Friday December 18 – “to ease attention off when overtight”
We are 4 days out from the winter solstice, the shortest day, the sun rising as far south as it gets before turning round to begin its 6 months march of sun rises across the eastern horizon to the summer solstice, the longest day. But that’s for the future. Now is a season to treat the dim light of long nights with respect. Robert Frost writes about dim light as an essential need. Here is his poem, posted to celebrate this time in our year, and this specific day when many of us at the university treat our students to our care about the quality of their intellectual achievements, grading papers time. {Note: when Frost writes “more divine than any bulb or arc” he refers to arc lights and light bulbs. Arc lights were the first economically feasible source of electrical power based artificial light. Immensely bright, they hurt your eyes to look at and so were hard to manage. Hard to breathe around them too, they gave off what people often called “noxious fumes.” Back in 1875, though, people thought of them as the march of progress. R Frost had another idea, as poets often do.}
Have a great weekend.
john sj
Today’s Post: Robert Frost “The Literate Farmers and the Planet Venus”
Here come the stars to character the skies,
And they in the estimation of the wise
Are more divine than any bulb or arc,
Because their purpose is to flash and spark,
But not to take away the precious dark.
We need the interruption of the night
To ease attention off when overtight,
To break our logic in too long a flight,
And ask us if our premises are right
O Antiphon # 2 – “O Adonai”
“O Lord above and ruler of the house of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the flaming bush,
who gave the Law to him on Mt Sinai
Comel and save us with your strong arm’s reach.
Thursday December 17 — “It is the 3 strange angels . . . ”
D. H. Lawrence, of Lady Chatterley fame, wrote poetry as well.
Here is an Advent prayer if there ever was one.
“What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody who wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.”
*******
********
********
pre-note, Dec 17, 2015:This late December contemplation of Detroit as its bankruptcy settlement was finalized appear on Dec 17 last year on this list. I’ve corrected dates and minor details. Mostly it’s meant as a reminder of a powerful moment in the city and, insofar as Detroit models fiscal challenges in many places, as a template for people whose commitment to realistically love the world challenges them on a regular basis. I see the start of the “7 O’s” as my real beginning of a Christmas turning of the year, this year partly sharing centuries of song and partly treating Detroit’s past 3 years as a song of hope.
john st sj
About December 17, 2014
“Late December two years ago the Detroit bankruptcy had matured into grinding uncertainties; surely for the c. 32,000 Detroit citizens whose futures looked harrowing — would their pensions, the magnitude of their underfunded status becoming obvious by then, be chopped down to $0.75 on the dollar? Surely for the Detroit Institute of Arts — would their world class collection of treasures be gutted by hungry creditors? Surely for the city — would Detroit lose any shot at a turn toward fiscal integrity if the bankruptcy went sour — any shot at rebuilding its bus system, its computer system, its water system, its neighborhoods, because the creditor process stripped the city clean until it resembled a carcass instead of a vital place in which people love to live?
I noticed in yesterday’s Crain’s Detroit Business (Dec 16, 2014), an article observing that Bankruptcy Judge Stephen Rhodes and, doubtless, Mediation Judge Gerald Rosen, had jawboned down the city’s legal bills from the most complex city bankruptcy in US history and freed up another $25 million that could go to pressing needs — like buses or computer systems or the neighborhoods, to go with the $1.7 billion fund already set aside as part of the Grand Bargain for those same rebuilding purposes. No mistake about it, Detroit still packs wounds and has a long list of rebuilding projects —> but they are projects, which, like the rebuilding of Livernois just outside our McNichols Campus, are starting points with believable futures. Last year’s knocking on our doors in the night of fiscal threat begin to look like D.H. Lawrence’s three strange angels. It is a very Advent emotion to risk some rejoicing of a future reborn in a still demanding world.
