Roy’s Ramblings

It seems like there is always something to remember/recognize/celebrate. For example (and after a quick google search) February: Black History Month, American Heart Month, National Library Lover’s Month, March: Women’s History Month, National Nutrition Month, April: Celebrate Diversity Month, Earth Month (including Earth Day) and the list goes on and on. Many years ago when I was in college I even had a giant poster in my dorm room that included 365 things to celebrate (obviously one per day for the entire year).

So, a friend, knowing my love of poetry, sent me an e-mail the other day that included an article from the New York Times and I have included part of it here:

What can we learn from April, a month of contradictions that never cleanly resolve themselves?

It’s the 30th anniversary of National Poetry Month, begun in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. I’m celebrating it in my own fashion, reading favorite poems about April. T.S. Eliot dubbed it “the cruelest month.” Edna St. Vincent Millay was equally suspicious: “It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, / April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” An idiot! When I read those lines, spring fever beginning to throb in my veins, I feel like Millay is mocking me for being so awed, again, by the magnolia blossoms flinging open their floppy petals for a brief window of delirium.

To Ogden Nash, April was “Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy.” There’s the cruelty again, but he ends having come to appreciate the month’s contradictions: “I love April, I love you.” Langston Hughes’s “April Rain Song” concludes similarly: “The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at night / And I love the rain.”

April has, in the Northeast, been inconstant as always. A perfect spring bike ride there; a windy, rainy hustle back. The poems tend to capture this fickle quality. As Robert Frost put it: “The sun was warm but the wind was chill. / You know how it is with an April day.”

We do. April days contain multiple seasons. There’s a lesson in there, if we want to take it, about holding multiple things at once. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, the challenge of containing conflicting emotions, conflicting ideas, the alternately sunny and stormy fronts of the internal weather system. I’ve been writing this new newsletter, The Good List (you should sign up!), and while it’s meant to catalog things that bring joy, it’s not meant to deny that there are difficult things in the world, or to avoid the inevitable contradictions that come from loving things: beautiful films about sad subjects, art that emerges from suffering. Things aren’t only good (or only bad). I often return to these lines from David Ferry’s translation of Horace: “It’s true that Jupiter brings on the hard winters; / It’s also true that Jupiter takes them away.”

Certainty is easier. April, in much of the country, is liminal, vacillating between winter and spring, refusing to resolve cleanly. If you look closely, you can observe this tension: the tulips quivering in the gusting wind; people in shorts and people wearing mittens on the same block; stepping onto the porch to see a robin and instead seeing your own breath. The internal work is much the same. Sitting quietly, paying close attention to the weather inside, you can observe the hope that blows in with the fear, the lightness and heaviness that seem to be competing. The psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach advises greeting each experience that arises within us with the phrase “this too,” accepting what’s there, even if it’s uncomfortable.

So, this coming Sunday as the Call to Worship, I am using the very familiar poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost – the focus and theme is Jesus meeting travelers on the Road to Emmaus and telling them the details of the happenings of the Easter Story. So my point is this: shouldn’t we constantly and consistently tell others about Jesus? Hence, taking the road less traveled. And, we can do this by our actions even if we aren’t comfortable by using words only. It is our calling, our mission, and our ministry – and it is something to remember/recognize/celebrate every month/week/and day.

Just some Words to Ponder – Pastor Roy