2019.08.07 For The Beauty Of The Earth

My birthday is today. So is my husband’s We are Leos in love. What I want for my birthday is that we all notice Beauty. It stuns and it saves. We see it in all living things, even when it’s obscured or dimmed by pain. Creative people know this. God is creative and creating all the time—with our help—making and illuminating Beauty. There is nowhere God is not. 

I see it as it looked one afternoon
In August,-by a fresh soft breeze o'erblown.
The swiftness of the tide, the light thereon,
A far-off sail, white as a crescent moon.
The shining waters with pale currents strewn,
The quiet fishing-smacks, the Eastern cove,
The semi-circle of its dark, green grove.
The luminous grasses, and the merry sun
In the grave sky; the sparkle far and wide,
Laughter of unseen children, cheerful chirp
Of crickets, and low lisp of rippling tide,
Light summer clouds fantastical as sleep
Changing unnoted while I gazed thereon.
All these fair sounds and sights I made my own.
    “Long Island Sound” by Emma Lazarus  born in New York City (1849).

I never noticed the beauty of Long Island Sound. It was too familiar a sight to me as I grew up on its banks and splashed in its waters. I think I would die of grief if it were not there to behold—ever again.

Emma Lazarus, a Jewish poet who was concerned for the plight of her people, the plight of the poor, and the plight of refugees and immigrants, knew about the spiritual power of Beauty. She is most remembered for her famous lines published in a poem, commissioned for The Statue of Liberty, gracing New York Harbor since 1886: “The New Colossus”: “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

So did English hymnodist and poet Folliot Sandford Pierpont (1835-1917) who wrote the words to this hymn in 1864 when he was only 29.

For the beauty of the earth, for the beauty of the skies,
for the love which from our birth over and around us lies. 

Lord of all to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.

Our current 1982 Hymnal changed the refrain to read: “Christ our God to thee we praise . . .” I guess they wanted to showcase Christ. But the above refrain is the one I grew up singing in the children’s choir at the Presbyterian Church in New York City, and “Lord of all” best expresses God as Creator of all for all. I believe we must seek beyond— way beyond—our religious preferences for the Beauty of the Earth.

When American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts left this Earth and headed for the moon on their spaceships, they looked back. Here is what they saw.

And this is what they all returned to tell us: this Earth is worth saving, and it has no nationality.

Only from a distance—time or space, physical or emotional— can we get perspective enough to realize what is worth expending every ounce of life, individual and collective, to save—with the help of the cosmic Artist who created it and gave it to us.  BEAUTY.

2016.06.26 Give Me Your Poor

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

"The New Colossus" poem by Emma Lazarus; lyrics for Irving Berlin musical, "Miss Liberty"

A friend recently told me that Emma Lazarus’s poem had been set to music by Irving Berlin. She said the women’s chorus of which she is a member sang it, and that I should check it out. It would make me weep, she said. It did.

In the context of the current skirmish over immigration and our highest court's split about whether President Obama’s proposal to allow 4 million immigrants to stay here and work here, Lazarus’s message rings sacred. Yes, I know it’s a vision, a dream—two words never to be prefaced by “only” or “just.”

My mother loved broadway musicals. Cole Porter and Irving Berlin were her two favorite idols. The information that Irving Berlin, composer and lyricist for “God Bless America,” first sung by Kate Smith in 1938, the year I was born, had written music for the Lazarus poem only added to my tears.

Mom died 18 years ago. I bet she never knew that music was the only source of income for Berlin, born Israel Isidore Baline (later Berlin, thanks to a typo) in 1888 in Belarus. Music was also the source of income for Mom’s own Jewish father. Berlin’s father had been a cantor in a synagogue. Through his father’s singing vocation Berlin learned to love music—for its spiritual power and its sheer beauty. I don’t know where my grandfather learned to love music, but he made a career of importing classical musical talent—most of it Jewish— from Europe to America.

                                                      Mr. Irving Berlin

With their music, my grandfather and Irving Berlin made this country rich. Neither would have come to America without the invitational hospitality of a Jewish poet named Emma and this country’s foundational principles. 

And neither man would  have come here without being ushered in by the inspired grandeur of the enormous Statue of Liberty, a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of America. She stands as a symbol of freedom and democracy. She holds a torch of welcome, stands 305’ 1” tall, and weighs in at 27,000 tons. Up close she represents one image of the soul of America.

