Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Monday  December 22  –  Pittsburgh to Detroit

270 miles across mostly northern Ohio.  Should be home by lunch.   Sunny most of the way.  December beauty.

Have a good day.

john sj

Dec 22 – 6th Antiphon   O Rex Gentium – O King of the Nations

Today’s Post:  “O King of the Nations”

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwDdEQCtIF4

December 22: O King of the Nations

O Rex Gentium

O King of our desire whom we despise,
King of the nations never on the throne,
Unfound foundation, cast-off cornerstone,
Rejected joiner, making many one,
You have no form or beauty for our eyes,
A King who comes to give away his crown,
A King within our rags of flesh and bone.
We pierce the flesh that pierces our disguise,
For we ourselves are found in you alone.
Come to us now and find in us your throne,
O King within the child within the clay,
O hidden King who shapes us in the play
Of all creation. Shape us for the day
Your coming Kingdom comes into its own.

~Malcolm Guite
http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/

Sunday  December 21 – “ to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.”

At Detroit’s latitude we will have 9 hours and 3 minutes of daylight, 14 hours and 57 minutes of night time.  Our shortest day.   Today’s O’Antiphon, “O Oriens” (“O Rising Sun”) tells us that the long-ago writers of these sung blessings for Advent’s last days lived in the northern hemisphere.  Deeper & deeper into the days of diminishing light they sing to human longing for liberation and dawn.  Tomorrow the day will be 3 minutes longer (I think that’s accurate), the dawn of the majestic march of sunrise back from it’s southern-most point of Oriens.

“O Dayspring
splendour of light and sun of justice:
Come and bring light to those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death.”

These days are full of tenderness, of  giving and hospitality, of forgiving old wounds, of allowing someone to forgive and welcome me when our connection had been wounded.   Days, too, of longing for the healing of the world’s wounds,   days of taking our places in the fatigue and longings of the whole human family.    

            Daring days of courage.    “O Oriens” is quite a prayer.  

Have a good day,

john sj

Dec 21 – 5th Antiphon   O Oriens – O Dayspring

Today’s Post:  “O Dayspring”

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant  —> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAUzuw1l-7U

December 21: O Dayspring

O Oriens

First light and then first lines along the east
To touch and brush a sheen of light on water
As though behind the sky itself they traced
The shift and shimmer of another river
Flowing unbidden from its hidden source;
The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.
Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice
Are bathing in it now, away upstream…
So every trace of light begins a grace
In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam
Is somehow a beginning and a calling;
“Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream
For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking”.

~Malcolm Guite
http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/

Saturday December 20

2nd shortest daylight of the year.  Check out how low the sun is in the sky,  amazing angles of light through windows because of that.

Blessings on your weekend.

john sj

Dec 20 – 4th Antiphon   O Clavis David – O Key of David

Today’s Post:  “O Key of David”

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant  —> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbdwoydPktQ

December 20: O Key of David

O Clavis David

Even in the darkness where I sit
And huddle in the midst of misery
I can remember freedom, but forget
That every lock must answer to a key,
That each dark clasp, sharp and intricate,
Must find a counter-clasp to meet its guard,
Particular, exact and intimate,
The clutch and catch that meshes with its ward.
I cry out for the key I threw away
That turned and over turned with certain touch
And with the lovely lifting of a latch
Opened my darkness to the light of day.
O come again, come quickly, set me free
Cut to the quick to fit, the master key.

~Malcolm Guite
http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/

Dec 19 —  “Steady your hearts for the Lord is close at hand, and do not grumble one against the other.’   1 James 5

“Veni ad liberandum nos
Jam noli tardare.”

“Come and liberate us
Come now, don’t delay.”

Today’s Antiphon asks for patience in a demanding, sometimes brutal, world.   John Foley’s haunting Advent hymn “Patience People”  fits today.    In my life experience, it fits many days.  On good days I love the patient courage all around me, ordinary people who look and act beautiful and brave.  On bad days, I need patient courage to live my commitments, and try to live a pretty elementary decent life.   Good days and bad days, the fabric of our lives, no?

