Thursday May 1, 2014 The First Day of May
Some friends of mine more or less hold their breath until May 1; April, in their experience, is unreliable — blustery, chilly, rainy with an occasional seductive charming day and hints of leaves and touches of hearty early flowers like daffodils. The farther north you live the more unreliable April is. But May is a month that can be counted on to deliver early summer’s blessings: flowering trees, perennials, summer plantings. In Motown, Flower Day at Eastern Market gathers the largest crowds of the year by the many tens of thousands. May is the month you get the knees of old gardening pants down and dirty from working the earth, fingernails too.
In the U.S., until the 1935 National Labor Relations Act guaranteed the rights of workers to organize (and was upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1937), US labor history meant sporadic violent rebellions by workers against brutal work conditions. For people with long memories. May 1 can be more about factory worker organization than flowers. The first of the Catholic Church’s series of major teachings on the rights of worker, Pope Leo XIII’s daring encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” wwas issued May 15, 1891.
Is this a good day to pay attention to flowers or to worker oppression or to both? The human condition — relief and beauty and springtime and hope plus 21st century slavery and global trafficking. Both matter on the first day of May. Both will matter tomorrow and the next day and the next.
I once heard Alice Walker on NPR explain the title of her 1983 book In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose. After she came to adulthood, Walker traveled to as many of her childhood homes as she could find. I remember her saying something like this: “Most of the time I couldn’t find the shack in which we lived; it had fallen down and disappeared. But my mother’s gardens were still there and I found them.” Imagine May flower work confronting the relentless horror of real, present tense slavery. That strikes me as a good May 1 prayer.
Have a good day.
john sj
Rocky Mountain National Park, July 9, 2011
