O Holy Week, your passions never fail...

Every Thought...

Week 12: Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday was the day my father died, decades ago, and yet he lives on, ever reminding me and encouraging me to remind others of the holy journey ahead and another Sunday coming.



03/18:

TWL, Dedication: Opening Allusions

0.4 For Ezra Pound
il miglior fabbro.

0.4. DEDICATION: See Longfellow’s translation of Dante, Purgatorio 26:115, 117, interpreting “il miglior fabbra” as “a better smith.”:

“‘O brother,’ said he, ‘he whom I point out,..
...Was of the mother tongue a better smith.’”

This is Dante’s tribute to 12th century Provencal poet Arnaut Daniel, also described by Petrarch as a “grand master of love” (see Petrarch, Triumphus Cupidinis, ca. 1350).  For Eliot’s further tribute to Daniel, see line 428.

See also Ezra Pound’s first book on literary criticism, The Spirit of Romance (1910), in which he translated Dante’s phrase for Daniel as “the better craftsman” and commended Daniel for his “refusal to use the ‘journalese’ of his day.”

EZRA POUND was a strong influence on Eliot, who added this dedication to him in 1925, in Poems, 1909-1925 (Faber); this was also the first edition in which Eliot included his explanatory endnotes. After they met in 1914, Pound was influential in getting Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock published in Poetry Magazine in 1915. See Eliot, Letters.

See notes 141, 198 and 219 for other Prufrock references.

Pound was even more actively involved as a reader and editor for The Waste Land.  See note 69, and for a sample of Pound’s editing see notes 167, 212, 219 and 293; for a fuller effect, see F&T (note 0.1).

See also Pound’s 1921 letter to Eliot just before The Waste Land was published (also in Eliot, Letters). In a 48 line poem he called “Sage Homme,” Pound congratulated his friend for creating the poem but took his due credit for helping with the delivery. Pound’s poem begins:

“These are the poems of Eliot
By the Uranian Muse begot;
A Man their Mother was,
A Muse their Sire.
How did the printed Infancies result
From Nuptials thus doubly difficult?
If you must needs enquire
Know diligent Reader
That on each Occasion
Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.”

For a delayed response, see Eliot, Ezra Pound (Poetry, Sept. 1946):

“I have sometimes tried to perform the same sort of maieutic task; and I know that one of the temptations against which I have to be on guard, is trying to rewrite somebody's poem in the way I should have written it myself if I had wanted to write that poem. Pound never did that: he tried first to understand what one was attempting to do, and then tried to help one do it in one's own way.”


03/19:

Twenty Fifth Anniversary, 2014

Before a Wednesday congregation

March 19.  I did not choose this date,
but today has some significance to me,
because it was 25 year ago today

that my father died.  And maybe
I shouldn’t dwell on this, but
He was 51, the same age I am today.

And he died of a heart attack, which
apparently runs in the family:
all six of my dad’s brothers and sisters

have had heart conditions since then.
So here I am in the middle of Lent,
focusing on my mortality.

As we are supposed to do, I guess,
but what I really want to talk about
is the rest of the story.


March 19, 1989 was Palm Sunday. Lent
came early that year, and it was (imagine!)
a beautiful beginning-of-spring day.

The grass was turning green.  The sky was blue.
And I was going to get out and enjoy the day.
But then the phone rang, and everything changed.

My thoughts ran all over the place: Immediately,
I missed my dad.  But then I remembered
that I hadn’t talked to him in over a month.

I thought about how 26 was way too young
to be making funeral arrangements.  And I thought
about the 600 mile drive I had in front of me.

But that call had come just as I was about to go
to church that morning, and something compelled me
to keep on going.  And it was a good thing.

Because for all of my scattered thoughts, I needed
to hear and sing those processional hymns,
and even though there were tears in my eyes,

it was good to be part of a crowd raising their
palm fronds and turning their eyes to Jesus
and maybe it was going to be a tough week ahead,

but it was nice to be reminded that Easter was coming.
And the reminders kept coming, all week long.
Everyone was so warm and close that week,

friends, family but also members of my dad’s church,
people I didn’t even know, and they were smiling,
even laughing, as they took time to remember Joe Vold,

and when we got to the funeral, there was even
a sense of celebration, because my dad knew
where he was going, and he wanted us to know it, too.


By Friday, I was back home in Chicago,
and Friday night I found myself back in church.
This time it was the Good Friday service:

the Tennebrae service, where they shroud the cross
and dim the lights and everyone slowly filters
out of the church, quietly, somberly,
and where the name of the day practically begs
the question: what’s so good about it?
But we all know the answer, don’t we?

And that’s the rest of the story.
You know, I might just live another 51 years,
and I have some encouragement in that:

of my dad’s six brothers and sisters,
five of them are still going strong,
and they’re all getting well into their eighties now.


But more importantly, I’m encouraged by
the daily reminders all around me,
encouragements from my aunts and uncles

and many of you, too, reminding me daily
that regardless of where we are in life
or how tough our Lenten journey may seem

it is good to know where we are going.


