Category Archives: Spirit and Faith

Reflections on the spiritual side of life

02.06.24
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Those Detestable Christians!

Or, SUMMA CONTRA BUMPTIOSI

Saint Michael and the Angels at War with the Devil, Painting, tempera on panel, by Domenico Ghirlandaio  (1448–1494). Public Domain.

AN OLD FRIEND—a man I have known casually for more than fifty years, one to whom I am kindly disposed because he once did me a great service—recently posted this verbal meme:

Thought for the Day: It kills me that Christians insist everyone else honor their religious sensitivities while they stomp all over others!

A thought leapt to my mind, a mirror of the meme itself: “Atheists demand we honor their religious sensitivities, which seem to require the indiscriminate slander of Christians!”

Striving to resist a knee-jerk reaction to my old friend’s provocation, I read on. Some of his Facebook followers had added comments, most of which echoed the anti-Christian meme. 

One commenter let loose a 12-gauge blast in five extended paragraphs. Pared down to its essentials: “. . . Lutheran, Baptist, ‘evangelical’, and ‘non-denominational’ were all about the same: hypocritical. . . . I believe people are intrinsically good and are sometimes made worse by religion. . . . As I saw once on a bumper sticker, ‘Religion is the Problem’.”

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Whew. 

Time to take a deep breath.

This blog generally avoids religion and politics, for good reasons. But Your New Favorite Writer is always concerned with the past and how it echoes in the present. My old friend’s bumptious meme fetches up undead beasts from the past that continue to haunt us today—to our great common detriment.

So, now: To the barricades!

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First, people have a right to cast aspersions on Christianity. That right I do not contest. It is guaranteed, in our land, by the First Amendment—whether such sentiments are spurred by generous or spiteful impulses.

So, the critics have the right to criticize.

But where do they get the moral standing, the breadth of outlook, and the depth of knowledge to swing their clubs with such casual malice?

These are questions of import, which I do not ask lightly. Thus, Kind Reader, I beg your indulgence as we explore the topic in some depth, at a leisurely pace.

We may as well begin with the grey squirrel, a shining emblem of moral deficiency.

Grey squirrel. Photo by Phil Sellens, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

The Grey Squirrel


Like a small grey
coffee-pot,
sits the squirrel.
He is not

all he should be,
kills by dozens
trees, and eats
his red-brown cousins.

The keeper on the
other hand,
who shot him, is
a Christian, and

loves his enemies,
which shows
the squirrel was not
one of those.

-- Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940)
Humbert Wolfe. Drawing by William Rothenstein, 1931. Public Domain.

It is mistaken, of course, to state that grey squirrels eat red-brown squirrels; in fact they do not. But Humbert Wolfe, a Christian poet with Jewish roots, wants us to understand that the grey squirrel, in any case, cannot measure up to a Christian standard of morality. He also points out, with wit, that a Christian may not measure up to his own standard of morality. 

This goes to the question of moral hypocrisy implied by my old friend’s meme and posed explicitly by the agitated commenter.

But, wait. Why are we all today, Christians and anti-Christians alike, so obsessed with morality? 

Jesus, depicted by an unknown artist on the wall of the 4th-century catacomb of Commodilla in Rome. Public Domain.

It seems to me we did not talk so urgently about morality before this fellow Jesus of Nazareth came along and made such a point of it in his teachings.

But I am digressing, I fear, into religious talk.

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Far be it from me, Dear Reader, to dwell on the theological basis of all those moral laws we have come to consider purely secular because they seem so dazzlingly self-evident. I merely mention this in passing, in case it is of any interest; for many things that are self-evident now only became so after long firing in the crucible of humanity’s tortured experience.

Rather than dwell on that, let us examine our propensity to evade morality whenever convenient.

Let me ask my old friend and his Facebook choristers: Do you suppose that in the whole sad parade of human inadequacy, it is Christians alone who have cornered the market on hypocrisy? 

Must we assume that pagans, animists, Zoroastrians, Mithraists, Jews, Hindus, Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, Shintoists, Stoics, Epicureans, pragmatists, utilitarians, agnostics, or atheists always live up to their stated ideals? 

Of course not. 

Hypocrisy is a human failing, not a Christian one.

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What can we take from this? That high ideals are pointless?

That’s absurd. Without moral aspirations, what will become of us?

Fair Reader, what we are left with is the fallible human animal: Someone who needs to hope to be good, yet who always falls short.

So when you fall short, do you give up? 

Winston Churchill—a man well-acquainted with failure, with repeated and spectacular failure—once advised young boys as follows:

“. . .  never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”  

Churchill at Harrow, 1941

Most of us, however, lack Churchill’s iron resolve. 

Where shall we find the sheer chutzpah to keep going in the face of our own shortcomings?

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We need to draw from internal wells of humility. 

In pursuit of that thought, I must beg to differ with the commenter who said, “people are intrinsically good and are sometimes made worse by religion.” 

People may be worsened by religion, indeed. But then, we are not intrinsically good to start with. 

Richard Mansfield starred in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in both New York and London. Double exposure photo by Henry Van der Weyde, 1895.

Life is not that simple. People are not wholly good nor wholly bad. Abundant experience shows that we are both good and bad: At the same time. 

We are mixed beings, angels and devils at once. Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.

Good and evil so commonly appear bound together in one person that it baffles me how anyone of mature years can have failed to notice that duality. 

We have various names for it. We call it inconsistency, perversity, or sheer cussedness. But by any name, its existence is undeniable.

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.

—James Truslow Adams

We desperately need to recognize this fact about our neighbors, and also about ourselves. It is not only the other guy who is a mixed being. As Pogo, Walt Kelly’s famous Okefenokee possum, said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

What has that to do with humility, and what has humility to do with anything?

One of the best and worst persons I ever knew was a colleague, back in the days when I exerted myself to make a living. Tim, raised a Catholic, had become a theoretical agnostic and a practical atheist. He projected the Self-Made Man, relying entirely on his own talents and exertions. This happened to be a good strategy for Tim, because he was intelligent, capable, and hard-working. 

He was also curious about many topics, including American history. But it shocked him to learn that U.S. presidents, including George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson, have called for national days of prayer and humiliation. 

“How,” Tim asked me, “how can any president call for national humiliation?”

To him, “humiliation” suggested ignominy, disgrace, and something akin to unworthiness. 

I’m afraid I let him down in this hour of crisis. 

