Poetry Blog: "A Work Day in Hard Times"

Friday  January 17,  “what amazes you with joy” 

Nothing is more practical than finding God,

that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way.

What you are in love with,   what seizes your imagination,

will affect everything.

It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,

what you will do with your evenings, 

how you spend your weekends,

what you read,   who you know,   what breaks your heart,

and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Fall in love;  stay in love,

                          and it will decide everything. 

                                                              Pedro Arrupe s.j.   

Thursday  January 16,   Two Penguins

Enough hard nosed poetry,  flinty and anvil hard.  Not all work life is tough;  some parts are just funny.

Two Penguins Video

Hint:  play this 4-5 times;

Have a good day.

john st sj

Wednesday January 15 “like a human being”

Jean Vanier is 86 now, the son of the 19th Governor General of Canada. He served with the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II and received a PhD in philosophy at the Institute Catholicque de Paris in the 1950s, a distinguished but so unusual a career path. In 1964, however, he invited Raphael Simi and Philippe Seux, two men institutionalized for mental disability, to leave their institutions and live with him in a little house in Trosly-Breuil, France. So began his life work as the founder and mentor of the now world-wide L’Arche movement. Today c. 150 L’Arche communities operate in c. 40 countries world wide. Every community is made up of people with disabilities, and those who assist them. They live together in homes and apartments, sharing life with one another and building community as responsible adults.

Vanier is a heroic figure with a challenging world view, namely, that every human being is beautiful when experienced at close range, and that the simple act of living with a full array of human beings at close range can create an astonishing healing presence in the world. Sitting on a shelf near where I pray in the mornings, along with books of poetry, is Jean Vanier: Essential Writings (Orbis). Some days I browse and pause to read. Here’s something I found today, the conclusion of a short talk titled “Love Your Enemies: Transform History.”

“I am not saying that a man intent on killing will always cave in before nonviolence. There are so many different kinds of people with different forms of violence in them. All I know is that if a violent person is treated like a human being rather than a wild animal, there is a chance that he will respond like a human being.”

One way to describe the calling of UDM might be: “an institution committed to treating every human being — students, faculty, staff, admininstrators, and people who share our urban space — like human beings.” Sounds simple but there’s a lot to it.

Have a good day.

john st sj

Tuesday January 14  Tagore # 2

A university has a constant identity.  Here, people listen, take each other seriously.  Teachers listen to students.   When I taught full time, some students told me one day that I was most scary when one of them would say something and I would turn around and write the student’s words on the board, circle one word, and turn around and say: “Why did you choose that word?”  Teachers do that, listen for the voice, call it forth; expect respect the words.   Not only teachers though.  We call on students to listen to each other, to expect meaning from each other.   Secretaries,  staff in the registrar’s office, nurse practitioners in the student wellness center,  campus security officers, coaches;  lots of listening goes on around here.

On good days, each of us knows that.  And on bad days, maybe one of our peers will  notice and ask how we are doing, listen to us.  Rabindranath Tagore writes of God expecting a song from me, thrilling me by sacred attention.  (Gitanjali # 2)

“Snow showers,” says weather.com, but I see the sun shining on tree tops outside my west-facing window.  Have a blest day.

john sj

Tagore # 2

When Thou commandest me to sing

it seems that my heart would break with pride

and I look to Thy face

and tears come to my eyes.

All that is harsh and dissonant in my life

melts into one sweet harmony

and my adoration spreads wings like a glad bird

on its flight across the sea.

I know Thou takest pleasure in my singing

I know that only as a singer I come before Thy presence

I touch by the edge of the far spreading wing of my song

Thy feet which I could never aspire to reach.

Drunk with the joy of singing

I forget myself

and call Thee friend

who art my lord.

