Overheard: Ted Kennedy, Poverty, and the New Testament

Stories about the late Senator Edward Kennedy have floated around since his death. They portray a man who used his influence on behalf of those who had little or none of their own. The sway of this man born into wealth and privilege helped countless persons on the underside of life. His deep passion for people has impressed me a great deal.

A friend referenced a recent tribute to the Senator in Christian Century magazine, written by a columnist from the Boston Globe.

“I asked [Senator Kennedy], ‘Where does this rabid concern about poverty come from?’ And he looked at me like I was from Mars. He said, ‘Have you never read the New Testament?’”

Levertov and the Source of Creativity

In a class a couple of weeks ago, discussing the Genesis 1 creation account, I said that authentic creativity comes from within, from the soul of a person. The human person may rearrange some pieces in the outer world, on the periphery of his/her life, in a way that brings about something unique; however, true creativity arises from the innermost core of a person -- that place at which we are most connected to the Divine -- and brings into being something that did exist previously. I said that this may be part of what it means to be created in the "image and likeness of God."

This morning I read this poem by Denise Levertov. It's good to hear another voice, just to know that I'm not entirely crazy all the time!


Misnomer

They speak of the art of war,
but the arts
draw their light from the soul's well,
and warfare
dries up the soul and draws its power
from a dark and burning wasteland.
When Leonardo
set his genius to devising
machines of destruction he was not
acting in the service of art,
he was suspending
the life of art
over an abyss,
as if one were to hold
a living child out of an airplane window
at thirty thousand feet.

(Evening Train, p. 79)

On Yearnings and Sieges

This poem/prayer from Rilke's Book of Prayer caught my attention today. It accurately describes my own inner resistance to what I need most in life, to that which if it overcame me, would be the life of me.


You many unassaulted cities:

Have you never yearned for the enemy,
that he might besiege you
for long irresolute years, until

in hopelessness and hunger you receive him?
He extends like the land beyond your walls,
and he knows he can hold out longer.

Look from your balconies:
there he camps. He does not tire
or diminish in size or strength.
He sends no messengers to threaten
or to promise or persuade.

He who will overcome you
is working in silence.


(Rainer Maria Rilke, I,49, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God)

Overheard: James Finley on Freedom

Our deepest freedom rests not in our freedom to do what we want to do but rather in our freedom to become who God wills us to be.

(James Finley, Merton's Palace of Nowhere, p. 73)

A Pig Poem in Response to the Elephant Poem

Wednesday night I used the William Stafford poem (the post below), "A Ritual to Read to Each Other," in a class in which I discussed some of the ways we get stuck in places we didn't intend to make home . . . we get lost holding the tails of the elephants before us . . . patterns others have made prevail in us . . . we follow the wrong god home and miss our star.

At the class I also offered a poem I had written earlier in the week as I considered Stafford's poem while reflecting on my own prodigal experience. Later, a friend referred to Stafford's poem as "the elephant poem" and to mine as "the pig poem." This is what I wrote:

At the time you followed
where they led
taking for yourself
the patterned life
they offered

You had no way of knowing
how stuck you
would become
in that far country
sucking pods
with pigs

and how much energy you'd need
to point yourself toward home

and how you'd have to leave pigs
littered alongside every homeward stretch of road

and how the dark and strenuous journey
back would become your life.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Stafford

A Ritual to Read to Each Other
by William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider –
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give – yes or no, or maybe –-
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

(In The Darkness around Us Is Deep)


This is one of my favorite Stafford poems. An inner stirring within me confirms its truth.

Patterns made by others prevail within me. Taking the tail of the elephant in front of me, I'm liable to get lost and miss the circus, or to follow the wrong god home and miss the star written with my own name.

So it is important to wake up -- awake people need to be awake. Sleeping through life, those familiar patterns prevail and I'll fail to recognize that my feet are only stepping where the elephants in front of me have gone.

I've spent enough years missing my star.

Overheard: Rilke on Unfolding

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)