December 16: "Don't Hesitate," Feast, Tears

Mary Oliver on joy . . .

Don't Hesitate

by:  Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don't hesitate.  Give in to it.  There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be.  We are not wise, and not very often kind.  And much can never be redeemed.  Still, life has some possibility left.  Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches and power in the world.  It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins.  Anyway, that's often the case.  Anyway, whatever it is, don't be afraid of its plenty.  Joy is not made to be a crumb.

Mary Oliver doesn't believe joy is stingy.  Her advice is to gorge on joy when it appears in your life.  Don't worry about joy disappearing or being used up.  Because joy is not a crumb; it's a feast.

Today, I feasted on joy.  My daughter graduated from college this morning.  

Yes, as I sat listening and watching the ceremony, I cried.  Yes, when her name was announced and she walked across the stage, I cried.  Yes, when she came up and hugged me after it was all over, I cried.  Yes, when I was grading papers after I got home, I thought about holding my newborn daughter, all the hope and joy housed in her tiny body.  And I cried again.

Basically, I spent the whole day near tears or in tears.  Good tears.  Happy ones, full of pride and astonishment.  I am the father of a college graduate.  Oliver is right:  you do notice joy in the instant when love begins.  From the moment my daughter came into my life, love began, and joy was close behind.  She has filled each day of my life with joy.

Tonight, our friends and family came together at a local restaurant to celebrate my daughter.  So many people filled the room--all because of love for her and joy in her accomplishment.  And I felt myself close to tears many times again.

Sitting in my office at home typing this post now, I'm not holding back the tears anymore.  Joy has been my constant companion today.  My daughter is an amazing human being, and I'm so proud to have had even the smallest part in making her who she is.  

She is one of Saint Marty's best poems.

November 16: Strangled Cry, Joy Harjo, Friend of Mine

Merton shares in the story of Holy Week . . . 

There was one thing the Cistercians had in their favor. The Carthusians had a kind of recreation in which they went out for walks together and conversed with one another, to prevent the possibilities of strain that might go with too uncompromising a solitude, too much of that sola beatitudo. Could there be too much of it, I wondered? But the Trappist with his unbroken silence—at least as far as conversations were concerned—had one advantage! 

And yet what did it matter which one was the most perfect Order? Neither one of them was for me! Had I not been told definitely enough a year ago that I had no vocation to any religious Order? All these comparisons were nothing but fuel for the fire of that interior anguish, that hopeless desire for what I could not have, for what was out of reach. 

The only question was not which Order attracted me more, but which one tortured me the more with a solitude and silence and contemplation that could never be mine. 

Far from wondering whether I had a vocation to either one, or from instituting a comparison between them, I was not even allowed the luxury of speculation on such a subject. It was all out of the question. 

However, since the Carthusians were, after all, far away, it was what I had before my eyes that tortured me the most. The Carthusians were more perfect, perhaps, and therefore more to be desired: but they were doubly out of reach because of the war and because of what I thought was my lack of a vocation. 

If I had had any supernatural common sense I would have realized that a retreat like this would be the best time to take that problem by the horns and overcome it, not by my own efforts and meditations but by prayer and by the advice of an experienced priest. And where would I find anyone more experienced in such matters than in a monastery of contemplatives? 

But what was the matter with me? I suppose I had taken such a beating from the misunderstandings and misapprehensions that had arisen in my mind by the time that Capuchin got through with me, in his confessional, the year before, that I literally feared to reopen the subject at all. There was something in my bones that told me that I ought to find out whether my intense desire to lead this kind of a life in some monastery were an illusion: but the old scars were not yet healed, and my whole being shrank from another scourging. 

That was my Holy Week, that mute, hopeless, interior struggle. It was my share in the Passion of Christ which began, that year, in the middle of the night with the first strangled cry of the Vigils of Holy Thursday.

Sharing in the Passion of Christ.  Through great suffering comes salvation and joy.  

That's what I want to talk about.  Joy.

