United In The Strife Which Divides Us
My writing since the election of our president has disclosed my state of mind, that we are on the cusp of destruction. Time will tell. Nevertheless one must live one day at a time. Living in premonition of the apocalypse is no life at all. It’s a stuttering distraction from the path that one must take, in order to live the one life that has been given. These words of T. S. Eliot help. The heart of these lines of poetry is a quotation from Julian of Norwich. A 14th century Catholic nun, she lived in a troubled time.
She lived in a tumultuous time, the Black Death was raging in Europe. The first such plague occurred when she was only six years old. The road beside Saint Julian’s Church was used to remove the bodies of the dead from subsequent plagues, and she probably heard the carts rumble by. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France had begun in 1337, as did the papal schism in which two popes each suspected the other of being the Antichrist. Famine and cattle disease contributed to the forces that caused the Peasants’ Revolt, and John Wycliff and his followers, the Lollards, were declared heretics. Some were burned and buried near Julian’s church cell. She must have been aware of the suffering of the time. –newworldencyclopedia.org
Life is shot through with error due to our naivete and ignorance. We will survive this president. May we have compassion for ourselves and patience, more patience.
“Sin is behovely (useful or necessary), but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” —St Julian of Norwich 1342-1416
History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of not immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;
If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet,
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us – a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, fragment of verse 3
