Imagine how many times in a week you hear some variant of the phrase, “I think [insert noun] sucks”.

I don’t have any hard data on this little thought/speech blurb, but I sure do find myself in conversations where people are uttering it. And often.

One thing I’ve noticed about how much such-and-such-things-in-the-world suck, is that people often want to tell me about them completely unprompted and unsolicited. This is not necessarily bad. After all, a great deal of what we collectively know about the world, we know in a mostly negative sense. (Think of the common definition of health as simply the absence of sickness). We stand to learn something from what others don’t like. Free speech! But.

Can we please stop taking unsolicited opinions so seriously? I can’t even begin to count the number of arguments that have been started amongst friends when someone ventures an opinion (say, “I think Forrest Gump sucks”), and someone retaliates with a personal attack (“Yeah? Well, I think you suck. Maybe you think you could do better” etc). This is the most immature and unkind form of argumentation and I continue to be amazed at how people well into their twenties can keep this kind of thing going.

Use of the Ad hominem attack not only runs the risk of being logically fallacious, but almost always results in the attacker sounding overtly uncharitable and abusive.

In this sense, I think “free speech” is still an optimistic ideal for the vast majority of conversations that I find myself having.

Normally summer is considered the month of preservation – not a time of growth or decay, but of holding steady, of staying the course. For me though, this summer has been anything but preserving. Instead, I’ve found myself grieving. Two very good people have died, and I struggle to accept and understand.

When I was fifteen, I stood in front of my english composition class and read the following lines from John Donne’s “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions” written way back in 1623,

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The meaning of those lines has not changed for me in the years that have passed since I first read them aloud, but it has deepened in much the same way that a river does as you walk towards the center current – gradually the texture of the ground slips away from you, until the water runs fast and cold and smooth underneath your feet.

After the service today, I thought about (among many other things) the beautiful music we play when people die to celebrate their life and to commemorate their death. This afternoon there was the twisting chromaticism of the organist’s interludes: dense, rich, beautiful, and sad. Then the people singing together, the men and women around me harmonizing unconsciously and without effort in fifths and octaves. Next was Schubert’s immortal and ethereal Ellens dritter Gesang. And finally, the flattened blue notes of a repentant slave trader.

In less than an hour, over 700 years of music in a building whose basic form was designed in Rome over 1500 years ago. Now, I sit in front of a screen typing words written four centuries before I was born. All that time and effort and human creativity and none of it makes it any easier for me to understand what happens when we die.

This has been a summer of departure. And in so many ways both large and small, the world feels more lonesome than I ever imagined it could be.