Monday, March 31

Weather.com for 1:00 pm Monday March 31
50° Sunny

Can’t say how good it feels to listen to Ernie Harwell.  Here he is on a youtube clip and in print from The Song of Solomon.

[jwplayer mediaid=”438″]

Friday, March 28 – The greatest commandment

Weather.com offers an hour by hour prediction, not only of temperature and precipitation but also of wind speed and direction. Today their predictive models tell us to expect warm weather (50+), gusty winds (in the 20 mph range) and cloudy skies. Not an idylic day but maybe a major help melting and then vacuuming away more stubborn winter-worn piles of snow. Spring housekeeping on a large scale.

Today’s Catholic mass recounts a question to Jesus: “What is the greatest commandment?” The question is important by itself. Not all commandments are the greatest, spend some time asking what are the more important challenges and constraints — at the university, in the city, in the country, in the world? The stakes are higher when you ask, not what are greater commandments, but what is the greatest commandment. Jesus says it is to “love God with all your heart” and then footnotes that by naming a second commandment, love other human beings as yourself.

Universities are centered on giving hospitality to all of the human condition, to discussing , exploring, mutually challenging and listening to other human beings about any element of the human experience. It’s a labor-intensive, gradually unfolding, act of hope at the deepest level. Perhaps that’s why Spring — labor-intensive, gradually-unfolding hope — feels like such an apt time in the year’s academic rhythm.

“You shall love the lord your God
with all your heart
with all your mind
with all your strength,
and
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Mark’s Gospel

Have a good weekend.

john sj

Thursday   March 27  –  Insomnia and the Seven Steps to Grace

The March 31 issue of the national Jesuit journal America publishes its first Joy Harjo poem.  Harjo brings loss and despair, and the resonant humor of embarrassment, into tight, sacred focus.  Listening for the focus can open me into beauty, and hope.  All the more astonishing because so improbable.

As with all poems,  it’s better to read “Insomnia” out loud.

For many UDM faculty today is the first day of a signed contract in a long time.   Blessings.

john sj

Today’s Post

Joy Harjo

Insomnia and the Seven Steps to Grace

Wednesday  March 26  –  a Spring Day in Detroit

They say the city set a record this early morning,  11º;  early sun on the most delicate traceries of snow can take your breath away if the biting unseasonal cold didn’t already do that when you stepped outside.  The McNichols Faculty Union officers and the UDM administration will sign a contract at 2:00 this afternoon.  Like winter, negotiations felt endless and burdensome.  A spring day like today, leading off with a shock of cold weather and a blaze of sunrise reminds us of hopes of things to come,  leaves and flowers and grass waking up, and baseball as well.   May the sheer beauty of the work all of us come here to do, beauty of our commitments, bring a spring of freshness to our work place too.  The thing about a long winter is that it makes me long for spring and makes Spring feel like a miracle of rebirth.

In yesterday’s Detroit News on line, right next to the monthly interactive map of the city’s deadliest crimes, appears a story about Lance Swain,  a man on his way to work, on the Lodge yesterday.     When I read it late last night it made me glad to live among people who do things like he did.  So today, instead of a poem, a story about a Detroit man on his way to work.

Enjoy Spring.

john sj

Good Samaritan pulls people from Detroit crash, says ‘that’s what a man does’

• Tom Greenwood
• The Detroit News

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140325/METRO01/303250091#ixzz2x4c2L74o

• Detroit — Freeing people trapped in overturned cars is getting to be a bit of a habit with Lance Swain.

For the second time in about a month, the Detroit resident has helped rescue victims of rollover crashes on area roads. The latest occurred shortly before 1 p.m. Tuesday as Swain was returning from lunch.

“I was driving down the Lodge near Howard Street and I saw a Jeep on its side,” said Swain, who works for Detroit City Connect, a non-profit agency that helpsDetroit area non-profits and the government to work together to solve local problems.

“I pulled up close and asked a bystander if there was anyone inside and he said, ‘Yeah, two people.’ I left my car so I could helpget them out of there.”

According to Swain, the victims were two women who were more or less dangling from their seat belts.

“They were conscious but shook up pretty bad,” said Swain, the married father of a 5-year-old daughter and a nearly 2-year-old son. “We got the passenger side door open, and I slid inside. The first lady was the passenger, and I had to undo her seat belt and then I pulled her out.

“But the driver’s foot was stuck and she couldn’t stand up so I couldn’t get her out.”

Pinned and panicky, the driver told Swain she was scared and that her chest hurt.

“I stayed with her; she was holding me,” Swain said. “I told her to breathe, gave her some water and put a scarf around her neck to keep her warm. When the paramedics arrived, they decided to remove her through the rear hatch of the Jeep.”

