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.
Share this Post on Your Preferred Platform
Inside the head of my three-month-old granddaughter, Lucy, said G.K. Chesterton is, "a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation...a new system of stars, new grass, new cities...and new seas." And this is because, he adds: The gravity of astonishment at the universe...dwells in the eyes of a baby three-months-old [and] the universe is put upon its trial and forces us actually to remodel our conduct...we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope...[with] delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body. But Chesterton's central thesis in this essay is not that babies are so marvelous, but that our treatment of each other as adults, in contrast, is so broken. "It is our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong," he writes, because we no longer see each other with astonishment and wonder (unless, that is, we are falling in love). But babies remind us that humans really are astonishing, and this "revolutionary theory of the marvelousness of all things" should force us to "remodel our conduct" toward everyone we meet. A baby seems to be a necessary icon for us, correcting our eyesight which grows old and struggles to see "the weight of glory" in each other as teenagers, adults, and perhaps especially, as old people. Even though he did not reference icons in his essay, we seem to drift very easily into what could be called a type of iconoclasm, an inability to see each other as image bearers of God Himself. William Wordsworth describes us as "trailing clouds of glory" when we first arrive here "from God, who is our home." But soon, he says, "shades of the prison-house" begin to smother us, and we forget. "We bow to grown people," says Chesterton in this same essay, "take off our hats to them, refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate them properly." God speaks to us, like we are working through in St. John of Damascus , through the "cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology," or literally from the spoken word (cataphatic) or unspeakable word (apophatic). Apophatic I noticed has the same root in Greek as Infant does in Latin. Both mean "unspoken." God has given us both bibles and babies, speechless wonders through which He means to unglaze our eyes and fill us with astonishment. MARK C. WATNEY is professor emeritus at Sterling College, assisting in its newly established C. S. Lewis Center. He has given papers at Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies and Dordt College
"God became man, so that man might become God." St. Athanasius the Great, On the Incarnation (54:3) These words from St. Athanasius may sound, at first blush, provocative. However, St. Athanasius is restating, perhaps more simply, what St. Peter says in his second epistle: the promise of being united to Christ is that men and women made in His image will partake in His divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). Paul Kingsnorth's latest book, Against the Machine, inverts this idea and opens our eyes to the world emerging at a rapid rate, the world dominated by what he calls The Machine. The new mantra of The Machine age is, instead, this: Man will become God by Man's own self-creation. Reading Kingsnorth is not for the faint of heart. It's easy to be overcome by despair. The goal of the Machine age is "transhumanism", to be liberated from the constraints of the body. For the transhumanist (self-described), the future is disembodied. The future is limitless. But this is not liberation. Because the Machine is not limited to the physical world, it follows naturally there is a spiritual nature to this lifestyle, what he ultimately identifies as a manisfestation and/or manipulation of the demonic. Whether or not you agree with his ultimate conclusion, we can see its effects. An entire generation, and many across generations, addicted to screens. Disintegration of communal life, most disastrously in the breakdown of the family. Increasing rates of loneliness, depression, and suicide, especially among children. It's clear we need a Savior, and the Machine isn't it. Instead, Kingsnorth encourages us toward a revival of community, men, women, and children living embodied lives in the same space and time: working together, eating together, worshipping together, loving each other, carrying each other's burdens. If this sounds like Eighth Day Institute...if this sounds like what the Church is meant to be, it is because this is exactly what the Church is. We are saved together in Christ. MICHAEL SIMMON currently serves as the Secretary of Eighth Day Institute Board of Directors and Coordinator for Hall of Men. He resides in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and four children.
"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.
Late-Night Bookstores and Spiritual Reading
On St. Benedict and the Making of Vows
The Pursuit of Truth in the Age of AI
On the Theology of Raising Chickens
G.K. Chesterton and Raising Small Children
"Seal of the Fathers"
