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Monday – New Year’s Day
Here’s a fun poem by Philip Appleman, reminding us to remember all those who, often invisibly, improve the quality of our lives. A good New Year’s resolution is to respect and honor our fellow human beings, including those that work in the shadows.
After all, at this time of renewal as many celebrate Christianity’s apocalyptic promise, Appleman tells us in his concluding punchline that these unseen workers represent “the second coming.”
To the Garbage Collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the First Pickup of the New Year By Philip Appleman
(the way bed is in winter, like an aproned lap, like furry mittens, like childhood crouching under tables) The Ninth Day of Xmas, in the morning black outside our window: clattering cans, the whir of a hopper, shouts, a whistle, move on … I see them in my warm imagination the way I’ll see them later in the cold, heaving the huge cans and running (running!) to the next house on the street.
My vestiges of muscle stir uneasily in their percale cocoon: what moves those men out there, what drives them running to the next house and the next? Halfway back to dream, I speculate: The Social Weal? “Let’s make good old Bloomington a cleaner place to live in—right, men? Hup, tha!” Healthy Competition? “Come on, boys, let’s burn up that route today and beat those dudes on truck thirteen!” Enlightened Self-Interest? “Another can, another dollar—don’t slow down, Mac, I’m puttin’ three kids through Princeton?” Or something else? Terror?
A half hour later, dawn comes edging over Clark Street: layers of color, laid out like a flattened rainbow—red, then yellow, green, and over that the black-and-blue of night still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave their silhouettes against the red, and through the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk of garbage truck, and stick-figures of men, like windup toys, tossing little cans— and running.
All day they’ll go like that, till dark again, and all day, people fussing at their desks, at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all things that are Caesar’s.
O garbage men, the New Year greets you like the Old; after this first run you too may rest in beds like great warm aproned laps and know that people everywhere have faith: putting from them all things of this world, they confidently bide your second coming.
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Sunday
On this New Year’s Eve I post a Kenneth Patchen poem that appears to be a prayer addressed to God the Father. But before you conjure up images of an old man with a gray beard, know that Patchen once wrote that“only an unbeliever could have created our image of God: and only a fake God could be satisfied with it.” We can never wrap our minds around God, even though we attempt to do so through anthropomorphizing.
“At the New Year,” which I’ll share in a moment, is not the only poem where Patchen associates God with the purity of snow. In “The Snow Is Deep on the Ground,” the poet assures us that “God shall not forget us./ Who made the snow waits where love is.” Seeming to echo The Song of Solomon only with snow instead of vineyards and apple trees, Patchen associates the whiteness of the snow with his beloved. Sewanee experienced a lovely dusting of snow last night, so I have a fresh sense of why a poet would link this whiteness to the woman he loves. Here’s the poem:
The Snow Is Deep on the Ground By Kenneth Patchen
The snow is deep on the ground. Always the light falls Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
This is a good world. The war has failed. God shall not forget us. Who made the snow waits where love is.
Only a few go mad. The sky moves in its whiteness Like the withered hand of an old king. God shall not forget us. Who made the sky knows of our love.
The snow is beautiful on the ground. And always the lights of heaven glow Softly down on the hair of my belovèd.
Now to Patchen’s New Year’s poem, which also takes place on a snowy night. Looking out at the world, Patchen sees the bad along with the good. At the same time that he is gazing into the “deep throw of stars,” he is also seeing the horrors of war, with the dead lying in the World War I trenches.
When the poem starts out, we don’t expect this dark turn. Indeed, it seems more of an “Oh, holy night” type of poem. Then, however, it moves into a balancing act where “all that has been said bravely” is countered by “all that is mean anywhere in the world,” and where “all that is good and lovely” is followed by “every house where sham and hatred are.” The poet will not pretend that the world is other than what it is.
And yet he imagines a “clean moment” on New Year’s Eve when we await the ringing of bells that we pray will usher us into new possibilities and new hope. “Before this clean moment has gone,” he writes to the Father, “before this night turns to face tomorrow…there is this high singing in the air.”