Last night, I had the privilege of being in a Zoom meeting with U. S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.  Around 6:45 p.m., I was sitting in front of a computer in my office, waiting.  I'd spent the entire day preparing for the moment.  Practicing with the technology.  Writing and rewriting my introduction for Joy.  Answering dozens of texts and emails.  It was chaotic.  Exciting.  Exhausting.

At 6:50 p.m., Joy Harjo's name appeared on my screen.  A few seconds later, I was having a conversation with the Poet Laureate of the United States.  The first Native American to hold the position.  Only the second person in history to hold the title for three consecutive terms.  Joy.

It was one of the greatest moments of my life.  In a time of personal struggle and loss.  

Here's the thing--it's easy to lose sight of joy when faced with darkness.  Last night, there was music and celebration in the library where I work.  People coming together to celebrate.  For an hour, I sat in in the presence of Joy.  Basked in joy.  Drove home in joy.  Drank a glass of wine with joy.

Tonight, I am thinking about a friend of mine who has taught me a great deal about what joy is all about.  Spreading joy has been her life's work.  She's seen me through some very difficult times in my life.  She's taken my hand in darkness and led me back to light.  Made me laugh in the middle of sorrow.  Given me poetry in moments of profound silence.

The saying goes that the price of love is grief.  I'm not sure what the price of joy is.  Tears, maybe.  Despair, perhaps.

Saint Marty gives thanks tonight for his joy mentor.

May 13: Give It a Try, Collage Concert, Let There Be Peace

"The thing is, Pop, I've decided to give it a try, it just feels like something I'm destined for; it's something I've thought about since I was a kid, and it just won't go away.  I guess what I'm asking you, Pop, is for your blessing.  I know you can give me that, can't you?"

Robert, Ives' son, has decided to enter a monastery, and he wants his father's blessing.  Ives never saw it coming.  He knew his son was devout in his faith, but Ives didn't realize how deep the waters flowed in Robert.  Of course Ives gives his blessing, but, like most parents, he frets and worries about his child's happiness.


I just got back from my daughter's Collage Concert.  It is the big, end-of-the-year performance for all the bands and choruses (grades four through high school).  It's one of my favorite events of the school year.  This evening, the closing number was an arrangement of "Let There Be Peace on Earth."  I thought I was going to hate it.  They have been playing that song at the end of the worship services at my wife's church every Sunday for months.  It doesn't make me feel very peaceful any more.  It makes me want to jab somebody with a sharp pencil.

However, tonight, I found myself profoundly moved by the closing number.  All those young people, singing, playing instruments, raising a sound for peace and love.  I was overwhelmed.  The fact that this is my daughter's last year in middle school may have also been a contributing factor, as well.  Like Ives, I find myself fretting and worrying about my daughter's future.

Anyway, Saint Marty had a really good night, full of music and laughter and a few tears.

There is hope for this world...

December 2: Searching for Grace, Joy Harjo, "Grace"

Searching for grace is difficult.  Because grace isn't something that can be found.  Grace is something that just happens.  Unexpectedly.  And it can take any form.  A cup of water on a scorching July afternoon.  A neighbor shoveling you out from a snow storm.  A song on the radio.  Or just a moment of quiet in the middle of a busy day.

I often labor under the belief that grace is something that can be earned.  It isn't.  Grace is something that's given freely.  Call it what you want.  God's love.  The Holy Spirit.  The Muse.  It's simply a gift.

Tonight, I'm not feeling grace too much.  I'm tired, anxious, sad.  Ready to go home after a long, long day.  I have another hour to kill in my office before I can do that.  Once I'm done with this post, I'm going to work on my Christmas poem.  I'm not feeling particularly inspired.  But I have to get started on it.  Poetry is about grace and inspiration, but poetry is also about hard work.  If you read a poem that seems absolutely effortless, I can guarantee you that poem is the result of a lot of sweat, tears, and perhaps anger.

The poem below is about grace in its many forms.  It feels effortless and beautiful.

But Saint Marty knows better than that.

