Author: itoccurstocp

Memorial Day – not a time for mattress sales, but a time to remember those brave men and women who have given their lives in service to our country.  From the first time I heard Let Them In, John Gourka’s musical tribute to them it has stayed in my mind.  And while I listen to it year round, I always make it a point to listen to it more around Memorial Day.  I don’t need a new mattress, but I do need to remember those men and women for their sacrifice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCX1cULwal8 (This version by David Wilcox)

Let them in, Peter
They are very tired
Give them couches where the angels sleep
And light those fires

Let them wake whole again
To brand new dawns
Fired by the sun not wartime’s
Bloody guns

May their peace be deep
Remember where the broken bodies lie
God knows how young they were
To have to die
God knows how young they were
To have to die

So give them things they like
Let them make some noise
Give dance hall bands not golden harps
To these our boys

And let them love, Peter
For they’ve had no time
They should have trees and bird songs
And hills to climb

The taste of summer in a ripened pear
And girls sweet as meadow wind
With flowing hair

And tell them how they are missed
But say not to fear
It’s gonna be alright
With us down here

Let them in, Peter
Let them in, Peter
Let them in, Peter

I stumbled across a poem today — A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert – through a very indirect route.  I say that because it seems to add to the feeling that I particularly needed to hear it today – which is what I feel.  You have to read on with trepidation any poem that begins as this:

“Sorrow everywhere.  Slaughter everywhere.  If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else.”

But it gets better:

“But we enjoy our lives because that is what God wants.  Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine.”

And ultimately hits what I needed to hear:

“If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation.  We must risk delight.  We can do without pleasure, but not delight.  Not enjoyment.  We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of the world.  To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.”

It is, it seems, easy to “deny happiness, resist our satisfaction,” in remembering the suffering in the world, and thinking just how f’d up the world seems at times.  Being afraid to send your children to school, to eat out at a restaurant….  It becomes easy to “make injustice the only measure of our attention.”  But to quote from one my my favorites, Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann, Gilbert reminds us: “With all its sham and drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.  Be caresul.  Strive to be happy.”

“Forgiveness does not chance the past, but it does enlarge the future.”  Paul Lewis Boese

Forgiveness is an amazing thing, isn’t it?  Here, I don’t really mean FORGIVENESS, as in what God provides, but the lower case, forgiveness, forgiveness that we humans dispense and receive (though sometimes that looks and feels like FORGIVENESS).  I mean, in the ins and outs of life we all encounter those “slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune” on a fairly regular basis on both the giving and receiving end both, yet somehow we continue to function.  More than that, we actually (in most cases) interact again (whoa here) even continue to have relationships with those we forgive/those who forgive us.

It occurs to me that if, instead of forgiving them, each day we all just lessened our circle of friends and family by casting out of our circles those who offended us, those we needed to forgive, pretty soon we’d all be alone in our circles.  In that way, forgiveness can enlarge our lives, “enlarge the future.”

From the poet, Wendell Berry:

“The past is our definition.  We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.”

Reading this, I am reminded of this admonition, which is attributed to Seneca:

“Don’t stumble over something behind you.”

Still, I like Berry’s approach.  They way to deal with bad things from life’s past is to add some goodness to life today.  It may or may not resolve the past issue, but it just might make today better.  And if that sounds a bit like denial, then so be it.  Delusion is like a habanero pepper in the kitchen.  It can serve its purpose, if used sparingly.

“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”  Proverbs 22:6

Sad, but true, I guess, that only in retrospect can a child (though not then a child) truly, fully appreciate the role of the parent in shaping and creating what he/she becomes.  Though perhaps that is best, lest we become intimidated by the thought/peril of raising our own, and procreation of the species ceases.  Thanks, mom!

“Every time I see the bumper sticker that says ‘We think we’re humans having spiritual experiences, but we’re really spirits having human experiences,’ I (a) think it’s true and (b) want to ram the car.”  Anne Lamott

I can relate to Anne Lamott here.  It is so easy to get tied up in knots about life and miss the life going on around me.  That it takes a bumper sticker, or worse yet, a tragedy or misfortune of some type to bring me back to these realities, to point out what is important in life, is a bit embarrassing.  But then, compared to the alternative – continuing on obliviously – I’ll take the embarrassment and the perpetual Homer Simpson, slap on the forehead “DOH!”

From Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata:

“Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.  But let not this blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.”

Ehrmann’s exhortation hits home, as it reveals how, in a setting where the misdeeds of people, particularly public figures, are public knowledge, it becomes easy to become jaded and cynical.  This is particularly true when there seems to be a lack of remorse, or for that matter, significant consequences, for the misdeeds.  But there I go again being judgmental.  More importantly, Ehrmann is pointing out the indirect cost of such misdeeds.  While the misdeeds of a person may directly impact another person or a group, the larger shadow cast is the one that can make those not directly affected become jaded and cynical, make them oblivious, or at least less open to the reality that “many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life if full of heroism.”  That is, or course, Ehrmann’s point.  While “the world is full of trickery” it is also full or persons with “high ideals” and “heroism.”

I particularly like Ehrmann’s equating “high ideals” with “heroism.”  It becomes too easy to limit heroism to people who run into burning buildings and such, but it occurs to me that it is also heroism to do what Ehrmann suggests, to sort through all the crap coming at you in life yet continue to “strive for high ideals.”  There is heroism in a simple action intended to relieve someone’s burden, an act of kindness, or continuing on in your efforts when you would just as soon quit.  There is heroism in a smile, a kind word, or in some circumstances, just doing nothing when what you really want to do is to react or lash out.

“If we magnified blessings as much as we magnify disappointments, we would all be much happier.”  John Wooden

Okay, I complain a lot.  I mean A LOT.  And if I were thankful, grateful, only half that much….

 

“The older brother stalked off in an angry sulk and refused to join in.  His father came out and tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen.  The son said, ‘Look how many years I’ve stayed here serving you, never giving you one moment of grief, but have you ever thrown a party for me and my friends?’  Then this son of yours who has thrown away your money on whores shows up and you go all out with a feast.”  Luke 15:29-30 (Peterson’s Message)

I appreciate Peterson’s fresh language in an old story.  Here is the older, obedient son, who, out in the fields five minutes before he heard the music and asked the servant what was going on, was likely quite content with his life.  Yet knowing the insolent younger brother (I suspect they never got along) has returned, and that there is an ongoing celebration over that, the older brother goes into a full-fledged snit about how much is life now sucks.

But isn’t that kinda how life is?  As John Prine characterizes it – “That’s the way that the world goes round.  You’re up one day, the next your down.  It’s a half an inch of water and you think you’re gonna drown.  That’s the way that the world goes round.”

The parable reminds me that I am like the older brother in that I focus too much on what isn’t than what is, more on what is wrong than what is right, what upsets me more than what brings me joy.  ….  So, if one believes in divine intervention — Literally, as I was typing these previous words, our diabetic cat, Zoe, threw up this morning’s breakfast, depositing it all onto the wood floor.  So here I am, returning to the keyboard after the clean-up, and I realizing that I am faced with the decision.  In an otherwise pretty good life, will I let semi-digested, god-awful smelling cat hurl define my day?  Will I be the older brother?  Where is my snit-o-meter going to point to?

I am a latecomer to poetry, or perhaps better stated, a returnee to poetry, having only recently been able to shed the pall put on it by well-intentioned English teachers who forced me to read, memorize, and, God forbid, recite before the class poetry such as Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade — the “half a league, half a league, half a league, onward” is still wedged in my memory between other grade-school atrocities.   But I am not bitter, and here I am, more than a few decades later, though still in recovery, enjoying a poem now and then.

So today, I was struck by this from Garrison Keillor:

“Poetry is a necessity as simple as the need to be touched and similarly a need that is hard to enunciate.   The intense vision and high spirits and moral grandeur are simply needed lest we drift through our days consumed by clothing options and hair styling and whether to have the soup or the salad.”

Of course, anything that takes us away from being “consumed by clothing options and hair styling and whether to have the soup or the salad” is worthy of celebration.  But poetry (Tennyson aside) is as good or better a means to accomplish that as any.