Words Twice a Week 12.27
If you are more into listening than reading, Words Twice a Week is available, along with other good stuff, as a podcast from St Paul’s Episcopal Church. Click here.
Last week’s challenge – a “longest night” poem. Here’s what I came up with -
Temperatures and snowflakes fall,
dark comes early, light comes late.
Our world pulls in, becoming small.
We sit beside the fire and wait
to hear the springtime siren call.
But first the winter must abate.
There’s time to think and read and write
... or...maybe binge-watch ______ tonight. (TV? Football? The News? The sky?)
“Best I could do”. Not too profound. Feel free to make any changes!
This week’s challenge -
What would be one line from a song or poem or play that you keep in mind as you look back over the past year? What would be one line you keep in mind as you look ahead? Well. I know what I would choose for the first one – I’ll have to think about the second.
Ok – like I said, the church pushes St John to Dec 28 this year – here’s one last bit on John, from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It -
“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”
Some days from the church calendar
Dec 28 The Holy Innocents, or the Children of Bethlehem. The story in Matthew 2.16-18 that when Herod realized he had been outwitted by the Wise Men he ordered the killing of all the boys under two years of age in the vicinity of Bethlehem. Most scholars think it’s just a story, possibly prompted by Pharoah’s attempt to kill the Hebrew babies before Moses was born. There is no historical record of it ever happening, which is good. On the other hand, while we are aghast at the cruelty attributed to Herod, what about our own country where some children are separated from their parents and many children go hungry? Perhaps a day to think of them.
Dec 29 Thomas Becket He was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170. He engaged in conflict with Henry II, King of England, over the rights and privileges of the Church and was murdered by followers of the king in Canterbury Cathedral. Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote a play Becket about it. T.S. Elliot wrote Murder in the Cathedral. The pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales are on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Becket at the Cathedral. The king's exact words are in doubt and several versions have been reported. The most commonly quoted, as handed down by oral tradition, is "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?", but according to historian Simon Schama this is incorrect: he accepts the account of the contemporary biographer Edward Grim, writing in Latin, who gives us "What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?" Many variations have found their way into popular culture.
And from the earth/world calendar -
Dec 28
+ Maurice Ravel died in 1937. He wrote Bolero – what comes to your mind: 10 or Torvill and Dean or ….?
+ the Endangered Species Act of 1973 was signed by Richard Nixon.
Dec 29
+ Rainer Maria Rilke died in 1926. Here’s one of his poems – it could qualify as a “longest night” poem -
The bleak fields are asleep,
My heart alone wakes;
The evening in the harbour
Down his red sails takes.
Night, guardian of dreams,
Now wanders through the land;
The moon, a lily white,
Blossoms within her hand.
+ Congress passed OSHA in 1970
+ Christina Rosetti died in 1894. She wrote In the Bleak Midwinter. Here’s a link to a piece about another of her poems – None Other Lamb - and a musical setting.
+ On this day in 1890 the US Army killed/massacred between 250 and 300 men, women, and children of the Lakota people at Wounded Knee.
Dec 31
+ John Wycliffe died in 1384. He was an English reformer. His writings legitimized the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, he insisted on scripture as the sole criterion of Christian truth, and he was one of the early translators of the Bible into English.
+ the first “ball drop” in Times Square took place in 1907
+ Ricky Nelson died in a plane crash in 1985.
If you gotta play a garden party I wish you a lotta luck;
If memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.
Actually the whole Madison Square Garden concert event was apparently a little more confused than it at first seemed to him. Maybe a time to end the year remembering perceived slights, deciding to assume the best intentions of all involved, and begin the new year with a clean slate.
+ Here is a covenant prayer from John Wesley’s Watch Night Service -
I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low by thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things
to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven.
Wesley wrote that he found the Covenant Renewal Service meaningful – “Many mourned before God, and many were comforted” and “It was an occasion for a variety of spiritual experiences… Afterwards many desired to return thanks, either for a sense of pardon, for full salvation, or for as fresh manifestation of His graces, healing all their backslidings.” In London the service was usually held on New Year’s Day; throughout the country the service was held whenever Mr Wesley visited the societies.
Jan 1
+ the Emancipation Proclamation, proclaimed in September of 1862 took effect on this day in 1863.
Jan 2
+ the birthday of Isaac Asimov in 1920. He wrote or edited 500 books. He was first and foremost a science-fiction writer, one of the big-three along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. “No matter how various the subject matter I write on, I was a science-fiction writer first and it is as a science-fiction writer that I want to be identified.” But he was also a professor of biochemistry at Boston University. He wrote mysteries. He wrote a guide to the Bible, a guide to Shakespeare, and several collections of limericks, including Limericks, Too Gross (144 by Asimov and 144 by John Ciardi). As part of his Robot series of books and stories he devised the Three Laws of Robotics and later added a “zeroth” - “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”
Jan 3
+ the birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien in 1892. He would be 129, just a year or two short of the age at which Biblo set out from the Grey Havens with the elves (and Frodo) for the Undying Lands. I don’t know – would you want to live forever? Sounds kind of long to me.
That’s it for now. Happy New Year!
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