Friday Quotes, part 2

I do quite a bit of reading every week and I can't share all of it (it's just too much) -- but here are some of the highlights from this week. This first from the book The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon by Donald Hall (a memoir of Jane Kenyon's dying at age 47)

Meantime we lived in a house of poetry, which was also the house of love and grief; the house of solitude and art; the house of Jane's depression and my cancers and Jane's leukemia. When someone died whom we loved, we went back to the poets of grief and aoutrage, as far back as Gilgamesh; often I read aloud Henry King's "The Exequy," written in the seventeenth century after the death of his young wife. Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the cmoplexity of feelings at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears.

The reading that comes to mind is shaded by life. Yesterday, my friend Shary's brother Dean died after a battle with cancer. She and his family were by his side.

In the midst of all the craziness in the Middle East this poem of Wendell Berry's came to my sight this week (from his book Entries)

A Lover's Song
When I was young and lately wed
and every fissionable head
Of this super power or that
Prepared the ultimate combat,
Gambling against eternity
To earn a timely victory
And end all time to win a day,
"Tomorrow let it end," I'd pray,
"If it must end, but not tonight."
And they were wrong and I was right;
It's love that keeps the world alive
Beyond hate's genius to contrive.

This week, as always, around here has been a time of meeting new folks who walk in looking for help with rent or a utility bill. The question always comes -- What to do in the midst of such questions." I picked up a book I really love by Donna Schaper. It's the first one of hers I ever read back in 1991. The title is A Book of Common Power: Narratives against the current.

My so-called ministry with the poor is not tender, or gentle, or even kind. It has had most of its softness stripped away. Confronted with a request for assistance, I never yield unitl at least three nasty questions are asked. How did you get yourself into this mess? How are you going to get yourself out of this mess? And who besides me and God, is going to help you? I then invite the stranger to worship and start telling him or her just how much help our congregation needs. We are desperate for their leadership and participation. They don't believe me, but it is true.

I've been reading for the last several weeks an old book (1977) by Howell Raines entitled My Soul Is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South. It is entirely a collection of interviews with participants and witnesses to what was happening in the Civil Rights Movement. Yesterday I read an interview with Amzie Moore who is described by Raines this way: "The U.S. Army made him a man, his own man, when it sent him from the segregated Delta to a segregated unit in the Pacific in World World II. 'Here I'm being shipped overseas, and I been segregated from this man whom I might have to save or he save my life. I didn't fail to tell it.' He kept on telling it when he got home to the steamy Delta town of Cleveland [Mississippi] in 1946."

But when an individual stood at a courthouse like the courthouse in Greenwood and in Greenville and watched tiny figures [of the SNCC workers] standing against a huge column...[against white] triggermen and drivers and lookout men riding in automobiles with automatic guns...how they stood...how gladly they got in front of that line, those leaders, and went to jail! It didn't seem to bother 'em. it was an awakening for me...