Yes, gun-wielding violent people can still slaughter innocent children in place after place, country after country, just as some Taliban tried to murder Malala, Nobel Laureate champion of girls who risk their lives to attend school. Yes, Detroit’s neighborhoods require daily courage to build on a miracle of cross-race and cross-politics mutual risk-taking through all this year of 2014. Like the birth of every child, the birth of hope emerges into the world bloody and exhausted . . . but pulsing with life.”
Have a blest day,
john sj
p.s. So the O Antiphons sing to us. I hope you enjoy them each day until Christmas Eve and recognize as you listen to their centuries-old Gregorian Chant that millions of women and men and children have listened before us.
N.B. We will post each antiphon on its day so you can look on this list from today (Thursday), Antiphon 2 on Friday, # 3 on Saturday, #4 on Sunday and into the days leading to Christmas.
Today’s Post December 17 — “O Sapientia”
“O wisdom, coming forth from the Most High, filling all creation and reigning to the ends of the earth; come and teach us the way of truth.”
“O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti, attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter,suaviterque disponens omnia: veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.’
Last August, Professor Fatemeh Keshavarz, poet and scholar, sent this poem to UDM’s “work day in a hard time” poetry list. We posted it last August 14. This morning the language of the poem feels just right given the overheated angry language skidding about in the public forum after the San Bernardino shootings. Fatemeh tells me that “O Highly Praised One” is the translation of “Mohammad.” Fatemeh wrote these words as a way to “smuggle some more of your laughter into this poem” . . . . “We need your humor, O highly praised One.”
Friday, December 11 – “imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty”
November 29 was the anniversary of Bill Pauly’s sudden death at 59, 2006, of a heart attack. That year Bill played inside a lovely sabbatical after years of demanding pastoring on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in western South Dakota. Before Pine Ridge Bill had been pastor in a South Milwaukee Hispanic parish. Bill is a soul friend and I miss him at especially at this time. He loved beauty, and hospitality, and play, and sacred stillness. Partly because of the date he died and partly because of the way he lived, Bill stays in my memory and imagination as an Advent figure. He did not fear grief or fatigue. Bill also introduced me to the poet Mary Oliver. There’s a lot of him in today’s post, “Wage Peace,” and a lot of Advent too. Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.
Have a blest weekend when the weather looks to be teasing winter from a safe distance.
john sj
Today’s Post – Mary Oliver – “Wage Peace”
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.
Advent Angel, Hummel; Lakota medicine pouch, Don Montileaux; Celtic cross, Waterford
One of my Jesuit soul friends sent me this poem yesterday: a contemplation of the beauty of flawed human kinship. These weeks of December a solid percentage of students and faculty and staff have reason to recognize a collective shared beauty, flawed and even wounded, beauty.
I love Advent most of all the Christian seasons. Blessings on the new week. It’s very short, this poem, read slowly.
john sj
Today’s Post
A b s o l u t e l y Perfect.
No, not me. I just dripped ketchup
on my shirt; and the hamburger
could use an onion.
But sitting here together
with spotted shirts
listening to our poems, is,
A b s o l u t e l y Perfect.
Detroit, July 4, 2011
October full moon, near dawn in the Western sky, out my west face window
Somali-British poet Warsan Shire’s poem evokes intimacy — a crying child lucky enough to have a mom or a dad hold her or him, whispering “where does it hurt?” Shire enters that moment and opens it out into the wide world and a time marked by brutal absolute convictions that demonize those with whom one differs. Columnist Omir Safi turned to Shire’s poem while reeling with shock after the Paris massacre.
“I watched the outpouring of grief from all over the world, including most of my Muslim friends. I saw hundreds of Facebook profiles being changed to the French flag-themed profile pictures, and thousands of #prayerforParis and #Prayers4Paris tweets.
I also saw, as I knew would come, wounded cries of the heart from friends in Beirut wondering why their own atrocity (43 dead) just one day before — also at the hands of ISIS — had not received any such similar outpouring of grief; friends from Pakistan wondering why there was no option to “check in as safe” during their experiences with violent attacks; friends from Central African Republic wondering why their dead — in the thousands — are the subject of no one’s global solidarity.”