The singing reminds me of the voices that the desperate speaker strives to hear and longs for in T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind’s singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star.
For Patchen, this “little point in time” before the New Year bells brings out our best. Although he knows only too well that the bells will just take us into the same world we have left—“the sorrowful human face in eternity’s window”—he knows that he is sensing the numinous as he imagines “other bells that we would ring.” These inner bells, like the high singing, are our connection with “our Father, who art in heaven.”
In “the deep throw of stars,” in “the wide land waiting,” in “all that has been said bravely,” in “all that is good and lovely,” these are the “other bells that we would ring, Father.”
At the New Year By Kenneth Patchen
In the shape of this night, in the still fall of snow, Father In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds and children In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys and the lovers, Father In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise of our cities In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches where the dead are, Father In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners out on the black water In all that has been said bravely, in all that is mean anywhere in the world, Father In all that is good and lovely, in every house where sham and hatred are In the name of those who wait, in the sound of angry voices, Father Before the bells ring, before this little point in time has rushed us on Before this clean moment has gone, before this night turns to face tomorrow, Father There is this high singing in the air Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window And there are other bells that we would ring, Father Other bells that we would ring.
In Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” which has been my New Year’s poem for the past two years, the poet imperiously instructs the bells to “ring out the darkness of the land,/ Ring in the Christ that is to be.” In Raymond MacDonald Alden’s “Why the Chimes Rang,” my favorite Christmas story, the chimes are quieter. “So far away, and yet so clear the music seemed,” he writes, “—so much sweeter were the notes than anything that had been heard before, rising and falling.” Patchen’s bells are even more distant–imagined rather than actual–but no less powerful for all that.
We all of us have those chimes within us. I pray to the God that (in the words of Julian of Norwich) made, loves and keeps us to help me hear them.
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Friday
As this is my last weekday post of the year, I went rummaging through past 2023 essays and came across one was particularly heartfelt. While I had many sublime reading experiences this past year—Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, Min Yin Lee’s Pachinko, Richard Powers’s Overstory, Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, George MacDonald’s Sir Gibbie, the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh and multiple novels by William Faulkner (Light in August, Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!) and Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton, North and South, Wives and Daughters)—none had the emotional impact of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. As I read her novel about Shakespeare using his famous play to process the grief over losing his son Hamnet, I remembered how I had turned to literature after my eldest son died 23 years ago.
This was before I learned, as I did later in the year from Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, that Hamlet may be above all a play about grieving—and that, through it, Shakespeare taught us a new and more powerful way to grieve than had existed previously. When I reached the end of Hamnet, I cried for Justin for the first time in over two decades. As you will see, I was profoundly moved by a book that reaffirmed how I had used art to work through my own sorrow.
Reprinted from March 6, 2023
I have just been emotionally blindsided by a powerful Maggie O’Farrell novel about Shakespeare’s wife and children. Hamnet (2020) is a fictional account of the bard’s marriage to Anne (Agnes) Hathaway and how the two processed the death of Hamnet, their one son. (According to Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt, “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” are in fact the same name.)
While some speculate that the marriage was troubled, that is not how O’Farrell sees it. Or at least, it is not troubled until Hamnet dies, at which point Shakespeare starts avoiding the family and burying himself in the theater. Feeling abandoned, Anne journeys to London when she hears (not from her husband) that he has written a play bearing their son’s name.
It is when she is responding to the play that Hamnet hit me with its hammer blow. Of course, the novel had to set me up for the final scene. As I read about Hamnet’s death and the family’s mourning, I thought of my own Justin, who drowned 23 years ago and who would have turned 44 this coming Sunday. Justin wasn’t uppermost in my mind as I was reading, but when I reached the end of the novel—where we see Anne/Agnes at the lip of the stage reaching out to the figures of Hamlet and the ghost of his father (played by Shakespeare)—something in me broke. I, who haven’t cried for Justin in over 20 years, was wracked by loud sobs that I couldn’t stop. Here’s the passage—the novel’s final paragraphs—that unleashed pent-up emotions I didn’t know were there:
For now, she is right at the front of the crowd, at the edge of the stage; she is gripping its wooden lip in both hands. An arm’s length away, perhaps two, is Hamlet, her Hamlet, as he might have been, had he lived, and the ghost, who has her husband’s hands, her husband’s beard, who speaks in her husband’s voice.She stretches out a hand, as if to acknowledge them, as if to feel the air between the three of them, as if wishing to pierce the boundary between audience and players, between real life and play.The ghost turns his head towards her, as he prepares to exit the scene. He is looking straight at her, meeting her gaze, as he speaks his final words:
“Remember me.”
