5.31.2024 – we, we shall be as

we, we shall be as
a city upon a hill
all eyes are on us

We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

According to Wikipedia, this phrase was cited at the end of Puritan John Winthrop’s lecture or treatise, “A Model of Christian Charity” delivered on March 21, 1630, at Holyrood Church in Southampton, before his first group of Massachusetts Bay colonists embarked on the ship Arbella to settle Boston.

In quoting Matthew’s Gospel (5:14) in which Jesus warns, “a city on a hill cannot be hid,” Winthrop warned his fellow Puritans that their new community would be “as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us”, meaning, if the Puritans failed to uphold their covenant with God, then their sins and errors would be exposed for all the world to see: “So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”

We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

The eyes of all people are upon us.

Still trying to get there.

That was first said in relation to this country or the beginnings of this country in 1630.

In 1961, JFL said, “History will not judge our endeavors—and a government cannot be selected—merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. For of those to whom much is given, much is required ...”

Ronald Reagan said in 1980″… visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still… a shining city on a hill.”

Still a hard road with lots of mistakes.

In 2006, Barack Obama said, “I look out at a sea of faces that are African-American and Hispanic-American and Asian-American and Arab-American. I see students that have come here from over 100 different countries, believing like those first settlers that they too could find a home in this City on a Hill—that they too could find success in this unlikeliest of places.”

We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

… Shall Be.

Not will …

Shall.

Still got a chance.

5.30.2024 – twelve people go off

twelve people go off
in a room – different hearts
minds, shapes, eyes and ears

Twelve people go off into a room.

Twelve different hearts, twelve different minds, from twelve different walks of life — twelve sets of eyes and ears, shapes and sizes.

And these twelve people have to judge another human being as different from them as they are from each other — and in their judgment they must become of one mind — unanimous.

It’s one of the miracles of man’s disorganized soul that they can do it — and most of the time do it right well.

God bless juries.

From the movie Anatomy of a Murder screenplay by Wendell Mayes From the novel by Robert Traver.

The book is based on a case from the Upper Pennisula of Michigan.

The author, a Judge from the UP writes in the forward that, “I longed to try my hand at telling about a criminal trial the way it really was, and, after my years of immersion, I felt equally strongly that a great part of the tension and drama of any major felony trial lay in its very understatement, its pent and almost stifled quality, not in the usually portrayed shoutings and stompings and assorted finger-waggings that almost inevitably accompanied the sudden appearance and subsequent grilling of that monotonously dependable last-minute witness. …“

It is one of the co-stars, Arthur O’Connell, as Parnell McCarthy who sits back and delivers this quiet speech on juries.

Today, I couldn’t agree more.

God Bless Juries.

5.29.2024 – sailing free sky blue

sailing free sky blue
sailing changing and sailing
let me have spring dreams

Spring Clouds – May 2024 – Broad River at Robert Smalls Parkway

Drift, and drift on, white ships.
Sailing the free sky blue, sailing and changing and sailing,
Oh, I remember in the blood of my dreams how they sang before me.
Oh, they were men and women who got money for their work, money or love or dreams.
Sail on, white ships.
Let me have spring dreams.

From Carlovingian Dreams as published in Smoke and Steel by Carl Sandburg, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1920

5.28.2024 – in any language

in any language
word enough for pleasure that
fills you as sun warms

Adapted from The Sun by Mary Oliver …

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone–
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance–
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love–
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

5.27.2024 – their disillusion

their disillusion
was deep and they had to fall
farther to reach it

Based on :

Those fanciful old ideas about the glory of a waving flag, the shame of running from danger, the high importance of dying with one’s face to the foe — since that war they have come to seem as out of date as the muzzle-loaders that were used for weapons in those days.

The American soldier of later, more sophisticated eras may indeed die rather than retreat, and do it as courageously as any, but he never makes a song about it or strikes an attitude.

His heroism is without heroics, and fine phrases excite his instant contempt, because he knows even before he starts off to war that fine phrases and noble attitudes and flags waving in death’s own breeze are only so many forms of a come-on for the innocent; nor does he readily glimpse himself as a knight of the ancient chivalry.

But in the 1860s the gloss had not been worn off.

Young men then went to war believing all of the fine stories they had grown up with; and if, in the end, their disillusion was quite as deep and profound as that of the modern soldier, they had to fall farther to reach it.

From Mr. Lincoln’s Army by Bruce Catton, Doubleday & Co, Garden City, NY, 1951

It would be another two years before Mr. Lincoln said:

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us,

that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,

that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain,

that this nation,

under God,

shall have a new birth of freedom,

and that government of the people, by the people,

for the people,

shall not perish from the earth.

And what kind of nation was Mr. Lincoln talking about?

A new nation,

conceived in liberty,

and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

On this Memorial Day, 2024 I close with this thought from Mr. Lincoln’s 1st Inaugeral Address, March 4, 1861.

 The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

 The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave let us know that we didn’t get this far on our own.

We are standing on the shoulders of a lot of other folks.

To slip now …

Time to depend on those better angels of our nature.