Grace

by:  Joy Harjo

for Darlene Wind and James Welch

I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time.So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.

Not the Grace I'm talking about...

October 1: Five Days, Lisel Mueller, "Tears"

Yes, only five more days until Saint Marty's Day.  Five more days of last minute shopping and gift wrapping and baking.  I'm not saying it's too late to get prepared, but, if you're depending on Amazon to get your Saint Marty's Day presents, you better get started.

It's been a pretty long day.  I watched 2001:  A Space Odyssey with my students this evening.  Tried to prepare them for it.  Apes and monoliths and deadly computers and such.  When I told them that the first five minutes of the film was a black screen with music, they looked at me as though I was speaking Urdu.  They weren't thrilled.

I have a Lisel Mueller poem about sorrow.  I've been thinking a lot about happiness and sadness in the last couple of days.  It's the normal array of problems:  money, exhaustion, auto, health.  My wife discovered some unexpected expenses on Monday, and suddenly we find ourselves on a very tight budget for the next couple of weeks.  My ear is sore.  I think I'm coming down with an ear infection.  I think the transmission is acting up on my car.  And the first case of Ebola has been diagnosed in the United States.

Yet, I really don't have anything to complain about.  I have two jobs.  A home.  Two great kids.  A laptop computer.  The Big Bang Theory is on TV.  I should be happy a majority of the time, minus the occasional bout of gastrointestinal distress due to the ingestion of too much buttered movie popcorn.  Of course, that would require me to ignore everything that I just listed in the previous paragraph.

Saint Marty isn't really good at ignoring potential plagues or unpaid bills or earaches.

Tears

by:  Lisel Mueller

The first woman who ever wept
was appalled at what stung
her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
Saltwater.  Seawater.
How was it possible?
Hadn't she and the man
spent many days moving
upland to where the grass
flourished, where the stream
quenched their thirst with sweet water?
How could she have carried these sea drops
as if they were precious seeds;
where could she have stowed them?
She looked at the watchful gazelles
and the heavy-lidded frogs;
she looked at glass-eyed birds
and nervous, black-eyed mice.
None of them wept, not even the fish
that dripped in her hands when she caught them.
Not even the man.  Only she
carried the sea inside her body.

Open the pod bay doors...

June 23: Softening Influence, Tears, New Cartoon

Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty store-house door, no, not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with softening influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.

This little softening occurs early in Stave Two when the Ghost of Christmas Past and Scrooge observe Scrooge's younger self, sitting alone in a schoolhouse on Christmas day.  The implication of this passage is that Scrooge had a pretty miserable childhood, and the memory of it begins the slow disassembly of Scrooge's defenses.  Scrooge is reduced to a young, abandoned child again.  It's a pretty heart-breaking moment, and, for the first time, the reader feels compassion and sorrow for Scrooge.

Last night, when my son was going to bed, he asked me to read him Love You Forever by Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw.  It's a book about a mother and her son, the unending love of a parent for her child.  I didn't get past the second page before I was ready to cry.  I found myself skipping huge portions of the book just so I wasn't a weeping mess by the end.  Robert Munsch definitely had a softening influence on me.  I felt a little ridiculous.

Anything about kids growing older sort of puts me over the edge right now.  I'm sitting across from my eleven-year-old daughter right now, and I'm looking at her closely.  She looks like a teenager.  She's going to be in sixth grade in September.  In six more years, she'll be a senior in high school.  As my daughter might say, "OMG!"  It depresses me a little.  Actually, more than a little.

It seems like yesterday when I was sitting beside her toddler bed, reading Charlotte's Web to her.  Now, she has me locked out of her iPod, and she's self-conscious about her clothes.  She wants to get her hair streaked pink, and she stays up late watching vampire movies.

I'm standing with the Ghost of Christmas Past, watching my daughter open her Barbie Dream Castle.  She's tiny, beautiful, excited.  She throws her arms around my neck and kisses me.

Saint Marty's little girl isn't so little anymore.

Confessions of Saint Marty