Up until the moment when the young Hamlet appears on stage, Agnes has been furious with her husband. The rest of the audience may be gripped with the early presence of the ghost on the ramparts, but Agnes cannot understand why Shakespeare would have their son’s name emerge from “the mouths of people she has never known and will never know.” Why pretend, she asks, that their son’s name
means nothing to him, just a collection of letters? How could he thieve this name, then strip and flense it of all it embodies, discarding the very life it once contained? How could he take up his pen and write it on a page, breaking its connection with their son? It makes no sense. It pierces her heart, it eviscerates her, it threatens to sever her from herself, from him, from everything they had, everything they were.
And:
She had thought that coming here, watching this, might give her a glimpse into her husband’s heart. It might have offered her a way back to him. She thought the name on the playbill might have been a means for him to communicate something to her. A sign, of sorts, a signal, an outstretched hand, a summons. As she rode to London, she had thought that perhaps now she might understand his distance, his silence, since their son’s death. She has the sense now that there is nothing in her husband’s heart to understand. It is filled only with this: a wooden stage, declaiming players, memorized speeches, adoring crowds, costumed fools. She has been chasing a phantasm, a will-o’-the-wisp, all this time.
Then, however, the magic of the theatre takes over, which is all the more intense in her case because she recognizes, in the boy playing Hamlet, her own son. Shakespeare has coached the actor to be Hamnet had he grown into a man:
He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him.
As fiction becomes more real than reality itself, Agnes realizes what her husband has done:
Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own.; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. “O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.
The novel affected me not only because, through it, I relived the death of our son. After all, I have encountered other such dramas in the intervening years that, while moving, have not struck this deep. No, I think what O’Farrell has done is show how, in a great work of art, we are able, momentarily, to penetrate the boundary that separates us from the dead. Agnes sees—imagines she sees— her child on the stage and experiences “an old, familiar urge, like water gushing into a dry streambed. She wants to lay hands on that boy; she wants to fold him in her arms, comfort and console him—and she has to, if it is the last thing she does.”
Of course, art, no matter how great, can’t bring the dead back to life. But think about it this way: those we have lost were never entirely material to begin with. They were the emotions they aroused in us, the anxieties they put us through, the love we felt for them. They are also integrally intertwined with the people we have become. What Hamlet does for Agnes is bring back all of that. She sees, in one of the most three-dimensional characters ever penned, everything but the actual flesh and blood of her beloved son. And that flesh and blood were never the most important part of him anyway.
I realized, in reading Hamnet, that the way I turn to literature to process my life—including the death of my son—is more than a shallow consolation or a wish fulfillment or a cerebral exercise. I already knew, of course—but here was an author confirming it—that literature puts us closer to life’s essence than any other use of language. Watching Agnes watching Hamlet, I saw myself reading the literature I turned to after Justin died: Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Mary Oliver’s “The Lost Children” and Percy Shelley’s Adonais and Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. These works, I realized, connected me to parts of myself that Justin had touched—which is to say, ways in which Justin was still alive. The sorrow I felt while reading Hamnet, which took me back to my own mourning period, was intermixed with a deep joy and maybe even relief: these fictional re-creations to which I have devoted my life, I was assured, are not in vain.
Julia the other day asked me why I thought she is so drawn to certain fantasy works (especially Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown) that she returns to time and again. I said that the works we love have articulated deep soul longings and that we reread to get back in touch. Sometimes an old work still functions as a conduit and sometimes we discover we have grown past it and need to turn elsewhere. In any event, when she saw me crying and saw the book that was lying by my side (she’s the one who alerted me to it), she knew what had happened and she held me, just as she held me almost 23 years ago when we mourned our son together.
