Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit

Did you ever understand this?

If my spirit was poor, how could I enter heaven?
Was I depressed?
Understanding editing,
I see how a comma, removed or inserted
with careful plan,
can change everything.
I was reminded of this
when a poor young man
in Tunisia
desperate to live
and humiliated for trying
set himself ablaze;
I felt uncomfortably warm
as if scalded by his shame.
I do not have to sell vegetables from a cart as he did
or live in narrow rooms too small for spacious thought;
and, at this late date,
I do not worry that someone will
remove every single opportunity
for me to thrive.
Still, I am connected to, inseparable from,
this young man.
Blessed are the poor, in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Jesus. (Commas restored) .
Jesus was as usual talking about solidarity: about how we join with others
and, in spirit, feel the world, and suffering, the same as them.
This is the kingdom of owning the other as self, the self as other;
that transforms grief into
peace and delight.
I, and you, might enter the heaven
of right here
through this door.
In this spirit, knowing we are blessed,
we might remain poor.

--Alice Walker (1944- ) African American novelist, poet, and activist.

This poem refers to the story of Mohammed Bouazizi, who on December 17, 2010 set himself on fire in response to constant government harassment, and act of protest that helped spark the Arab Spring.

Scripture Reference: Matthew 5:1-12

Psalm III

To God: to illuminate all men. Beginning with Skid Road.
—Let Occidental and Washington be transformed into a higher place, the plaza of eternity.
—Illuminate the welders in shipyards with the brilliance of their torches.
—Let the crane operator lift up his arm for joy.
—Let elevators creak and speak, ascending and descending in awe.
—Let the mercy of the flower’s direction beckon in the eye.
—Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness — to seek the light.
—Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness — to seek the light.
—Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.
—Let Puget Sound be a blast of light.
—I feed on your Name like a cockroach on a crumb — this cockroach is holy.

Seattle, June 1956

--Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), American Buddhist poet, writer, activist, and member of the Beat Generation of writer, National Book Award for Poetry winner in 1974

A Narrow Girdle of Rough Stains and Crags

 A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags, 

 A rude and natural causeway, interposed 

 Between the water and a winding slope 

 Of copse and thicket, leaves the eastern shore 

 Of Grasmere safe in its own privacy: 

 And there myself and two beloved Friends, 

 One calm September morning, ere the mist 

 Had altogether yielded to the sun, 

 Sauntered on this retired and difficult way. ----

 Ill suits the road with one in haste; but we 

 Played with our time; and, as we strolled along, 

 It was our occupation to observe 

 Such objects as the waves had tossed ashore-- 

 Feather, or leaf, or weed, or withered bough, 

 Each on the other heaped, along the line 

 Of the dry wreck. And, in our vacant mood, 

 Not seldom did we stop to watch some tuft 

 Of dandelion seed or thistle's beard, 

 That skimmed the surface of the dead calm lake, 

 Suddenly halting now--a lifeless stand! 

 And starting off again with freak as sudden; 

 In all its sportive wanderings, all the while, 

 Making report of an invisible breeze 

 That was its wings, its chariot, and its horse, 

 Its playmate, rather say, its moving soul. --

And often, trifling with a privilege 

Alike indulged to all, we paused, one now, 

And now the other, to point out, perchance 

 To pluck, some flower or water-weed, too fair 

 Either to be divided from the place 

 On which it grew, or to be left alone 

 To its own beauty. Many such there are, 

 Fair ferns and flowers, and chiefly that tall fern, 

 So stately, of the queen Osmunda named; 

 Plant lovelier, in its own retired abode 

 On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side 

 Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere, 

 Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance. --

 So fared we that bright morning: from the fields 

 Meanwhile, a noise was heard, the busy mirth 

 Of reapers, men and women, boys and girls. 

 Delighted much to listen to those sounds, 

 And feeding thus our fancies, we advanced 

 Along the indented shore; when suddenly, 

 Through a thin veil of glittering haze was seen 

 Before us, on a point of jutting land, 

 The tall and upright figure of a Man 

 Attired in peasant's garb, who stood alone, 

 Angling beside the margin of the lake. 

 "Improvident and reckless," we exclaimed, 

 "The Man must be, who thus can lose a day 

 Of the mid harvest, when the labourer's hire 

 Is ample, and some little might be stored 

 Wherewith to cheer him in the winter time." 

 Thus talking of that Peasant, we approached 

 Close to the spot where with his rod and line 

 He stood alone; whereat he turned his head 

 To greet us--and we saw a Man worn down 

 By sickness, gaunt and lean, with sunken cheeks 

 And wasted limbs, his legs so long and lean 

 That for my single self I looked at them, 

 Forgetful of the body they sustained.-- 

 Too weak to labour in the harvest field, 

 The Man was using his best skill to gain 

 A pittance from the dead unfeeling lake 

 That knew not of his wants. I will not say 

 What thoughts immediately were ours, nor how 

 The happy idleness of that sweet morn, 

 With all its lovely images, was changed 

 To serious musing and to self-reproach. 

 Nor did we fail to see within ourselves 

 What need there is to be reserved in speech, 

 And temper all our thoughts with charity. --

Therefore, unwilling to forget that day, My Friend, 

Myself, and She who then received 

 The same admonishment, have called the place 

 By a memorial name, uncouth indeed 

 As e'er by mariner was given to bay 

 Or foreland, on a new-discovered coast; 

 And POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the name it bears.

--William Wordsworth (1770-1850), English poet and British poet laureate

Chorus I from The Rock

I
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God .
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

I journeyed to London, to the timekept City,
Where the River flows, with foreign flotations.
There I was told: we have too many churches,
And too few chop-houses. There I was told:
Let the vicars retire. Men do not need the Church
In the place where they work, but where they spend their Sundays.
In the City, we need no bells:
Let them waken the suburbs.
I journeyed to the suburbs, and there I was told:
We toil for six days, on the seventh we must motor
To Hindhead, or Maidenhead.
If the weather is foul we stay at home and read the papers.
In industrial districts, there I was told
Of economic laws.
In the pleasant countryside, there it seemed
That the country now is only fit for picnics.
And the Church does not seem to be wanted
In country or in suburb; and in the town
Only for important weddings.

CHORUS LEADER :

Silence! and preserve respectful distance.
For I perceive approaching
The Rock. Who will perhaps answer our doubtings.
The Rock. The Watcher. The Stranger.
He who has seen what has happened
And who sees what is to happen.
The Witness. The Critic. The Stranger.
The God-shaken, in whom is the truth inborn.

Enter the ROCK , led by a BOY :

THE ROCK :

The lot of man is ceaseless labour,
Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder,
Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant.
I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know
That it is hard to be really useful, resigning
The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
I say to you: Make perfect your will .
I say: take no thought of the harvest,
But only of proper sowing.

The world turns and the world changes,
But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change.
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.
Forgetful, you neglect your shrines and churches;
The men you are in these times deride
What has been done of good, you find explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind.
Second, you neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in southern tropics,
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.
The good man is the builder, if he build what is good.
I will show you the things that are now being done,
And some of the things that were long ago done,
That you may take heart. Make perfect your will.
Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.

The lights fade; in the semi-darkness the voices of WORKMEN are heard chanting .

In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
There are hands and machines
And clay for new brick
And lime for new mortar
Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

Now a group of WORKMEN is silhouetted against the dim sky. From farther away, they are answered by voices of the UNEMPLOYED .

No man has hired us
With pocketed hands
And lowered faces
We stand about in open places
And shiver in unlit rooms.
Only the wind moves
Over empty fields, untilled
Where the plough rests, at an angle
To the furrow. In this land
There shall be one cigarette to two men,
To two women one half pint of bitter
Ale. In this land
No man has hired us.
Our life is unwelcome, our death
Unmentioned in " The Times".

Chant of WORKMEN again .

The river flows, the seasons turn
The sparrow and starling have no time to waste.
If men do not build
How shall they live?
When the field is tilled
And the wheat is bread
They shall not die in a shortened bed
And a narrow sheet. In this street
There is no beginning, no movement, no peace and no end
But noise without speech, food without taste.
Without delay, without haste
We would build the beginning and the end of this street.
We build the meaning:
A Church for all
And a job for each
Each man to his work.

-- T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), Anglo-American Modernist poet and Nobel Prize winner in literature, from his play The Rock.

Image: Workers at La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, 2015

Chorus VII from The Rock

VII

In the beginning GOD created the world. Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And when there were men, in their various ways, they struggled in torment towards GOD
Blindly and vainly, for man is a vain thing, and man without GOD is a seed upon the wind: driven this way and that, and finding no place of lodgement and germination.
They followed the light and the shadow, and the light led them forward to light and the shadow led them to darkness,
Worshipping snakes or trees, worshipping devils rather than nothing: crying for life beyond life, for ecstasy not of the flesh.
Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.
And the Spirit moved upon the face of the water.
And men who turned towards the light and were known of the light
Invented the Higher Religions; and the Higher Religions were good
And led men from light to light, to knowledge of Good and Evil.
But their light was ever surrounded and shot with darkness
As the air of temperate seas is pierced by the still dead breath of the Arctic Current;
And they came to an end, a dead end stirred with a flicker of life,
And they came to the withered ancient look of a child that has died of starvation.
Prayer wheels, worship of the dead, denial of this world, affirmation of rites with forgotten meanings
In the restless wind-whipped sand, or the hills where the wind will not let the snow rest.
Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.

Then came, at a predetermined moment, a moment in time and of time,
A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time,
A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.
Then it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the light of the Word,
Through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being;
Bestial as always before, carnal, self-seeking as always before, selfish and purblind as ever before,
Yet always struggling, always reaffirming, always resuming their march on the way that was lit by the light;
Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other way.

But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before
That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason,
And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.
The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do
But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards
In an age which advances progressively backwards?

VOICE OF THE UNEMPLOYED ( afar off ):

In this land

There shall be one cigarette to two men,
To two women one half pint of bitter
Ale. . . .

CHORUS :

What does the world say, does the whole world stray in high-powered cars on a by-pass way?

VOICE OF THE UNEMPLOYED ( more faintly ):

In this land

No man has hired us. . . .

CHORUS :

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.
Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?
When the Church is no longer regarded, not even opposed, and men have forgotten
All gods except Usury, Lust and Power.

--T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), Anglo-American Modernist poet and Nobel Prize winner in literature, from his play The Rock.


Image: Detail from Passion exterior at La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, 2015

Walking the talk blessing

May God the maker bless you:
God who speaks words of freedom and justice,
God who walks what he talks forever.
May God bless you,
with hope.

May Jesus the teacher bless you:
Jesus who speaks of Good News for poor people,
Jesus who talks and does the business.
May Jesus bless you,
with truth.

May God the Holy Spirit bless you:
the Holy Spirit who speaks in fire and stillness,
the Holy Spirit who dances what she announces.
May the Holy Spirit bless you,
with joy.

May you walk and talk with God
who love you forever,
every step of your journey
every moment of your life.

Amen.

--Ruth Burgess, written for Church Action on Poverty, from Like Leaves to the Sun: Prayers from the Iona Community, 2013



Photo: Rainbow in the Cloud Forest, Monteverde, Costa Rica