Service of Dedication
Emerson Robert Rhoads
son of Marcia Bean Rhoads & William Rhoads
Reading
The late Italo Calvino has been described as "Italy's most dazzling writer." My guess is that he is still dazzling us from his own quirky star. I read from Calvino's Cosmicomics.
"One night I was, as usual, observing the sky with my telescope. I noticed that a sign was hanging from a galaxy a hundred million light-years away. On it was written: I SAW YOU. I made a quick calculation: the galaxy's light had taken a hundred million years to reach me, and since they saw up there what was taking place here a hundred million years later, the moment when they had seen me must date back two hundred million years.
Even before I checked my diary to see what I had been doing that day, I was seized by a ghastly presentiment: exactly two hundred million years before, not a day more nor a day less, something had happened to me that I had always tried to hide. I had hoped that with the passage of time the episode had been completely forgotten....Instead, from a distant celestial body, here was somebody who had seen me, and the story was cropping up again, now of all times.
I thought of replying at once with a sign, using a phrase in my own defense, like LET ME EXPLAIN or else I'D LIKE TO HAVE SEEN YOU IN MY PLACE, but this wouldn't have been enough and the things that would have to be said were too many to be compressed into a short statement legible at such a distance....
I thought the best line to take was to act as if nothing had happened, minimize the importance of what they might have found out. So I hastened to expose, in full view, a sign on which I had written simply: WHAT OF IT?....
I went on living, waiting for the remote moment when, from the galaxies, the comments on...new episodes would arrive, charged for me with embarrassment and uneasiness; then I would be able to rebut, sending off my messages of reply, which I was already pondering, each dictated by the situation. Meanwhile, the galaxies for whom I was most compromised were already revolving around the threshold of the billions of light-years at such speeds that, to reach them, my messages would have to struggle across space, clinging to their accelerating flight: then, one by one, they would disappear from the last ten-billion-light-year horizon beyond which no visible object can be seen, and they would bear with them a judgment by then irrevocable.
And, thinking of this judgment I would no longer be able to change, I suddenly felt a kind of relief, as if peace could come to me only after the moment when there would be nothing to add and nothing to remove in that arbitrary ledger of misunderstandings, and the galaxies which were gradually reduced to the last tail of the last luminous ray, winding from the sphere of darkness, seemed to bring with them the only possible truth about myself, and I couldn't wait until all of them, one after the other, had followed this path."
Petra, an ancient city carved out of the cliffs rising primally from the desert of southwestern Jordan. Petra, which is Greek for rock, is entered through a long narrow gorge, a sikh. Just before coming into the expanse of what was the city itself, the visitor notes that this sikh angles sharply to the right. At this midpoint in Petra's lengthy corridor, a temple has been sculpted from the face of the cliff, the handiwork of Romans stretching their borders circa two millennia ago. Like the rock surfaces throughout Petra, this temple is bathed in the variegated hues of lavender, salmon, saffron, amber, sienna, rose-red. Is this of the earth? I wasn't sure. We camped--other students and I from the American University of Beirut--in a cave directly opposite the temple, an ample shelter accessed by a stone staircase. In the cave's center we built our fire; it was home for the next five days.
I lay at night on the open terrace of this cave gazing up at a narrow ribbon of blackness, with eye after countless eye gazing back--no signs saying I SAW YOU, just the brilliance of a seeming infinity of stars. Life beheld light kindled hundreds of millions of years ago. Yet that ribbon of black and light was more alive, more here and now, more sensually transfixing, than the utter darkness of the canyon on whose sill I reposed.
Out of wonder the Psalmist spoke:
"When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou has established; [who are we] that thou art mindful of us..." (Psalm 8:3-4a)
How can we not consider the stuff of transcendence on the morning of dedicating a tiny Emerson? See, Emerson, you're already sharing your legacy, and you don't even need to walk in the footsteps of Ralph Waldo. Believe me, you'll make marks on this earth that are wholly yours....of course some of those marks may be a tad sticky for awhile, but we'll definitely know you were here.
The birth of a child, the birth of a star. Are they both not cradled in the same wonder? Has each not been an object of worship--whether by parents and family or by creatures of faith throughout the millennia?
"The million candles in the sky are lit and singing," wrote the 14th-century poet Hafiz, "Every particle of existence is a dancing alter [worshipped by] some mysterious force."
There is a paradox here. We know awe in what is immediate and new, living matter that emerges from our very bodies, and we know awe in what is distant and ancient, the stuff out of which life comes, the light to which we shall return. Only moments ago we spoke responsively:
"The womb of stars embraces us; remnants of their fiery furnaces pulse through our veins." (Joy Atkinson)
Children and stars are the harvest of the cosmos, fruits of love and wonder ripened in wombs immediate and transcendent. Today we celebrate the first day of Kwanzaa, a recently established holiday born of the struggles of those of us who are African-American. Kwanzaa is Swahili for "first fruits of the harvest." As the candles of the Kinara, or candle-holder, are lit over a span of seven days, families attend to the seven principles of Kwanzaa, which span from Unity on the first day, to Faith, on the seventh. They are principles of right relationship that unfold in freedom, freedom of the truth realized in right relationship.
