If the dawn that plays on the waves of a lake, if the sway of a bough in a cedar-scented breeze, if bullfrogs and fireflies and the rosy maple moth, all seem trivial in the violence toward extremes;
if the poetry of roses no longer satisfies, if the movements of art and song no longer meet the hunger for meaning (or evasion), then let us release them to the chilling weight of the moment, and let it snow, let it deepen, let it blot out the death-driven spirits of dominion.
Dear Mr. Ginsberg we need your Howl, Dear Robert Bly we need your faith, your fire, your scowl, Dear Ms. Levertov, we need your lamp-lit soul — a light to our feet.
And walk us through the darkness to the oasis of silence and reflection, lake of mystery, full of uncatchable fish — see them leaping at the joy of adoption.
Dear stranger at the empty tomb, lend me your garden trowel, for I have sewn my rows of conditional love, but have neglected to plant the only miracle that matters: perpetual compassion and love for all others.
Jesus wept and cried out, “If only, if only you knew the things that make for peace.” – Luke 19
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. -M.L. King
Remembrance Day — not easy because I will not be ungrateful for the sacrifices made in war, and the debt I owe for freedom; but I know as well that peace secured by war is illusory, temporary.
Not easy because I honour Remembrance Day and its place in our culture, but I know of no “great war,” no “war that ends all wars,” unless it’s the war that ends our existence, …calling to mind that darkest of ironies: peace through mutually assured destruction.
Not easy, because the primary beneficiary of war, and the globally accepted policy of, Peace through strength, is the arms industry.
Not easy because while we gather to lay wreaths at monuments, hear the rooted platitudes and share in the solidarity of our side, what goes unacknowledged, and unspoken, is the deeper universal yearning, to be the joy of another, to be present for each other.
Not easy because I’m grateful to be Canadian, and I honour the longstanding role Canada has in peacekeeping, but my government’s moral condemnation of other nation-states who “threaten our way of life,” while strategically aligning ourselves with an even greater aggressor, requires a particular kind of blindness.
Not easy because daily, thousands of memorials, remembrances, arise — now in the Ukraine, now in Gaza, now in the ancient city of peace, now like a contagion, touching us all; Lest we Forget — is long forgotten.
Not easy, for if we only remember “our dead,” and do not bring to mind all victims of war, the things that make for peace stay hidden, and the lie of redemptive violence goes unchallenged.
Not easy because outside of a few authentic examples, albeit, aberrations, like Jesus, St. Francis, Gandhi, Bacha Khan, ML King, Mandella, we’ve never been able to give up on the seemingly pragmatic use of violence, even though our refusal to renounce it will end in our own demise.
Not easy because wars are almost always started, waged, and prolonged, by men, while women and children pay the greatest cost.
Not easy because the world is closing in, and the war over there will increasingly become the war over here, …we must love one another or die (W.H. Auden).
Not easy because I know my own complicit heart, that desires security over trust, and so must excavate my own fear with its hidden hate, and daily risk the invitation of Peace, that seeks to surround my enemy with love.
But not easy, for what would I do if my own granddaughter, niece, or son, had been shredded by shrapnel, or taken captive — what then would I write? And yet,
where will it end? this escalation of extremes. If the girl sitting on rubble and weeping, or the one naked and running from the atomic explosion, is not understood as an ultimate call to humanity, even, should we have the eyes for it: a woeful, sorrow-filled intrusion of grace, to awaken and see war’s distortions of justice, its twistings of truth; awaken and see, as in a mirror, our own propensity toward envy and rivalry; dear God, should we awaken, collectively, to throw ourselves into the arms of undeserving pardon, what an occasion of mercy, what life that would be!
Gradually, under the spell of gravity, I’m changing back into a handful of dust, a handful, moreover, I borrowed.
I step out of the shower and look into the mirror, and I have to laugh. Still, there’s the human glue of touch, the not-yet-joke of sex.
I’m only passing through, is how the old hymn puts it, which my late aunt, Irma, sang in the Springside Baptist Church, in gull falsetto, with peacock gusto, and I, barely a fledgling, roared inside.
But the art of aging, which is the art of failing, which is the art of losing, which is the art of accepting, is hard to master, let alone, graciously.
I wake at 2AM and become my own bully: fool, coward, failure, you could have done more with your life, and before I imagine a bullet tearing through my cranium, I silently recite Psalm 23.
Beside me, Deb is sleeping, softly breathing. She is my true comfort. Yet, not always comfort enough.
We are living and dying at once. I know this! I’ve said it in conversation when I was the age of my children. Now, how comically different it sounds.
This strange spiral of years, like a towering tin trophy, teetering, and I, scavenge the hours for pauses, to shore up its brittle pedestal.
And now I see my mother — smiling, amused by my youthful naivety. Almost 92, she died full of grace, happily content, as though eating cherries.
My father, who died at 73, liked to say, “young at heart,” and I liked to hear him say it, right up until that surprising day.
At the cusp of my seventh decade, I’m learning to accept my death, and wondering if I’ll see my aunt again. I’d love to hear her sing. Then we’d get down to some gossip, over a cup of Postum.
Mom will be making sandwiches, homemade butter on homemade bread. Dad, at the kitchen table, will be tilting back in his chrome-frame, blue-vinyl chair, wearing two holes in the linoleum, reading the Yorkton Enterprise.
I’ve read the science. Our collections of atoms, scattered, repurposed, going on and on; but I’m not happy about the thought of atomizing. Give me an afterlife, but with real fried bologna.
So just this morning, at Country Grocers, someone touched my arm, and I melted, and I burned to remain here, here, on this blue, blue, earth.
I step out my front door and in the distance, I hear a freight truck and some cars. There is no thunder of tanks or rolling explosions. I look around my cul-de-sac, the fences are straight and painted. My neighbour has de-thatched his lawn. There are gardens quietly resting in backyards, fruit trees are dropping their canopy of leaves and are preparing to sleep, everything has been harvested, some people have put up preserves, and all their houses are standing, just the way they were built. Two homes down an older couple have their garage door up and are sitting in front on lawn chairs. They are not frightened or running away from something burning or breathing the gas from spent artillery. A neighbour, who has not just emerged from a bomb shelter, who doesn’t even have a bomb shelter in his home, is smiling and walking across the street towards them. Now he’s telling them a story about his vacation to Granada and the charmed Moorish palace called Alhambra, where nothing happened, and he saw no one torn apart or laying under rubble. The elderly couple respond with their own story about how their grandchildren came and visited for Thanksgiving, “We were so happy to see them,” says Gramma, “oh, but the youngest, a vibrant sprout of five, had fallen from a swing and couldn’t have been happier about the pink cast on her wrist.” Farther up the lane a woman wearing a western gabardine coat is getting ready to walk her two dogs, a labradoodle and collie, they aren’t whining or cowering, but are excited and they tug at their leashes. I’ve seen her before, she will walk seven blocks up Fourth Avenue, then down to First, where there’s a store called Share-Care that sells dog treats, and other sundries for pets. All along her route, cars will pass, people will pass by, some will wave in recognition, and not one missile will land, not a single fighter jet will fly above her head, not one panicked scream.
If you have a moment, please read this statement (linked here), written and signed by Palestinians, Jews, and others who are committed to overcoming the seemingly irreconcilable and violent divide between the Palestinians and Jews. And if you agree, consider adding your voice.