Given enough time, I might have stumbled through an explanation that America has always been steeped in Reform Christianity—or, in one word, Puritanism. The Founding Fathers, even those who were not Puritans, grew up in a Christian world that assumed a universal need to repent of our transgressions; to recant any claims to pride; to be brought low by prayerful introspection. And this process of becoming appropriately humble—since we all have a bit of the Devil in us—was called “humiliation.” 

Given enough time, I might have explained all that. But Tim’s question was posed in passing, on a typically busy day. So he went to his grave without ever hearing my (possibly tedious and long-winded) explanation. In case you’re wondering, Dear Reader, the God I know would not hold this  human lack of information against him. 

And suddenly, with no warning, we have arrived at the central point.

If we think we understand everything, we are grossly mistaken. We need more humility than that. 

It’s true that Christians have often fallen short of our ideals. One of the ways we fall short of our ideals is by trying to force our views on others. 

It is wrong to suggest, as the meme does, that all Christians always do this. But some of us do, sometimes.

Some non-Christians, and some anti-Christians, also do this sometimes. 

Even when we are at our worst, Christians are no worse than other people when they are at their worst. 

A terrible frailty is part of the human condition. Puritans called it “original sin.”

If you think it does not apply to you—whatever you may like to call it—I invite you to think again.

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At the beginning of this essay I said the man who posted the bumptious anti-Christian meme on Facebook was an old friend. And so he is. 

How I can treasure my old friendship with one who blithely flaunts such a clouded and limited vision of the world? 

Let me tell you, Fair Reader: Many years ago, this same man taught me how to ward off airsickness—a terrible occupational hazard to a young airman. That teaching was the act of an angel. Without it, I would have been condemned to great misery in the course of military duty.

I also happen to be conscious that I have made my own share of foolish declarations.

We ought to try, as best we can, to show the world our clarity and our charity, not our presumptuous hobgoblins of prejudice. 

Yet we can’t always manage that. 

The Season of Lent approaches, and we require humiliation, in the old sense of the word.

Unless we cultivate enough humility to cut one another a bit of slack, how shall we ever find our way to the light?

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

01.30.24
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Oracles

Your New Favorite Writer is but recently returned from a visit to the famed Oracle of Delphi. 

Temple of Apollo at Delphi. Photo by Annatsach, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. 

Well, not the Oracle, exactly, but the place of the Oracle—the ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece—which itself is often spoken of, in a modern linguistic convention, as “the Oracle of Delphi.”

Attic red-figure kylix from Vulci (Italy), 440-430 BC. Kodros Painter. Oracle of Delphi: King Aigeus in front of the Pythia. Antikensammlung Berlin, Altes Museum, F 2538. Photo by Zde, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. 

The actual Oracle, however, was a high priestess, conventionally named Pythia but embodied by many generations of actual women who spoke forth from at least the eighth century B.C. (but perhaps much earlier) to the late fourth century A.D. 

Persons, representing themselves or their city-states, would come to Delphi—a place perched high on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, overlooking the Gulf of Corinth—with urgent questions bearing on their plans or hopes. 

On the seventh day of each non-winter month, the petitioners or “consultants,” in order of priority as assigned by priests or priestesses, would present their questions, and Pythia would present her answers. A long tradition says that Pythia did so in a trance-like state, influenced by toxic vapors seeping from a chasm in the ground underneath the Temple of Apollo.

The Oracle of Delphi Entranced, engraving by Heinrich Leutemann  (1824–1905). Public Domain.

Thus, the Oracle’s answers, or “oracles,” were ambiguous, easily misunderstood by the customers. Or maybe, Pythia’s utterances were pure gibberish, rearranged by the members of her subordinate priesthood into intelligible yet ambiguous formulations.

Lots of examples cited by ancient authorities such as Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diogenes Laërtius show that understanding and applying Pythia’s advice could be tricky.

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Marmota monax. Photo by Cephas, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. 

We have our own oracles.

For example, this demigod, Marmota monax. What are we to make of him?

Woodchucks, we have in plenty. There is only one Groundhog, one Lawgiver of February. 

A rodent is only a rodent, but the Groundhog is an oracle.

He goes by many names: Punxsutawney Phil, Wiarton Willie, Jimmy the Groundhog, Dunkirk Dave, Staten Island Chuck, etc. But these are merely local avatars of the Universal Groundhog.

Wikipedia confides that the groundhog “is also referred to as a chuck, wood shock, groundpig, whistlepig, whistler, thickwood badger, Canada marmot, monax, moonack, weenusk, red monk, land beaver, and, among French Canadians in eastern Canada, siffleux.” 

But clearly, those terms refer to ordinary rodents.

An ordinary woodchuck preparing to chuck wood. Photo by Rodrigo.Argenton, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0. 

The Groundhog—the One and Only Groundhog—is said to control the weather. He controls it absolutely.

Stated baldly, the One Unitary Groundhog makes one unitary prediction, and we must all live with it for a whole season. 

“Which season is that?” 

The season of Winter-into-Spring, Dear Reader—a fraudulent season to begin with.

And how can we foretell the weather for Winter-into-Spring?

The Groundhog wakes up. Not at any old time, as a proper woodchuck would, but precisely on the second day of February. First thing in the morning.

When Groundie stumbles from his burrow, he waddles about for a while in a post-hibernial glaze. After coffee, he opens his eyes. If he sees his shadow, he goes back to bed. If he does not see his shadow, he stays up and does calisthenics. 

Punxsutawney Phil, Oracle, protected and cosseted by members of his priesthood. Photo by Anthony Quintano, licnsed under CC-BY-2.0. 

It’s that simple. A binary choice, ruled by a shadow. 

People say if the sun is shining, the Groundhog will have a shadow and can’t miss seeing it; but if the weather is overcast, there will be no shadow, hence nothing for the Groundhog to see. This may be reading too much science into the picture. The governing myth only says, “if he sees his shadow.” Parse that how you will.

Now, here’s the corker: If he sees his shadow and re-hibernates, there will be six more weeks of winter. Holy cow. 

But wait, there’s more: If he does NOT see his shadow and therefore stays out, then we shall have an early spring. 

Now, Fair Reader, we have breached the Innermost Cave, the Sanctum Sanctorum, the Mystery of Mysteries. For, in any place where anybody gives two hoots about the Groundhog, six more weeks of winter IS an early spring.

