Baseball91's Weblog » Poetry

Minnesota Mortar

baseball91 — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:30:44 +0000

Connecting the stories of the week. Thoms Lynch said that really poetry was connecting items that seemed in no way connected.

Bob had had a coming out party. At the age of 44. Saturday night. The party was an announcement to friends that had always meant the most to him. The party represented his desire to say something intimate about himself. His past, his future. It was interesting to note who was and who was not present, and who might not be there for him from now on.

He had addressed intimacy, when there always was a fear of it for everyone, of saying what is deepest inside. I was not crazy to hear in this case what it was that was deepest inside. The fear was about not knowing how to handle it. “It” being loss or change.

On Sunday of this weekend the story was about the potential bankruptcy of the Minneapolis StarTribune. It was a decade where the future of all newspapers, an enterprise of communications, was being threatened. Not many Americans had wakened to what it meant to be in the throes of this loss.

I had a dream last night that my mother was going in for a CT scan to address issues of dizziness. At least to my knowledge this was a physical problem restricted to my dream. But it too did call the question of the meaning of love and of being loved. The dream also called the question of identity, my family identity, expression of who were and are. In my dream, I wanted to work at communications, communicating the importance one life had been to mine. And like most guys, I was not very good at expressing it.

Intimacy: Sex. Communication. In a world where there was so much threatening human existence, in illness that needed to be diagnosed, most people had something wrong with them. And it was in facing challenges to good health, physical, econonomic, in relationships, each of us was challenged to how express things of significance.

I had seen a rat in the garage on Saturday. I had not seen many rats in my life. Never before had I seen one in my neighborhood. The rat still existed as some kind of terror. And these were the days of the ongoing, never ending War on Terror which did show the ultimate threat to life was death. Whether it was a worry from the dream of what was wrong physically, fears of what were spiritually wrong, whatever the answer, it was the threat of, a fear of the unknown.

When so many people have no spiritual identity, then there is a threat to spiritual existence, to ideals. A good number of people amongst us had no idea who they were. The threat was to the meaning and purpose of any individual. The trouble was living in relationships, in community, with people different than I was. And institutions were a mortar that held us all together.

With death, an individual comes to grips with a side of intimacy and the desire to pass on what is, what was most important about life. Intimacy afterall determines identity.

With sickness, it was a time to wake up to reflect on what I could pass on. What was most important here, in the area of ideals? For the friend now gay, the newspaper, the rat, a mother near the date of Mother’s Day? Was Darwin right? Was ultimately life, the sex life, about the survival of the fittest?

I had started to think of all this last night on a walk. I had wondered this spring what was the shape of the foundation of who I was, who I am, who we were, we are. I had noticed the bricks around the base of a wall near a Summit Avenue mansion, close to the governor’s mansion, when I wondered about the mortar of American identity this year, that certain mortar that had always held people together. On Summit Aveneue, the mortar was coming apart but only at the base. It dawned on me that the legislature was due to adjourn this week.

Actually when I got home there was a live debate still on public television at 10:30 pm when PBS programming should have been on.

Newspapers, government, there had always been a certain mortar—keeping people together. We took the connectiveness all for granted. Now we need this real life poetry more than ever.

Passover

baseball91 — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 19:49:07 +0000

What a Catholic person, an university should be was the challenge of the modern age.

In a speech given at Boston College, a former prime minister of Ireland had said that the “idea of a Catholic University would seem very strange – I would even say unacceptable – to modern Irish society.” He acknowledged “the idea” of a Catholic University in a country like the US where Catholics are in a minority, “may make” sense. It is interesting to reflect on his words the “the idea” of a Catholic University. Was identity only an idea? And was it an insult to the Jesuits there at Boston College that he said “may make” sense? He did not even acknowledge the challenge in a land without one religion as part of its identity to pass on its tradition and all of its meaning? Was this the unrecognized burden within the European Union? Were the Irish on the verge to be washed of their past, or at least the part that had to do with the faith?

