A House Divided

On a railroad car in your America,

I made the acquaintance of a man
who sang a life-song with these lyrics:
"Do whatever you can/ to avoid
becoming a roofing man."
I think maybe you'd deem his tenor
elitist, or you'd hear him as falling
off working-class key. He sang
not from his heart but his pulsing
imagination, where every roof is
sloped like a spire and Sequoia tall.
Who would wish for themselves, another,
such a treacherous climb? In your America,
a clay-colored colt stomps, its hooves
cursing the barn's chronic lean.
In your America, blood pulses
within the fields, slow-poaching a mill saw's
buried flesh. In my America, my father
awakens again thankful that my face
is not the face returning his glare
from above eleven o'clock news
murder headlines. In his imagination,
the odds are just as convincing
that I would be posted on a corner
pushing powder instead of poems—
no reflection of him as a father nor me
as a son. We were merely born
in a city where the rues beyond our doors
were the streets that shanghaied souls.
To you, my America appears
distant, if even real at all. While you are
barely visible to me. Yet we continue
stealing glances at each other
from across the tattered hallways
of this overgrown house we call
a nation—every minute
a new wall erected, a bedroom added
beneath its leaking canopy of dreams.
We hear the dripping, we feel drafts
wrap cold fingers about our necks,
but neither you or I trust each other
to hold the ladder or to ascend.


-- Kyle Dargan (1980- ), prize-winning African American poet, professor, and teacher of creative writing

Image: A House Divided, by Lynette Cook

Scripture reference: Mark 3:20-35, 3rd Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 5B

The poet writes about this poem at The American Academy of Poets about this poem:

"I took Amtrak from Washington, D.C. to Atlanta for my brother's wedding. I'd never travelled that far south by train. I saw a familiar but antiquated ruralness—another iteration of America. On the return, I grabbed a seat next to a group of Alabamians on their way to Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity. It seemed that, in the moment, there were so many different “Americas” colliding in the coach. While conversing about work over a dining car breakfast, one of the men, Mike Laus, offered a line about roofing someone had passed on to him. It struck me, and provided an entry point for musing on how little we see of, or believe in, each other's Americas."

Don't Call Me a Stranger: The Cry of a Migrant

Don’t call me a stranger:
the language I speak sounds different
but the feelings it expresses are the same.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I need to communicate,
especially when language is not understood.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I need to be together,
especially when loneliness cools my heart.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I need to feel at home,
especially when mine is very far away from yours.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I need a family because mine I’ve
left to work for yours.

Don’t call me a stranger:
the soil we step on is the same
but mine is not ‘the promised land’.

Don’t call me a stranger:
the colour of my passport is different
but the colour of our blood is the same.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I toil and struggle in your land
and the sweat of our brows is the same.

Don’t call me a stranger:
borders, we created them
and the separation that results is the same.

Don’t call me a stranger:
I am just your friend
but you do not know it yet.

Don’t call me a stranger:
we cry for justice and peace in different ways
but our God is the same.

Don’t call me a stranger:
Yes! I am a migrant
but our God is the same.

--National Council of the Churches of India, found at Welcoming the Stranger: praying in solidarity with refugees from around the world, part 2: Lent and Easter, by the Jesuit Refugee Service, https://www.jrsuk.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Lent-Prayers-Pack-JRS-UK-2016.pdf

Not Once

Not once—not when I toppled, rigid, a
5’7” pine felled,
stiff as a board, a five and a half foot
plank, 16x32,
and not while I wallowed on the rug among
his oxygen tubes and my cane and his 8
wheelchair wheels, and not when I sat by his
hospice bed, chirping I’m fine!,
and not the next day, when the brilliant violet
and black slash-slathered in my easy-life skin,
or days later when the purple turned to yellow and the
blue green—never once when I
said No pain, Nothing broken,
did I feel lucky, did I measure the force of the
blow, the floor speeding up like a heavy-weight’s
smash to my cheek and eyebrow, not until
today, did I begin to feel
grateful for my good fortune—no concussion, no
fracture—as if I expected to be able to be
struck by the earth, a wrecking ball,
and not feel it—
as when someone on the other side of the world
or the city, is struck in my name, I do not feel it.