The YouTube recording is 3:44 minutes.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQVE-5yfq4s

Antiphons 4, 5, and 6 should arrive in your mail boxes without a lot of comment for Saturday and Sunday and Monday.

Have a blest weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post:  “O Root of Jesse”

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant  —>  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8Z3nwkExUQ

December 19: O Root of Jesse
O Radix Jesse
All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,
Rose from a root invisible to all.
We knew the virtues once of every weed,
But, severed from the roots of ritual,
We surf the surface of a wide-screen world
And find no virtue in the virtual.
We shrivel on the edges of a wood
Whose heart we once inhabited in love,
Now we have need of you, forgotten Root
The stock and stem of every living thing
Whom once we worshiped in the sacred grove,
For now is winter, now is withering
Unless we let you root us deep within,
Under the ground of being, graft us in.

~Malcolm Guite
http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/

Thursday December 18

I am writing today’s post by candle & oil lamp light as DTE takes the first steps toward a renovation of UDM’s McNichols electrical infrastructure.  When power goes out,  the building goes quiet — no compressors,  no fans — remarkable how those sounds of living with an electric light & power grid come to feel natural.  The stillness inside the house allows sounds from outside to get some attention, traffic from Livernois can whisper and be noticed so that it is not only sirens that reminds us that we work in a city.   While writing this at 7:40 power returned to our building, compressors and fans return to their duties and so do we.

Robert Frost writes about dim light as an essential need.  Here is his poem, posted to celebrate a morning begun with batteries, candles and some stillness.

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

Have a blest day,

john sj

Today’s Post:  “O Adonai”

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant  —>   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvafrxZ_Ww4

Malcolm Guite is a poet and singer-songwriter living in Cambridge. He is a priest, chaplain, teacher and author.  (http://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/)

December 18: O Lord

O Adonai
Unsayable, you chose to speak one tongue,
Unseeable, you gave yourself away,
The Adonai, the Tetragramaton
Grew by a wayside in the light of day.
O you who dared to be a tribal God,
To own a language, people and a place,
Who chose to be exploited and betrayed,
If so you might be met with face to face,
Come to us here, who would not find you there,
Who chose to know the skin and not the pith,
Who heard no more than thunder in the air,
Who marked the mere events and not the myth.
Touch the bare branches of our unbelief
And blaze again like fire in every leaf.

~Malcolm Guite

Wednesday December 17  — “It is the 3 strange angels . . . “   D. H.  Lawrence

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.”

Late December one year 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, 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 phase one of 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 132 innocent children as did the Taliban yesterday, just as other 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.

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 (Wednesday) on Thursday,  the ordinary post-day Friday, as well as Saturday and Sunday and into the days before Christmas.

Have a blest day,

john sj

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.
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.”

O Sapientia,
quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter,
suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

To listen to the Antiphon sung in Gregorian Chant  —>   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6zaiZxJIpU

― D.H. Lawrence, Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence

Friday Dec 12  —  “Intimate knowledge of the many blessings received”  Ignatius of Loyola

It’s almost 5:00 am in Western Nevada.  I come here each December for a few days with my sister Midge and Jim, taking time to breathe family air and savor our long kinship, what St. Ignatius calls “intimate knowledge of the many blessings received.”   He meant, I think, that we humans never exhaust our awareness of the depths in our loves; they remain capable of surprise life long.

It’s 8:00 am on UDM’s campus where, Weather.com says, the sun just rose from nearly its farthest southern place on the compass, over the corner of Calihan Hall.  Weather.com predicts a short sunny day for today’s final exams and exam grading, and for this year’s UDM employee recognition party in the still-new ballroom.   One of the costs of finding this family time is missing the party I have come to love.  About 3:00 pm ET, I want to send some blessings over the Rockies, across the Great Plains, and over Lake Michigan to Livernois and McNichols.

Just as I typed that “I will send some blessings . . . “ line, a Terri Breeden poem came to mind.  She is probably getting the kids ready for school about 500 yards east of her Mom and Dad’s home where I sit with coffee and laptop.    I love her flint-hard language, especially when she and I give each other real hugs, in the same place this one time of the year.   “Prayers that Mean Something” comes from her “Grandma Hilde” series.   My mom died in October 2005 at age 102.  I don’t know how old she was when Terri wrote this poem.   I’ll ask her when I see her.

