A vest of bombs

 

Here's a new poem by a friend of mine, Jeff Hardin:

GOSPEL

Someone’s always trying to destroy someone else.

Actively. Without remorse. With a vest of bombs.

With rumor, innuendo. With mischaracterization.

A network, a think tank, an issued report. More often

than not succeeding. Civilians flee. Borders close.

A lawsuit moves forward. A colleague resigns.

Self-interest competes against self-interest. An

invisible hand, a shaping force, a deity. Words are

arranged for maximum effect. In speeches. Prayers.

Interrogations. This new freedom. This new gospel.

and a quote from Thomas Merton:

Everything Falls Away

 This very humid and grey August weather is really getting to me.  I go to garden and am overwhelmed by the enthusiastic weeds.  A mosquito bites me on my back, and I give up and go back inside.  Hurricane Ida, which just hit poor New Orleans,  is barrelling northeast into the country and heading toward us with drenching rains expected to arrive by Wednesday.

Here's a poem by Parker Palmer that I love:

Sweet Nathalie Dahlia -  need this in my garden

Tolle Lege

 

On the feast of Saint Augustine,  I've decided to post excerpts from my long poem Pick It Up and Read,which was published as a chapbook by Finishing Line Press in 2008.  I am posting the pieces that related particularly to Augustine, and then spin off into something more personal.

Pick it up and read,

 

sang the child's voice beyond the wall.

The first word was SAID.

Three children -

a boy and two girls,

played with a dog and a cat.

White children with brown hair

whose plain names excited me

to hear in the air from my own mouth.

 

I had trouble telling

through from thought,

though from thorough.

 

My father picked me up at school.

We walked by the statue of Saint Agnes,

through the cement arch

from schoolyard to street.

I thought about knowing how to read SAID

though, by itself, it was lying alone in a corner,

but put it behind someone,

and it opens its mouth to a thorough coverage

of the news of the day.

Pick it up and Read  (II)

 

 

 

You hated that your

father saw your teenaged body

in the bathhouse,

bleated greedily about

grandchildren.

 

Even then, your joy was not in the pears, their taste,

the juice running down your neck,

not in the picking,

but in the stealing,

the stealing,

then, the thought of stealing.

 

Pick it up and read

Pick it up and read,

sang the child's voice beyond the wall.

 

Don't leave that garden

until you remember

those tears from your body.

 

The stirrings stayed

never left you

haunted you with dreams

of sweaty couplings,

 ragged cries of delight.

 

  

Pick it up and read ( III)

 

 

In October, I thought the paper lied

about Nickel Mines and the one room school

where the milkman

lined up ten Amish girls

in front of the  classroom

and shot blood and brains

on the blackboard.

My red-haired cousin, eight years old,

the one with garden genes like me,

the one who shared a grandfather,

fell still alive, though,

a bullet through her jaw.

 

Pick it up and read,

sang the child's voice beyond the wall.

 

 

 

Augustine and his mother, Monica

 

 

 

 

 

What a friend we have in Time

 

45th reunion of the Class of 1970   Saint Joseph College, Emmitsburg Maryland

Misty Sunday morning, I was listening to this song by John Denver:

What a friend we have in time
Gives us children, makes us wine
Tells us what to take or leave behind

And the gifts of growing old
Are the stories to be told
Of the feelings more precious than gold

Friends I will remember you, think of you
Pray for you
And when another day is through
I'll still be friends with you

Babies days are never long
Mother's laugh is baby's song
Gives us all the hope to carry on
Friends I will remember you, think of you
Pray for you
And when another day is through
I'll still be friends with you

Friends I will remember you,
Think of you, pray for you
And when another day is through
I'll still be Friends with You

Friends I will remember you,
Think of you, pray for you
And when another day is through
I'll still be Friends with You

Yesterday I attended the Memorial Mass for a well-loved colleague who died at age 70 of colon cancer.  I knew her for all the twenty-one years I have been at the Mount; so many of the colleagues from those years were at this funeral that I felt as though I were in one of my "convention dreams" come to life.

Time tells us what to take and leave behind.  It made me think of all the friends during all these 73 years of my life... who I've taken with me, and who I've left behind.

artist: Charles Courtney Curran

Better Late Than Never

 

I took this photo of a Monarch caterpillar in the garden in 2017.  Don't have a good photo of the ones I've seen this year, but at last they are here!

Much later than previous years,  at least three weeks later, the caterpillars are showing up in the garden.

They lift my spirits  in the midst of suicide bomb killings in Afghanistan, as thousands of Afghans and Americans rush to the airport to leave the country, now that our soldiers are leaving.

So much is wrong and divided and hostile and downright crazy in the world, but still we have caterpillars.

Things Fall Apart; the center cannot hold

 

The poem from our Modernity class today:

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

 

   The Second Coming,  (1919)

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;

    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know

    That twenty centuries of stony sleep

    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 Yeats wrote this poem in 1919....

the falcon cannot hear the falconer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Time's excuse to frighten us

 

Georgia O'Keeffe       Sunrise 1916

Here is the second poem in my Modernity students' Poetry Packet:

The Future     Rilke

 

 

  The future: time's excuse

to frighten us; too vast

a project, too large a morsel

for the heart's mouth.