--Sharon Olds (1942- ), American poet and professor, New York State Poet 1998-2000, winner of the Pulitzer and T. S. Eliot prizes, Guggenheim and NEA fellow.

Pākaitore

They formed a circle, holding hands.

What cop would break such brittle wrists
stretched round this smallest of small lands?

The statue gone, the plinth still stands.
The fig tree squiggles, bends and twists.
Its branches circle, holding hands.

Some years the garden fills with bands.
The vocals roll, the beat insists,
all round this smallest of small lands.

Movers and shakers, firebrands,
rock standing firm, song that resists;
all in that circle, holding hands.

The grassy bank, the river sands,
the landing place that still exists
beside this smallest of small lands.

The years move on, and time expands
the distance, but the tale persists:
they formed a circle, holding hands,
around this smallest of small lands.


-- Airini Beautrais (1983- ) New Zealand poet. From  Flow: Whanganui River Poems, Victoria University Press, 2017.


Background for this poem, found at Best New Zealand Poems :


‘In 1995, Whanganui iwi occupied Pākaitore/Moutoa Gardens for 79 days. The occupation sought to restore mana over the site, a former pā and trading place, and to highlight treaty claims and tino rangatiratanga.

‘When police came to intervene, a group of supporters of the protest organised an action, holding hands around the park to obstruct police entry. The poem says the circle was “all round” the park; however, this is an exaggeration. I asked Whanganui Quaker and Treaty issues educator David James for the story. He replied:

“There were something like 200 there on the day, but they were still not enough for a complete circle, so the police could indeed have walked straight on via the courthouse side. The mayor found it useful to say that they couldn’t have come on to the evict the occupiers because of the risk to the old people who were on the picket line—but we weren’t all old at all, though there were ninety-year-olds involved. So it was the mayor who started the notion that it was a complete circle, and it’s also gone into Māori lore as that. Two other important things: We were facing outwards towards the police and the other citizens, some of whom were lined up on the opposite river bank to see the action, leaving our Māori allies free to do what they needed to inside. Symbolically that’s an important stance for allies—interacting with our own and not crowding Māori or monitoring them . . . And at the end, when the action was ending, Moana Jackson came out from Pākaitore and went round thanking every individual, and saying that to the best of his knowledge it had been a unique stand by Pākehā in support of Māori.”

‘The protesters were not evicted and eventually left the park peacefully at dawn on 18 May. In 2001 a tripartite agreement concerning management and ownership of Pākaitore was signed by iwi, local council and the Crown.’

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw. 

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard. 

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled. 

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands. 

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough. 

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned. 

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

--Jane Hirshfield (1953- ), American poet, from Ledger (2020)

