Last week, I kept forgetting to bring a face mask along when I was going someplace. It's hard to remember that old problem when you're getting earnest messages encouraging you to hide your trash bin and hook up your garden hose. The federal government seems to have forgotten about it, too. Every day, about a thousand more dead, but the administration is said to have "pivoted." I guess that explains the tweet about the 75-year-old Catholic fellow in Buffalo who, according to the first official police statement, "tripped and fell." But, unfortunately, once again, someone standing around with a cell phone, and it now develops that he's actually a bad actor who fell harder than he was pushed and, moreover, is probably an Antifa provocateur.
Better pivot again.
I watched a little of the Floyd funeral in Houston yesterday and, on account of all the swaying and clapping, was reminded of some lines of poetry:
The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows,
Only their children feel the holy ghost.
I was about to say I don't know why these lines are in my head, or who wrote them, but then I remembered it's 2020 and I typed into Google "The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows"—voila! Copyright 1978, when I was in college, and I wonder . . . yup, the author, Marilyn Nelson (pictured), taught English at St. Olaf College when I was a student there in the late 70s. Never had her, but that must account for my familiarity with the opening of one of her poems. It must also account for her familiarity with Lutherans. African-Americans who grew up on military bases generally aren't acquainted with the insides of Lutheran churches, but at St. Olaf it would have required an effort to maintain her innocence.
Reading over the whole poem ("Churchgoing"), I think it must be intended as an answer to one of the same title by Philip Larkin. Larkin was a thoroughgoing atheist, but Nelson's poem concludes:
We sing a spiritual as the last song,
and we are moved by a peculiar grace
that settles a new aura on the place.
This simple melody, though sung all wrong,
captures exactly what I think is faith.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
That slaves should suffer in his agony!
That Christian, slave-owning hypocrisy
nevertheless was by these slaves ignored
as they pitied the poor body of Christ!
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble,
that they believe most, who so much have lost.
To be a Christian one must bear a cross.
I think belief is given to the simple
as recompense for what they do not know.
I sit alone, tormented in my heart
by fighting angels, one group black, one white.
The victory is uncertain, but tonight
I'll lie awake again, and try to start
finding the black way back to what we've lost.
Meanwhile protesters are cleared away so that our president, fingering a Bible as if it were an item for sale on a cable-tv shopping channel, could assume his position between a church and some photographers. I think George Will's column advancing the thesis that with Trump there is no bottom was published the day before that debacle.
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