 

Future, who won't wait for you?

Everyone is going there.

It suffices you to deepen

the absence that we are.

 

 

We are here as on a darkling plain

 Today is the first day of class for me for this semester.  I have 24 students -  mostly junior and seniors - none of them English majors.  To think that these young men and women weren't even born in the 20th century!

I begin this Modernity in Literature class with Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach."  I talk about the changing way that we thought about many things from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Dover cliffs by moonlight

Dover Beach                             by  Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) 

 

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

 

 

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

 

 

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

                                                                       

Dover beach in 2020

Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone...

 

I'm being followed by a Moon Shadow...

report from  Yahoo:

August full moon will be a blue moon and a sturgeon moon

A full moon unlike any other in 2021 to rise this weekend ... Bright moonlight will fill the night sky during the weekend when a seasonal blue moon rises on Aug.

The most common type of blue moon is the second of two full moons appearing during the same calendar month. While that scenario played out last October, when we had a full moon on Oct. 1 and another full moon on Halloween, that’s not the case this month.

Although most sky watchers will be calling this the August blue moon, its most common nicknames are the “sturgeon moon,” the “green corn moon” and the “grain moon,” according to the Farmers’ Almanac and the Old Farmer’s Almanac.

Here are two poems about the moon which most do not know:

Amores (III)

E. E. Cummings - 1894-1962

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

there is a 
moon sole 
in the blue 
night 

             amorous of waters 
tremulous, 
blinded with silence the 
undulous heaven yearns where 

in tense starlessness 
anoint with ardor 
the yellow lover 

stands in the dumb dark 
svelte 
and 
urgent 

           (again 
love i slowly 
gather 
of thy languorous mouth the 

thrilling 
flower)

Will You Come?
Edward Thomas - 1878-1917
Will you come?
Will you come?
Will you ride
So late
At my side?
O, will you come?
Will you come?
Will you come?
If the night
Has a moon,
Full and bright?
O, will you come?
Would you come?
Would you come
If the noon
Gave light,
Not the moon?
Beautiful, would you come?
Would you have come?
Would you have come
Without scorning,
Had it been
Still morning?
Beloved, would you have come?
If you come
Haste and come.
Owls have cried;
It grows dark
To ride.
Beloved, beautiful, come.

Afghanistan concedes to the Taliban

 I read in one of the many essays about this situation that after 9/11 the US should have (1) routed the Taliban and (2) taken down Osama Bin Laden,  and that was it.  No nation building.  But we stayed and tried to help the Afghans with nation building.  And as soon as we pulled out ( happening now)  the government collapsed.  So much for our efforts.

One of the frightening things about this situation is that it seems to have history repeating itself.

Some Facebook friend posted this meme the other day, and it really hit me:

The world is now too dangerous

 

Art by Christian Schloe

I am sorry I don't know the author of this, but I like it very much:

Artist: Christian Schloe

The Mass was in Latin

 

The Chapel of the Miraculous Medal at our Motherhouse in Paris, decorated for the Solemnity of the Assumption today, August 15.

Born in 1948.     I wasn’t conscious of the Mass that I went to with my parents until I was in grade school. It was all in Latin. Pius XII was Pope then.  I didn’t think twice about this.  For me, it was just as a fish in the sea. I loved the feast where the priest walked around the inside of the church, carrying the Blessed Sacrament in that large golden Monstrance, with altar boys swinging incensors and little girls in white dresses scattering flower petals on the floor.  Was the feast Corpus Christi?  Or was it after a Forty Hours devotion?  I do not know.  The aura of it was what pulled me. What did I think?  Feel?  It was not participation; it was audience, and I liked being part of that audience. But I didn’t think anything of it. I couldn’t imagine church being any other way.

Then, in the beginning of seventh grade – probably October of 1960,  the Sisters started putting up posters and talking about Vatican II.  It seemed to be very important to them, but it didn’t matter to me in the least, even though I was a fervent Mass goer, even daily Mass.  We began to have “dialogue Masses” , but in Latin, where we learned the responses and said them out loud, in Latin.

I am not sure when – but I think it was when I was a freshman in high school, at my well-loved high school, where we had Mass in the Auditorium, not weekly but fairly occasionally regularly (?) that the Mass changed . The priest was now facing the congregation, and the Mass was in English.  Again, all this momentous change took place with me just going with the flow.  I didn’t much like the Folk Mass music, and much preferred the Latin songs in three part harmony. Somewhere in those Religion classes, we were being taught the significance of the changes. But again, I was a self-absorbed teenager.

Skip through the years 1966-70, and on into the early 70’s, with all of the ups and downs of my life, during which going to church played a very peripheral role.  Until my heart changed , and I picked up on that call I had heard in 1960, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. It resulted in 1978, when I joined the Daughters of Charity, and church, and Jesus, became central.

