Longfellow, Herr, & Hope
by Erin Doom
Feast of Sts Carpos & Alphaeus, Apostles of the 70
Anno Domini 2020, May 26
1. Essays et al: “Gene Herr: A Deep Well of Life-Giving Hope”
Gene Herr is one of my heroes. I met him while working at Eighth Day Books, back in the late 90s. We immediately hit it off. But when I shared with him my vision for a Catechetical Academy, he really got excited. He had done something similar many years before. And so his excitement carried over to helping found EDI. In addition to generous financial support, he was extremely generous with his time, serving as an original board member and regularly feeding me with encouraging words, articles, quotes, and even books. He was a remarkable man.
His daughter Ellen has also been important for EDI, helping found and lead the Sisters of Sophia. Back in 2017, almost six years after Gene died, Ellen wrote a moving reflection on her dad Gene. Here’s the opening paragraphs:
On January 1, 2012 at 6 PM, hope took in a quick breath, released everything it had left for this world, and lay ashen and still on a small bed in a nondescript room. I was sitting solitary by my father’s bedside, willing him to be released. Never did I think this task would be mine, as the youngest child and only daughter in the family. It was a beautiful and terrible assignment. At that time, I knew only that our 14-month family battle with brain cancer was over. I needed to wake my mother to tell her that her best friend and loving partner was gone. I had to call my brothers who had just returned to their homes from visits to say a painful goodbye to our father.
In the days that followed there were two services, one Mennonite and one Catholic (my father was both Mennonite and Catholic). Many people shared stories of how my dad had given them encouragement, believed in them, shared books and more books. There were many stories of touched lives. One pastor, whom my father had mentored, lingered long after the first service (the Mennonite vigil). I remember recognizing that he didn’t seem to want to leave, which would mean letting go, acknowledging the finality of this loss. We shared a brief conversation, both of us confirming what a source of light and hope my father had been. There was some comfort knowing that I wasn’t the only one feeling as if I’d lost access to a deep well of life-giving hope.
2. Books & Culture: “A Memorial Day Poem by Longfellow, From the Atlantic, June 1882”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped found The Atlantic in 1857. And he contributed more poems to the magazine than anyone else…ever. In the June issue of 1882, he published “Decoration Day” for the recently established Memorial Day in commemoration of the Civil War’s fallen soldiers.
3. Bible & Fathers: “Believing, Hoping, Loving: Three Movements of the Soul”
Acts 17:19-28; Jn 12:19-36. Online here.
Here’s a snippet from a homily by St Augustine on the three theological virtues:
He who believes, hopes, and loves, must not, on that account, be assured of salvation. For what he believes, what he hopes, and what he loves make a difference. No one lives in any type of life without those three movements of the soul, that is, of believing, hoping, loving. If you do not believe what the pagans believe, if you do not hope for what they hope for, if you do not love what they love, then you are gathered from among the pagans; you are removed from them; that is, you are separated from the nations. Let not mere physical association alarm you when you are separated in mind.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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