Do the math. February 2 + six weeks = March 16 most years, or March 15 in a leap year. That’s six or seven days before the Vernal Equinox, the “official” start of spring. But in most temperate climates, the real spring—meteorological, vegetative, phenological spring—does not come round until days or weeks after the Equinox. 

So, what can this rodentine Oracle be trying to tell us? In plain English, it’s not plain English. It’s mere gibberish, no more understandable than the virgin Pythia’s long-ago howls and whistles in ancient Delphi. 

Perhaps that’s why we, like a certain film character, are doomed to repeat the whole thing over and over until we get it right.

You may be forgiven, Neighbor, if you haul off and belt Ned Ryerson right in the kisser.

You have my earnest hope for brighter days, six weeks from now or sooner.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

12.26.23
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The Feast of Stephen

Today is December 26, the day after Christmas. Sigh. 

In the world you and I live in, each year starts on January 1, possibly with a hangover. 

Then time grinds inexorably through days, weeks, and months, headed for the Promised Land of Christmas. We can tell when we’re getting close. Retailers provide mileposts as we enter and traverse the preparatory season of HallowThank-mas en route to the Big Day.

Christmas is the climax, the thrill, the big payoff. We are told repeatedly that “it’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” 

If you can’t believe Johnny Mathis, who can you believe?

After all the letter writing, card mailing, buying, wrapping, baking, cooking, traveling over the river and through the woods, the Big Day itself can feel anticlimactic. My wife and daughter both said yesterday, “It went by so fast.” 

Still, when it’s over we’re tapped out. We are ready to welcome a season of tranquillity—that week that falls after Christmas but before the New Year. It’s the one week of the year we are neither joyfully anticipating Christmas nor desperately cramming for it. 

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If you feel a bit “so what?” after Christmas, be of good cheer. 

It will interest you to know that today, December 26, is the Feast of Saint Stephen.

When Christianity was being invented, church leaders dotted the calendar with special dates so that believers—as they tilled their fields, planted their crops, and scanned the skies for portents of prosperity or disaster—could also ponder and celebrate heroes and events of their faith. 

Christmas, when God sent his Son to save the world, became an important day; but it was not the only important day. Easter, when the Son performed the miracle of salvation, was even more important. Days were also named to mark the Annunciation to Mary that she would bear God’s son; the Transfiguration, when Jesus became radiant with light and conversed with Moses and Elijah on a mountain; and the Ascension, when Jesus, resurrected from death, rose into Heaven. Likewise, known martyrs of the faith were honored on appropriate dates.

The whole of Christendom was one gigantic, universal—“catholic”—church, and this calendar of special days helped its adherents move through each year in a somewhat organized way.   Even in 1054, when the one great church split in two, with Eastern and Western branches, the old church calendar marched on, with minor adjustments. 

But five hundred years later, when we Protestants rejected the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, that system of date-marking was called into question. Those of us in what is now called the Reform Tradition—that is, Puritans—utterly rejected the notion of holy days in the year, whether special masses, feasts, or saints’ days, because their observance was not commanded, or even mentioned, in the Bible. 

In the United States, a nation heavily influenced by Puritanism, large parts of the population, as lately as two hundred years ago, celebrated neither Christmas nor Easter, much less any of the lesser feasts or saints’ days. Saints, in fact, were not considered to be persons canonized by the Church for special holiness, but simply any believing Christian who led a blameless life.

Then a funny thing happened. We found we could not thrive within a faith tradition so plain and featureless. Celebration of certain days and repetition of certain rituals in Sunday morning worship came back into use, even among us Congregationalists—spiritual heirs of the Puritans—because people simply hungered for them. The mid-nineteenth century became a time when the simple, “low-church” assemblies of former days began to sing new hymns, accompanied by fancy organs, in buildings ornamented with stained-glass windows, and with recognition of Christmas, Easter, and certain other special days of worship. This did not happen all at once, nor did it happen completely. But it did happen.

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Saint Stephen, painted by Carlo Crivelli (c. 1435-1495). Public Domain.

Stephen was a Jew—likely a Greek-speaking, Hellenistic Jew—chosen to be one of seven deacons of the Jerusalem church in the earliest days of Christianity, within a few years after Jesus was crucified. 

In a well-known passage in the Book of Acts, Stephen was stoned to death by a crowd of people who held him guilty of blasphemy against Moses and God, while Saul of Tarsus—not yet known as Paul the Apostle of Jesus—held the stoners’ coats and approved of their violence. This incident became the first known and recorded martyrdom of a Christian for his faith.  

What seems the point of the story, as recorded in Acts, is that in the very throes of death, Stephen interceded with God for his killers, praying for their forgiveness.

It was on December 26, 415, that a priest named Lucan unearthed the remains of Stephen from a grave in Jerusalem; so December 26 became a day for veneration of the saint. Stephen was a saint both in the Puritan and Catholic senses of the term, having been canonized by the Catholic Church on account of his saintly life as a witnessing Christian.

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Today, the Feast of Stephen is known to millions of people mainly for its association with another saint: Duke Vaclaw I of Bohemia, better known as “Good King Wenceslas.”

A nineteenth-century Anglican clergyman, John Mason Neale, earnestly working to restore the veneration of Christian martyrs and saints to the previously-Puritanized Church of England, published in 1853 a hymn he had written about the pious Bohemian duke (who was posthumously dubbed a king).

Wenceslas and page adorn a page of sheet music. Public Domain.

Good King Wenceslas looked out, 
on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about, 
deep and crisp and even;
Brightly shone the moon that night, 
tho’ the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight, 
gath’ring winter fuel.

The ruler was moved to inquire the location of the poor man’s house. Armed with that information, he set out to bring food, drink, and firewood to the straitened peasant’s hut. Snow and wind daunted the page whom Wenceslas brought along to help carry, but the king replied,

“Mark my footsteps, my good page. 
Tread thou in them boldly
Thou shalt find the winter’s rage 
freeze thy blood less coldly.”

The monarch’s response strengthened the page’s will, and so—

In his master’s steps he trod, 
where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod 
which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure, 
wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor, 
shall yourselves find blessing.

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Perhaps the Anglo-Catholic hymnodist, John Mason Neale, wanted to suggest the feast day of Saint Stephen had something to do with the good king’s act of charity.

Was Wenceslas inspired by Stephen? Did the saint’s holy day serve to focus the Bohemian duke’s mind on his Christian duty? 