Swain let down the seats and helped the paramedics remove the woman.

And then he went back to his job at City Connect.

“The funny thing is the same sort of thing happened about a month ago on Grand River,” Swain said. “We were coming back from the Black History Museum and there was a car that had been hit and was on its side. My cousin and I hopped out and did pretty much the same thing for the two people who were inside.

“So when this crash happened on the Lodge it was pretty much like, ‘Let me out of my car and get to work.’ ”

Swain demurs when anyone suggests that he might be a hero.

“I’m a man and that’s what a man does,” Swain said.

Monday, March 24 — David Whyte

12 hours and 20 minutes of daylight today in Detroit {sunrise 7:29 –> sunset 7:40}. June’s longest day isn’t so far off; neither is baseball season. This morning I could see the tips of daffodils from our kitchen window.

Sometimes I notice that I walk right by the beauty — playful teasing, cooking oatmeal, tears for someone’s tragedy, showing up when you have a headache. And yesterday’s Honors Convocation put a light on students’ accomplishments, and on the faces of their families.

David Whyte’s poem reminds me that my opaque self-absorptions are always permeable. “Yours too,” so the poet tells us.

Have a good day in this March work week. It’s good to read the poem out loud.

john st sj
Enough

Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

David Whyte, Where Many Rivers Meet

Thursday, March 20

Weather.com’s “Countdown to Spring” live clock tells us that Spring begins at midnight tonight. Thursday morning, we wake into Spring. Gerard Manley Hopkins, sj writes “Spring” as lush with beaty and relief and delight (“the racing lambs too have fair their fling.”). Fleeting beauty takes my breath away and sets my table with profligate smiles, wooing me to let go and revel at the first unmistakable signs of new life, to risk delight even though I know that such beauty is not the whole story. Risking deligh, though, is a real part of the whole story. “Risk it,” says Hopkins.

I had been hoping for a lot more rain on Wednesday to use the high 40s and the breezes to melt a lot more of the tired snow that hasn’t found a way to leave gracefully yet. But I saw this morning, near the fountain, very tiny shoots peeking out of the winter earth. They were worth smiling about.

I may miss tomorrow’s post — I’ll be at Creighton U in Omaha. Have a good weekend.

john sj

Spring
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Wedneaday March 19 — the last full day of winter

Jim Janda lived as a mystic pilgrim for most of his 74 years. He died August 7, 2010 in Salt Lake City, a priest of that diocese since 1996. Jim also lived for a quarter century as a Jesuit which is when we met. Jim was “well known for his gentle and generous heart. . . . During his life he wrote and published a series of short religious stories for children, school plays and books of poetry.” So reads his obituary in the Salt Lake Tribune. The obit is accurate, as was the stated cause of his death, emphysema; I think he smoked too much. I can’t remember ever visiting with Jim without feeling bathed in wisdom and tenderness, and in his awareness of how deep grief runs in human beings, right there along with whimsy.

The Tribune’s evocation of “stories for children, school plays and books of poetry . . .” does not even hint at the flint-hard prose and fine tuned ironies that throb and flow through his poems. Today’s post comes from the 1970s when Jim lived on the Lakota Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. Like many of his poems, “The Town in March” is homey and close to the grass without flinching from pain.

Jim Janda reminds me of Joy Harjo. I am glad I thought to pull his book off my poetry shelf on this last full day of winter.

John sj
The Town in March

I.
a wind smelling
of grass
and wet earth
was coming
off the prairie
and blowing
through town

you could hear
Mr. Buffalo Robe
playing marches
on his piano
from the open door
of his shack

Mrs. Big Dog
sitting on the
stoop of her trailer
was squinting
in the sun

kids were shouting
about the dead
badger they found

II.
he does not play
the piano any more

some men broke his
hand and arm
when he was drunk

some men blinded
John Red Feather too

this is not spoken of
in town

ps March 19, feast of St. Joseph and of Sisters of St Joseph everywhere. Happy feast Sr. Beth.

Tuesday March 18 – “Nevertheless, God calls us and keeps us moving”

Ten years ago last week the university gathered  in Our Lady of Mercy Chapel on the campus of Mercy College of Detroit which had come to be called “The Outer Drive Campus.”   Decades of humanity and commitment — hard work and play, hospitality and prayer — created a sacred place there, steeped in history and affection.   It was a hard goodbye.   Gretchen Elliot, one of the great voices of the Sisters of Mercy,  read  some paragraphs near the end of the chapel’s final liturgy on March 7.   When  I read them last night, ten years later,  she reminded me of the sacredness of the places where we gathered to live our work lives then and of the sacred places we make now:  McNichols,  M L King Drive, and Jefferson.   In 2004 Gretchen told us that our university’s choice “to stay in the city in solidarity with its people” was the heart of what makes our places beautiful and holy.   Still true this Tuesday morning as we look out, see some winter-worn grass, and long for spring to wake our campuses  and refresh our spirits.

