture's laments."

"Matthew 23:27," I said. "Not the kind of thing about the Lord Jesus Christ that is often remembered, and certainly not the kind of thing about being like Him that anyone would want to learn ... but to the extent that I can in my mere mortality, I know now more of what He must have felt like, looking at His own beloved city, and knowing what would happen there in the coming decades, and turning back only to those who believed on Him."

"What is not in the song, Frau Mathews -- what phrase is missing from the song?"

I had to think, and then I shivered.

"'You that kills the prophets' ... and that was just a few days before Good Friday, too."

"Do not underestimate, Frau Mathews, in your mere mortality, what the stakes are for you in these matters. This is the third spring out of four that you are getting this lesson. All three were of course necessary ... you had to come to understanding what cannot be done, and that is difficult when you are very adept, and also very loving. It is exceptionally difficult when you have seen people you love die for not following wisdom. But you also can die, Frau Mathews, for not following the wisdom you know. You are alive to see the spring because you have followed wisdom about your true physical condition as it was revealed to you both last summer and this winter ... you must continue to follow wisdom in all affairs, and the path is not dim, but bright.

"I had thought this week that we might resort to any of our favorite watersides, but this week it is foggy and windy to our west where they lie in Golden Gate Park, so I thought we might go from the near meadows of Golden Gate Park to the lower reaches of Alamo Square Park -- that would give you more than enough of a walk."

"Indeed, that will be plenty."

He smiled, and then that smile became poignant ... such intensity of emotion there!

"I am but a man, Frau Mathews. It has not been easy for me, in Q-Inspired terms, to watch you have nightmares and not wake you -- to watch you sit in the pain -- but I was forbidden to utter a note, and what I was given is the assurance that your pain would bear good fruit for you ... and that, afterward, I might do all that my heart desired for your comfort, and that the way itself would be made glorious for you. So now: come with me!"

Every street, indeed, had spring loving on it ... the first blue rose smelled of bright blueberries with rose ...

... and the first yellow rose was a little shy ...

... the wisteria was framing up other flowers ...

... and just overgrowing a whole two-story house because spring...

Up to Alamo Square Park by its true north entrance ... along the way there was gold in them there hills...

... and all the way up the stairs, hollyhocks glowed to meet us...

... and another cherry blossom tree came into view and reached out for us in love ...

Up still more, from at our feet ...

... to above even his much higher head ...

... spring was doing its abundant blessing thing!

I watched him glowing up as we went ... Germans do love spring and I just knew he could just feel May 1, the day this will be posted ...

"Look, I know you are about to act a whole May fool and next week it will be solidly May, but I'm just going to remind you that you are a sensible old basso profondo!"

"Thank you -- you know I always need the reminder! I remind you that there is still a first time for everything, with my pockets burning holes in my money and having a known high G to work with!"

"Oh no," I said. "What is a Blumenkind to do in May with you?"

"Everything not to be done in June, mein Blumenkind!"

He laughed, and swept me clear up the hill ...

... and carried me up still higher, still laughing ...

... and then danced me up still higher, approaching the top of the hill ...

I started wondering if Alamo Square was a little higher than I thought that day, and if really we should have acclimatized before coming up quite that fast ... between spring and the sunshine and the music of birds singing above his merry laughter, and the speed at which I was going around and around, I was getting giddy ... the speed from which I had come from my deep, grave considerations and the great pain of the weekend to this complete relief had stunned me, and he still had not sung a note.

He did, however, have a shocking thing to say ... for he was also giddy, relieved to the point of being overjoyed while looking at me glowing up and glowing up even more as we went around and around. He had gotten younger in appearance to my near-peer, barely hanging on as old as 50-ish, and his dark eyes were fiery as he drew me close to him as we spun again around that loop at the top...

"What if you remember what you learned in 2024 ... of the glories that have been given to you, and of the possibility that when you are not doing what is specifically charged to you, you may pass all of the impossible by, and live here again, and have your cup running over even in the presence of your enemies ... what if this is your life, Frau Mathews, between here and all that you are called to do, and you cannot bring anyone because this is for you? The life you are to live is given only to you!"

Long ago, in a book three inches thick by a man named David Spurbeck, I had read in my early twenties that among the most worldly things anyone does is to constantly be doing things, even under the presumption of doing them for good and God. He said the most spiritual thing to do was to get clear on the will of God, do the things in that will, and at all other times, rest. He pointed to the example of the Lord Jesus, Who went aside and took His disciples aside to rest quite often -- away from the necessary affairs of ministry to be alone in the presence of God and rest. For all of 2024, into 2025, I had observed this without firmly remembering where I read it ... but TWICE, it has saved my life in this last nine months.

"Because it is your life we speak of, Frau Mathews ... ach, meine liebe Dame, mein geliebtes Blumenkind ... your precious life can only be lived as it is called to be lived ... what if this is it along with your responsibilities, and what you did to save your life is what you must do always be doing to save your life? What if you, and this, are more than enough?"

"Well, tell me anything in that big, beautiful bass voice of yours, and I'll at least consider it," I purred.

"And that is all I ask, for you know I do not lie!"

So on we danced into May, but by no means toward home in this long, long Q-Inspired day ... while I took that thought with me to consider for another week on the non-fiction side of the fourth wall.