Is there anything in all these notions from which you and I can draw inspiration?

December 25 and December 26.

It just seems like one day Love comes into the world, and the very next day we are shown the way of  loving service.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

12.12.23
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Our Tree

I thank God for our tree. 

It’s no ordinary tree. 

We have quite a few trees in our yard. But this one stands above the others. It’s a black locust, tall and stately. It was already so when we moved in thirty-three years ago. 

Judging by its three-foot girth, it must be near two hundred years old. 

Possibly Heraclitus, c. 500 BCE, photo by RoyFokker, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

These days, whenever I drive around town, all along the main streets they’ve torn up the former landscape and built glass-and-steel towers, shoulder to shoulder. Major thoroughfares cower under continuous assault by jack hammers, their lanes in constant flux. 

All is change, all the time. Even Heraclitus would weep.

But this old tree: It stood here more than a century before I was born in 1945 and will likely continue in the same old stand long after I am gone. That is, barring a tornado, a lightning strike, or an unfortunate re-zoning.

It’s a living thing that goes on and on.

Although our tree is rooted in front of the house, it towers over the roof, so I can sit in the backyard and watch its canopy. In December you can see its structure—all black limbs, branches, and twigs, reaching upward in a complex pattern against the sky. But in summer it is covered with leaves—compound leaves, each with nine to nineteen three-quarter-inch leaflets arranged on a central stem. They start out green and gradually turn to gold, wind-glittered in a blue sky as summer becomes fall. 

Our tree in December, its structure naked.

Those leaflets are uncountable. I try to guess their number but cannot. It embarrasses my imagination. 

It should not be a mystery. The main trunk, after all, splits into only two huge limbs. One of these splits in two again a foot higher, and the other splits in two a bit higher up. Each of these four main branches ascends to a point where it splits into four or five still-large branches. At this height, forty feet up, smaller branches erupt from all sides of the larger branches. And each side branch splits and resplits many times and sprouts forth smaller branches from its sides. This goes on and on, until the tiniest twigs, unable to support the weight of a sparrow, burst forth in leaves and leaflets. 

How many leaflets could there be? Millions, I’ll bet. Maye tens of millions, just on this one tree. But I don’t really know. 

I do know that when I gaze up at its majestic form, winter or summer, I feel completed. Whole, bound to a piece of earth. I am in the presence of a living creature not only older, but likely wiser, than I. It has stood there for ages. It has stood the test of time. It survived a tornado twenty years ago that took down an eighty-foot silver maple in our backyard. Who knows what other challenges it has mastered in its decades, its centuries rooted to that spot?

Our tree in October, with millions of leaves.

Our daughter and grandchildren come over frequently. I want to grab them by their collars, point upward, and shout, “Look! There it is! Still there! Doing what it always does: basking in the sun, breathing in carbon dioxide and exhaling oxygen, sucking water from deep underground and spraying it as vapor to moisten our air supply.” But I’m not sure I would really be saying what I mean to say.

It is, after all, a perfectly ordinary tree. Not at all unusual. Most of our neighbors have trees of like age, longevity, and probity supporting the skies above their half-acres. Big old trees live everywhere in our city and state, and most places in our nation and world. 

In earlier days, when I was a young, struggling, bewildered atheist, my late mother-in-law—gentle with my folly but firm in her own beliefs—was the finest theologian I knew. 

“Look at a tree,” she said.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

11.21.23
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Learnt by Heart

Our parents and teachers believed children could commit poetry to memory.

It was not only possible; it was desirable.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of “The Midnight ride of Paul Revere,” photographed in 1868 by Julia Margaret Cameron. Public domain.

Not only possible and desirable, but important.

“That kid is smart as a whip,” Grandpa would say. “She knows Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride by heart.”

We could memorize rhymed, metrical verse. And not just rhymed, metrical verse, but any form of poetic, exalted language. And that was important. 

Types of Poetry

Poets today concentrate on depth, originality, subtlety. Poems probe the psyche, exploit the mutability of language, deconstruct human relationships—as if human relationships were not deconstructed enough already. 

Poetry has become—I almost hate to say it—an intellectual exercise.

Our poems used to tell stories, or spin metaphors, of personal, spiritual, or civic virtue. Poetry was less a private thing and more a public thing. It was common coin of the realm, a language we understood together.

If you spoke of Barbara Fritchie, your uncle might chime in:

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.
John Greenleaf Whittier in 1885. Public domain.

Barbara Fritchie was an elderly widow in Frederick, Maryland. Her legend, spoken in verse, had meaning for us all. A Unionist, she allegedly stood up to Stonewall Jackson and his troops by flying the national flag from her upstairs window. When the general told his troops to take down her flag, she spoke out.

John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet, wrote up the fabled encounter in thirty rhymed couplets of iambic tetrameter. The poem was revered not only for the old woman’s patriotic outburst but for its dramatic context. Her words pricked the heart of the Confederate general: 

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;
The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and word:
“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

Who speaks of Barbara Fritchie nowadays?  Nobody. The only thing that brought her to our lips occasionally in the old days was that we all knew the poem. The poem and its message, encapsulating the lesson of the Civil War, are mostly forgotten these days.

And yet, we’re still fighting the Civil War.

Not Only Verse

The poetry in which we children were marinated encompassed not only verse, but also prose:  Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Preamble to the Constitution and Jefferson’s introit to the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That  whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Such words gave us a common mental furniture that let us live together. 

Maybe that’s not so much the case anymore. 

Entertainment Also

Poetry also served more frivolous, pedestrian ends. Hazel Felleman’s classic anthology Best Loved Poems of the American People, contains a whole section dedicated to “Humor and Whimsey.” It includes “Strictly Germ-Proof” by Arthur Guiterman, which tells the adventures of the Antiseptic Baby and the Prophylactic Pup. It contains “Evolution” by Langdon Smith (“When you were a tadpole and I was a fish / In the Paleozoic Time . . . “). 

Carmen Possum. Photo by Cody Pope, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.5. 

For you classical scholars there is even a poem, “Carmen Possum” that features a hilarious mix of Latin and English: 

The nox was lit by lux of Luna,
And ’twas a nox most opportuna
To catch a possum or a coona;
For nix was scattered o’er this mundus,
A shallow nix, et non profundus.
On sic a nox with canis unus,
Two boys went out to hunt for coonus. . . . 

