News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Winter has settled in here in western PA, and I'm hoping for an opportunity to do some ice fishing. But I won't be sad to spend a few days next week in the relative warmth of Georgia at Covenant College. Come say hi if you're in the area.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Milton, Babbitt, and Auden.
- Teddy Macker traces Michael Pollan's public comments in recent weeks about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On the one hand, the two men share similar visions for healthy food systems, but they find themselves on opposite sides of a polarized political landscape, which discourages any cooperation. Macker shares recent correspondence with Pollan, and wisdom from Thomas Merton and Wendell Berry, to imagine what it might take to cultivate common ground in contentious times: "Humanity should remain a larger category than political allegiance even as we openly—and, one hopes, bravely—discuss and work through our politics."
- Ivana Greco defends the importance of home: "Politicians and economists have long focused on policy steps to increase GDP and workforce participation rates. These are worthy goals, but they discount the critical work that goes into making home and family life. Changing this dynamic requires a shift of perspective by elites that while career and marketplace consumption remain important, what we “produce” at home—family dinners, holiday get-togethers, tucking little kids into bed—is critical."
- Alice Evans praises the decency that President Carter embodied: "President Carter showed what was possible when people came together for a cause and acted out of decency."
- Carter Johnson contemplates Epiphany via T.S. Eliot's classic poem on the Magi: "Eliot defamiliarizes the Christmas story by refracting it through a Magi’s perspective and reimagining how death and life are intimately intertwined."
I'm relishing Benjamin Myers's new book Ambiguity and Belonging: Essays on Place, Education, and Poetry. The title should be familiar to readers of FPR as the lead essay first appeared here. Some of the essays are new to me, some are familiar, but all are worth reading and re-reading. This book reminds me of another favorite of mine, Eric Miller's Glimpses of Another Land. I imagine that neither book sells particularly well, meditative essays on place, culture, and faith don't tend to go viral. Yet both books offer a profoundly affirmative vision of life without in the least sugarcoating the pains and frustrations endemic to earthly existence. Formally, as Myers writes in his introduction, these essays are offered "in the spirit of conversation," and they offer the kind of wise, substantive thought that should mark our personal--and public--conversation. In the book's final essay, "A Little Homily on Providence," Myers turns to a poem I've recently memorized and been pondering:
I want to end by pointing you to a poem I think about when I think about suffering and God's Providence. It was written by Jane Kenyon, one of my favorite late-twentieth-century poets, and she wrote the poem as she was dying of cancer. It is called "Let Evening Coming." Kenyon begins in a gentle way, describing late afternoon light as it moves through a picturesque rural setting. In a delightful simile, she compares the beginning of cricket song in the evening to a woman taking up her knitting needles.
So far the poem is perhaps little more than a simple reflection on the pleasantness of the closing of the day. Yet as she continues to develop the imagery of the poem, we come more and more to see the unexpectedness of evening, as well as its inevitability. In other words, the "evening" becomes more clearly metaphorical. This sense of an ending culminates, fittingly, in the poem's final stanza:
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Faced with impending death from an incurable disease, Kenyon reminded herself (and us) that "God does not leave us comfortless." And that line break reminds us that our great comfort is that "God does not leave us." He has said, "I will never leave you or abandon you," hasn't He? Our God's Providence is His presence, His nearness even when evening comes.
Take heart.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro