Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Tuesday October 21,

This is cheating a bit.  No poem today, just a personal thanksgiving for sheer beauty with some stillness.

john sj

p.s.       from the last days of my retreat  at the home of a life long soul friend,  Connie de Biase, where I’ve come to be still for c. 25 years.

I wrote this journal note 2 years ago almost to the date from the same back porch where I sat this morning.  Marsh and estuary = stillness.

“I can see Amtrac at the edge of the marsh. It feels like a true privilege to live where one sees an ancient estuary winding through its marsh and can pause now and then to watch people from Boston and upper New England heading south and people from Pennsylvania, New Jersey & New York heading into New England.  People aiming at purposeful destinations gliding past a marsh older than they.  Older than I too.”

blessings from the Sound.

Wednesday Oct 15  –  “The works I have in hand
I will finish afterwards.”

I’m in the Philly airport, which was very new when I lived here as a grad student in the 1970s.  They’ve kept up with its aging process pretty well though and, when something takes me here I feel immediately at home — the south Philly accent especially.   I just finished 2.5 days with my peer Mission & Identity officers from the Conference of Mercy Higher Education, and I’m heading up to Connecticut for my annual retreat.  Unless I am smitten with some flash of beauty for a post, I’ll follow the guidance of Rabindranath Tagore in his #5 (Gitanjali) & not post until I get home at the end of next week.

Have good days.   Best to read the poem out loud, a couple times.

john st sj

Today’s Post 

I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side,
The works that I have in hand
I will finish afterwards.
Away from the sight of thy face
my heart knows no rest nor respite,
and my work becomes an endless toil
in a shoreless sea of toil.

Now is the time to sit quiet,
face to face with thee
and to sing dedication of life
in this silent and overflowing leisure.

Tagore 5

Friday,  October 10  –  time for dancing

I’m at a board meeting (Regis University) in Denver.  And I’ve been posting a fair bit about grief and fatigue.  Here’s a change of pace that you may have seen before on youtube.  It’s 4:53 minutes.  I was skeptical before opening it.   And began bopping around the place. Maybe just right for the Friday before the Columbus Day class schedule long weekend.

I’ll be making retreat next week (Long Island Sound, Connecticutt shore) until Oct 22.  Prayers would be welcome.

john sj

Today’s Post

To match Matisse 1909 & 1910, try this 4:53 youtube  “Where the hell is Matt?” 2012   Treat it like a poem.   Probably an ad you have to click through first.

[jwplayer mediaid=”835″]

Matisse 1909                                                        Matisse 1910

Wednesday, October 8  “about being pregnant”

The guiding assertion of these work day posts is that words matter.  Our fatigues, when they get hard enough, suggest gloomy word choices;  the beauty we encounter, if we pay attention, opens the fatigue to resilience and reminds us that beauty runs deeper.  Does any beauty run deeper, and surprise us more, than giving birth?   That’s not all there is to living for sure, but birth might prove the best of all metaphors.    In The Letter to the Romans, Paul of Tarsus chose a specific Greek verb for groaning, the word that means a woman’s labor pains.     It’s one of my favorite scriptures.  What if all our fatigue and groaning  were labor pains?   All were absolutely worth it?  Now that’s a daring idea, no?

            “I think that what we suffer in this life can never be compared to the glory, as yet unrevealed, which is waiting for us  . . . .

            From the beginning till now the entire creation, as we know, has been groaning in one great act of giving birth;

             and not only creation, but all of us who possess the first-fruits of the Spirit, we too groan inwardly

            as we wait for our bodies to be set free. . . .   “ (Romans 8)

Chemistry professor Dawn Archey witnesses birth pangs in students like all of us do,  groaning all around the place some times.   In late September she sent me a poem she wrote c. 5 years ago during pregnancy.    Reading it ove these last couple days is what brought Paul’s Letter and the university to mind. I am in her debt.  Bet you will be too.

Best to read the poem several times with time for breathing in  between.

Have a good day.

john st sj

Today’s Post

Making Humans

Kudos to you, Lord God,
for making humans in only
six days.

I’ve been working on one for eight weeks now
and all I have is a proto-human
the size of a raspberry.

In six days you made
two full-sized humans.

Its hard work, God.
Even you had to rest on the 7th day.
Makes me feel a little better
about being tired all the time.

Dawn Archey

Monday,  October 6  —  “How I was glad he’d stopped me there”

Making oatmeal and tea this morning I felt sad.    Several good friends have lost someone too young to lose;  others have been orphaned while keeping watch with someone much older.  Some soul friends carry wounds lodged in their flesh and memories.  Me too.   How many of the 1612 members on our list woke today close to grief?  How many woke fresh with the beauty and the play of life?   Or maybe both.  Or maybe we just grunted a little, got out of bed, and prepped for a work day.  No matter how we woke, it’s a safe bet that we are more beautiful than we usually notice.

It happens that, on this day,  A woman died who is beautiful to me.   In October 1958, I spent a month working at a hospital in Oshkosh WI, part of ordinary training for baby Jesuits.   Nancy Toth  met me there.  Cancer was stretching her gaunt and tired and near death.   I was a teen-ager trying to manage cathaters and bed pans and closeness to sick people.   It amazes me still, that  she found the inner energy to welcome me.   I wonder what she made of that earnest 18 year old boy,  searching for an identity?    I like to think she sparkled with amusement and affection, no matter her deathly fatigue.

Have a good day even if those Lions and Tigers lost yesterday.

john sj

Today’s Post

I came across a poem about a turtle trying to cross a road.  Feels like good stuff for the 1st day of the week.   The poet’s boy car driver reminds me of Nancy.  Dying she was, but she found a way to stop me in my tracks and show me the human.

“An Interruption”

A boy had stopped his car
To save a turtle in the road;
I was not far
Behind, and slowed,
And stopped to watch as he began
To shoo it off into the undergrowth—
This wild reminder of an ancient past,
Lumbering to some Late Triassic bog,
Till it was just a rustle in the grass,
Till it was gone.
I hope I told him with a look
As I passed by,
How I was glad he’d stopped me there,
And what I felt for both
Of them, something I took
To be a kind of love,
And of a troubled thought
I had, for man,
Of how we ought
To let life go on where
And when it can.

Robert S Foote  The Hidden Light: Poems (2012)

“Turtle Crossing Road” photograph by Malcolm MacGregor , May 22, 2013

Friday October 3 — “the world offers itself to your imagination”

I missed Wednesday’s list-post. Some good, strong listening Tuesday in the Santa Clara Valley among Advisory Board members for the Center for Science, Technology and Society. Then a Red Eye back home, a morning nap and plenty of ordinary work from then until now. Friday feels fresh, gusty rain and an embarassing Tigers blow-out notwithstanding. It’s the first week when driving around the city, flashes of color & early fallen leaves blowing stop me in my tracks. You too I bet.

There are 1612 people on this list as of yesterday from UDM and around the rest of the world; we human beings carry our burdens, are surprised by beauty, and sometimes get cranky. Autumn’s wild geese, the poet reminds us, have a thing or two to tell us, pointing us to our place in the family of things. “The world offers itself to your imagination.”

Have a great weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post

Best to read the poem out loud and then breathe slowly for a little while.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

You can listen to Mary O read her poem at this link but you’ll have to put up with an ad for 15 seconds or so:  some new action shoot-em-up thriller while I waited for Mary’s voice this morning.   Even with the ad, it’s worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_4xmh_WtE

Monday, September 29 “Our dreams drink coffee with us”

A refreshing weekend for me; a good friend came in from out of town spending time with her family in Trenton. Tigers squeaked out a Division Win. Lions won. Packers won. “Hope springs eternal” as sports fans say. The 9th or 10th straight day of clean, crisp days; an early sprinkling of trees changing their leaves. “A good way to begin a week,” I thought this morning, “I bet there’s a poet who is coming close to the surface of attention.” Joy Harjo. The Poetry Foundation rewarded me with a poem I’d not read before. Kitchen table as earthy mysticism.

I hope you like it; I hope it gives you a good start to this week when September turns to October and October begins to enchant us with its breezes and its colors.

Have a good day.

john sj

Today’s Post

Perhaps the World Ends Here
The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

Joy Harjo from The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 1994

Crazy Brave, W. W. Norton & Company. 2012. ISBN 9780393073461.

Friday September 26  — “A little faith will see you through”

One sunrise-sunset calendar for Detroit tells me that today is the autumn equinox, that Detroit has precisely  12 hours of daylight (http://www.sunrisesunset.com/calendar.asp).    The play of sunrises and sunsets with our particular place on the earth gives the north east corner of campus a privileged vantage point.  The corner offers a pretty vast patch of sky to the eye, compliments of the big parking lot & soccer/lacrosse field,  and because it borders on McNichols Road (or as the cool new baseball hats on sale as of yesterday in the McNichols book store say  “6 Mile.”)  and because McNichols Road is a surveyor line east-west street.  So today’s equiniox sun rose dead center down the middle of the street giving early east bound drivers fits.   Besides all that,  the combination of UDM’s big sky right next to surveyor-line 6 Mile Road  lets me track sunrises as they march a little farther to the south each day until December’s winter solstice when the sun will rise just about over the north-east corner of Calihan Hall,   Then sunrise begins to trek north a little bit each day until the height of summer.   It took  10-15 years at UofD before it dawned on me that I had fallen in love with the parking lot’s big sky and the east-west precision of 6 Mile.  How about you?  Any other druid wannabees out there?

Today is also the last Friday of the first full month of the Term.  I looked the post on this day in 2013 and I still like it a lot.   Garrison Keillor mixes tough social criticism with a poet’s feel for metaphors and with a deep affection for ordinary human beings.

Have a good weekend.

john sj

Today’s Post

A little faith will see you through.
What else will except faith in such a cynical corrupt time?
When the country goes temporarily to the dogs,
cats must learn to be circumspect,
walk on fences, sleep in trees, and have faith
that all this woofing is not the last word.
Even in a time of elephantine greed and vanity,
one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
Lacking any other purpose in life,
it would be good enough to live for their sake.

Garrison Keillor

This is not an ordinary post on the Work Day in A Hard Time list.  It’s a note that one year ago today appear the first post on the list.  Since that day 534 emails have come from list-members commenting on one post or another.  For me as I write the posts, this feels like a conversation, not a sermon (good as a good sermon can be). Your emails help me imagine all 1609 of you and imagine the humanity we all share.

Regular post tomorrow.

Have a good day,

john sj

2013, September 25 first post

a work day in a hard time — from john st sj

Wednesday September 25, 2013

Hard times — a Congress locked in venom and contempt for those with whom one must negotiate, “partisan” is a common adjective for elected officials at the national level; Detroit city caught in uncertainties about bankruptcy that stir mistrust and fear for the future; UDM negotiating a McNichols faculty contract turned acrimonious and hurtful.

In easy times you don’t have to be so careful about your language, you will spontaneously find playful words, wise with kindness. In hard time it helps to pay attention to word choices. I decided to choose one prayer or poem each work day for a while. Unless I screw up that plan and forget one day or another.

Here is today’s word, sent with much respect and affection.

john st sj

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
It is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
Of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying
That the kingdom lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capacities.
We cannot do everything,
And there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete
But it is a beginning, a step along the way,
An opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results,
But that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are the workers, not the master builder,
Ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
Amen

Ken Untener, Bishop of Saginaw

Wednesday  September 24

Mercy Day
The great feast that unites the Mercy world is Mercy Day. Its origin dates back to September 24th, 1827 when the House on Baggot Street opened as a school for the education of poor young girls and as a residence for homeless girls and women.

3 bishops come to mind.
1)         Bishop 1   Dom Hélder Câmara (1909-1999)

Once,  at a St. Louis celebration of the 150th anniversary of Sisters of St. Joseph in the US, Archbiship Dom Hélder Câmara changed me.  He had come from his home, the northeast industrial city of Recife, Brazil.  Dom Helder was a little man full of fun, passion and courage.  On the banks of the Missouri with 1000+ people sitting on the levee, his voice was drowned out by a tourist helicopter taking off just behind him.  He paused, turned around, gave the tourists and the pilot a little wave, and turned back to business.  Later, in a formal address, he grew so angry at the violence of extreme wealth/extreme poverty that he wept as he spoke  .  .   .   and then spoke of God’s astonishing love for the human family and began laughing with abandon — all this in the same grammatical sentence.  Dom Hélder was completely believable, one of my heroes.

2)         Bishop 2  Blase Cupich

Late last Saturday night, I read on-line that Pope Francis had named Blase Cupich the new Chicago Archbishop.   A wave of delight for me and many.   Chicago is one of the big-dog dioceses of the country,  a pivotal public voice of U.S. Catholicism.  I briefly met Cupich on the Pine Ridge Reservation when he was Bishop of Rapid City SD and had heard from local people that he has a welcoming presence.  In his Sept 23 blog John Gehring contrasted Bishop Cupich with the retiring Cardinal Francis George:

“Bishop Blase Cupich of Spokane, Wa., an unexpected pick, replaces the hardline Cardinal Francis George, who clashed with the Obama administration, compared organizers of a Chicago gay pride parade to the Ku Klux Klan, and once declared liberal Catholicism an “exhausted project.” Cupich prefers dialogue and common ground to rhetorical fireworks. When some bishops warned that Catholic institutions could be shut down because of the contraception mandate in Obamacare, he cautioned against “scare tactics” and instead emphasized the church’s commitment to universal health care. “We should never stop talking to one another,” he wrote in a 2012 essay in the Jesuit America magazine.”

All week I’ve been smiling and getting emails from friends around the country who are smiling too.

3)         Pope Francis changes Catholic focus.  In an early interview published September 19, 2013 Francis created a metaphor that has become a bedrock description of what the RC Church ought to be — field hospital.

         “The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds, heal the wounds. … And you have to start from the ground up.”

            I don’t know why these three bishops all came to mind this morning when I contemplated today’s post.   All three help me imagine that you do not have to ignore savage grief in order to dance with joy.   So does Denise Levertov.   Best to read her out loud.

Have a great day,  another dazzling welcome into Autumn.

john sj

Today’s Post:  from “Conversation in Moscow”

And the poet–it’s midnight, the room is half empty, soon we must part–
the poet, his presence
ursine and kind, shifting his weight in a chair too small for him,
quietly says, and shyly:
“The Poet
never must lose despair.”
Then our eyes indeed
meet and hold,
All of us know, smiling
in common knowledge–
even the palest spirit among us, burdened
as he is with weight of abstractions–
all of us know he means
we mustn’t, any of us, lose touch with the source,
pretend it’s not there, cover over
the mineshaft of passion
despair somberly tolls its bell
from the depths of,
and wildest joy
sings out of too,
flashing
the scales of its laughing, improbable music,
grief and delight entwined in the dark down there.
Denise Levertov, “Conversation in Moscow” in Freeing of the Dust