A Believer's Journal

Our writers’ group assignment today … We each took a book and found the fifth word on the forty-seventh page of the book. We wrote down each of these words, eleven words in all. Then we wrote pieces that had no requirements other than they must contain these eleven words. The words: the, the, Scioto (a river), was, his, fisherman, impressive, hill, livings, front, edge. Here is my piece …

He stood on the knobby edge of the granite escarpment, gnarly limbs of stunted spruces dotting the steep rise of the familiar hill behind him, far from the first time he had stood here, just here as he stood now, wordless and transfixed, his eyes following the tumultuous freshet twisting and turning beneath his feet, its waters shrouded in morning mist, heedlessly bent on its one purpose: to spill itself into the sea.

The name of the stream, if you must know, was the Scioto, but the name meant little to him, merely an epithet rather arbitrarily attached by men who hardly knew the river, who could hardly know a river that lived and moved and had its being centuries before they had theirs. They borrowed the word from the Wyandots, another affront, naming a river not theirs with a word not theirs, stealing from the peoples who had made their livings for generations from these fertile waters.

He hardly knew the river, though undoubtedly better than most, the best moments of his now long life spent here watching its moods, spring and summer, fall and winter, walking its stony banks, wading its stiff currents, trailing fingers in the frigid waters. He always came here alone, in the commonly understood sense of the word, though he knew with absolute certainty, that in this hallowed place he was never alone. Given the constraints of his delimited body and his oh so brief lifespan, he was sure the river knew him better than he knew it.

He watched now as a lone fisherman stepped in front of a mid-stream boulder, carefully moving in the direction of a smooth run along near bank. Pausing in the eddy, the stranger raised his rod tip and, after two or three false casts, set the fly at the end of his leader gently into the seam between run and eddy. His steady retrieve was abruptly interrupted, rod now bent, line spooling off his reel, and then the head-shaking leap of an consummately impressive rainbow trout.

The fisherman took back line, steadily and surely bringing the fish to net. After admiring the exquisite silver and pink flanks of this inimitable creature, he held the fish beneath the babbling surface for the stream for a few short moments before releasing it to its proper home, which he, not the fisherman, but the one watching the fisherman from the granite escarpment, which he hoped too was his own proper home, because when the fisherman lifted his eyes from the waters looking upwards to where he himself stood, he realized that watched and watcher were the same.

We share a birthday, the queen and I. I was born on April 21, on her twenty-seventh birthday, little more than a year from the day in February she had been crowned after the death of her father. Elizabeth died last Thursday, so we share a birthday no more.

She died a queen, that title both lifting her up and weighing her down; conveying little actual authority, but considerable responsibility; granting her unrivaled access across seven decades to the wealthy, the powerful, and the notorious, but leaving her little time or space or cause to simply be, to simply be Elizabeth.

Her death has unleashed a torrent of public opinion, her title and the unprecedented length of her reign making her a lodestone both of fervent acclamation and vehement denunciation. She is adored for performing her royal duties with decorum and dignity, with grace and humor, and she is reviled for epitomizing Britain’s dubious colonial legacy and for failing to publicly disown it.

I am not sure she deserves either. Yes, she dutifully fulfilled the requirements of her unique office with a style particularly decorous and gentle and humble, but the outsized and undifferentiated adulation she is now garnering speaks more to the human need for heroes and saints than it does her qualification to be the one or the other. And, though she is heir to the burden of Britain’s sins, enchained to a past she cannot escape and constrained by the ongoing obligation to buoy the spirits of the present commonwealth by embodying its honor and dignity and pride, it is her title, her office, her heritage that merits unflinching critique, not her person.

Gloria Jean Pollard died last Thursday, in Scarborough, Maine. She and I do not share a birthday, but she shares with Elizabeth their death day. Ms. Pollard had no title, but she did have an office: French teacher. This daughter of Italian immigrants taught French for thirty years, much of it at Yarmouth High School, earning the honor of State Foreign Language Teacher of the Year in 1996. Her office granted her access to children, to human beings with bodies and minds and spirits still forming, still becoming, supple and elastic, not yet hardened and brittle, but tender and fragile and vulnerable, too. She likewise deserves praise for fulfilling her vital duties with skill and sensitivity, with eagerness and attentiveness.