And in that action, I see another passage in Hamnet. Right before the end the author tells us that, after the play, Agnes will find her husband, “his face still streaked with traces of paste,” and they will stand together in “the open circle of the playhouse” until it is “as empty as the sky above it.” Perhaps they will think together, “Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” Because art has opened hearts that were in danger of shriveling, their relationship too will grow, in spite of—or even because of—the stresses that have been put on it. The Globe Theater opens them up to a vision that is as wide as the sky.
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Thursday
In this Christmas season, why are Republicans behaving like they are villains in a Charles Dickens novel? First, there was Iowa governor Kim Reynolds rejecting a federal summer program to feed underprivileged kids because she was worried that children would become too fat. Then Republican legislators in North Dakota rejected universal free school lunches on the grounds of cost, even while boosting their own meal allotment.
Their defensive rationales are what most remind me of Dickens since his comic satire shines most brilliantly when he’s having his villains defend their behavior. Check out how the trustees in Oliver Twist’s workhouse explain their food policies:
The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered—the poor people liked it! It was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work. “Oho!” said the board, looking very knowing; “we are the fellows to set this to rights; we’ll stop it all, in no time.” So, they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. With this view, they contracted with the waterworks to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll of Sundays.
Compare this reasoning to that of Iowa governor Reynolds:
“Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families,” Reynolds said in a release. “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”
In other words—if Iowa accepted federal funds, we’d have to keep feeding kids when the funds run out and furthermore kids don’t need the aid since they’re already eating badly.
And now check out a North Dakota legislator, courtesy of the Grand Forks Herald:
“Yes I can understand kids going hungry, but is that really the problem of the school district, is that the problem of the state of North Dakota? It’s really the problem of parents being negligent with their kids,” Senator Mike Wobbema said during the March 27 vote. Wobbema was one of the senators who voted in favor of boosting reimbursements for state workers like himself.
So it’s not the state’s problem. It’s the kids’ fault that their parents are negligent. One imagines Wobbema swelling up with indignation, just like Dickens’s workhouse beagle when Oliver asks for more gruel:
“Please, sir, I want some more.”The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralyzed with wonder; the boys with fear.
“What!” said the master at length, in a faint voice.
“Please, sir,” replied Oliver, “I want some more.”
The master aimed a blow at Oliver’s head with the ladle; pinioned him in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.
The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high chair, said,
“Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir! Oliver Twist has asked for more!”
There was a general start. Horror was depicted on every countenance.
“For more!” said Mr. Limbkins. “Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer me distinctly. Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?”“He did, sir,” replied Bumble.
“That boy will be hung,” said the gentleman in the white waistcoat. “I know that boy will be hung.”
So our Republicans, who are obsessed with cutting taxes on the wealthy, think they can find offsets by stiffing the poor. Dickens describes the potential savings:
For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was in full operation. It was rather expensive at first, in consequence of the increase in the undertaker’s bill, and the necessity of taking in the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two’s gruel. But the number of workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were in ecstasies.
Incidentally, I wondered what effect Dickens’s satire had on the poor laws of the time. I found the following from a google search:
While there is no direct link between Dickens’ work and the abolishment of the Poor Laws, his works sparked debate and changed the way people viewed what was going on in England at the time. Dickens’ vivid stories that captured the attention of the country gave faces and names to the tragedy that was the Poor Laws and showed a view into the lives of the poor. As people grew attached to Oliver and felt for his situation, many began to change their views on how the poor should be treated and the current modus operandi of ‘helping’ them.
One wonders whether even Dickens could shame our own legislators.
Julia and I returned yesterday from a trip that had us visiting one son in Buford GA and the other in Washington, D.C. Since we spent all yesterday in the car, I am reprinting an old post, this one about the poem that Bilbo chants as he nears the shire after having defeated the dragon.