It’s the first Friday of Advent, for me and perhaps for you this is a good time to allow a poem to take me into intimate tenderness. When we have eyes to see and ears, close kindness can open ways into courage during a hard time in a hard world.
Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses, to let the cadence and word choices surprise you and restore realism and a capacity for the world’s beauty.
Have a blest weekend.
john sj
Today’s Post: “Where does it hurt?”
later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
ps Some of us who work at U Detroit Mercy would want to remember that today, December 4, Art McGovern, sj would turn 86 were he still walking the earth. Lots of us miss him a lot.
Wednesday, December 2 – “while I was making other plans the wind drew circles around this town”
Outside my room at 7:34 our parking lots begin to fill, residence hall students wake to late semester deadlines and rub sleep from their eyes. Work requires our attention, keeping track of commitments, while all along an entire city breathes in and out, millions of women and men tending the commitments and burdens of their lives. Call it morning traffic maybe. All along, all this sleeping and waking, hustling and waiting, opens to a day alive with sheer beauty and the mystery of . . . of what? Of human depth, longing for stillness. For Christians, this season invites Advent contemplation, a pause in the pace of the city’s humanity.
Joy Harjo’s meditation on Worcester, MA makes a fine read early in this early December day. Read it out loud, pause here and there, and she may anoint your day. Have a good mid-week day.
john sj
Today’s Post: “Climbing the Streets of Worcester, Mass.”
Houses lean forward with their hands
on thin hips.
I walk past their eyes
of pigeon gray, hear someone
playing horn, and there’s the wind
trying to teach some trees
to fly.
It could happen.
LA is tempted by the ocean.
And sleeping storms erupt the weakest hearts.
I scan the street. Know up one hill.
groans a sacred fire
and down the next
could be a crazy trick:
three crows laugh
kick up the neighbor’s trash.
Telling jokes
they re-create the world.
All night
while I was making other plans
the wind drew circles around this town;
scraped clean the dead skin
of its soul
but left three crows, a horn
some trees
to talk it back again.
First Monday of Advent November 30 – “Companion is the one who eats the same bread.”
Yesterday morning when I opened the blinds in my room, snow traceries on the courtyard cloister walk roofs took my breath away. A few minutes later I remembered that Advent begins today. Because of Advent, and the move from Advent into Christmas and the turning of the year, and because of the coming of winter, these days begin my favorite of the 12 months.
Here’s a look out my window over the courtyard a week ago after our 1st notable snow. The window looks West so the rising sun is just peeking over the roof of our 3 story Jesuit house. I leaned out my window to breathe and taste the air and my iPhone caught bands of light: high up = clean early dawn sun on the trees carrying the day-before’s snow; middle = pale light on the lower branches and the roof of the community courtyard (which was built in 1926) and the courtyard itself is almost invisible because very little light was reaching it yet. Sometimes Detroit is tough; sometimes it’s beautiful.
Have a blest work week.
john sj
p.s. Advent often reminds me of one of the saints in my life. Here’s a meditation about Dom Helder Camera I wrote early in Advent two years ago.
Dom Helder Camera February 7, 1909, Fortaleza, Brazil – August 27, 1999. He was archbishop of Recife and Olinda from 1964 to 1985 during military dictatorship in Brazil. He interpreted Catholic teaching with a consistent, fierce attention to the violence of systems maintaining brutal poverty. He made serious enemies. It is said that some of them hired a hit man to remove him. Like the professional he was, the hit man stalked Dom Helder for some time, learning his habits, seeking a place and time apt for killing. In the process, he listened to him speak a number of times until, one day, he fell at Dom Helder’s feet, weeping, and begged for the grace to change his profession and his life. When he walked this earth, Dom Helder’s presence engaged the world’s wounds.