First fruits of the harvest suggest a welcome bounty of reaping what has been sown. We know from scars borne of the realities of unjust living that we reap what we sow for better and worse. What Kwanzaa suggests to me is a profound accountability that we hold to one another. I am my sister's keeper, my brother's keeper, a keeper of the earth whose matter I share. We are not just harvesters, but gardeners of our space and time. And we reap what we sow, but with a forgiving array of second chances.
Every time a child is born, we know a second chance, a fresh start, a new life. Yet none of us is a creature without history. We carry genes that are blessings and burdens. We carry traces of the ancient. As Frederick Buechner reminds us in his memoir, Telling Secrets , we are old bodies and old souls.
"Who knows what all of us have in us not just of our parents but of their parents before them and so on back beyond any names we know or any faces we would recognize....? Who knows what we carry in us either for those unspeaking, unthinking creatures that slithered and crept their way through the millennia until they turned into the likes of you and me and who have never stopped speaking and thinking since?"
As soon as we draw breath, we are creatures molding and molded by our environment, both proximate and light-years away. We are inherently worthy. We are insatiably curious. We are wholly interdependent with all existence. And, yes, we are cosmicomical.
How human it is to conjure up a sign light-years away that says: I SAW YOU. How human it is to balk with an UH-OH and immediately conjure up defense after defense after defense. How like us to test a posture that says WHAT OF IT! What a marvel it is that we can conceive at all of writing accountability into a script so utterly vast. How like a child too young to be told not to be so silly, to sense justice on a scale transcendent.
So we go about our daily business, read the papers, wring our hands over crises real and imagined, cruise the web, walk the dog, take our kids to the park, or, if such is our plight, consider where we're sleeping tonight, worry about making it one more day with our kids in a city shelter, do all we can to hold onto our kids, figure out how to summon a together enough look for that job interview--the first promising one in months. We matter. We matter not. We matter. We matter not. How far from this daily grist is our contemplation of how our mattering figures in the schema figured in dimensions of solar systems, universes, galaxies, light-years?
We are mundane, and we are the very stuff of stars. We risk drowning in the frenetics of our daily lives, and we are capable, along with the elder Emerson, of catching a glimpse of the night sky and beseeching those stars to show us a different way:
Teach me your mood, O patient stars! Who climb each night the ancient sky, Leaving on space no shade, no scars, No trace of age, no fear to die.
I have heard that when we are lost, we travel in circles. While we and the rest of humankind give ample evidence of being lost, or losing it altogether, the reality of our orbiting, of our ever circling years, is that we do not travel in circles around our sun, but in ellipses. Now elliptical movement is no guarantee that we are not lost, but it does give rise to other speculation. It is as if there were two centers, two suns, focal to our larger voyage. Pluralism, not singularity, defines the reference of our arcs. We inhabit a system of space where the presumed power of a center is diffused by the shared power of two centers, two foci, a metaphor of relationship around which we arc, a metaphor of ancient celestial relationship, perhaps the ripened fruit of an age-old harvest.
Relationship, accountability--grist for matters terrestrial and celestial, for matters timely and beyond time.
The millennia that we are straddling are constructs of our need to measure sequence. Relationship, accountability are dynamics at the heart of our being here at all. What we do in the space and time that we inhabit is precisely that which we would or would not hold up for observation by some language-endowed eccentric on a distant planet, waving a crazy sign, I SAW YOU, probably with fine print that reads: I REALLY DID!
With such possibility, even the possibility of an imagination bridging galaxies, we need all the patience and peace that Emerson can coax from these candles of the sky. We are souls newborn and ancient. Our deeds resonate across the room and, in traces immeasurable, but no less alive, across galaxies. Pablo Neruda, the poet and revolutionary from Chile, understands exactly:
"Someone will ask later, sometimes searching for a name, his own or someone else's, why I neglected his sadness or his love or his reason or his delirium or his hardships: and he'll be right: it was my duty to name you, you, someone far away and someone close by, to name someone for his heroic scar, to name a woman for her petal,...
...maybe it was the strain of the city, of time, the cold heart of the clocks that beat interrupting my measure, something happened, I didn't decipher it, I couldn't grasp each and every meaning; I ask forgiveness from anyone not here: ....Why describe your truths if I lived with them, I am everybody and every time, I always call myself by your name." Neruda's poem is itself a trace of the act of his writing the poem.
We gaze at the night sky and know we are of it, timely and timeless. And so it does not feel so strange. Like the cave where I lived warmed by friends and a simple fire, we shall find home once again in the stars whose children we are. In the meantime, the precious meantime that we know as that span between birth and death, limited as these notions may be, we are accountable for sowing seeds of justice and compassion and for walking in wonder with our God.
So take heart, gather your second wind, or maybe your hundred billionth wind, and join your voice to that of the 13th century poet Rumi: don't go to sleep this night one night is worth a hundred thousand souls the night is generous it can give you a gift of the full moon it can bless your soul with endless treasure every night when you feel the world is unjust never ending grace descends from the sky to soothe your souls.....
Whether we lie on the sill of a cave in an ancient city or in the arms of our parents, like Emerson, or on our neighborhood streets or in a city shelter, we are bonded to one another and to the most distant star by the miracle of creation. As souls newborn and ancient, our deeds resonate across the room and, in traces immeasurable, across all time and space. Carpe diem. Carpe annum. Carpe millennium. Amen Copyright AllSouls 1999.