When I went to Wikipedia to find “The Road Goes Ever On and On,” I discovered that there are three versions. The first one alludes to the adventures encountered in The Hobbit:
Roads go ever ever on Under cloud and under star, Yet feet that wandering have gone Turn at last to home afar. Eyes that fire and sword have seen And horror in the halls of stone Look at last on meadows green And trees and hills they long have known.
“Fire and sword” and “horror in the halls of stone” may well be oblique references to Tolkien’s World War I experiences in the trenches. Imagine what it must have meant to him to come home to England’s meadows, trees, and hills—its “green and pleasant land,” as Blake puts it.
I like the way the other two versions capture the different feelings one has, first when one embarks on a journey and then when one comes to the journey’s end. The first poem, as the Wikipedia article notes, talks of eager feet while the second of weary feet. Right now, like many travelers reaching the end of their journeys, I’m experiencing weary feet. The first poem is spoken by Bilbo as he sets off for Rivendell in the third chapter of Fellowship of the Ring. The second is spoken by Bilbo in Rivendell in The Return of the King after Frodo and the others return from the ring quest, weary and in shock. I’ve labeled them “before” and “after.”
Before
The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.
After
The Road goes ever on and on Out from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, Let others follow it who can! Let them a journey new begin, But I at last with weary feet Will turn towards the lighted inn, My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
I conclude with the final line in Richard O’Connell’s adventure story, “The Most Dangerous Game”:
He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided.
Still from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935)
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Tuesday
I’ve just finished reading W. G. Sebald’s remarkable novel Austerlitz, and while I know this is the Christmas season, it’s nevertheless useful to have this reminder of fascism’s threat, which is always with us. The novel is about a five-year-old boy who, for no reason he can figure out, is suddenly sent to Great Britain by his loving parents and taken in by a grim Welsh couple. The shock is so great that large swatches of his previous life are erased, including the fact that he used to live in Prague. Only years later, after he has retired from a career as an art historian, does he discover that his family was Jewish and that his parents died in the Holocaust.
When he is reconstructing this history through Vera, a family friend whom he has rediscovered, he learns about his father’s first awareness of the threat. On a trip to Germany Maximilian realizes, from a piece of candy, just how deeply the Germans have internalized the fascist ideology. The candy had embedded within it
a raspberry-colored swastika that literally melted in the mouth. At the sight of these Nazi treats, Maximilian had said he suddenly realized that the Germans had wholly reorganized their production lines, from heavy industry down to the manufacturing of items such as these vulgar sweets, not because they had been ordered to do so but each of his own accord, out of enthusiasm for the national resurgence.
I share the following passage because it describes a disturbing number of Trump’s followers. Austerlitz’s father describes Hitler’s famous Nuremberg rally, which brings to mind Donald Trump descent’s down the golden escalator in 2015, where he would go on to accuse Mexico of sending rapists to the U.S. as he announced his candidacy for the presidency:
Hours before his arrival, the entire population of Nuremberg and indeed people from much further afield, crowds flocking in not just from Franconia and Bavaria but from the most remote parts of the country, Holstein and Pomerania, Silesia and the Black Forest, stood shoulder to shoulder all agog with excitement along the predetermined route, until at last, heralded by roars of acclamation, the motorcade of heavy Mercedes limousines came gliding at walking pace down the narrow alley which parted the sea of radiant uplifted faces and the arms outstretched in yearning. Maximilian had told her, said Vera, that in the middle of this crowd, which had merged into a single living organism racked by strange, convulsive contractions, he had felt like a foreign body about to be crushed and then excreted.
In other words, the Jewish Maximilian realizes that fascists regard him (to borrow from Trump’s terminology) as “vermin” and poison in the blood.
Leni Reifenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will, about Hitler’s Nuremberg rally, confirms for Maximilian “his suspicions that, out of the humiliation, from which the Germs had never recovered, they were now developing an image of themselves as a people chosen to evangelize the world.” He mentions how, like Republicans at the 2015 Iowa State Fair witnessing Trump’s helicopter, they are awed by “the Führer’s airplane descending slowly to earth through towering mountain ranges of cloud.”