                Tagore  Gitanjali  #

Monday, January 13  — Ordinary Time

At Lansing Reilly we took down 3 Christmas trees and two creches yesterday.  The house looks leaner after two-plus weeks of the Christmas season. The Christian calendar calls today the first day of the first week of “Ordinary Time.”  I like that expression, “Ordinary.”  In the liturgical calendar this begins 34 weeks  of time not made special by the music and bright colors of Christmas, nor by the somber gravity of Lent and the springtime relief of Easter.  Just ordinary, like most of the human condition, like people’s cars driving through the pre-dawn dark to park and head in for work, maybe relieved that it is not – 11º (- 33º wind chill like last week).  When I took a minute to watch from Lansing-Reilly, campus security took a shift change at the McNichols gate,  Ordinary.

Yesterday in the McNichols Library was more than ordinary;  UDM joined Broadside Press to remember the 100th birthday of one of the university’s most compelling citizens, the poet Dudley Randall (founder of Broadside Press one of the great poetry publishing houses in the US).  In 2001 our library was designated a National Literary Landmark because of the years Mr. Randall worked there as a librarian, and helped uncounted numbers of students to find a voice, and to write and perform poetry.  Our library was the 48th site so designated.  Dudley Randall took his place with Faulkner, Robert Frost, and a host of other icons of the U.S. landscape of literature.  We continue to hold the Dudley Randall poetry prize competition long after Dudley no longer lives to judge each year’s poems.  Three former UD/UDM students read their poetry and Dr Gloria House read five of Dudley’s poems.  I was not the only one in the crowded Bargman Room moved to stillness by the flint-hard immediacy of the poetry we heard there.  Perhaps we can arrange to post those poems in this list during February’s Black History Month.

Ordinary time begins with the Gospel of Mark’s 1st chapter, Jesus appearing in Galilee “proclaiming good news.”  Like a Zen master,  Jesus says the gate into good news is repenting.  What might that mean?   Here’s a poem that takes a crack at answering.

“Repent and believe the good news.”

Is our main repenting, perhaps, made of believing good news,

that there is news,

something new,

and it is good?

That what we already know is not all there is,

that we must approach the presence of God knowing we will be surprised,

committed to being surprised

and so to living in a surprise-able way?

******                        ******                        ******

An ordinary work day.   Blessings.

john st sj

Thursday  January 9

I know it’s off season to post a lovely song from the depths of summer, but it’s not perverse to make the point that these winter days will not last forever.   Besides, there’s lots to be said, about weather and other deep matters such as the learning process, for the Lark’s astonishingly renewed  inner energy.

Blessings from the north edge of McNichols Campus.

john sj

Mary Oliver today.

“The Lark”

And I have seen,
at dawn,
the lark
spin out of the long grass
and into the pink air –
its wings,
which are neither wide
nor overstrong,
fluttering –
the pectorals
ploughing and flashing
for nothing but altitude –
and the song
bursting
all the while
from the red throat.
And then he descends,
and is sorry.
His little head hangs
and he pants for breath
for a few moments
among the hoops of the grass,
which are crisp and dry,
where most of his living is done –
and then something summons him again
and up he goes,
his shoulders working,
his whole body almost collapsing and floating
to the edges of the world.
We are reconciled, I think,
to too much.
Better to be a bird, like this one –
an ornament of the eternal.
As he came down once, to the nest of the grass,
“Squander the day, but save the soul, ”
I heard him say.

Wednesday  January 8

If you see poinsettias here and there it might mean that someone has not cleaned up after Christmas yet.  Or it might mean that someone celebrates the Christmas season in following traditional Christian practice –  Begins with the burst of  wonder and light on Dec 25 and extends to the 12 day, traditionally January 6, the feast of Epiphany, the three strangers (sometimes called Kings, sometimes Magi {learned ones} coming out of nowhere looking for “the one who is to be born”  following that one star.  Technically, Epiphany is a big feast and it’s remembered for 8 days, so this week carries the taste of the 3 strangers.

Christmas centers on giving birth —  the miracle of courage, exhausting labor and wrenching pain and finally,  a new person, exquisite beauty and amazing tenderness.  Maybe humanity at its most beautiful.