Et, for the record, cetera. 

Best Loved Poems of the American People was first published in 1936 and includes more than 575 poems. They are old-fashioned. They are also superior to much of today’s poetry. These verses, high or low in theme, have stood the test of time.

From the Heart

But there is another dimension to this business of learning poetry by heart, Dear Reader. I have saved it for last, because it is best.

If learning poetry helped us bind our own fortunes to that of the commonwealth, and if it gave us enjoyment and even belly laughs besides, it also imprinted our souls with deep truths of human life that stood us, and are standing us, in good stead as we go through this mortal experience.

Miss Ruth Breiseth was your stereotypical old maid English teacher of yore—prissy, pedantic, and tyrannical. She measured the margins of our handwritten compositions with a ruler and marked us down if they varied more than a hair from one inch on the left and three-quarters of an inch on the right. If there were two Toms in one class, never mind their surnames, she addressed them as “Thomas One” and “Thomas Two.” The Toms were expected to know their numbers. The Marys, too. 

And she made us memorize poetry. Not just any poetry, either. High-class poetry, mostly American poems from the nineteenth century.

There are deep lessons in some of those poems, things you can carry with you through life and come to appreciate more as you get older. 

Byant, c. 1876. Photo by José Maria Mora. Public domain.

William Cullen Bryant, addressing a waterfowl, observed

There is a Power, whose care 
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,— 
The desert and illimitable air 
Lone wandering, but not lost. 

This is a religious message, yet it was taught in the public schools. A funny thing about education: Once you learn something, especially by heart, it’s apt to get stuck there.

Your New Favorite Writer’s own life seems to be following the pattern suggested to Oliver Wendell Holmes by a lowly shellfish:

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 
As the swift seasons roll! 
Leave thy low-vaulted past! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 
Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
—“The Chambered Nautilus,” 1858
Cutaway view of a nautilus shell. Photo by Chris 73, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

What of the Future?

At the height of the covid pandemic, my wife and I were given the unanticipated pleasure of providing a free-form curriculum every Wednesday for our grandchildren Elsie and Tristan, then eleven and eight years old, respectively.

My part boiled down to a weekly lesson in “literature.” We sang songs and read stories. I introduced them to poetry and even encouraged them to memorize a bit of it. 

They both liked Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

Committing all four stanzas to memory was a harder slog. Today’s children do not expect to encounter such a challenge.

Alexander Pope, portrait by Michael Dahl, c. 1727. Public domain.

One item I did force them to memorize, a simple couplet from Alexander Pope:

Honor and shame from no condition rise; 
Act well your part, there all the honor lies.  

If Elsie and Tristan can carry those two lines with them—learn them by heart, take it to heart—it will be a great comfort to their old-fashioned grandpa.

Blessings,

Larry F. SommersYour New Favorite Writer

10.31.23
by

Pied Beauty

“. . . skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow . . .” 

Glory be to God for dappled things – 
   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 
      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 
   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 
      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 
      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 
                                Praise him.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

Hope you enjoyed the poem.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

10.17.23
by

On Trust

Dame Julian of Norwich, statue at Norwich Cathedral by David Holgate, completed in 2000. Public Domain.

“Jesus answered with these words, saying: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ . . .  This was said so tenderly, without blame of any kind toward me or anybody else.”

—a vision from Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich (1343-1416 or later), English mystic

We find ourselves thrust into an age when the foundations of the world crumble. We wish we could re-anchor our world, put it on a firmer footing. But all hope seems vain.

Here, then, is good news: There is something simple—not easy, but simple in concept and execution—that each one of us can do to help set the anchor.

We must restore Trust.

In the world’s large affairs, disputes between nations or factions are moved inch-by-inch toward resolution through “confidence-building measures”—small actions that begin the renewal of trust. 

Small things can lead to big things. 

Let me be the apostle of small things. Allow me to insist that the tiny, relentlessly accumulated, sooner or later rules the great.

#

Once upon a time, we trusted our government more than we do now. We trusted our churches more than we do now. We trusted our news sources more than we do now. We trusted our police more than we do now.

I am old enough to remember when we trusted one another in general, even as we reserved the right to suspicion in special cases. Nowadays, however, we regard one another through slitted eyes.

This change did not happen overnight. I have watched the seepage of Trust from our society, bit by bit, most of my adult life. There is no precise measure of that outflow, but there can be no doubt that it happened. 

This will not be not news to you. You know it, too.

#

A  young friend of mine, involved in our community’s nightly street disturbances in 2020, posted this justification on Facebook: 

i think something people dont understand is that these protests and riots aren’t dangerous. spray painting city property is not dangerous. marching in the streets is not dangerous. 

it gets dangerous when police start a fight

arguably, rolling dumpsters to the courthouse and setting them on fire really isn’t that dangerous. it was very controlled. we aren’t idiots.

Okay. 

Dumpster fire. Photo by Arny Mogensen on Unsplash.

Forget windows broken, stores looted, buildings torched. Forget the potential for people to be maimed or killed. Those, after all, are large issues, and I am the apostle of the small.

My young friend is right to focus on the trivial, as in “spray painting city property is not dangerous.” But let us examine that claim.

Wouldn’t it depend on who or what you might think is endangered? True, painting slogans or graffiti on a public building does not directly threaten anybody’s life or limb. 

But something more important is endangered: Trust.

When we take somebody else’s stuff and spray paint our own message on it, we have taken what is not ours to take. In so doing we have dissolved a smidgen of the mutual trust that society absolutely requires in order to function.

When did we stop knowing this?

Any time we encroach on someone’s property or person, we are tearing down the house we all live in.

That is the reason bullying is so roundly condemned. Not only for its physical effect on the immediate victim, but because of the harm done to all of us when it is tolerated—leaving us exposed to a more dangerous world we do not entirely trust.

#

“But, it was city property.”

Okay, but city property is ours only in the sense that it is also everybody else’s. We own it in common with all other citizens. How do we grant ourselves alone the special right to paint it with art of our own choosing?

In doing so, we cause more than the physical results of our vandalism. Our fellow citizens will now trust us less than they did. Or, since they may never know who it was that wielded the spray paint, they will now trust people in general less than they did.

It would be the same if we set a dumpster fire. We steal somebody’s dumpster and damage it with flame, smoke, and ash. We release smoke and probably a vile smell into our common air. 