Gretchen died four years ago;  these words she addressed to the women and men of UDM that March day still speak.  I am one of many who miss her.

john sj

Today’s Post

Taken from
Communion Reflection for the Final Mass
In Our Lady of Mercy Chapel
University of Detroit Mercy,  March 7, 2004
Sr. Gretchen Elliot, RSM (d. October 3, 2010)

“We are incarnate beings and therefore exist in time and space.  We are always someplace.  We cannot be no place!  Depending on one’s perspective we are each occupying a few square feet of ground in a shelter or outside, in the country or a city, in a particular continent, on this planet, Earth, in our solar system, in the cosmos.

Sometimes we move around, as Abraham did in response to God’s call, from the Land of Ur to the land between the Wadi of Egypt and the Great River, Euphrates.   Usually we station ourselves somewhere. . . .   We put down roots in one or a few places, figuratively and literally. . . .  The places and spaces in which we live shape us profoundly – and it is reciprocal, we shape those places.  They give us a sense of the shape of the world and we plant trees, build bridges and wear down paths and stairways in them. . . .

Many years ago, in the sixties and seventies, the Sisters of Mercy and the Society of Jesus and their institutions of higher education reaffirmed their stance in a bigger place than is marked by these walls.  Their choice to stay in the city in solidarity with its people was more primary than decisions about buildings.  The consequences of that stance were that Detroit’s needs –and strengths — challenged them to change.  They — we — joined energies and resources and rearranged places in order to continue serving in the city and beyond in the ways that were needed.  Now we are changing again, making new spaces and leaving some that no longer fit the ministry.

At one time or another in our lives we, like the three apostles in the Gospel reading, might feel ourselves on the mountain with the radiant Christ, sure that we’ve arrived, that we are in the place where we should be.  When we feel like that we might try to “set up a tent” to stay there.  But God usually takes us down the mountain into the daily flow of people and the unfinished world.  We may not like that change,  just as the cabbage farmer may not have liked the encroachments of the city near his land.  Nonetheless God calls us and keeps us moving.”

Monday March 17 – e e cummings – “. . . the voice of your eyes . . . ”

I don’t know why e e cummings love poem caught my attention over the weekend; perhaps because I ended last week worn out and have been loving time to sleep in, work out, take another nap, get some shopping done, after a week of slamming work. But it really doesn’t matter why. “Somewhere” is always worth another reading.

Try it out loud and leave some time when you’ve finished for stillness and breathing.

Have a good work week.

john sj

p.s. Weather.com suggests we might lose lots of snow this week {i.e., warm temps (32, 45, 48, 44, 39); maybe some rain Wednesday to wash some salt away; breezy winds Wed and Thursday to vacuum up snow melt. Could be sweet.

p.p.s. Here’s the post for today.

Somewhere

Somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

e e cummings

Friday  March 14  —  Pope Francis — first anniversary

One year ago yesterday a just-elected pope stepped out on a balcony in front of thousands of people waiting to meet him, and begin to learn what sort of humanity he would bring to his new job.  Instead of blessing the crowd, Francis asked those people to bless him.  This morning marks one year after his first day at work.

Francis has a gift of recognizing leadership as a matter of mutuality more than distance.  This first year he keeps raising the question:   “Where is the Church”?  A Pope can do that just by showing up in one unlikely place or another.  When he chose to celebrate Holy Thursday services in  a prison instead of in St. Peter’s Basilica, when as part of the liturgy he washed the feet of prisoners — including several women (whom some priests have been known to exclude from that ancient ritual) and several muslims, he said of that hard place;  “The church is here.”  When he went to Lampedousa, an island of Italy’s coast from which thousands of desperate refugees try to migrate into Europe, in sight of which many of them drown in their desperation,  he said of that hard place: “The church is here.”  With a world full of the human places where the church can be found, Francis seems to say, it can take a lifetime to learn how to listen for God in so many different languages.   Perhaps Francis had something like this in mind when he spoke to the bishops of Brazil last July of the need for church leaders to slow down, to take time to listen.

Hence today’s post, taken from that talk.

Have a good weekend; enjoy spring’s unpredictabilities.

john st sj

From the address of Pope Francis to the bishops of Brazil, July 2013 

 “People today are attracted by things that are faster and faster: rapid Internet connections, speedy cars and planes, instant relationships. But at the same time we see a desperate need for calmness, I would even say slowness. Is the Church still able to move slowly: to take the time to listen, to have the patience to mend and reassemble?”