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LETTER FROM FITZ - 2021​

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The renowned cellist Yo Yo Ma once came to the home of computer pioneer Steve Jobs and performed a private concert. Jobs was deeply touched, and told Ma,"Your playing is the best argument I’ve ever heard for the existence of God, because I don't really believe a human alone can do this."

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Christmas 2021

 

God! Wouldn't you love to have been at that performance? One of the great joys of my life is that I'veseen and heard and experienced what seem like very privileged moments of ecstasy, perhaps like whatSteve Jobs felt after that YoYo Ma recital. Some have been in theaters and concert halls. Some havebeen during ritual acts in churches. Others took place in soup lines and charity kitchens. So many of them struck me as "glimpses of the divine."

(I don't know who coined that phrase. I do know that they continue to be very real phenomena in mylived experience.)

 

You've known me to go on and on about Leontyne Price, Barbara Cook, Judy Collins and Joan Baez.Among others. Also Solti and the CSO and/or Michael Tilson Thomas here in SF conducting Mahler.Sigh. Here's something I've never told anyone else about. It was during a performance of Strauss'Der Rosenkavalier. I was at my usual spot, standing room at the very top of the War Memorial OperaHouse here in SF. When they got to that glorious final trio (perhaps the most sublime operatic moment ever composed) I got so engulfed in the performance that I felt as though I were levitating and was startled to feel myself dropping back to grounded reality. It wasn't so much an "out of body" moment as a very, physical, intensely sensual experience. But more mystical than bodily.

 

One of those glimpses of the divine is etched on my soul and will go with me someday into eternity. It was Christmas night in 1984 when we did our first Andre House meal at the "shelter" (a tent city)alongside the railroad yards in downtown Phoenix. Mike Baxter and I and a small bunch of friends madeturkey soup to share with several hundred homeless folks. The preparations were a comedy of errorsbut we somehow (think "by the grace of God") managed to pull it off. When we got back to the house we were so transfigured that we spontaneously prayed with both laughter and tears.

 

The late, great San Francisco longshoreman/philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote about a passionate state of mind. I treasure that, realizing that not being trapped in only logic unlocks the door to a whole world of otherwise remote, unattainable experience. When our great American poet Robert Frost writes of his"lover's quarrel with the world" he could have been describing me. And I am humbled. Someone (yes, Iadmit, it was on Facebook) told me a few months ago that I am "very opinionated". How the hell cananyone live to be 78 and NOT have some strong opinions and convictions?

 

Maria Shriver writes a syndicated Sunday column. Here is a passage from one of them. "All of this (disturbing news) was on my mind as the week was coming to an end, but then I watched a meeting between Pope Francis and President Biden and I instantly felt better about our world. Here weretwo warriors in the fourth quarter of their lives still trying to make the world a more equitable place.They haven't given up. They are still engaged, still out there fighting against negative forces in theirown faith and in their own bureaucracies. They are still believing and they are still hopeful that ourbetter angels will carry us forward". (10-31- 2021)

 

Do you know who Louise Erdrich is? I didn't until a few months ago. She is a Native American (Chippewa and Ojibwe) writer who won this year's Pulitzer Prize for literature. Here is a passage from her 2006 novel The Painted Drum LP. One of those things you read and whisper "I wish I had writtenthat."

 

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are hereto risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you arebroken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness.Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

 

I wish you a holiday season and a new year of tasting apples and of other potential glimpses of the divine. Merry Christmas, my friends.

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