We deem ourselves protectors of the environment, but look: We have just committed a gross act of pollution. The air is not ours to foul. It belongs to everybody. 

Have we forgotten such elemental concepts? Have our parents failed to teach them to us?

The direct effects of encroaching on other people’s rights are as nothing compared to the erosion of Trust that eventually affects us all. 

Vandalism, arson, and looting may destroy physical property. But far harder to repair is our broken Trust in the protectiveness, the essential safety, of our community.

#

“Thank you for your touching concern, but I can look out for my own reputation. The trust of my fellow citizens is not as important to me as you may think, Old Timer.” 

Have you been listening at all, Grasshopper? If you were destroying only your own reputation, I would not lose much sleep. 

But something greater is at stake: Namely, our future happiness, and that of our children and grandchilden.

Trust, or lack of Trust, does not exist in a vacuum.

When you break what is not yours, the markdown of Trust does not accrue to you alone. 

The generalized Trust that keeps society glued together is all one thing. That’s why, as you may notice, I use a capital T. Your little bit of that Trust is part of the common pool. 

When you piss away trust through your own actions, the total Trust in our society goes down. When your conduct validates trust placed in you, total Trust is increased. 

That—the sum of small increments of responsible or irresponsible conduct—makes the difference between a High-Trust Society and a Low-Trust Society. 

In a Low-Trust Society, everybody locks everything up. Properties are guarded by walls topped with barbed wire and broken glass. Cameras are everywhere. Stores and businesses have small windows, or none at all. Strangers are viewed with suspision. A large, aggressive police establishment is called forth, because nobody is to be trusted. 

A High-Trust Society has less need for such precautions. Store owners display fine merchandise in large picture windows. There is a plenitude of goods and a smaller propensity to steal them. What police there are may seem more like Andy and Barney in Mayberry. People are more relaxed, less guarded. 

Such societies do exist, or did. I remember. 

You and I would rather live in a High-Trust Society than the Low-Trust version.

#

“But you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

What if we must violate others’ persons and property in order to build a more perfect society? If even a little act like spray-painting a building or burning a dumpster destroys Trust, then what about police brutality? What about racial discrimination? Don’t they destroy Trust even more? May we not need to combat larger crimes with smaller ones?

Every act that encroaches on persons or property reduces the total of Trust in our society. This includes not just things done in the heat of demonstrations or riots. It also includes acts of larceny, coercion, intimidation, or brutality committed in everyday life. It includes offenses done by law enforcement officers who should know better. 

All such encroachments are bad. All of them make it harder for us to build a society of people who mostly trust one another. 

It is mistaken to think your graffiti or your dumpster fire is okay, or even laudable, because it is not a racial slur or a police shooting; or that your graffiti or dumpster fire may prevent future racial slurs and police shootings. 

Your act of vandalism in the streets is the same kind of thing as the police shooting of an unarmed black man, different only in scale. Both acts violate other people’s rights, degrade our sense of community, and lead to a Lower-Trust society

Two wrongs, in the whole history of good and evil, have never yet added up to a right.

Small offenses, while not as extreme as large ones, are much more numerous. Taken together, they may bleed off much more Trust from society at large.

#

Here Is What I Am Not Saying:  I am not saying we should simply trust one another more, regardless of our experience.

Here Is What I Am Saying: I am saying that we need more Trust in society, and that to get it we must act in ways that engender trust, not in ways that squander trust.

Here Is What I Am Not Saying:  I am not saying that you have no right to protest wrongdoing. 

Here Is What I Am Saying: I am saying that you can not protest a great wrongdoing by means of lesser wrongdoings. To do so squanders trust, thus adding to the problem, not subtracting from it.  Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King knew this, preached it, and practiced it.

Martin Luther King, Jr., 1964. Public Domain.
Studio photograph of Mahatma Gandhi by Elliott & Fry, London, 1931. Public Domain.

#

I have tried to show that small, seemingly inconsequential, acts of incivility and barbarism are actually dangerous contributors to the sweeping malaise of our society, which is largely a simple deficit of Trust.

This is, in brief, an appeal for us all to hold ourselves to a high standard of trustworthiness in all our acts.

Trust and fear exist together. You cannot separate them. 

They live on a continuum, with trust at one end, fear at the other.

Which do you prefer?

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

08.01.23
by

Book ’em, Dano.

Here’s a small story of the publishing world. It includes hope and anguish, heroism and tragedy. If you read to the end you may be touched, as I have been, by the goodness that surfaces from time to time in human affairs.

In December 2020, mystery writer G.P. Gottlieb sent word to book coach Christine DeSmet that Dan Willis of DX Varos Publishing, Inc., would be open to new submissions in January. Noting that historicals were among the genres Dan published, Christine passed the information on to me.

I sent a query, and Dan asked to read my shiny new manuscript, Freedom’s Purchase. Trembling with hope, I sent him the file. After only a few weeks, he replied:

Dan Willis

Hi Larry,
Thank you for the opportunity to consider to consider your manuscript for Freedom’s Purchase. 

I’m afraid I’m going to take a pass on this one. The plot as described in the query had not begun to develop in the first 50 pages, and I frankly lost interest in the story at that point. You might want to consider rearranging some of your chapters, assumed the escaped slave story did eventually materialize, and have it interspersed with the character/scene development that was all at the beginning. 

Best luck to you! 

Daniel Willis, Publisher D. X. Varos, Ltd. 

Sigh. Another rejection, par for the course. 

But this was the best kind of rejection—a personal note telling me what was wrong. Combining it with one received from another publishing house and triangulating: BAM! I achieved a sudden blinding insight.

I spent a year rebuilding my book from the ground up, gave it a new title—The Maelstrom—and asked Dan to read the new version. He agreed to read it and then agreed to publish it. 

So on August 23, 2022, I became the author of a published novel, now titled Price of Passage. This is the proudest accomplishment of my life, after my daughter and grandchildren.

Think of my world as a great room in which nervous writers shuffle about, bumping into one another, smoking endless cigarettes (real or metaphorical), while riffling the smudged and bruised pages of manuscripts that are getting old. The vast floor of that room, Dear Reader, is knee-deep in jagged shards, the remains of shattered dreams.

My book, Price of Passage, would be among those dead fragments of once-bright literature, had not Galit Gottlieb shared key information; had not Christine DeSmet passed that information along; and, especially, had not Dan Willis agreed to read my manuscript—twice!—finding, on the second read, some of the value I had struggled so long and hard to put there. 

