Monday December 2
Last Friday, November 29, was the anniversary of Bill Pauly’s sudden death at 59 of a heart attack while taking a lovely sabbatical after years of demanding pastoring on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in western South Dakota. Before Pine Ridge Bill was pastor in a South Milwaukee hispanic parish. Bill is a soul friend and I miss him at especially at this time. This Mary Oliver poem to which he introduced me captures his earthiness and urgency and his passion for the sacred ordinary.
Welcome to these last days of Term One.
john sj
p.s. This post is the first of a new format — a new listserve address and a blog. I’m still working on an email that explains how it works; it should arrive in your mailbox later today.
WAGE PEACE
Mary Oliver
Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children and fresh mown
fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.
Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty or the gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Don’t wait another minute.