I said yesterday’s blessing of hands would be the last posting before Thanksgiving Break — changed my mind looking out at the November dawn today and smiling all over because of this break. Here’s a Hopkins praise of beauty. I wonder if anything restores fatigue so much as a slow-down pace and the presence of beauty.
See you next week.
john sj
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Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918. |
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13. Pied Beauty |
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Tuesday November 26
Thanksgiving looks to close to the ground human experience — visiting, cooking, eating, maybe watching some football, gatherings of different branches of your family. Thinking of that this morning reminded me of a blessing we posted on October 28, taken from the health care tradition of the Sisters of Mercy. As written for UDM it has the effect of bringing those who read it or listen to it close to the human fabric of our place of work. A good send off into this wonderful few days of respite.
Happy Thanksgiving to you.
john st sj
Hold up your hands and look at them
See your hands as God sees them.
Recognize the source of their power.
Imagine your life in and beyond the classroom. See the work of your hands in kitchens and corridors, on tennis and basketball courts, in dorms and dining rooms, at planning tables and parties and in gatherings of every kind. Choose to use your hands this year for good. Trust that your hands will know the right thing to do even when you do not; and know that, in every act, small or large, the work of your hands makes a difference.
Bless the work of our hands.
Bless the hands that build lasting things.
– hands of architects, engineers and chemists;
– of stone masons and day laborers;
– of writers and printers; of inventors and computer programmers;.
– of teachers and parents, negotiators and peacemakers, poets and musicians.
Bless the hands that build, we pray.
Bless the hands that heal.
– hands that skillfully clean and mend and comfort those in pain;.
– that create beauty in art and song, in homes, parks and gardens;
– that touch with strength, with compassion and tenderness, with healing power.
– that are lifted up in prayer asking for the transformation of difficult situations.
Bless the hands that heal, we pray.
Bless the hands that reach into the future
– hands that open with invitation and hope,
– that reach out to new possibilities
– that hold strong to what is just,
– that extend their passion for doing good toward a world in need.
Bless the hands that reach into the future, we pray.
Monday November 25
The pre-dawn sky promised a strong sunrise; weather.com promised it at 7:36 am. Dawn this morning showed a dance of subtle changing colors lured me to stand a while at an east window on Lansing Reilly’s 2nd floor looking out over Calihan Hall, the LaCrosse and Soccer field, and the big parking lot. It turned out that the parking lot caught my attention more than the magnificent sunrise. People driving in to park pause before turning off their lights, gathering their stuff, and heading to a work place on campus. Two surprises — the scattering of car lights look very different when they play a part in a sunrise, mellow lights that grow a little more delicate as sunrise changes the light around them; that was one surprise. The other was the serene pace of each vehicle as its driver decided which slot to choose. The people pulling into the lot were matching the pace of their parking space choice with the dawn’s opening. The sunrise was worth watching; so was the parking lot.
All that beauty reminds me of one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnets. Hopkins dedicates the poem “to Christ our Lord,” the only explicit faith language in the poem. The rest is all falcon swooping in the sky at dawn.
The Windhover: To Christ our Lord
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in
his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl
and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,–the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume here
Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plốd makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, a my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
post-note;
Hopkins’ poems are [in]famous for the density of their vocabulary. If you want to catch all the descriptive meaning packed in these 16 sonnett lines, bring your dictionary. Hopkins’ life-long friend Robert Bridges often ground his aesthetic teeth at what seemed to him to be unnecessary complexity. On November 6, 1887 Hopkins wrote Bridges, attempting to explain the density of his poetic language; Try reading GMH’s explanation out loud, for that matter, try reading The Windhover out loud as the poet intended.
“Plainly if it is possible to express a subtle and recondite thought on a sublte and recondite subject in a subtle and recondite way and with great felicity and perfection in the end, something must be sacrificed, with so trying a task, in the process, and this may be the being at once, nay perhaps even the being without explanation at all, intelligible.”