This unblinking attention to the violence of poverty was matched by legendary playfulness. Here is one story among many, this one I witnessed. Once Dom Helder was speaking to about 1500 people who sat on the St. Louis levee overlooking the Mississippi River (by the Arch); in the middle of the talk, a helicopter took off right behind him filled with tourists taking a ride with a bird’s eye view of the river and the city. It made enough of a racket that it was impossible to hear what the Dom Helder was saying. He paused, turned around to the helicopter, and gave the tourists a puckish little wave. When the helicopter got a little farther out on its trip, he turned back to us.
Here is one of his sayings. Read it like a poem, out loud, with pauses.
Today’s Post – Dom Helder Camera
“It is possible to travel alone, but we know the journey is human life
and life needs company.
Companion is the one who eats the same bread.
The good traveler cares for weary companions, grieves when we lose heart,
takes us where she finds us, listens to us.
Intelligently, gently, above all lovingly, we encourage each other to go on
and recover our joy
On the journey.”
Wednesday, November 25 — the U.S. Thanksgiving Day break
Each year on this day our campus eases toward stillness. Students have headed out to where they will gather for the most peace-oriented of the U.S. national holidays. The non-academic side of campus heads in the same direction later this afternoon. The university’s new main entrance inches closer to its finished state, exciting lots of university on-lookers. Some in our community carry sharp griefs, news of illnesses taking threatening turns, gatherings to cherish people who have died very recently, some like Justin Schaffer, a volunteer in the city of Detroit, or the adult children of Betty Nelson and Victoria Spalone, each too young by far. All of us hear, cannot avoid hearing, hateful talk and fearful talk. All of us can listen to voices of sheer beauty that we find ourselves able to speak to one another.
Lots of us pray for the grace of a break from mean spirits during these few days and for the taste of sacred beauty on our tongues. Strong poetry, a poet friend likes to say, places every word carefully with flint-hard, tender language, opening readers to grief and joy sometimes so close together that they touch.
Best to read the poem out loud.
john sj
Today’s Post: Mahmoud Darwish wrote the poem about the 1982 Israeli 88 day siege of Beirut
“Think of Others”
As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you conduct your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: “If only I were a candle in the dark”).
The original Arabic:
فكِّر بغيركَ
وأنتَ تُعِدُّ فطورك، فكِّر بغيركَ
لا تَنْسَ قوتَ الحمام
وأنتَ تخوضُ حروبكَ، فكِّر بغيركَ
لا تنس مَنْ يطلبون السلام
وأنتَ تسدد فاتورةَ الماء، فكِّر بغيركَ
مَنْ يرضَعُون الغمامٍ
وأنتَ تعودُ إلى البيت، بيتكَ، فكِّر بغيركَ
لا تنس شعب الخيامْ
وأنت تنام وتُحصي الكواكبَ، فكِّر بغيركَ
ثمّةَ مَنْ لم يجد حيّزاً للمنام
وأنت تحرّر نفسك بالاستعارات، فكِّر بغيركَ
مَنْ فقدوا حقَّهم في الكلام
وأنت تفكر بالآخرين البعيدين، فكِّر بنفسك
قُلْ: ليتني شمعةُ في الظلام
Monday November 23 “all the stars stand up and shout”
A long time soul friend sent me this poem over the weekend. Knocked me over; a strong short poem about the coming of snow and ice to our part of the world. Metro Detroit is a sprawling city often with notable weather variations. So on Saturday, some neighborhoods only 10 miles from campus would recognize that the following description could be reworded negatively (beautiful but dangerous for tree limbs and such). Here at Six Mile and Livernois, the snow fell at a near-perfect temperature (c. 32-35º) and a wind speed slow enough for snow to cling to twigs and branches and roofs and to linger without falling off all night long. I took this picture when the early sun on Sunday kissed the tops of trees while our house’s courtyard was still in shadows. I’ve been using the pic as my desktop wallpaper.
First snow of this year and a drop-dead beautiful landscape where I live. Weather.com says this goes away on Wednesday (50º and sunny) but for a winter lover, it’s a promising beginning.
The pic’s beneath the poem. Happy week of Thanksgiving.
john sj
Today’s Post- “November 20″
The geese have gone.
The cranes have flown.
The night is cold,