So why all the concern over the loss of identity? There was many an Ivy League University that had once been identified by its theology and their identity had survived quite well. And until the past generation, most European countries were identified by its religion. But the European Union had changed a lot of that. (Even though the British wanted to keep at a distance, it had nothing to do with matters of faith.) Georgetown University had a Catholic population of less than 50%, had now a president that was not a Jesuit, and seemed proud to have grown beyond its original identity.

Whatever the denomination, worship was used to unite a people, to energize them to work for others. Music, worship, could change the shape of the world and my shape within it, but my interpretation depended upon whom I had come across or what that something inside was, that something which seemed to build over the years, this spirit within me. All artists had something half-formed, needing an external phenomenon. Mine was the written word. Other used clay. At the vineyard, they worked at creating a new wine. Identity was how I saw, what I liked, and what I wanted to look like… a lot like what was in the wine

Alcohol was all about changing perceptions. In this life, humor and alcohol were all about a different perspective. Comics made their living delivering unexpected lines. So did wine merchants. Have you shopped at a wine shop lately? Most people on the weekend seemed to like the unexpected. God seemed a like those comics delivering unexpected lines. And He delivered a lot of the unexpected. If you were lucky, you learned to laugh. If you drank wine to moderation, there was a lot of laughing. Doctors were now discovering the benefits of one glass of red wine per day. And as the commercial stated, “Oh what a feeling!”

It seemed ironic, that those who wrestled with consumption of too much wine often missed a perspective of the spiritual in their lives, a fundamental shift in perception that happens when one goes through the process to become sober. History will address whether Georgetown University will have that problem without a Catholic identity. It does call the question, what did an identity of an institution, of a person, lost or changed, mean to a tribe of people and their survival? Was that what Jacob wrestled with in the night?

To see God as the great comedian was to look what he had done with simple grapes to make a simple barrel of wine, with the help of human hands. It got me to thinking the next day. To be Catholic was to believe God had a son who had used wine to change perceptions, with the unexpected. Through alcohol, through wine, perceptions were changed. Change was everywhere.

So why all the concern over the loss of identity? The pope had come to a nation of religious equals, a land where we wrestled with displays of faith—in public, in a world where everyone seemed on a search for meaning. A place where people laughed. To be Catholic in 2008, where many were accused of being menu selectors, was to say to leaders, ‘why do you put so much on our plates?’

What would the neighborhood become without a church, without a church with a Catholic identity? To be anonymous was to lose an identity. An institution had become just another_____, fill in the blank. Hospital? Restaurant. Fast food outlet? To be anonymous was to lose a sense of significance. To be anonymous was to lose a sense of shame, of deprivation. Think of drugs, porn, any sin…..including the issue of the abuse scandal.

Was the question of identity about survival, or about the manner of being saved? It was a weekend of Passover. What did Passover still mean for this Jewish identity? It was time of celebration through a meal, of a real event of history, of the real presences of God. It was not the story of survival but the story of salvation, how a people were saved for history.

This past week I had viewed the movie Hotel Rawanda. It seemed little different than the turmoil witnessed with the Holocaust, a desire of people to be saved amidst the turmoil. There was an exuberance of life in the present tense in any real threat to survival. Whether Jews were being saved from a plague at their doorsteps, saved from hunger with manna, there was exuberance. The exuberance was not of the appearance of things but in the unexpected. A lot like the things we laughed at in the unexpected. There was also an exuberance of prayer, NOW! There was exuberance of my significance. NOW!

Yes, it was a weekend of Passover. What did it mean this Jewish identity? We are all in exodus, from our origin, trying to recapture a past that we are lucky enough to have inherited. These stories are about you, your loved ones, your personal relationship with this God. It had been, it was, real. You are related to Him with your DNA, with your creation, in the stories of the origin of woman and man, and in your conflict.

If we were made in the image of God, in this world filled with great poverty, with great problems to feed each person, was power and money only illusion of grandeur? How did this power reflect upon the identity of the Creator? In a world that came to grapple with loss of identity of institutions, with people, how did this reflect on this Creator? What did an identity of an institution, of a person, lost or changed, mean to a tribe of people and their survival? Was that what Jacob wrestled with in the night?