The extent to which the crowds have internalized Hitler’s message become even clearer to Maximilian when
a bird’s eye view showed a city of white tents extending to the horizon, from which, as day broke the Germs emerged singly, in couples, or in small groups, forming a silent procession and pressing ever closer together as they all went in the same direction, following, so it seemed, some higher bidding, on their way to the Promised Land at last after long years in the wilderness.
The Promised Land for MAGA is a white Christian patriarchy where women, Jews, and people of color know their place. So in the spirit of the season, let’s express our gratitude for our multicultural democracy and celebrate the richness of a society conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.
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Monday – Christmas
Here’s a Christmas poem, written by my father, that was probably inspired by Jean Luc Godard’s controversial film Hail Mary. It captures the miracle of Christmas by situating the birth of Jesus in a setting we can relate to. Merry Christmas!
Item By Scott Bates
They came in on Interstate 93 Past a dozen signs of NO VACANCY
And finally stopped at the Holiday Inn Where she stayed in the car while he went in
And was politely given the information They unfortunately had made no advance reservation
And although it was regrettable considering her condition They were all booked up and in any case had no resident physician
So it was at Cohen’s Garage that it came about With Cohen and his night man helping out
And some workers from the factory across the street Bringing in beer and something to eat
And finding the babe wrapped in a tarpaulin And lying in a station wagon
Between a pickup truck and a Dodge V-8 And staying all night to celebrate
So all in all it was quite a night And she was relieved that everything went all right
And thought to herself that it could have been worse And welcomed him into the universe
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Sunday
Sue Schmidt, pastor at the Salem United Church of Christ in Harrisburg PA, sent me her Christmas Eve sermon, which she says was shaped in part by Denise Levertov’s sublime poem “Annunciation.” Both Levertov and Sue focus on the human choice in accepting the divine call. It took courage on Mary’s part to do so, Levertov observes, while going on to note that we are all of us faced with comparable choices in our own lives. Sue quotes Levertov as she imagines the moment of choosing:
This was the moment no one speaks of, when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed, Spirit, suspended, waiting.
Sue goes on to elaborate:
The angel waits, respectfully, for Mary has a choice. This is Mary’s call, Mary’s invitation to respond to. She could have said – thank you, but I don’t think so. God will have to choose someone else. But after some time, Mary turns to the angel. “Let it be,” she says. “Let it be.” Let it be – these aren’t passive words like some teenagers use – yeah, whatever…said with indifference. Or words of resignation. Sure, if that’s the way it has to be, let it be. No, these are words of co-creation with the God of creation. “All right, God, Mary says, I will do this with you. Together we will co-create the child who will show the world your love.” “Let it be.”
After this choosing Levertov asks, “Aren’t there annunciations / of one sort or another / in most lives?” Sue makes the same point:
Tonight, as we sit surrounded by the beauty of the Christmas story, I wonder. Has God come to you with an invitation? Perhaps it’s a thought or longing that won’t go away. Or a new opportunity that’s been presented to you. It could even have been in a dream. And yet we wonder… How could that happen? I’m not able to do that! I couldn’t be that person! God leaves space for our questions; God stays in the conversation. “Yes, you can. I know. I’ve seen you. I know you. And I’m not asking you to do this alone. My spirit is working in you. I am with you – isn’t that what Immanuel means?”
Sue then drives the theme home by making Mary relatable:
Mary was a regular person. You could have passed her on the road or in the supermarket and not even noticed. She could have been your daughter’s best friend, or your child’s daycare worker. But Mary loved God. And Mary was willing to do something audacious – to create something new and beautiful and powerful with God. Into the silence, into the question, into the improbability of it all, Mary said “Let it be.”
Here’s Levertov’s poem:
Annunciation By Denise Levertov
We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always the tall lily. Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings, the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering, whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions courage. The engendering Spirit did not enter her without consent. God waited.
She was free to accept or to refuse, choice integral to humanness.