One of the last days before Thankgiving break. Yippee!
john st sj
About 1985, I conducted an oral history session with Lloyd N. Morrisett, then Director of the Markle Foundation in their Rockefeller Plaza offices. While I was waiting for my appointment, I saw this cartoon on the receptionist’s personal bulletin board. I liked it a lot and asked the if I could have a copy. She made one for me. I still like it. It’s been on my office door for years. Every now and then, when I pause to look at it, I ask myself why I do not look at it more often. Maybe it came to mind because I’ve been thinking about fatigue levels as we collectively stagger toward Thanksgiving Break.
I’m in San Francisco for a Thomas Edison biography film shoot for the PBS “American Experience” series. Have a great weekend.
Back on Monday
john st sj
Tuesday November 19
Marathon runners have allies who hand out quick sips of water as they labor deeper into the 26 + miles
Here’s a quick sip of refreshment as we work deeper into the marathon that is Term One before Thanksgiving Break.
Perhaps my favorite love song ever.
Have a blest day
john sj
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
Monday November 18
I got off to a busy start today and here it is mid afternoon.
No introduction to this poem except that it was written by my neice Terri Breeden, another in a series she wrote about her grandmother, my mom, who died in 2005 at 102.
Storms battered our state, blessings on those who got hit, and blessings on the people of the central Phillippines.
Today’s poem
Octogenarian
I was nine that summer
when you taught me satiated.
It came after precocious
and pernicious, but was obviously
and immediately the best word yet.
We refill the drinks with extra ice, cool ourselves
with condensation, that slick of sweat dripping down
our glasses. You proffer crackers; I decline,
satiated and smug about it. You shuffle and deal, while the sun
slowly loses its glower in the Menomonee River.
I place each card carefully, fingers splayed,
intent. I hunch a bit, slanting my anticipation
toward the deck in those gnarled fingers, toward
the sheen of sun on water, the road and the bridge,
the cities on the far side, toward you.
It doesn’t matter what we play: 66, gin rummy,
cribbage, even two hands of solitaire, laid out
like opposing armies or fields fresh planted, seven shirts
spaced out on each side of the clothesline, falling straight,
quiet in the fading heat.
You hold your cards loosely, competent,
a word from last summer, but you don’t
always win. I learn to bridge the cards without
spraying any into the porch screen,
dragonflies darting toward the river.
I learn about matrimony from the thin band
embedded in the swollen skin of your ring finger, about eternity
from the way you refer to Grandpa as though
he were still here. And I learn about gratitude
without noticing, even how to spell it.
Some things though I didn’t learn, like when you taught me
octogenarian and I thought it meant
a person eight decades old, thought
it meant you at your next birthday, never comprehending
that it really meant
you would leave me someday.
Today’s poem
I met Joy Harjo, a Muscogee-Cherokee poet, when she was 16 and I was assigned to teach her in place of her Bureau of Indian Affairs English teacher. I was at The Institute of American Indian Arts for half a year in 1968 teaching remedial reading. Joy was brilliant and deeply insightful. We are still close friends.
Here is another of my favorites of her poems. “She had some horses.”
Pretty cool string of sun splashed November days, eh?
john sj
She Had Some Horses
She had some horses.
She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break.
She had horses who were splintered red cliff.
She had some horses.
She had horses with long, pointed breasts.
She had horses with full, brown thighs.
She had horses who laughed too much.
She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.
She had horses who licked razor blades.
She had some horses.
She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their
bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet
in stalls of their own making.
She had some horses.
She had horses who liked creek Stomp Dance songs.
She had horses who cried in their beer.
She had horses who spit at male queens who made
them afraid of themselves.
She had horses who said they weren’t afraid.
She had horses who lied.
She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped
bare of their tongues.
She had some horses.
She had horses who called themselves, “horse”.
She had horses who called themselves “spirit”; and kept
their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names.
She had some horses.
She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.
She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who
carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.
She had horses who waited for destruction.
She had horses who waited for resurrection.
She had some horses.
She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.
She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.
She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her
bed at night and prayed as they raped her.
She had some horses.
She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.
These were the same horses.
