Grief, rejoicing and the odd flow of things...

Earlier this month, while I was visiting my brother in San Francisco, I happened upon this 1958 poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti that I used to cherish but had forgotten.

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no rootless Christmas trees
hung with candycanes and breakable stars

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
there were no gilded Christmas trees
and no tinsel Christmas trees
and no tinfoil Christmas trees
and no pink plastic Christmas trees
and no gold Christmas trees
and no black Christmas trees
and no powderblue Christmas trees
hung with electric candles
and encircled by tin electric trains
and clever cornball relatives

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no intrepid Bible salesmen
covered the territory
in two-tone cadillacs
and where no Sears Roebuck creches
complete with plastic babe in manger
arrived by parcel post
the babe by special delivery
and where no televised Wise Men
praised the Lord Calvert Whiskey

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no fat handshaking stranger
in a red flannel suit
and a fake white beard
went around passing himself off
as some sort of North Pole saint
crossing the desert to Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
in a Volkswagen sled
drawn by rollicking Adirondack reindeer
and German names
and bearing sacks of Humble Gifts
from Saks Fifth Avenue
for everybody's imagined Christ child

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and ran away to where
no Bing Crosby carollers
groaned of a tight Christmas
and where no Radio City angels
iceskated wingless
thru a winter wonderland
into a jinglebell heaven
daily at 8:30
with Midnight Mass matinees

Christ climbed down
from His bare Tree
this year
and softly stole away into
some anonymous Mary's womb again
where in the darkest night
of everybody's anonymous soul
He awaits again
an unimaginable
and impossibly
Immaculate Reconception
the very craziest of
Second Comings

It caused me to note - and wrestle - again with some of the irony and mystery of everyday life:

+ Sensitive people - loving and compassionate individuals - who are simultaneously so self-absorbed that they are often cruel and judgmental without ever knowing it...

+ Good people (in the worst sense of the word to quote Mark Twain) who inflict pain on innocents in the name of love or God or "helping" (whatever that really means...)

+ Spiritual people who get so trapped or lost in their feelings for an extended period of time and lose all sense of the Spirit's presence in their lives...

+ Those people who have made peace with their physical and spiritual pain and NEVER utter a complaint...

+ Ordinary people who have discovered how to let suffering take them into greater compassion...

+ Seemingly nonspiritual people who are filled with wisdom and patience and acceptance...

+ Warriors and soldiers who are more committed to peace-making and tenderness than some self-identified pacifists...

+ Poets who are heavy-handed...

+ Historians who hide and obscure the truth...

+ Academics who are ideologues rather than advocates of the intellectual quest...

+ Politicians who have never considered the common good...

+ Educators who hate children...

+ How tired I can feel while still loving those closest to my heart...

+ Mother Teresa never feeling God's love AFTER receiving her call to India...

+ The fear that is so often just below the surface of most lives...

+ The anguish and pain that fills every soul no matter HOW blessed the individual...

+ The grace of God that passes all human understanding...

Ferlinghetti wrote of another collection of ironies in another poem, "Pity the Nation," that goes like this:

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation - oh pity the people
Who allow their rights to erode
And their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!

And after I spend time with all of these ironies - and more - I go back to St. Paul: now we see as through a glass darkly, LATER we shall see face to face... three things abide: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is... love.

credits:
1) Claude Bently @ http://www.rubylane.com/shops/bassfineart/item/012104e

2) Richter Courbet @ http://premierartscene.com/magazine/richter-from-private-collections/

3) Hans Hoffman @ http://abstractexpressionism.wordpress.com/2007/08/25/abstract-expressionism/

4) Gorky @ http://sauer-thompson.com/conversations/archives/2003/12/surrealism-sexuality1.html

5) Gerry Lamarre @ http://www.gerylamarre.com/index_en.php