Rosa Parks

This is for the Pullman Porters who organized when people said
they couldn’t. And carried the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago
Defender to the Black Americans in the South so they would/
know they were not alone. This is for the Pullman Porters who
helped Thurgood Marshall go south and come back north to fight
the fight that resulted in Brown v. Board of Education because
even though Kansas is west and even though Topeka is the birth-
place of Gwendolyn Brooks, who wrote the powerful “The
Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock,” it was the
Pullman Porters who whispered to the traveling men both
the Blues Men and the “Race” Men so that they both would
know what was going on. This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled as if they were happy and laughed like they were tickled
when some folks were around and who silently rejoiced in 1954
when the Supreme Court announced its 9—0 decision that “sepa-
rate is inherently unequal.” This is for the Pullman Porters who
smiled and welcomed a fourteen-year-old boy onto their train in
1955. They noticed his slight limp that he tried to disguise with a
doo-wop walk; they noticed his stutter and probably understood
why his mother wanted him out of Chicago during the summer
when school was out. Fourteen-year-old Black boys with limps
and stutters are apt to try to prove themselves in dangerous ways
when mothers aren’t around to look after them. So this is for the
Pullman Porters who looked over that fourteen-year-old while
the train rolled the reverse of the Blues Highway from Chicago to
St. Louis to Memphis to Mississippi. This is for the men who kept
him safe; and if Emmett Till had been able to stay on a train all
summer he would have maybe grown a bit of a paunch, certainly
lost his hair, probably have worn bifocals and bounced his grand-
children on his knee telling them about his summer riding the
rails. But he had to get off the train. And ended up in Money,
Mississippi. And was horribly, brutally, inexcusably, and unac-
ceptably murdered. This is for the Pullman Porters who, when the
sheriff was trying to get the body secretly buried, got Emmett’s
body on the northbound train, got his body home to Chicago,
where his mother said: I want the world to see what they did
to my boy. And this is for all the mothers who cried. And this is
for all the people who said Never Again. And this is about Rosa
Parks whose feet were not so tired, it had been, after all, an ordi-
nary day, until the bus driver gave her the opportunity to make
history. This is about Mrs. Rosa Parks from Tuskegee, Alabama,
who was also the field secretary of the NAACP. This is about the
moment Rosa Parks shouldered her cross, put her worldly goods
aside, was willing to sacrifice her life, so that that young man in
Money, Mississippi, who had been so well protected by the
Pullman Porters, would not have died in vain. When Mrs. Parks
said “NO” a passionate movement was begun. No longer would
there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs.
Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system,
the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and
the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young
men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No. Great
voices would be raised singing the praises of God and exhorting
us “to forgive those who trespass against us.” But it was the
Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it
was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not
being able to stand it. She sat back down.

--Nikki Giovanni (1943- ), African American poet and teacher

Making Peace

A voice from the dark called out, 
                       ‘The poets must give us 
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar 
imagination of disaster. Peace, 
not only the absence of war.’ 
                                       But peace, like a poem, 
is not there ahead of itself, 
can’t be imagined before it is made, 
can’t be known except 
in the words of its making, 
grammar of justice, 
syntax of mutual aid. 
                                        A feeling towards it, 
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have 
until we begin to utter its metaphors, 
learning them as we speak. 
                                                A line of peace might appear 
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making, 
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power, 
questioned our needs, 
allowed long pauses . . . 
                         A cadence of peace might balance its weight 
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence, 
an energy field more intense than war, 
might pulse then, 
stanza by stanza into the world, 
each act of living 
one of its words, each word 
a vibration of light—facets 
of the forming crystal.

--Denise Levertov (1923-1997), Anglo- American poet, from Breathing the Water, 1987

Caged Bird

A free bird leaps 
on the back of the wind 
and floats downstream 
till the current ends 
and dips his wing 
in the orange sun rays 
and dares to claim the sky. 

But a bird that stalks 
down his narrow cage 
can seldom see through 
his bars of rage 
his wings are clipped 
and his feet are tied 
so he opens his throat to sing. 

The caged bird sings 
with a fearful trill 
of things unknown 
but longed for still 
and his tune is heard 
on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom. 

 The free bird thinks of another breeze 
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees 
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn 
and he names the sky his own

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams 
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings 
with a fearful trill
of things unknown 
but longed for still 
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill 
for the caged bird sings of freedom.

--Maya Angelou (1928-2014), African American poet, activist, and memoirist, from Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?, 1983

When Peace Become Obnoxious

Mt 10: 34-36

A few weeks ago, a federal judge handed down an edict which stated in substance that the University of Alabama could no longer deny admission to persons because of their race. With the handing down of this decision, a brave young lady by the name of Autherine Lucy was accepted as the first Negro student to be admitted in the history of the University of Alabama. This was a great moment and a great decision. But with the announcement of this decision, the vanguards of the old order began to emerge. The forces of evil began to congeal. As soon as Autherine Lucy walked on the campus, a group of spoiled students lead by Leonard Wilson and a vicious group of criminals began threatening her on every hand. Crosses were burned. Eggs and bricks were thrown at her. The mob even jumped on top of the car in which she was riding. Finally the president and trustees of the University of Alabama asked Autherine to leave for her own safety and the safety of the university. The next day after Autherine was dismissed the paper came out with this headline: “Things are quiet in Tuscaloosa today. There is peace on the campus of the University of Alabama."

