Good morning…
“I saw this clip and it really resonated with me so I thought I’d share,” wrote a friend from Florida yesterday. “Through grief I have found the deepest blessing and comfort in the love and laughter shared with friends. I think this is so true and a perspective to seek and focus on in trials, surrounding yourself with protective love and laughter. Xo”
The video clip, to which she was referring, was widely circulated three years ago. Here is what one daily blogger had to say about it.
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Words in the Mourning by GC Myers on February 4, 2022
One of my favorite parts of writing this blog is the stream of consciousness part of it where I encounter something new. That part where I begin to research and one thing leads to another and another, wild tangent to wild tangent. The result is that I end up learning of someone of whom I was previously unaware or some new concept or fact.
It often starts innocently. For example, this morning I stumbled across a short video from last night’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert where the singer Dua Lipa turned the tables and asked Colbert about whether his comedy and his faith ever intersected. His answer was thoughtful and complete. I urge you to watch the clip at the bottom.
But in it, he invoked lines from the late poet Robert Hayden, from his 1970 book of poetry titled Words in the Mourning Time, that were very powerful and to the moment:
We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.
Words powerful enough that I immediately began looking up Hayden. I was a little embarrassed and ashamed that I didn’t know the name. His credits and the poems that I read were staggeringly impressive.
Hayden was an African-American born in Detroit in 1913 and died in 1980. He was the first African-American to hold the post Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, which is now known as Poet Laureate.
Inspired by the poetry of W.H. Auden and Stephen Vincent Benet, Hayden’s work often outlined the experience of the African-American throughout our history. But even so, Hayden rejected the idea of being called a black poet, referring to simply be recognized as a poet. This small distinction put him somewhat out of favor during the 1960’s with the black community though in essence his desire to be recognized without reference to his race represented one of the desired goals of the civil rights movement.
In fact, the whole of the verse from which Colbert quoted made just that point:
We must not be frightened nor cajoled
into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
We must go on struggling to be human,
though monsters of abstraction
police and threaten us.
Reclaim now, now renew the vision of
a human world where godliness
is possible and man
is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike
but man
permitted to be man.
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Pure gold put in the fire comes out of it proved pure; genuine faith put through this suffering comes out proved genuine. When Jesus wraps this all up, it’s your faith, not your gold, that God will have on display as evidence of his victory. You never saw him, yet you love him. You still don’t see him, yet you trust him—with laughter and singing. Because you kept on believing, you’ll get what you’re looking forward to: total salvation (1 Peter 1:7-9, MSG).
Please give yourself the gift of watching the interesting Colbert clip as you wrestle with your own mourning this morning.
…Sue…