As a child growing up in Manhattan, I looked up to her as if to a Goddess. I was also a little afraid of her, just because she was so huge and a bit stern looking.

For some of us today the message she carries is frightening. Whom shall we let in? Will we lose our rights, our identities, our properties if we share? Have we become so afraid of “pollutants” from without that we are going to create a toxic closed system within our borders—such that we will stifle—not grow, not evolve?

Lady Liberty, the one Berlin praised in song, in all her glory and her gospel, reflects the God I love and worship, the One who amorizes the whole cosmos, kindling love throughout.  

2015.07.05 Immigration Policy in Poetry, Sculpture, Religion, Politics—and Money

"Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth." George Washington said this. It's also a biblical metaphor for the reign of God—true and a bit scary. How do we accommodate such growth?

Washington's portrait must, legally, always be on the U.S. $1 bill. But the $10 is now up for grabs with a plan to replace Alexander Hamilton's portrait, presently on the obverse side of our ten-spot, with a woman!!
 

How far has Lady Liberty come? How wide is her spread and how broad her embrace? Who shall this woman be?

In 1884, the cornerstone of the New York harbor's Statue of Liberty’s pedestal was laid. The French gave the statue, and the U.S. raised the money for its pedestal. We funded the foundations mostly by an auction of contributed art and literary works. Emma Lazarus, 34 years old at the time, donated a poem for the occasion, which she titled "The New Colossus."

Lazarus, a Jewish-American author, was born in 1849, the fourth child in a wealthy family of seven children. She grew up in New York city’s Union Square area and mingled with the literary elite. As a woman and a Jew Lazarus knew the sting of prejudice on both counts. She burned with passion for liberation and was devoted to the plight of Jewish immigrants. She had the experience of assimilation into this land of liberty, and longed for more. At the same time, she urged the Jewish people to organize for a homeland in response to rising antisemitism—well before the term Zionism came into use. Lazarus died young at 38, probably from cancer.

In 1903, 16 years after Lazarus’ death, her friends lobbied to have a bronze memorial tablet with Lazarus’ poem inscribed on it installed inside the entrance to Ms. Liberty’s pedestal. The poem reflected her soul’s words and immortalized a vision: there is hope for the “huddled masses.”

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

These fiery words recall to my mind the gospel vision of Jesus the Christ: "Come unto me all who travail and are heavy laden and I will refresh you." In one prayer book liturgical version, this phrase is the invitation to the table of Holy Communion. I said it every Sunday over my early years of being a parish priest and thought these the most authentic theological words I'd ever heard. There is true divinity in all such words, calling us still to compassion and justice. How, when, and to whom do you say them?

“The New Colossus” was the projection of a young woman’s own experience and hope onto a statue, a still-standing symbol of America’s beginning and her commitment to liberty and justice for all. Darn good spirituality! The poem did not just define the monument, but also envisioned the country's immigration policy. Who can forget the call of the Lady of the Harbor? I grew up waving to her, and was awestruck looking out from the top of her "crown" at what I thought must be the whole world. 

Hers is also the call of all religions and their holy scriptures—not to mention the divine gift and vision for Creation. Liberty and justice for all make peace for all.

Over centuries, many have followed the vision, yet without legal protocols in place. They longed to breathe free. Now we have a problem with our "promised land." It seems to be a tragic irony that now we are forced to create enslavement in order to to protect liberty. It's costly to imprison illegal immigrants, most of them women fleeing violence, so we track them down and shackle them with GPS detection devices, the kind people under house arrest must wear, until we can put them through the proper paces of legalization, a protocol we might have had in place with forethought. It is no surprise to me that a woman wrote the mighty vision, that a woman is encased in colossal statuary, and that it is mostly women who still have no safe harbor. 

What will the "land of the free and the home of the brave" do now?

Are Lazarus's words still enough to inspire and inform our current immigration policy?  Does this vision have clout and spirit enough to console those who live in fear of deportation, to motivate our citizenry and government? Is it enough to inspire religions to speak out? Is it enough to fill places of worship with the tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free?  Might "expired" church buildings become affordable housing and enliven the vision?

I don’t know. But I nominate Emma Lazarus as a worthy candidate to be the first woman to grace an American greenback, the $10 bill.

I have no long-term answers, but I know Lazarus's vision is more expansive than it appears, and that liberty includes all humanity on all shores, as well as our endangered planet. The hope of this is worthy of prayer and hard political work.

For liberty we risk extinction unless we broaden our embrace and open wider our hearts.