Month: November 2016

Thinking About Yeats

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment
The Second Comingyeats
By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I am a retired English professor, and I once spent a semester in college reading Yeats for a tutorial. This poem comes from World War I, but the first stanza resonates especially strongly with me today. In the United States at the moment, half of the population appears to be in mourning while the other half is jubilant. Clearly this is no way to coalesce to face the very real problems facing this society.
There is no going back to a mythical “great America,” as I have written previously. The very notion damns a sizeable proportion of our citizenry for whom America was anything but great. It is like a 19th century Confederate longing for the “good old days of slavery,” with our “happy Mammies” and “nigras” who “knew their place.”
The way forward is the only way available. No one knows what it looks like, but it certainly won’t be full of steel mills and “the little woman” at home. May we face reality with hope rather than bitterness and blame. May we find a way to  redirect our “passionate intensity” into rebuilding a nation with “justice and liberty for all.”

Micah 6:8

~ Elizabeth ~ Leave a comment

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“He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God?”

My grandparents lived through two world wars, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. They survived the Spanish Flu, which nearly claimed my grandfather. They lived through the Great Depression. During that economic crisis, the faculty at the University of Buffalo where my grandfather was a Dean, chose to take an across the board pay cut rather than lay off junior faculty members. They understood ordeal, suffering and sacrifice. Yet they remained loving and hopeful throughout their lives. Their faith gave them a firm foundation on which to stand.

My foundation is God, not the United States. This morning as I deal with a new and troubling national reality, I look to Micah for instruction. It is pretty clear that despair is not from God. I will continue to try to walk out my life justly, kindly and humbly.

As the New England abolitionist Theodore Parker said in 1853: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one. . . . But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

The Long Struggle to Live

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This sunny photo of me, my dog, the garden and my beloved Aunt Cary obscures the reality that she struggled with what was then called manic-depression, though I didn’t know it. I loved her high energy, her warm love and and kind spirit. By the time I went to college in 1965, Cary was hospitalized in Chicago for a while. There was no treatment for bipolar disorder at the time, and she experienced manic highs and desperate lows. In November of 1969, she jumped off a ledge of a Manhattan hotel room.

This week we learned of the hospitalization of another dear family member, now 39, who has endured the ravages of schizophrenia since she was 18. Medicine contains it somewhat, though the medicine has discouraging side effects. Still, she was suicidal and was again taken into care.

On November 19th our church holds an annual Mass for the families of those who have taken their own lives. We light candles, hear their names read, and weep together for those who lost the struggle to live.

May we be kind to one another. May we recognize the daily struggles around us of people just trying to make it through another challenging day.

Winding Down

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It has been a very long time that we have suffered through the 2016 Presidential election in the United States. I think it has left many many people deeply demoralized and discouraged about the future of the country. Ugliness has abounded, truth seems to be up for debate. Not any particular truth, but the existence of truth itself seems to challenged.

I was this tiny baby born just after the horrific conflict in World War II. I joined the “boom” of infants born then to visibly show faith in the future. Now two of us are grappling for leadership of this country with conflicting views of the future of America.

I cannot seek to “make America great again,” knowing as I do the multitudes who were excluded from that purported Eden. Instead I look to a future that deals with the reality of a massively shifting economic base, globalization and climate change. These things are true. They will not disappear by calling them lies. There is no way to return to some imagined perfect past. May we rise to the challenges ahead and vote with our hopes, not our fantasies.

Leonard Cohen and Apple Pie

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applepie

Leonard Cohen recently released an astounding album which runs for 36 minutes. It turns out that the time it takes me to peel 10 apples, slice them, sugar and cornstarch them and put them in a pie crust is 36 minutes. It is a wonderful juxtaposition to be listening to dark, end of life musings while making an sweet apple concoction. Somehow it seems metaphoric, that dark and light can co-exist, both in me and around me.

I first heard Cohen when he and I were very much younger, back in the mid-1960’s. In fact I knew a girl who had slept with him in Toronto. (Probably hundreds of women know someone who slept with Cohen!) Now as he muses about Judaism, life, cults, death, sex and love, I experience reverberations of my own past. Lovers come and gone, spiritual struggles, a desire to reconcile with those estranged.

The music accompanied bittersweet remembrances. The pie welcomes home my husband, present time love. It reminds me that most things have turned out well after all.

Gone Too Soon

~ Elizabeth ~ 2 Comments

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This is All Souls’ Day, and I am thinking about the people in my life who have lost children in sudden and unexpected ways. I refer to them all by initials only to protect their privacy.

I remember M, beloved son of M, who died in a brief freak snow burst on an interstate highway on his way home from work. His car was rear ended by a truck and he died instantly. He and his mother had last had an argument, and there was no time on earth for a repair of the rupture.

I remember R and L, beloved son and daughter of P and R.  R died in a one car crash at 19, the floor littered with empty beer cans. His sister L died one night of a heroin overdose, having battled addiction for twenty years. There was no time for repair of either relationship before their sudden deaths.

I remember J, beloved daughter of N and J, who died on the operating table from a “routine” operation. Only 13, she left her parents without a chance to say for the 1000th time how much they loved her.

Giving birth to a child changes us forever. Losing that child leaves a pain that, while sometimes eased, never departs. Let us never add to the pain by asking why they “aren’t over it by now.”