Epiphany has wonder also, the three strangers actually find the one they are looking for.  But the wonder is set around with confusion and suspicion, with  political intrigue and deception.  And, finally, with soldiers and flight.   It’s a sober reminder — grace is never far from loss and loss is never far from grace.  Epiphany concludes with an angel in the night waking the little family, telling them to pack what they can and run, soldiers are coming.   Maybe this week could be a time to pay attention to the millions of men and women and children on the roads of the world or in refugee camps that last too many years without becoming home.  The Mercies and the Jesuits both engage refugees around the world;  UDM engages too;  last year our many clinics worked with over 32,000 people mostly from Detroit.  Something to be proud of, no?

They say tomorrow it will warm up.  I hope so.

john st sj

Here’s today’s poem.  T. S. Eliot, say some critics, came to dominate the literary landscape of the mid 20th century.  Here’s his sardonic account of the three strangers, burdened with their hope and with elitist expectations of travels without troubles . . .  written in 1927.

Journey of the Magi

‘A Cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory, Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces, And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling And running away, and wanting their liquor and women, And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters, And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, sayiing That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation; With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness, And three trees on the low sky, And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel, Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver, And feet kicking the empty wine-skins, But there was no information, and so we continued And arrved at evening, not a moment too soon Finding the place;  it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember, And I would do it again, but set down This set down
This:  were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly, We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different;  this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

p.s.         This Youtube Eliot reads the poem.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCVnuEWXQcg

“A whirlpool of frigid, dense air known as a polar vortex descended Monday into Michigan, pummeling metro Detroit with a dangerous cold that shut down universities, forced a delay in the Detroit bankruptcy case, and closed restaurants, shops and other businesses across the region.“

December 20,  All seven Antiphons

One UDM reader/listener asked if I could send out the final three O Antiphons.  Sure.  Here they are but without comment.   I found a site that offers a link to each of the 7 Antiphons — the Latin, a translation, an MP3 of each one sung with the Gregorian Chant found in the Liber Usualis.   And some background interpretation of the Antiphon in question.

http://www.wdtprs.com/JTZ/o_antiphons/

john st sj

p.s. If you like the other choir,  I found their version of  Oriens and Rex Gentium but for some reason not O Emmanuel.

O Oriens  Dec 21   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAUzuw1l-7U

O Rex Gentium  Dec 22   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwDdEQCtIF4

Friday,  December 20,     “O Key of David”

“O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel: qui aperis, et nemo claudit;  claudis, et nemo aperit : veni et educ vinctum de domo carceris, sedentem in tenebris et in umbra mortis.”

translation:
“O key of David and scepter of the house of Israel : you open and no one closes;  you close and no one opens : Come and lead us out from the chains of this prison house, where we sit in darkness and the shadow of death.”

Early this morning in the dark of our Lansing-Reilly kitchen, I made tea and oatmeal and savored stillness.  The last work morning of this year, a turning toward a time for noticing kinship at a slower pace.   It came to me that the words of today’s O Antiphon do not sing of a single person. The first person plural pronoun “we” is the one who “sits in darkness and death’s shadow.”  We share griefs and fatigue;  we suffer the violences that afflict any one of us; we share delight and achievement and creative passion.

It’s an old lesson: that I do not live by myself.   Noticing that while drinking some tea in the early morning dark made the tea taste a little better than usual.   See you in the new year.   Thankyou to everyone who gave me suggestions to improve these posts, or stopped me on the sidewalk, or emailed, to celebrate the power and beauty of one or another poem.

See you in 2014.

john sj

sung in chant (not precisely from the Liber Usualis though)  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbdwoydPktQ

• December 17: O Sapientia (O Wisdom)
• December 18: O Adonai (O Lord)
• December 19: O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse)
• December 20: O Clavis David (O Key of David)
• December 21: O Oriens (O Dayspring)
• December 22: O Rex Gentium (O King of the nations)
• December 23: O Emmanuel (O With Us is God)