Margaret’s Song

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  There was a king in Thule,  True even to the grave;  To whom his dying mistress  A golden beaker gave.  At every feast he drained it,  Naught was to him so dear,  And often as he drained it,  Gush’d from his eyes the tear.  When death came, unrepining  His cities o’er he told;  All to his heir resigning,  Except his cup of gold.  With many a knightly vassal  At a royal feast sat he,  In yon proud hall ancestral,  In his castle o’er the sea.  Up stood the jovial monarch,  And quaff’d his last life’s glow,  Then hurled the hallow’d goblet  Into the flood below.  He saw it splashing, drinking,  And plunging in the sea;  His eyes meanwhile were sinking,  And never again drank he. “Margaret’s Song” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) in “Faust. Part I.”

Gone Fishin'?

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Were do you like to fish?

Where thousands of people are stepping all over each other, using the same bait in a lake known to have been heavily fished day after day for decades?

Perhaps you like to fish where the catch is already gorged with bait, swiming wearily away as you plop more bait-a-plenty near them?

Maybe you enjoy fishing for a place among fishermen, jockeying for the pole-position, stumbling over one another?

Or do you prefer to fish where the terrain may be difficult, where danger may lurk in the vicinity, where the lake is attainable only after sacrifice and hardship, but, oh, the hungry fish! Multitudes fight and starve for even one morsel of food, and many others have never so much as seen one time the bait you have to offer . . .

Is that you? Do you prefer the last fishing hole?

That is missions.

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