Joy Harjo, from the book of the same title
cd performance version of 12 poems from the book available on itunes
Wednesday November 13
Tagore about the power of the unfamiliar; a university labors to introduce students to realities beyond the ones they already recognize.
Some more November sun today.
john sj
Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not.
Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.
I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter;
I forget that there abides the old in the new,
and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others,
wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same,
the one companion of my endless life
who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar.
When one knows thee, then alien there is none,
then no door is shut.
Oh, grant me my prayer
that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one
in the play of the many.
Tagore Gitanjali #63
Tuesday November 12
The march of the sunrise heading south across our northern sky stirs my blood on sunny mornings as autumn ripens. From my end of campus where the big parking lot opens a wide sky scape, it rose about half way between McNichols and the Northeast corner of Calihan Hall. At the December solstice, if we are lucky enough for a sunny dawn, it will rise right over the corner of Calihan. Sweet.
Here’s another Denise Levertov about the Christian metaphor “Lamb of God.”
Have a good day.
john sj
Agnus Dei by Denise Levertov
Given that lambs are infant sheep,
that sheep are afraid and foolish,
and lack the means of self-protection,
having neither rage nor claws, venom nor cunning,
what then is this ‘Lamb of God’?
This pretty creature, vigorous to nuzzle at milky dugs,
woolbearer, bleater, leaper in air for delight of being,
who finds in astonishment four legs to stand on,
the grass all it knows of the world?
With whom we would like to play,
whom we’d lead with ribbons,
but may not bring into our houses because it would soil the floor with its droppings?
What terror lies concealed in strangest words,
O lamb of God that taketh away the Sins of the World:
an innocence smelling of ignorance, born in bloody snowdrifts,
licked by forebearing dogs more intelligent than its entire flock put together?
God then, encompassing all things, is defenseless?
Omnipotence has been tossed away, reduced to a wisp of damp wool?
And we frightened, bored, wanting only to sleep
till catastrophe has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us,
wanting then to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony,
we who in shamefaced private hope had looked to be plucked from fire
and given a bliss we deserved for having imagined it.
is it implied
that we must protect this perversely weak animal,
whose muzzle’s nudgings suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold to our icy hearts a shivering God?
So be it.
Come, rag of pungent quiverings, dim star.
Let’s try if something human still can shield you, spark of remote light.
Monday November 11, 2013
VETERANS DAY AT UDM
I owe a growing awareness about veterans to one of our grads who double majored in Catholic Studies and Sociology and received her degree at age 31 a few years back. Sarah Shaffer came to UDM later than many students because she enlisted in the U.S. Airforce shortly after high school. Her sophisticated ability to interpret complex computer data patterns led her to serve with distinction during the war in Bosnia. During her years at UDM and since, Sarah taught many fellow students and faculty about questions of justice, the need for active peace making, and about the lives of women and men after they come out of service. She also taught young Lakota children computer skills as a Red Cloud Volunteer (on the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation) and is currently working with disabled veterans with PTSD as part of the Palo Alto CA division of the Veterans Administration in San Jose CA.
One thing Sarah teaches, now as her VA job but also to people like myself is that disability, wounds both physical and emotional, are honorable and that the challenge for many vets is to learn how to live with disabilities. One part of this life lesson applies to veterans and non veterans alike; learning to be flawed and beautiful at the same time. Thinking of that this morning let me to repeat the poem first posted on October 29, a first in the series of work day poems.
Posted in honor of all UDM students and grads who are veterans.
john sj
Tuesday October 29
This short prayer challenges me whenever I think to read it. It challenges me to recognize beauty while recognizing my propensity to nit pick about flaws. Flawed beauty is the only beauty on offer and, when I find the grace to notice, I come away playful and nourished.
Blessings on your day.
john sj
Prayer for Everyday
I think You want me
to let You
thank me for my generosities.
You want me
to let You
call me beautiful.
My own voice qualifies
your gratitude
— so creative, so majestic, so innocent and so kind —
endlessly.
But I give my permission.
July 18, 1997
p.s. UDM’s Cathlic Mass for Veterans Day will be in The Fountain Lounge at 11:30