Yes things were quiet in Tuscaloosa. Yes there was peace on the campus, but it was peace at a great price. It was peace that had been purchased at the exorbitant price of an inept trustee board succoming to the whims and carprices of a vicious mob. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of allowing mobocracy to reign supreme over democracy. It was peace that had been purchased at the price of the capitulating to the forces of darkness. This is the type of peace that all men of goodwill hate. It is the type of peace that is obnoxious. It is the type of peace that stinks in the nostrils of the almighty God.

Now let me hasten to say that this is not a concession to or a justification for physical war. I can see no moral justification for war. I believe absolutely and positively that violence is self-defeating. War is devastating. And we know now that if we continue to use these weapons of destruction, our civilization will be plunged across the abyss of destruction. 

However, there is a type of war that every Christian is involved in. It is a spiritual war. It is a war of ideas. Every true Christian is a fighting pacifist. In a very profound passage, which has been often misunderstood, Jesus utters this. He says “Think not that I am come to bring peace. I come not to bring peace, but a sword.” {Mt 10:34-36} Certainly he is not saying that he comes not to bring peace in the higher sense. What he is saying is: “I come not to bring this peace of escapism, this peace that fails to confront the real issues of life, the peace that makes for stagnant complacency.” Then he says, I come to bring a sword—not a physical sword. Whenever I come a conflict is precipitated between the old and the new, between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. “I come to declare war on evil. I come to declare war on injustice."

This text is saying, in substance, "Peace is not merely the absence of some negative force—war, tensions, confusion but it is the presence of some positive force—justice, goodwill, the power of the kingdom of God." 

I had a long talk the other day with a man about this bus situation. He discussed the peace being destroyed in the community, the destroying of good race relations. I agreed that it is more tension now. But peace is not merely to absence of this tension, but the presence of justice. And even if we didn’t have this tension, we still wouldn’t have positive peace. Yes it is true that if the Negro accept his place, accepts exploitation, and injustice, there will be peace. But it would be an obnoxious peace. It would be a peace that boiled down to stagnant complacity, deadening passivity and 

If peace means this, I don't want peace: 
If peace means accepting second class citizenship I don't want it. 
If peace means keeping my mouth shut in the midst of injustice and evil, I don't want it. 
If peace means being complacently adjusted to a deadening status quo, I don't want peace. 
If peace means a willingness to be exploited economically, dominated politically, humiliated and segregated, I don't want peace.

In a passive non-violent manner we must revolt against this peace. Jesus says in substance, I will not be content until justice, goodwill, brotherhood, love yes, the kingdom of God are established upon the earth. This is real peace. Peace is the presence of positive good. Finally, never forget that there is an The inner peace that comes as a result of doing God’s will. 

Our Father God, who dost overarch our fleeting years with thine eternity and dost undergird our weakness with thy strength, in the midst of the pressures of another day, as we face its vast concerns. Above all else save us from succumbing to the tragic temptation of Of becoming cynical. 


 -- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King,  Jr.  (1930-1968), African American pastor, civil rights leader, preacher, and martyr; Sermon Delivered on 18 March 1956 at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in Papers 3:207-208. 

Dexter’s 18 March 1956 program indicates King preached this sermon. King's trial began on 19 March 1956. Judge Eugene Carter found King guilty after a four-day trial and sentenced him to either pay a $500 fine plus court costs or serve 386 days in jail. The sentence was suspended following an appeal by King’s attorney (Testimony in State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr., 22 March 1956, in Papers 3:183-196). 

My Standard Response

I. 
      The first question is always phrased this way: 
      “So. How much Indian are you?”

II. 
      We did not live in tepees. 
      We did not braid our hair. 
      We did not fringe our shirts. 
      We did not wear war bonnets. 
      We did not chase the buffalo. 
      We did not carry shields. 
      We were never Plains Indians. 
      We tried to ride, but we kept falling off of our dogs.