03/20:

Palm Sunday, 2009

This will be the twentieth Palm
Sunday after my father died
(All the importance we put in a day).
“Sunday’s coming,” he used to say
In the evenings, preparing to preach.

He was fifty one; another month
He would have been fifty two.
We plodded through that Holy Week;
By Maundy Thursday we were driving home;
Good Friday, watched them veil the cross;

And Saturday, turned the television on
To see March Madness with brother Josh
Blowing a horn with the Illini band.
“Sunday’s coming,” Dad used to say,
As if every day were Saturday.

Another two months and brother Dan
Would graduate from college,
Dad’s college, his old alma mater
From thirty years before.  It felt to us
Like Dad was there all over again.

And suddenly it’s twenty years ago,
Twenty years of Sundays coming.
As Dad would say, I’m doing okay.
But it will be harder at number twenty five
When I will be fifty one.


03/21:

A Perpetual Place

    I

There is a place along Algonquin Road
that I pass by, when I am on the way
from here to there, whenever fates allow
my passage and the meeting points align,
a place in time that stirs me every now,
between point east, a chapter of my youth,
and then, post-scripted, education’s berth,
while to the west, the middle marriage days
when we would send our toddlers off to school
and lose ourselves and move ourselves away.
We ended twenty miles to the north,
but still I pass this wooded place, preserved
along the Des Plaines River corridor,
both nestled in the shadow of O’Hare
and paralleled by I-294,
this quiet place, in spite of everything,
a respite from the traffic’s constant noise,
a solace more important than it seems,
a piece of peace exceeding understanding
and this, the place I stopped one day to scream.

    II

O Holy Week, your passions never fail
to move me, if not too far from the pews,
and Spring, each passing year you manage to
renew my spirit with your April rain,
and even now I want to cling to you,
but I have always had my destinies
to pull me through and keep me on the road,
and though I know this place will never be
the only place I’ve found myself compelled
to stop along the way, to feel free
to park the car, to leave the beaten path
and walk into the muffle of the woods,
to sit a while upon a fallen tree
and ponder where I’ve turned and what I’ve seen
and think about the sounds surrounding me,
there’s never been another place or time
where in my desperation it would feel
or when from daily driving it would seem
so necessary to set everything
aside, to face the forestry, to scream.

    III

And still that April echoes in my soul.
When you have lived for twenty seven years
and you would live for fifty seven more,
when you’re not certain what may lie ahead
and you don’t have the world you had before,
when this big city closes in on you
and overwhelms you as you make your way
from here to there, when you can’t take the sounds
of now and then, and when you cannot find
a place along the way to turn around,
allow yourself, at least once in your life,
to claim that place, your own Algonquin Road,
and pick someplace that’s not so far away
or out of reach that it might be forgotten
or lost to random paths of yesterday,
and even if you never stop again,
pass by your April every now and then,
and if some day you move your stuff upstream,
you’ll keep this place and time forever, where
you walked into the woods one day to scream.


03/22:

We Need To Pray

It is a time of mixed emotions at 520 Stewart Ave. We are suddenly shaken with unfamiliar feelings of anxieties and perplexity, stunned by the news that brother Josh has a tumor in his head, and yet we are brought closer together by this. We are sharing our feelings and holding each other up and learning how to pray.

“The family that prays together stays together,” my girlfriend noted a few days ago, and it is true. We need the familiar so very much these days; we need to lean on and to be leaned upon; and when our mixed emotions threaten to weaken us and tear us apart, we need to pray.


We pray as Jesus taught us. 

It is not our instinctive nature to know how to pray or what to say, but Jesus has made it easy, giving us words that say it all, every word with a power that we cannot find on our own.
We pray, right from the start, to one who has been personally introduced to us not only as the Lord’s father but as Our Father, in the spirit of togetherness and family. God is our father and this is our prayer.


We pray with a sense of our place.

And we praise God, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name! But we also pray with the encouragement to turn boldly to Our Father with our every need. Jesus taught us to pray upward, without reserve and for everything at once: for strength and healing, providence and peace, hope and joy and humility. Yes, we talk of bread and leading and deliverance, but there is so much more than these words in the prayer we are taught.


  We pray for strength. 

We ask for the strength to merely stand sometimes, and once we are strong we pray for the strength to support others. And all along, weak or strong, we pray for the individual strengths of those around us. I am right now praying for Annie, our youngest sibling, who, being only twelve, has been hit especially hard this week. I am also praying for Mom and Don, who, being our parents, seem to be going through a period of rational denial —but who am I to say? I can only pray. And of course we all pray, every day, for Josh, who has the biggest battle to fight, and yet he seems so strong already, stronger than any one of us; often more fortified than all of us collectively. Still, we pray for his continued strength against all weakness, and we pray knowing that it is by the grace of God that Joshua is strong at all. All strength comes from God. Thine is the power.


We pray for healing. 

“Deliver us from evil.” There are people in our church family who have started praying fervently for Joshua’s physical healing. Maybe he will be healed by these petitions. For the sake of Joshua and all of us, I hope that this will be true. We love Josh, we don’t want to lose him, but we sometimes fear the worst —Joshua dying, leaving us — and so we pray desperately for God to take away the cause of this fear. Some people even say that it is Satan inside of Joshua’s head, and these people pray quite intensely to exorcize. But I must tell you, I haven’t prayed this prayer very often. I don’t know why God put a tumor in Josh’s brain or why there is fear inside of my own head, but I don’t want to think about Satan. Nonetheless, or maybe consequently, I pray: Deliver us from fear and deliver Joshua from every malignancy. Deliver us from doubt and every shade of the devils within us. Deliver us from evil.


We pray for providence. 

This is the healing prayer that I am more inclined to pray. I pray for the doctors. I pray for a reduction of any pain Joshua may have. I pray that he will be able to appreciate God’s gift of life to the fullest and I pray that it might be God’s will to let Joshua live rich and long. But I pray, perhaps more fervently again, for the strength of one step at a time, for Joshua and for all of us. I pray for a simple Providence, that God might simply provide us with what we need from day to day. Give us this day our daily bread.


We pray for peace.

We try to believe, somehow, that everything is according to God’s plan, that God is just and merciful, that whatever the cause of Joshua’s suffering, God will restore him and reward him in the end. The very last of us, the least comforted, will be the first: God has promised this. I don’t know how to rest in this promise, but I am praying all the same for the truth of it, that Thy will be done and that I will be able to accept the pace of it even before I know the peace of it. We don’t pray to understand. We pray instead for God’s strengthening through the trials and for God’s encouragement by his presence and loudest of all for what we don’t have: that specific peace, the peace that passes all understanding: peace for Joshua, peace for each one of us brought together in prayer, peace on earth as it is in heaven.


We pray for hope. 

We pray to believe that some day, if we all keep praying, we will reach the place where there are no weaknesses or fears or pain or confusion, where there is only the certainty that God’s will is to take care of us —forever and ever. “The kingdom of God is very near,” always, and so it is: Thine is the kingdom, and so we pray, Thy kingdom come!


We pray for joy.

And that we will one day be able to look back and see all that God has given us —even a brain tumor, even if it is a cancerous one —as a blessing. “Blessed be the name of Yahweh!” cried Job in a windstorm. Hallowed be thy name, he cried. And I pray to have that same perception, that beautiful attitude, well before the final day, even as God’s will is done here on earth, as it will be done in heaven. “Blessed be the name of Yahweh!” I want to say, even in the midst of this misfortune, blessed be God for all things! Thine is the glory.


We pray to be forgiven.

Praying joyfully is how I would pray all the time. But I admit, I cry more often out of fear and uncertainty and anxiety, and so there is one more thing I am learning to pray these days. I pray for forgiveness. I pray to be forgiven for my lack of joy and my weakening faith, even as I learn to forgive others for their own lacking —the deniers, the perplexed ones, the people who refuse to see Satan and the people who see more of Satan and less of God. I pray to remember that underneath our mixed emotions and amidst the storms around us we are all the same; lead us not into the temptation of thinking otherwise.

Forgive us all, Father, and help us to have faith the size of a mustard seed to move each mountain before us. Or if it is thy will, Father in heaven, give us the strength to climb the mountain and to get to the other side.


We pray many prayers, and yet one.

At 520 Stewart we have prayed many prayers in the last several days, but each of our prayers are in the nature of the singular prayer that Jesus taught us to pray, the Lord’s prayer that is our prayer. In Jesus’s name we pray.

   Thank you God for teaching us to pray and for hearing our prayers, for giving us your strength, your healing, your providence, your peace, your hope, your joy, and for giving us forgiveness and a place for us beyond our mixed emotions.

Forever and ever, Amen.  Let it be so.


03/23:

Our (collective) Father (familiar)

Our (collective) Father (familiar)
who art in heaven, hallowed (praise)
be thy name (Yahweh hear us calling).
Thy kingdom come (show us your place),

Thy will be done (the peace that passes)
on earth (to mortals: Jesus born)
as it is in heaven (Jesus risen
everlasting, every morning).

Give us this day our daily bread
(the daily gift of life revealed)
and forgive us our trespasses (faithless fears)
as we forgive (and learn to heal)

those who trespass (the uninvited)
against us (us and them the same).
Lead us (let us ever follow
on thy path and in thy name)

not into temptation (our otherwise
of empty prayers and private hells),
but deliver us (when we do not follow)
from evil (save us from ourselves).

For thine is the kingdom (heaven and earth)
and the power (every strength we know)
and the glory (Jesus lives!), forever
and ever. Amen (let it be so).


03/24:

Moleskin 2.4: Preacher’s Kids

My first memories, beyond the haze of my first-born years, seem to immediately include my brother Daniel Martin. He was born where my sentience began: in central North Dakota during the war protest years, son of a homemaker and a seminarian, the second child as long as I’m here to remind him. Neither of us has any awareness of our family’s move to North Dakota, where our dad was assigned an internship in his last year of seminary, nor have we ever paused to consider what was surely, leading up to this, a momentous career change for our father. In our eyes he had always been a preacher, and we were the preacher’s kids. There is a lasting camaraderie in that distinction. There was also a level of community attention, and stigma, from this, which brotherhood would help us endure and appreciate.