Connected While Apart
Inspiration in Well and Woe
Inspiration is always a surprising visitor. (John O’Donohue)
Dear Mayfield,
Our English word “inspiration” can be traced back to the Latin inspirare which means “to blow into or breathe upon.” I have been breathing with a parade of inspiring moments, encounters, or discoveries this week. They form this webnote. I invite you to pull up a chair and take a look at the visitors occupying the other chairs around us.
With its broad land and big lake, Illinois frequently hosts stunning skies at sunrise, sunset and inbetween, in countless shades of blue, often populated by different sorts of clouds. The clouds were beautiful over Lake Michigan on Monday when I was out walking shortly before sunset. I recorded numerous pictures on my phone, knowing one of them would wiggle its way into a web note or worship resources soon. A few days later, this poem arrived in an email. Maya Stein titled the poem with a line borrowed from a friend, a line that served as a caption beneath a cloud picture her friend had taken
It looks like the sky is coming apart and together at the same time (Maya Stein)
And the body is holding its losses like a fist. And a fleshy hope
is opening to an unprecedented vastness. And whatever we think
we are leaving behind will keep insisting. And the things we desire
will elude us. And our efforts will pose as failure. And we will not recognize
how far we’ve come. And we will solve one problem and create another.
And we will feel broken. And we will not be broken. And the silence
will be deafening. And we will love destructively. And no one
will appear to be listening. And there will be too many doors
to choose from. And we will keep saying, “I don’t know how to do this.”
And we will be more capable than we ever imagined.
The poet piles paradox upon paradox. Life like a sky full of clouds is not one fixed thing. The shifting and rearranging, arriving and disappearing become the ongoing rhythm. We can’t catch life and keep it, define life and control it in a single shape we favor.
On Tuesday the mail brought me two books I had been waiting for, one was a new labyrinth book and the other Matthew Fox’s recently published Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic–and Beyond. I used quite a bit of material from Julian back in May, the month that holds her feast day. Julian was a 14th and 15th century English mystic who lived through six waves of plague, successive pandemics in her lifetime. Fox begins his book with this wisdom from Julian:
The first thing is the goodness of nature.
God is the same thing as nature.
The goodness in nature is God.
God feels great delight to be our Father.
God feels great delight to be our Mother.
We experience a wondrous mix of well and woe.
The mingling of both well and distress in us
is so astonishing
that we can hardly tell which state
we or our neighbor are in–
how astonishing it is!
The medieval mystic like a poetic gaze into the clouds in the sky comes to the truth of the mingling of well and woe. We can’t select one or the other. Together in varying and sometimes heartbreaking combinations, they form the flow of life in which we find ourselves.
Clouds, a medieval mystic, a couple of readings, O’Donohue’s quote on inspiration all arrived, dropping into my life this week. I didn’t realize at least one more empty chair was waiting to be filled as inspiration gathered. It’s occupant showed up earlier this morning in the daily email briefing from the New York Times, I read of the recent death of Lucille Bridges from cancer at age 86. Most of us know much more about Lucille’s daughter Ruby than we do about Lucille. Lucille was born in Mississippi in 1934. Her parents were sharecroppers. After eighth grade she left school to join them in the fields. She would become a housekeeper and marry Abon, a mechanic. They had eight children together. In 1956 they moved from Mississippi to New Orleans seeking a better education for their children. The Brown versus Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954 had determined that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. So in 1960 Ruby was among the165 Black children who took a test for admission to the all- white William Frantz Elementary School. Only five of those children, including Ruby, passed the test. The school superintendent suggested to Lucille and Abon to start praying since they were religious people and Ruby’s education at William Frantz Elementary School wasn’t going to be easy. Along with two heavily-armed US marshals, Lucille accompanied six year old Ruby to and from school every day that year while verbal assaults, eggs, and tomatoes were hurled in their direction. Ruby was the only student in her first grade class. Both Lucille and Abon lost their jobs when the story of Ruby’s education was reported in the papers. People in their all-Black neighborhood worked in shifts guarding their home. Ruby would grow up to be a powerful civil rights activist. Her journey to and from school was immortalized by Norman Rockwell in his well-named 1964 painting “The Problem We All Live With.”
Born as a child into a sharecropping family in Mississippi in 1934, Lucille knew full well how much despair accompanies the joys of life. Valuing the education of their children above all else, Lucille and Abon risked complicating and deepening their own struggles to deliver a gift to their children — educational beginnings they did not have. Some of life’s reliable mixture of pain and delight makes its way to us all by itself. Some of it, we may choose in doing what is courageously right no matter how difficult that is. We may never face the anguish that met Lucille and Abon in the ugly racial realities of this country, but we along with everyone else will have our own blending of coming together and tearing apart. These days, this year, has certainly been teaching us that. It is the nature of life. The issue is how we will meet that reality, encounter that challenge, and grow in love through all of its paradoxes.
Peace, Martha.