Beginning Again
Posted on | December 6, 2011 | 2 Comments
In the past year my wife Sylvia has pulled back from her big
artistic projects and gone back to the piano, which took a back seat to her other pursuits in music and the arts for many decades. We recently found a picture of her at age seventeen standing next to her family’s piano in a dress she had made. Moreover, the picture contained the same book (John Thompson’s “Modern Course for the Piano”) that she has returned to now under the guidance of a teacher in our community. All of this led to a poem that might resonate for all of you who have taken up something that meant much in younger years and that can once again feed you in a new way. As they say in the fancy restaurants, “enjoy.”
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Her fingertips caress the keys
exploring half-remembered chords,
hands travel over black and white
reflections of her hair…
Thanksgiving
Posted on | November 28, 2011 | 4 Comments
Thanksgiving Day has always been my favorite holiday, with its simple focus on a gathering of family, friends, and sometimes strangers for a feast to celebrate God’s abundance. Like the good deed that goes not unpunished it is now engulfed in violent gridiron sports, an obscene scramble for merchandise gnawing at its shrinking stage. As we feed the economic machine, the holiday concludes with an immense explosion of fossil fuels to whisk us back to ordinary (Christmas shopping!) time. Instead of schooling us in gratitude it leads us into greed and competition. It leaves me looking forward once again to Pentecost, my last best hope for holidays.
The poignancy of Thanksgiving’s beleaguered state renews my realization that we are servants of our gods. And gods require sacrifice. That is what a god is. “The Economy,” whose fine-tuned appetite requires sacrificing families to its priests on Wall Street, academe, and government. “The [football, basketball, you name it] Team,” feeding on the aspirations of the young and the lost hopes of the old. And then, of course, “America” in all its guises — military, cultural, racial, even ecological.
We cannot live without our gods, unless we are true atheists who will make no sacrifice at all, not even for another human being. So sometimes we construct a pantheon, trying to balance them with one another, a government of checks and balances. Other times we make a ladder leading up, we hope, to heaven. We live upon a pyramid of sacrifice where we must decide at every moment when the lower gods must yield to higher calls to sacrifice.
This leaves me wondering this morning after what it means to follow a light and life that was the end to sacrifice, an end to lower and higher gods. What is it to truly love the Creator of us all? While America doesn’t want to let us pause to wonder at this question, perhaps we might sneak in a moment in the coming often hectic weeks. Take it as an assignment in waiting, in Advent. An overture to the turning to the light that is solstice, that is Hannukah, that is Christmas.
Meanwhile, I share a poem about our planet’s plight.
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Earth gasping
overheated from the race
against our human grasping
reeling from its broken pace…
Peace, Poetry, and Cyprus
Posted on | November 21, 2011 | No Comments
The past two weeks have been a departure from my usual routines of writing and woodworking, as I journeyed to research some family history at the old family home in Virginia and then took part in this year’s Lake Junaluska Peace Conference, followed by the semi-annual conference of the North Carolina Writer’s Network. In between I sandwiched in a memorable celebration of my birthday and the first anniversary of my infamous kidney operation. That’s why you haven’t seen any poetry – yet. This is a brief report on these doings.
My sister Lois, who maintains the old family farm house (minus the farm) in Loudoun County, Virginia, has also diligently assembled many of the family archives. These include pictures from my mother’s two-year stay on Cyprus in 1923-25 with her family. Her father was a mining engineer who helped re-open the old copper mines that the Romans had operated two thousand years ago. My mother often spoke of their experiences, and some of the artifacts they uncovered in the mines have passed down in the family. Some of them are in the Carlos Museum at Emory University. Sylvia and I decided to celebrate our thirtieth anniversary by going to Cyprus this coming May and try to find the old monastery they lived in, the Skouriatissa mine itself, and the mountains they used to have picnics in. Our trip to Virginia enabled me to scan the old pictures to guide us in our search. If all goes well, you’ll here more about this next summer!
The Peace Conference focused on Poverty, Abundance
and Peace, drawing our attention to the impact of hunger and poverty on peacebuilding around the world. Sylvia and I set up her mobile of cranes and other art pieces she has made for the conference as a setting for the presentations and worship events. As always, the Conference took an interfaith perspective with the presence not only of Christian leaders like Bishop Ntambo from the Democratic Republic of Congo, but also Rabbi Mordechai Liebling from the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, and Dr. Ibrahim Moosa, Professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University. Their powerful presentations made it clear that any effort at peacebuilding and economic justice requires that our religious traditions recognize and affirm their interdependence, at theological as well as institutional levels. Bob Edgar, of Common Cause, drove home the desperate need to reform the financing of our political system, while David Beckman, of Bread for the World, delivered an impassioned plea for supporting efforts not only to alleviate hunger but to eliminate it in the next 20 years. With these and other events, the Conference demonstrated a maturity in vision, rhythm, and quality that lead it to next year’s focus on non-violent movements for peace and in 2013 on the ecological dimensions of peacebuiling.
At the Writer’s Network conference in Asheville I spent over three hours in a Master’s Poetry Class with Anthony Abbott, Professor of English at Davidson University, who led me into a new phase of my writing, namely memorization and performance. Yes, memorization for people over 70! In exploring the experience of memorized performance I could hear the cadences, rhymes, alliterations, and assonances that have so marked my poetry and that prepare it for use in worship. A couple of generations of students have benefited from his insight, enthusiasm, and encouragement. I may be in the caboose, but thankfully I’m on the train!
Here endeth the reportage. I won’t report on the double bevel sliding compound mitre saw that Sylvia authorized for my birthday. What a beauty she is. I can’t wait to get back in the shop.
Tags: Anthony Abbott > Cyprus > Ebrahim Moosa > Lae Junaluska Peace Conference > Mordechai Liebling > North Carolina Writer's Network
Tsunami Wings
Posted on | October 17, 2011 | 1 Comment
The earthquake and tsunami that devastated Sendai, Japan, last March continues to reverberate in our minds and hearts, just as the painful task of recovery continues for the Japanese people. On World Communion Day this October, we remembered this suffering and struggle for restoration in solidarity with the people of Japan. My wife Sylvia created an installation
composed of fabrics recalling the waves, pieces of reuse, and dormant stalks symbolizing a life still to rise from the destruction. She constructed a mobile of 150 origami cranes that we suspended over the altar, each crane representing 100 of the known dead, which surely will reach some twenty thousand people. The cranes, a symbol of peace and hope, move slowly and quietly with the air above the altar.
In response to this moving memorial I composed a poem, which I share here. In addition, Sylvia led our Roundtable Worship in creating our own origami cranes as a work of prayer, meditation, and reflection about the arduous movement from tragedy to transformation.
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Sky disappeared
when water stole our lives
and slunk back to the darkness of the sea,
leaving dolls, refrigerators, calendars, and cars,
whole houses in a pyre
waiting for the burning….
Tags: Tsunami
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...
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.