Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

I sat on the roof and kicked off the moss
Well, a few of the verses, well, they've got me quite cross
But the sun's been quite kind while I wrote this song
It's for people like you that keep it turned on
Your Song, Elton John

You'd think that people would've had enough of silly love songs
I look around me, and I see it isn't so
Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs
And what's wrong with that?
I'd like to know, 'cause here I go again
Silly Love Songs, Paul McCartney 

What is it to be able to write love songs? To have the lyrics of so many love songs that we almost don’t know what to do with them? What is the power of having so many love songs, generations of love poetry, ones that were sappy then and are sappy now? Is there a point to a love song when whatever images it evokes are no longer culturally relevant? Who remembers what was so critical about having a brand-new pair of roller skates and giving one’s significant other the key?

There is a book of Ukrainian poetry that is, in part, filled with love poetry. Some of the love poetry is the very silly gushy type we would expect. Much of it, however, speaks of lovers lost to conscriptions, imprisonment, and war. Alongside this there are all manners of poems making up the complete known works of Taras Shevchenko, it is known as the Kobzar. To write this poetry in his native Ukrainian, to write honestly about the reality of Ukrainian subjugation under the Russian Empire, Shevchenko became acutely aware of the realities of imprisonment. His work, from the 1800s, is the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature. He wrote using the local variation of the Cyrillic Script used within Ukraine.

A thousand years before Shevchenko began writing the Kozbar, two monks, Cyril and Methodius, were asked to come to Khazars, an empire that included part of modern Ukraine. They began learning the local language, began translating the gospels and liturgy into them, but encountered a major hurdle. There was no regional written alphabet and transliteration of the language using the Greek alphabet was awkward, at best. This brought them to create the Glagolitic Alphabet… a derivative of which is in use today in the Ukraine. It is the alphabet they use to write their silly love songs.

I don’t think that Cyril and Methodius were thinking that hundreds of years in the future their alphabet would be used to write silly love songs, to make a world filled with silly love songs in Ukraine. The seriousness of their work at the moment probably precluded such thoughts. On this, the day of silly love songs, when we celebrate not Saint Valentine but Cyril and Methodius… I cannot help but pray for the day when the Ukraine is again a place of silly love songs. That making that happen is perhaps the most serious work of the moment.

Pax,

—Ben