I was still thinking of myself as a “Vatican II Catholic” and resisting any of the “old time religion” pious practices and language we got in our novitiate. And I was sent on mission to a wonderful “post Vatican II” parish in the very progressive Diocese of Richmond, and I loved it. 

I am trying to fast forward, through the 80’s and 90’s, until 2000, when I was in Campus Ministry at the Mount, and living in our large Seton Shrine building.  And, of course, reading things on the Internet.

The Internet made me aware of the revisionist/restorationist movement in the Catholic Church, led by a few vocal priests and many more very vocal lay Catholics. 

Now  it is 2021, and all these Catholics who weren’t even born in 1965,  want the Lain Mass.   And they want the priest with his back to the congregation.   On Facebook posts, they abbreviate and call it the TLM -  Traditional Latin Mass.  And the present Pope is trying to rein that movement in.  But many of the young priests and seminarians want it too. 

I’m not even talking at all about the Gospel message of peace and justice and being servants.  I know those Restorationists still hold those values.  They just don’t talk about them very much.  I also know that these young Catholics who weren’t even born in 1965 don’t know about some of the negative baggage that had accumulated around the clergy and the TLM.

It’s the lack of charity and the divisiveness  - the split between the two groups, each one chastising the other,  that upsets me.  In this last year of becoming hooked on the TV series “The Chosen”, and reading the Facebook group posts from “Catholics Who Love the Chosen” as well as the really wonderful posts and prayers of Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus, and who is a fervent Catholic, I have moved from the left to the center and maybe even to the right-center in my attitude to prayer and liturgy.  I still prefer the “Vatican II Mass” but I am not so bothered by the proponents of the TLM.

I still find the mantillas and  incense pretentious, and still complain about some outrageous displays of clericalism,  but  I have returned to saying the Miraculous Medal novena each morning ,  and the Divine Mercy Chaplet each afternoon,   and Centering Prayer in between.

Amen.

Just recently, Jonathan Roumie and Dallas Jenkins ( the evangelical writer and director of "The Chosen") met with Pope Francis.  Notice especially the expression on Jonathan's face in this photo:

In the August heat, some lines and colors

 

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

~ May Sarton

art by Rex Preston

Sacre Coeur, Paris

 

On this day in 1976, I was in Paris with a foreign study group. It's the feast of Saint Lawrence. I went to Mass at the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.  Heard the responsorial psalm "Je t'aime qui donne avec joie."  I love those who give with joy.  I wrote this poem:

Sacre Coeur, Paris

 

 

In the Metro,

I could not feel the rain.

Emerging as from sleep

at the other end of Paris,

where the rain just stopped,

you were waiting,

waiting for me

on top of the highest hill.

 

Heart pounding speed

into my legs,

I climbed a million steps

to meet you.

 

Tired hitchhikers

sang beside your door.

Rain wet city

glistened at sunset,

stretched before your face.

You called stories out of our hands,

gifts out of our eyes.

You never closed for the night.

 

The stars rose down

on your round white crown

like halo,

like Bethlehem.

 

As the round earth rolls

 Art by Lara Paulsson

I love that observation by John Muir...especially since my unforgettable visit to Muir Woods in California in 1996.  Was it that many years ago?

The Same Stars

 Art by John Atkinson Grimshaw

The bee is not afraid of me

 

The bee is not afraid of me

by Emily Dickinson

 

 

The bee is not afraid of me,

I know the butterfly;

The pretty people in the woods

Receive me cordially.

The brooks laugh louder when I come,

The breezes madder play.

Wherefore, mine eyes, thy silver mists?

Wherefore, O summer's day?

 

July carried me away in a whirl of gardening!   Now it is August and I am turning my mind to the upcoming semester.  I'll be teaching one section of Modernity in Literature ( same course I've taught for about twelve years) and again on Zoom.

Covid is surging again.  A new "Delta" variant,  and this time around about 60% of the US population is vaccinated.  But that other 40% are refusing for a variety of crazy reasons.  We vaccinated folks , it turns out , can still get Covid, but a mild case with flu-like symptoms, which doesn't mean you won't feel very sick.  And worse, we can still transmit the virus, even if we don't get it.  So the country is moving back to mask mandates --- or at least to begging people to wear masks.  

I blame Donald Trump for brainwashing so many Americans into believing this virus, and this vaccine, is some kind of hoax.  They are dying as a result.

painting by Mats Rydston

I love this prayer from Teilhard's  The Divine Milieu:

“It was joy to me, O God, in the midst of the struggle, to feel in developing myself I was increasing the hold that you have upon me; it was a joy to me, too, under the inward thrust of life or amid the favorable play of events, to abandon myself to your providence.

Now that I have found the joy of utilizing all forms of growth to make you, or to let you, grow in me, grant that I may willingly consent to this last phase of communion in the course of which I shall possess you by diminishing in you.

When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all at that last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.”

Amen