Best to read the poem out loud, with pauses.

Come 3:00 pm I will be thinking of UDM employees in our Ballroom and wishing I was there . . .   and savoring gladness that I live and work at Six Mile and Livernois, proud of the mission of the university in the city of Detroit and grateful that I share it with many women and men on this list.

Have a blest day and a blest weekend.

john sj

ps         Today is the feast of The Lady of Guadalupe, an anointing for millions of people who live in the Western Hemisphere.

I’ll be heading home early next Monday so the list takes a day off.    Back Wednesday.

Today’s Post — “Prayers That Mean Something”

Grandmother loans out guardian angels.
She is generous with them, always
has an extra. I suppose she’s been
collecting them, maybe inheriting them,
one every five years or so,
from loved ones gone.

If my need is truly great, she sends two or three, or
one of her best, my grandfather’s
or her own. She
grips my hand, without
fragility, tells me,
“You are good” and
it means just that.

When Grandmother says she’ll pray for something,
it is wise to have faith. For her,
even wishbone wishes come true.

Her prayers are long,
include every grandchild by name.
She prays, “Dear Lord, for what is best…”
and it is not less to be one
of so many grandchildren, for
her prayers have strength.

And she prays,
“Dear God, thank you that I still am able,” as
she hangs wet clothing between
two trees older than she, but
less gnarled.

And I, without any gods, pray too, pray, dear god dear
god, dear
thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou

that she still is able.

Terri Breeden

Wednesday December 10

Today is Human Rights Day.  The Nobel Peace Prize was presented several hours ago in Oslo to Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi, two fierce advocates for children, in particular the right of all children in the world to an education and to be free from sexual and manual labor slavery.   I just listened to Malala’s 11 minute acceptance speech, the Genius.com version;  the link appears below as today’s post.  Usually I write these posts aiming at a c. 3 minute read.  I hope you take the time, when you have the time, to click on this link and listen.

While I listened I felt as if I were in the 19th century listening to Catherine McAuley, foundress of the Sisters of Mercy or, better, that Catherine is speaking now in the 21st century, a source of grace and courage for many people like Malala and Kailash.  For me her single most important teaching appears in Original Rule, Chapter 2.   Best to treat Catherine’s saying as a poem.  Read it out loud,  pause in the middle; pause at the end.

“no work of charity can be more productive of good to society, or more conducive to the happiness of the poor, than the careful instruction of women” 

Catherine McAuley, Original Rule, Chapter 2

Today’s Post:    Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance – Malala Yousafzai  December 10, 2014

http://genius.com/Malala-yousafzai-nobel-peace-prize-acceptance-speech-annotated

Have a blest day,

john sj

ps. Today’s New York Times article  “Malala Yousafzai and Kailash Satyarthi Receive Nobel Peace Prizes” can be found at

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/world/europe/malala-yousafzai-kailash-satyarthi-nobel-peace-prize.html?&hpw&rref=world&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

pps.   Detroit was declared out of financial emergency today.  Much more for our city to do but it’s a big milestone.

Monday December 8 –  “It was always yes”

For years and years this passage from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians has stirred my soul.  When I lose track of it for a time and find myself grinding away and looking at my life with sardonic know-it-all aloofness, and then think to treat these words like a poem again, the words turn me toward playful attentiveness and a grateful heart.   Today, what led me to 2nd Corinthians was a weekly feed called “A Year of Being Here.”  Readers of this list have benefitted from quite few poems that I met there.   In this week’s set of seven I found the 14th century Persian poet, Hafiz  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez).

Many people find that the stately procession of sunrises toward their northernmost Solstice point at the shortest day of the year wears on them,  too many dim and dark minutes per day.  Sometimes pockets of bright light from tight beam lamps help treat the dark as holy; but sometimes gloom settles in and saps the power of imagination.  Poems like Paul’s and Hafiz’s help a lot.

