knit together

This image of how a community is formed by being knit together appears in Winthrop's "Models of Christian Charity" in his conclusions about the nature of love and two sorts of laws.  Of course it is an image drawn from a particular craft, knitting.  And we can learn much from that reference.

This poem, that is today's from the Writer's Almanac, offers another glimpse into the connections that "knitted together" suggests:

Picking Pears

by Gary J. Whitehead

I stand on the top rung and the step ladder

   shakes; above me the winter pears just out

of reach, clean and strung heavy along limbs

   and swaying like my grandmother's aprons

hung on the line to dry. I drop one into

   the bag she holds open below me. She grins,

and I'm drawn into the embrace of her gaze—

   down into handfuls of earth, seasons, the empty

cup of a lost daughter, a lost breast.

   I'm stitched into miles of quilts, curtains,

tablecloths, hems of pants, skirts.

   I'm held to her like a button on a shirt pocket,

and I smell soap, tomatoes, chicken soup,

   Portuguese sweet bread, goat cheese, pears...

and I lower myself out and around the gnarl

   of branch, down the ladder to take the full

bag of the fruit I love, warm from

   the sun and spotted like her hands.

"Picking Pears" by Gary Whitehead, from The Velocity of Dust. © Salmon Publishing Ltd., 2004. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Dream Work

"But it is precisely the willingness to do something difficult, painful, unintentionally mischievous, or finally impossible that gives purpose to individual lives, both as they are lived and as they are remembered."  Jim Cullen, The American Dream, p. 34

Although Cullen never uses the term "vocation," this sentence sheds light on that notion so often used here on campus.  The light falls upon an aspect of vocation that is easy to overlook, namely that responding to a call, as understood in a theological, Christian way,  is likely to be hard work and perhaps will involve agony.

This the Puritans knew.  They were not looking for an easy life, neither a spiritually easy one nor a physically easy one.  If the later had been on offer, maybe they would have accepted it, but not if that ease brought with it harm to their spiritual life.  They were looking for freedom from the obstacles that would prevent them from engaging in struggle to live godly lives.

So, if we think that having a dream is just a matter of falling asleep and then waking up to a new world, we are sorely mistaken.  From dream to reality is hard work.

Reading Poetry

A Teacher Considers Why She Includes Poetry

I am a lover of poetry:
for the sounds,
for the shape on the page;
words turned to images
or a shaft of light.

A poem read aloud first thing:
a bell to invoke the spirit,
a bouquet of roses for beauty;
water in a pump
or a new pair of glasses.

The work of poetry:
to open the heart,
to stimulate imagination;
waves against walls
or an angle of insight.

LDL


From the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project  Billy Collins on how to read a poem, not instructions, but analogies that evoke other experiences.

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

This is NOT how American Conversation students responded to the poems they read for today!

Some images of common place books

From Thomas Jefferson.  Click on view image for source.

A contemporary example from the Moleskin page.

14th century example.  Click view image for source.

Freedom of WHAT religion?

A news story LINK about the interplay of various freedoms and rights in a North Carolina school.  This time the issue is not textbooks, but rather a dress code.  That code has been interpreted to prohibit a student from wearing her nose ring (really a stud, not a ring) to school, but the student and her mother contend that the nose ring should be allowed as an instance of freedom of religion.  Those who heard Prof. Schillinger on minority and majority views of freedom of religion, at the Constitution Day panel, will now hear echoes of his remarks.  Is this practice, body piercing, a form of religious expression?  Who has authority to decide? At the center of the case is a question about the equal treatment of all religions.

In view of our discussion today in Section A, those students may be interested in the notion of hybrid rights described in this news article.  While noting that freedom of expression may be limited in certain settings, the student and her mom argue, with the ACLU, that freedom of religion trumps those limits.  The legitimate limits may be analogous to the locational barrier we discussed in class.

From Yahoo News.