That’s exactly how gritty and how personal the book publishing business is. 

Nearly a year has elapsed since my book was launched. Dan Willis has been my partner in the tough job of selling books. Neither of us is flush with money for advertising. Both of us have struggled, persistently. Dan has been in this struggle not only with me but with about thirty other authors DX Varos publishes.

Dan Willis died July 9.

R*I*P

Dano died of natural causes. He was a comparatively young man, I don’t know how old exactly, but he had not been healthy for some time.

His demise has thrown the future of DX Varos Publishing, Inc., and the future prospects of more than fifty books, by about thirty authors, into uncertainty. That’s because DX Varos has been virtually a one-man operation. 

Dan’s friend Karen Morrisey, secretary and co-owner of the publishing house, is trying to sort things out. It will be a while before we know what the future holds.

What we all do know—we authors have been commiserating via Facebook and Zoom—what we all know is that we have lost a great friend and champion. 

Dano was a man of many parts. He was an accomplished genealogist with a deep and abiding interest in the royal families of Europe. He was an author, who published several works of fantasy or speculative fiction plus authoritative nonfiction works on the Romanovs, the Hapsburgs, the Windsors, and other royal lineages.

And, oh yes, he was a publisher for aspiring authors like me. In the halls of Random Penguin Publications, he would pass unnoticed. Hidden behind a water cooler. Swamped under piles of digital press releases. Perhaps relegated to the AI department. Who knows?

But at little DX Varos, in Denver, Colorado, Dano was a giant. 

Dan didn’t make money as a publisher. He always had to supplement his income with a day job.  But he discovered authors, gave them a chance to shine, and brought out a lot of worthwhile books that otherwise would have been just the fragments of shattered dreams.

Dano hawking his wares at a book fair.

His contract was simple, clean, and unambiguous. He responded promptly to emails and was, according to all his authors, a delight to work with. Amid financial and business pressures that must have been gigantic, Dano always found time to pay attention to our questions and concerns. And he was an important part of the volunteer machinery of the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. 

We are finding out that Dan, fearing his life might be cut short, had taken special care to set up his files and busines operations in an orderly way so that Karen, his executor and successor at the helm of the publishing company, will have a fighting chance to keep it going, sell it advantageously, or wind up its affairs in a sound way.

We mourn the loss of a wise and patient man who helped us all navigate the problematic world of book publishing. 

The Big Five publishers—the ones we all wish would look at our books—have their own way of doing things. A profit-oriented way.

I kind of like Dano’s publishing model.

He will be missed.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

02.10.23
by

Boatman on the Tamsui

Dear Reader: This is a Friday Reprise of material originally posted on 28 May 2019. Enjoy!

Taipei, 1968

The boatman bends to his oars. He guides his sampan with the ease of a sage, gliding by a large gate, toward a three-masted junk that looms beyond. Shadows and ripples tether him to water, yet he hangs suspended, the center point on which the misty harbor turns. 

“Look at this, Ralph.” 

My drinking-, carousing-, philosophizing-buddy peers through the shop window at the row of canvases. “I can’t believe the same guy painted all of these.”

“Me neither.” Six oils in sepia monochrome. Five show stark village streets, all sharp angles, hard lines, crisscossed phone wires; the sixth reveals a dreamscape that evokes the timeless China of peasants and poets. All six have the same name at the bottom.

“Good afternoon, you like these paintings?” A man stands at my elbow. A smiling man, a chubby Chinese with a servile aura. (Hen heqi,“very affable,” his mother might say.) He wears dress slacks and a gray short-sleeve shirt, stands before the storefront, shares our perspective on the art.

“Not bad,” I say.

“These are my paintings.” He smiles full wide. “I am Peco Yeh.” He shakes hands, gives us each a small card. On one side, Chinese characters; on the other, in English,  “Peco Yeh, Traditional Chinese Artist.”

Sidewalk commerce, typical for Chungshan North Road. I downplay the boatman in his watery realm, feign attraction to the sterile village scenes. But Peco Yeh homes in on my real interest. “This, Tamsui River,” he says.

Chungshan North Road, 1960s. Courtesy Taipei Air Station Blogspot.

“Local scenery, huh?” 

He waxes lyrical on Taiwan’s mountains and rivers. Besides his fawning attitude, typical for Chinese pitchmen, there is something else. One can’t mistake Peco’s effeminate manner. It suggests he is queer—a surprise, in broad daylight, here in Chiang Kai-shek’s Methodist/Confucian state. However—to each his own. He’s trying to sell his paintings, that’s all.

Ralph bad-mouths the artwork. I walk away twice; both times Peco Yeh shepherds me back to the storefront for “one more little look.” Eventually I make the watery scene my own for three dollars American, twenty-two less than his original price. The artist smiles, gives us a good-bye wave, bends his head, palms together, in the timeless Asian gesture.

A fictionalized account of true events.

#

Larceny at Twice the Price

My only defense: It was a different time and place. The event narrated above is fictional only to the extent that I have invented bits of dialog I can’t recall, word for word, from fifty years ago.

Ralph and I were U.S. airmen stationed on Taiwan to monitor radiocommunications of the Chinese Communist Air Force, who flew operations just across the hundred-mile-wide Taiwan Strait. We had been taught Mandarin Chinese for eavesdropping purposes; it also came in handy when we mingled with the people of Taipei. 

Young men on our own in a place where most prices are negotiable, we took haggling to extremes. We prided ourselves on the discount we could wring from anyone selling anything. The sum of three dollars in those days was equivalent to about twenty-two of today’s dollars. One U.S. dollar bought forty NT (New Taiwan dollars), the local currency. You could get a nice restaurant dinner for half that or less. So Peco Yeh got more purchasing power from me than may be apparent. Still—when you consider that Peco’s asking price of twenty-five U.S. dollars would be less than two hundred today—I feel chagrin at having driven such a hard bargain, in the service of youthful pride. 

The value derived from this picture is far beyond the three dollars paid. That price, by the way, included the wood frame that the canvas still wears today. I took the whole thing to the U.S. Navy’s Headquarters Support Activity just up Chungshan Road. They crated and shipped it to my mother and father in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for fifteen dollars—five times what I had paid for the painting, but a worthwhile expense. 