Days of darkness for sure;  best watch your language and read the poems out loud.

Have a blest Monday.

john sj

p.s.       I used Paul’s poem on the card we made for my father’s funeral and then, 25 years later, for my mother’s.

Today’s Post # 1  Hafiz  “Every Movement”

I rarely let the word “No” escape
From my mouth
Because it is plain to my soul
That God has shouted “Yes! Yes! Yes!”
To every luminous movement in existence.

Today’s Post # 2  Paul “Always Yes”

The Son of God,
The Christ Jesus that we proclaimed among you . . .
was never “yes” and “no.”
With him it was always “yes.”
And however many the promises God has made,
The “Yes” to them all is in him.

“Every Moment”  — Text as published in I Heard God Laughing: Renderings of Hafiz (Sufism Reoriented, 1996). Purported to be translated from the original Persian (Farsi) by Daniel Ladinsky.  Please note that Ladinsky’s “translations” are controversial, considered by many to be less Hafiz than Ladinsky himself.

Friday December 5  —  “Our students reminded me to keep on loving a hard world in a hard time.”

I don’t know when The Rock landed in it’s famous place on campus;  50 years ago? more?   No matter; The Rock has carried paint brush wielding student group statements all these years;  some messages playfully silly,  some Greek-pride statements,  and  lots and lots of other student statements.   It may be that in my 34 years at UDM I have never been so proud of UDM students “painting the rock” as last night between 10:30 and 11:45.  About 80 people, mostly students but maybe 10 old folks like me, gathered on a cold night to pray and pay attention to what has come to be called  “excessive police violence.”  Trevor Martin, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice,  and Eric Garner had many companions less well known in current media whose names the students read in prayer.

Yesterday, the US Department of Justice released a multi-year study of the use of force by the Cleveland Police Department.    I heard a first news story yesterday afternoon, that called the DOJ report “scathing.”  Today’s New York Times article ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/us/justice-dept-inquiry-finds-abuses-by-cleveland-police.html?&hpw&rref=us&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0 ) includes these two summary paragraphs:

The city’s policing problems, Mr. Holder said, stemmed from “systemic deficiencies, including insufficient accountability, inadequate training and equipment, ineffective policies and inadequate engagement with the community.”

Continue reading the main story

Justice Department officials had been saying for weeks that the Cleveland inquiry was coming to a close, suggesting that the timing of the release of its findings was not related to the outrage prompted by the Rice killing. On Thursday, Steven M. Dettelbach, the United States attorney in Cleveland, said the investigation, which involved a review of nearly 600 encounters involving police use of force from 2010 to 2013, did not include the shooting of Tamir.

Readers of this blog know well this searing national question and its partison passions.   As I stood in the circle of mostly students holding candles around The Rock, what impressed me most was that they were addressing the wave of ugly news sweeping the nation the way UDM hopes it’s students and employees will engage hard realities.  Universities  commit to a bedrock respect for people with whom one differs, to patient sorting out of the tangled moments of human behavior, for betting on the long haul rather than the short violent fix.   It is a demanding moral code.  UDM, in its statement of Catholic identity underscores this commitment with a theological belief:  that God approaches the human condition as one whole, leaving no one and nothing out, from a starting point of affection rather than suspicion.  At our best, UDM people respect this immense challenge as sacred reverence for God’s love of the mess of humanity.  On good days I am proud of how we do that here,  proud of the 30,000+ people who came to our 20+ clinics last year,  proud of our stated commitment to the heart of the city of Detroit.  On bad days I get cranky about those same realities and look for a club to settle my disagreements at least in my fantasy life.

By this measure, last night at The Rock was for me a very good day: the soft spoken reverence of the student speakers called me to love the world as it is and to build out from that love.  For the 80+ of us, last night’s hour was a sacred vigil, not a rant.   Our students reminded me to keep on loving a hard world in a hard time.

Thank you,

john st sj

Today’s Post  The Prophet Habakkuk

“For the vision still has its time
presses on to fulfilment, does not deceive
if it comes slowly, wait,
for come it will, without fail.”

Habakkuk 2