III. 
      A local official came to our office to ask our help with a city event. He had a splendid 
     idea, he said. To kick off the event and show everyone in town that our tribe was still 
     around, we should go up to the bluff overlooking the city and make a big smoke 
     signal. Then they would know we were here. 
      Who ever heard of smoke signals in the forests? I imagined us upon the bluff, lighting 
     one of those firestarter bricks. We haven’t made fire since the Boy Scouts took over. 
     And how would the citizens know it was us? They’d probably call the fire department.

IV.
     As they ask, they think, yes, 
      I can see it in her face. High cheekbones 
      (whatever those are) and dark hair. 

      Here’s a thought: don’t we all have 
      high cheekbones? If we didn’t, 
      our faces would cave in. 
      (But I do have a colonized nose.) 

      I’m sick of explaining myself. 

      “You know,” I finally say, 
      “It doesn’t matter to my people.” 
      I ride off to my ranch-style home. 
      Time to weave a basket, or something.

--Dr. Karenne Wood (1960-2019), member of the Monacan Indian Nation, poet and anthropologist, from Markings on Earth, 2001

Sonnet

My heart be brave, and do not falter so, 
Nor utter more that deep, despairing wail. 
Thy way is very dark and drear I know, 
But do not let thy strength and courage fail;  
For certain as the raven-winged night 
Is followed by the bright and blushing morn, 
Thy coming morrow will be clear and bright; 
’Tis darkest when the night is furthest worn. 
Look up, and out, beyond, surrounding clouds,
And do not in thine own gross darkness grope,
Rise up, and casting off thy hind’ring shrouds,
Cling thou to this, and ever inspiring hope: 
 Tho’ thick the battle and tho’ fierce the fight, 
 There is a power making for the right.

--James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), African American poet, teacher, newspaperman, and lawyer

For the Union Dead

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, 
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die—
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flag
 quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year—
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

-- Robert Lowell (1917-1977), from Collected Poems, 2003.



Image: Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, By Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1888.

Bitter Fruit of the Tree

They said to my grandmother: "Please do not be bitter,"
When they sold her first-born and let the second die,
When they drove her husband till he took to the swamplands,
And brought him home bloody and beaten at last.
They told her, "It is better you should not be bitter,
Some must work and suffer so that we, who must, can live,
Forgiving is noble, you must not be heathen bitter;
These are your orders: you are not to be bitter."
And they left her shack for their porticoed house.

They said to my father: "Please do not be bitter,"
When he ploughed and planted a crop not his,
When he weatherstripped a house that he could not enter,
And stored away a harvest he could not enjoy.
They answered his questions: "It does not concern you,
It is not for you to know, it is past your understanding,
All you need know is: you must not be bitter."
And they laughed on their way to reckon the crop,
And my father walked over the wide garnered acres
Where a cutting wind warned him of the cold to come.

They said to my brother: "Please do not be bitter,
Is it not sad to see the old place go to ruin?
The eaves are sprung and the chimney tower is leaning,
The sills, joists, and columns are rotten in the core;
The blinds hang crazy and the shingles blow away,
The fields have gone back to broomsedge and pine,
And the soil washes down the red gulley scars.
With so much to be done, there's no time for being bitter.
Your father made it for us, it is up to you to save it,
What is past is over, and you should not be bitter."
But my brother is bitter, and he does not hear.

--Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989), African American poet

The Laws of Motion

(for Harlem Magic)

The laws of science teach us a pound of gold weighs as much as
a pound of flour though if dropped from any
undetermined height in their natural state one would
reach bottom and one would fly away

Laws of motion tell us an inert object is more difficult to
propel than an object heading in the wrong direction is to
turn around. Motion being energy—inertia—apathy.
Apathy equals hostility. Hostility—violence. Violence
being energy is its own virtue. Laws of motion teach us

Black people are no less confused because of our
Blackness than we are diffused because of our
powerlessness. Man we are told is the only animal who
smiles with his lips. The eyes however are the mirror of
the soul

The problem with love is not what we feel but what we
wish we felt when we began to feel we should feel
something. Just as publicity is not production: seduction
is not seductive

If I could make a wish I’d wish for all the knowledge of all
the world. Black may be beautiful Professor Micheau
says but knowledge is power. Any desirable object is
bought and sold—any neglected object declines in value.
It is against man’s nature to be in either category

If white defines Black and good defines evil then men
define women or women scientifically speaking describe
men. If sweet is the opposite of sour and heat the
absence of cold then love is the contradiction of pain and
beauty is in the eye of the beheld

Sometimes I want to touch you and be touched in
return. But you think I’m grabbing and I think you’re
shirking and Mama always said to look out for men like
you

So I go to the streets with my lips painted red and my
eyes carefully shielded to seduce the world my reluctant
lover

And you go to your men slapping fives feeling good
posing as a man because you know as long as you sit
very very still the laws of motion will be in effect

--Nikki Giovanni (1943- ), African American poet and essayist, from The Women and The Men, 1970

Morning Prayer 2

Once more a new day lies before us, our Father. As we go out among humanity to do our work, touching the hands and lives of our fellow human beings, make us, we pray thee, friends of all in the world. Save us from blighting the fresh flower of any heart by the flare of sudden anger or secret hate. May we not bruise the rightful self-respect of any by contempt or malice. Help us to cheer the suffering by our sympathy, to freshen the drooping by our hopefulness, and to strengthen in all the wholesome sense of worth and the joy of life. Save us fro the deadly poison of class pride. Grant that we look all persons in the face with the eyes of a brother or a sister. If anyone needs us, make us ready to yield our help ingrudgingly, unless higher duties claim us, and may we rejoice that we have it in us to be helpful to our fellow human beings.

--The Rev. Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), Baptist minister, theologian, teacher, and social reformer, one of the founders of the Social Gospel Movement, adapted from Prayers of the Social Awakening, 1909

Paradox Blessing

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers,
half-truths, superficial relationships,
so that you will live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice,
oppression and exploitation of people,
so that you will work for justice, equity, and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed
for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war,
so that you will reach out your hand to comfort them
and change their pain to joy.

And may God bless you with the foolishness to think
that you can make a difference in the world,
so that you will do the things that others tell you
cannot be done.

 --from Celtic Daily Prayer, Book 2, from the Northumbria Community, p. 1088

Migratory God

Migratory God
who uprooted Abraham
and led him into a foreign land
provide rest for your people
the stranger and alien
the refugee and wanderer the one seeking sanctuary
settling in an unfamiliar place

Migratory God
who travels great distances
to become human
and live among us
dwelling in us
help us see that we all are restless
searching and seeking
finding that place of being and belonging
to lay our heads as you who had no place
except with your people

Migratory God
who has crossed borders and boundaries
to be born a stranger
fleeing from country to country
feet moving for miles, over desert and dry places
into the Jordan River
where you cross from one land to the other
in the waters of baptism
where you wash off ties to nation and citizen
so we might enter into a newkingdom and country  

Migratory God
who accompanies us in our journey
remind us of where we’ve been
from where we’ve come
so we might not forget
that we all traversed great distances
to find the place that our hearts seek to settle
that place all of us call home

--Phuc Luu, found at http://www.theworkofthepeople.com/migratory-god

For the Indifferent

Crucifixion facade at the Basilica of La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona.

We pray thee for those who
amid all the knowledge of our day
are still without knowledge;
for those who hear not the sighs of the children that toil,
nor the sobs of such as are wounded
because others have made haste to be rich;
for those who have never felt
the hot tears of the mothers of the poor
that struggle vainly against poverty and vice.
Arouse them, we beseech thee,
from their selfish comfort,
and grant them the grace of social repentance.
Smite us all with the conviction
that for us ignorance is sin,
and that we are indeed our brothers' keepers
if our own hand has helped to lay him low.
Though increase of knowledge bring increase of sorrow,
may we turn without flinching to the light
and offer ourselves as instruments of thy spirit
in bringing order and beauty
out of disorder and darkness.

--Walter Rauschenbusch, from Prayers of the Social Awakening, 1909