The canvas graced my parents’ living room wall for decades. It came back to me when they died. Now it hangs in our house, where I pass it every day, oblivious to the quiet beauty it radiates. When I do stop to notice, I can’t believe my good fortune in having encountered Peco Yeh fifty years ago in Taipei. 

In Search of Peco Yeh

Who was Peco Yeh? It seemed he spent a lot of time on the street, promoting his art to any American who happened to walk by. His effete manner made him the butt of ridicule. “That guy’s as queer as a three-dollar bill,” one of my fellow airmen said. In 1968 “queerness” was not accepted. Homosexuality, although common and known of (even in the military), stayed under cover.

A Google search on “Peco Yeh” yields thumbnail photos of a few pictures attributed to him on various online auction sites, at modest prices. The paintings shown do not much resemble my boatman in style or substance, any more than did the stark village scenes with which it appeared in the store window. Peco, I think, dabbled in many styles.

Some sites give an unattributed, apocryphal biography of the artist:

“Peco Yeh is/was a Chinese man living in Taipei Taiwan during the 1970s. He came from Chengdu, China with the nationalists in 1947 with his mother. His mother was the mistress of the last court artist of the Qing Dynasty. When Empress Dowager Cixi was poisoned, the court artist went to Chengdu and took the mistress.”

A romantic tale. It seems farfetched. Could it be true? Yes. Stranger things have happened. 

China was in turmoil in the late 1940s. Communists under Mao Tse-tung defeated Kuomintang (Nationalist) forces under Chiang Kai-shek. In 1949, the Nationalists fled the mainland, occupied Taiwan, became its government. Wikipedia says, “The Kuomintang (KMT, Chinese Nationalist Party), its officers and approximately 2 million troops took part in the retreat; in addition to many civilians and refugees, fleeing from the advances of the Communist People’s Liberation Army.” Most civilian escapees came from Sichuan or other southern provinces.

The thumbnail bio puts Peco Yeh on Taiwan two years before the main exodus. That’s possible; or it could be a misprint. He is said to hail from Chengdu, which happens to be the capital of Sichuan. Many civilians who fled with the Nationalist Army were members of, or related to members of, the upper crust. The mistress and child of a former imperial court artist could have been among them. So this narrative, though extravagant, may be true. Hard to tell.

I pray that Peco Yeh lived out a long life to its proper natural conclusion. And may God forgive me for appropriating his fine artwork at such a mean price. 

Mountains and Water

Whatever the merits of his other works, the one that hangs on my wall seems to me a fine example of a modern impressionistic work that embodies important elements from classical Chinese art: Careful composition, calligraphic brushwork, and the suggestive use of negative space—areas of the canvas that seem occupied by nothing at all yet contain the universe in that nothingness. The effect is of beauty, tranquillity, eternity. The masters of the Southern Song would recognize an affinity with their landscapes.

Chinese people use the term shan-shui(山水), “mountains and water,” to mean both natural scenery and the landscape painting that depicts it. They also have an old maxim, “The wise delight in the mountains; the good delight in the waters.” 

I can only hope the delight I now take in Peco Yeh’s Taiwan waterscape, purchased in 1968, suggests some upward evolution of my soul in the intervening fifty years.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

BUY NOW

(History is not what you thought!)

12.19.22
by

The Green Diamond

“And Joseph . . . went up from Galilee . . . unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem—because he was of the house and lineage of David—to be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.”

They journeyed back to where his people had lived. Were they glad for the trip, or were they troubled? Did they feel like outcasts on a weary road or homeward-bound children expecting a warm welcome?

#

We drove by night, from Streator, Illinois, on December 24, 1952. Or maybe it was 1953. In either case, my little sister, Cynda Jo, was only a tyke, rolling around in the back seat with me. 

It was dark by six p.m. Mom may have packed sandwiches to be eaten in the comfort of our 1939 Chevy. It was a black sedan, the kind you see in old movies, where gangsters lean out the windows with tommy guns and spray lead back at the cops chasing them in the same kind of car. 

We were bound for Knoxville, a small town where both Mom’s and Dad’s parents lived. A two-hour drive, it seemed forever to a boy of seven or eight. 

“Are we there yet?” 

“Not yet, honey. You just asked five minutes ago.”

We cruised past ground streaked with snow. Or maybe it was bare dirt, stripped fields where corn had grown last summer. Flat lands, with farmhouses set back a quarter-mile from the road. The night was cold, but was it white? I really don’t remember. 

It was dark for sure. We rumbled down state roads—Illinois 18 to 29 to 17 to 90 to 78 to U.S. Highway 150. I didn’t know the highway numbers then, only the names of the little towns we passed through: Wenona, Lacon, Edelstein, Princeville. 

There was a mountain in Wenona, a hundred-foot-tall cone of tailings from an old coal mine. You couldn’t see it in the dark, but townsfolk had put a lighted star on top, so you knew that was where the mountain was. Pretty much the only mountain in Illinois.

The roads were paved highways, one lane each direction. No multi-lanes, no grassy medians. Superhighways did not exist. If they did, I had never seen one.

Somewhere near Edelstein the state highway department had knocked off work for Christmas. To keep folks from driving into the unfilled hole, they had left a barricade lit by guttering flames from two black kerosene pot flares—small candles challenging the blackness of night. 

The light great we looked for was a green neon quadrangle on the roof of the Green Diamond, a small tavern on Highway 150. When you saw that green neon diamond, you were just outside Knoxville. The town itself was dry, so the Green Diamond was a roadhouse, out on the highway. 

We drove through Knoxville to the public square and parked in front of my grandparents’ house. 

All the aunts, uncles, and cousins had gathered inside. Uncle Earl and Uncle Dick sat on the floor amid strings of tree lights, which were wired in series in those days. If the string did not light, all you could do was replace each light in sequence with a fresh bulb until you found the culprit. Then, voilà!, there was light.

Out on the highway, huddled in the car, only an occasional light flickering from a farmyard across the fields, we had been lonely pilgrims, outside the pale of human care. 

Now we were home.

#

“And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

The Adoration of the Magi by Leonaert Bramer (Dutch, 1596-1674). Public Domain.

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

“And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

“For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” 

#

I don’t know how Mary and Joseph felt when at last they stumbled into Bethlehem, after a long, tiring journey. 

But every year at this time, pondering their momentous journey, I feel I have suddenly come out of darkness into a great light.

May you experience peace, and may your holidays be warmly illuminated.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer