The Question of All Saints
Posted on | November 1, 2012 | 2 Comments
It is All Saints Day in the Church calendar here in the Latin West. We expand the horizon of our indebtedness to all those who have gone before and passed on to us a legacy of faithfulness. It’s tarnished with all manner of stains, battered by storms, washed in blood and tears. But today we polish it up, look into it, try to see the treasure that is our inheritance. And maybe sometimes in it we can see our face, our own finite face. And we know that it too will merge someday into the chorus of the ancestors. So it’s a somber time as well as a grateful time. In the midst of the utter destruction of the Superstorm that has devastated New York and New Jersey we know that death is not merely an end time but always a darkness lying not far from our doors. So it’s a time of reflection on our own dying, just as it’s a time of reflection on our own loving and whether it extends beyond our life. At least, that’s how it came to me this year.
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How did I do?
I mean
my death?
Did I slip the latch
in silence
leaving no address,
only breath to pass
between their open lips?
Was I screaming mad
at tubes and wires
that tethered me
against my twisted will?
Was I anxious
for the soup
I left on simmer?
Was my mind distracted
by the bills unpaid?
Did I weep
for unforgiven injuries?
Did my fingers let the feather go
to float among the dancing children
in a field of buttercups?
Did I
(that’s the question)
whisper
Yes
I love you,
love you,
love you
to the face that filled God’s light?
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William J. Everett
In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to a poetically written novel to probe the issues of ecological and human reconciliation.
When I am not writing, I create furniture for worship settings. For more about my work, go to www.WisdomsTable.net, where you will also find galleries of artwork by my wife Sylvia, whose ancestors were the original inspiration for Red Clay, Blood River. READ MORE...
TURNINGS: Poems of Transformation
Like works in
wood upon a lathe, these poems are word-turnings that reveal the inner grain of our human experience. They are bowls to catch our turnings of memory, conversion, falling in love, and passing through our seasons and the wrenching turns that mark our lives. Above all these turnings are a shout of praise, a murmur of wonder, a turning away from life as usual, a merciful re-turning to the songs, images and stories that move our lives.
You can get TURNINGS at:
For More on TURNINGS:
Red Clay Blood River
Red Clay, Blood River is a story told by Earth about two brothers from Germany and an enslaved South African woman whose lives bind together America’s “Trail of Tears” and South Africa’s simultaneous “Great Trek” of 1838. You can get Red Clay, Blood River at:
Booklocker--also in ebook version (PDF)In South Africa at: www.Loot.co.za and www.Kalahari.net
November 1st, 2012 @ 11:12 am
Thanks, Bill. So right, so true, so beautifully so.
Hope to connect sometime; we are savoring life in New Mexico; I have accepted a professorship in Germany, beginning in March, 2013 (delayed by a semester). Also just received a fellowship as artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute, which I’ll “do” next summer after teaching.
Love to Sylvia!… Mark
November 1st, 2012 @ 2:24 pm
Thanks Bill. Thinking of you both during this time of such frightful devastation. Hope all is well in Waynesville.