The queen and the French teacher share a death day, but more, too, much more. Despite personal histories and family legacies and public personas and public perceptions that are literally worlds apart, they both died, not as queen and French teacher, but as mothers, grandmothers, widows, women. They both knew the unparalleled anguish and elation of birthing a child, the delight and heartache of raising a child, the thrill and the tedium, the unready challenges and the unexpected discoveries, the sorrow and the joy, of sharing a bed, a home, a life with a husband for a lifetime, and the unquenchable grief of outliving him.

They were both given life, as it came to them, and the opportunity to live it, as it happened to them: with gratitude or with bitterness, with hope or with despair, selflessly or selfishly, lovingly or callously. This is what matters. This is how we should judge them. This is how we should remember them, not merely or especially because of their offices, for how they performed their duties, not as queen and French teacher, but as Elizabeth and Gloria, Lilibet and Glo, as two women whose distinctive and deeply personal and ultimately simple ways of being, of simply being, are indelibly etched on the spirits of those who loved them and live on, in memory and in tears.

Two a half years ago, just before my retirement, David sent me this poem. He wrote in his email:

“I very much enjoyed reading your book on Ecclesiates!! Made me look not only more deeply into what he was saying but also into how I understand and how I live my life with insight and faith as one.

The following is a poem that draws from some of the book and my own faith. I am submitting it to a poetry contest in Northfield with the theme, “Poetic Living Wills,” as we are asked to write about how we look at death and living.”

It is now, some two years later, an extraordinary testament to David’s readiness for death, because of how grateful he was for his life. It reflects the wisdom and clarity of a man who has learned what it is that matters, who understands the wondrous privilege of loving and being loved.

I don’t know that I have reached the point of his unquestioned contentment, but I am working on it!

I am content
“…chasing the wind…”

I am content!
Time will come when no one remembers me,
Family, friends gone, leaving not a hint!
Nothing I have done, or built, is left to see,
Hard work, success, achievements, illusions!
I am free,
Relieves me of confusion,
I am content.

Today, I love and hold you close,
Dearest wife! you my brothers, sisters,
Strangers became friends giving me hope!
Still, does not death come ever closer?
Joyfully we make plans for tomorrow!
Confront our terror, trust in something greater,
Accept the final loss that brings sorrow!
I am content.

Crossing through dark waters of death,
I will forget things I left behind,
Except for when I loved without regret!
Not when I was right! but whenever I was kind,
Working for justice with humor our human majesty.
Moments I forgot myself the best times!
The wise man of Ecclesiastes speaks of mortal frailty,
Be thankful, he says, “All else is vanity!”

I am content.

Photo of the May super moon taken through our woods Friday night.

My people have forgotten me ……

Again. An attack. A suicide bomber. Scores of people dead and injured. Again.

But for twenty-two human beings, including an eight-year-old girl, it is not again, but the first time, the last time, the only time, that their lives will be brought to an end, an unwarranted, untimely, unconscionable end. For them, for their mothers and fathers, for all those who love them, this is not one more act of terror, but THE single moment that now overshadows and redefines an entire history, a life that was and the life that might have been.

I too feel the grief, the unabated sadness, not again, but for the first time, twenty-two times over. Each had a name. Each had a life, a gift, a most precious gift, given each of them by God, now stolen from them, now stolen from God.

“Do not kill.”

The command is rooted deeply in our religious heritage. Do not kill. Period. To take a life is to defy God, because God is the life-giver. To bring a life to a foreshortened end, at any time, for any purpose, is blasphemy: defaming the name and being of God, desecrating the image of God that is imprinted into each of us.

It was blasphemy when Salman Abedi wandered into a crowd of teenaged girls at a Manchester concert and detonated an improvised explosive device …

It was blasphemy when Mohammed Atta flew a hijacked plane into the tower of the World Trade Center …

It was blasphemy when six days ago a Georgia prison official inserted a needle into the arm of J.W. Ledford Jr. …

It was blasphemy when the crew of the Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy” onto the citizens of Hiroshima …

Do not kill. Ever. Not again.