____________________________
Aren’t there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? Some unwillingly undertake great destinies, enact them in sullen pride, uncomprehending. More often those moments when roads of light and storm open from darkness in a man or woman, are turned away from in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair and with relief. Ordinary lives continue. God does not smite them. But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.
______________________________
She had been a child who played, ate, slept like any other child – but unlike others, wept only for pity, laughed in joy not triumph. Compassion and intelligence fused in her, indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous than any in all of Time, she did not quail, only asked a simple, ‘How can this be?’ and gravely, courteously, took to heart the angel’s reply, perceiving instantly the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb Infinite weight and lightness; to carry in hidden, finite inwardness, nine months of Eternity; to contain in slender vase of being, the sum of power – in narrow flesh, the sum of light. Then bring to birth, push out into air, a Man-child needing, like any other, milk and love –
but who was God.
This was the moment no one speaks of, when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed, Spirit, suspended, waiting.
______________________________
She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’ Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’ She did not submit with gritted teeth, raging, coerced. Bravest of all humans, consent illumined her. The room filled with its light, the lily glowed in it, and the iridescent wings. Consent, courage unparalleled, opened her utterly.
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Friday
Here’s a heartwarming story that has an obvious literary parallel. Neither story starts out promising, however.
When a tornado recently swept through Clarksville, Tennessee (where, incidentally, my brother lives, although he was unaffected), one family thought they had lost their baby. Here is the account given by ABC News. First the build-up:
Sydney Moore had just put her two young sons down for an afternoon nap when a deadly tornado tore through her hometown of Clarksville, Tennesseenover the weekend.
Moore, 22, said she and her fiancé Aramis Youngblood were standing in the living room of their mobile home when they heard a huge sound that she described as like an airplane flying directly over them.
Then the tragedy. While Moore protected her eldest son, she said Youngblood ran to the front of the house to grab Lord. As the tornado passed through, both adult and baby were grabbed by the winds:
“In the front bedroom, Aramis was in there with Lord, and the roof came off and swept them up,” [Moore] said. “The bassinet was the first thing to go.”
When the storm passed and Moore and Youngblood, whose collarbone had been dislocated, were able to talk, her first frantic question was, “Where’s my baby?” to which he replied he didn’t know.
And then the miraculous ending:
After a 10-minute search, Youngblood found Lord nestled safely in a tree, around 25 feet away, according to Moore.
“It was just like he was placed in a tree, like a little tree cradle for a baby,” Moore said. “It was like a cubby hole in a tree, at the bottom.”
Moore says of Youngblood, “I saw him walking through the woods, carrying Lord in the pouring down rain, and all of his clothes were ripped. It was like a scene in a movie.”
The baby had a cut that had to be treated but was otherwise fine. The trailer home, on the other hand, was completely demolished, with the bathtub “almost a mile away” and the roof at the other end of the trailer park. A member of the rescue unit said of the devastation, “It looked like a bomb went off. It looked like it had been in a war zone.”
And now for the literary equivalent. First, the tornado touches down:
Dorothy caught Toto at last and started to follow her aunt. When she was halfway across the room there came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard that she lost her footing and sat down suddenly upon the floor.
Then a strange thing happened.
The house whirled around two or three times and rose slowly through the air. Dorothy felt as if she were going up in a balloon.
What happens next is not unlike what happened with baby Lord. The author even compares it to a baby being rocked:
It was very dark, and the wind howled horribly around her, but Dorothy found she was riding quite easily. After the first few whirls around, and one other time when the house tipped badly, she felt as if she were being rocked gently, like a baby in a cradle…. [After hours of suspense], at last she crawled over the swaying floor to her bed, and lay down upon it; and Toto followed and lay down beside her.
In spite of the swaying of the house and the wailing of the wind, Dorothy soon closed her eyes and fell fast asleep.
It so happens that Dorothy’s landing is harder than Lord’s, but both are spared:
She was awakened by a shock, so sudden and severe that if Dorothy had not been lying on the soft bed she might have been hurt. As it was, the jar made her catch her breath and wonder what had happened…
