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This week marked the third anniversary of the mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018. I was asked to do the Chalice Lighting at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenrythe next day. The topic for the morning was sanctuary. I threw away what I had carefully prepared. I was planning on reading this new poem instead which was totally inadequate to the situation but due to a scheduling mix up, I didn’t read it that day. Instead, I read it for the first time a year later at the Tree of Life Coffee Houseat the church. The poem also referenced other ugly, hateful episodes the same week.
Sanctuary in a Very Bad Week
Headlines:
Trump Attempts to Erase Transgender Identity
Two Blacks Killed at Walmart by Angry Racist
14 Bombs Sent to Targets Denounced by Trump
11 Dead at Tree of Life Synagogue Mass Murder
Sacred shelter—A haven offered or sought,
a holy obligation and a desperate resort.
The Church once offered it to those fleeing
the wrath of a king or war lord.
Today we are called to offer it to
immigrants and refugees,
the homeless and unwanted,
the despised of color, gender, faith,
abused women and families,
all the wretched.
Know this—Sanctuary can fail.
Ask Thomas Becket, Ann Frank,
the four little Girls of Birmingham,
the frozen bum,
the murdered wife,
the deported asylum seeker,
the immigrant children in cages,
the dead Jews of Tree of Life.
But failure does not cancel hope or duty.
time to step up,
to take our chances,
to become a People of Sanctuary.
—Patrick Murfin
A miracle is a universal blessing from God through me to all my brothers. It is the privilege of the forgiven to forgive. T-1.1.27:1-2
God doesn’t really forgive us because God doesn’t even know what we have created for ourselves in this world of the ego. God loves us unconditionally, always has, does now, and always will. Life is, after all, the gift we all have been given to learn what we need to learn to be consciously aware of our Source. When we decide to no longer make other people and circumstances responsible for our unhappiness, we are blessed to become aware of Love which is our natural inheritance. With this awareness, we are able to bless others.
In Alcoholic Anonymous, it is suggested, in step twelve, that we share this spiritual awakening with others and practice this blessing in all our affairs.
In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to accept one another and encourage spiritual growth in our congregations and around the world.
Today, we recognize and acknowledge the universal blessing of God’s love for us and we share this blessing with everyone whom we interact with as we go about our daily affairs.
A few years ago, I noticed that Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath shared a birthday, October 27—1914 in Wales for him, 1932 in Boston for her. They had little in common except that they wrote poetry—although poetry very different in form, theme, style, and substance—and died young each in a kind of pitiful squalor. Each had crossed the ocean and died in the other’s country, a nice cosmic balance.
That year—2012—their common birthday also coincided with a new moon and where I was, at least, a howling storm of darkness.
Sylvia Plath in a similar venue battling her invisible demons.
You know me. I am a sucker for cosmic coincidence. So, I scribbled a poem for the occasion.
Writing poetry about poets, both infinitely more gifted than I, is an act of terminal hubris for which I shall be justly punished. But here it is anyway.
How Black the Night
October 26, 2011—New Moon, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath
Even the New Moon hides behind the howling clouds.
Happy Birthday Dylan—
Why did you not
rage, rage against the dying of the light
in that pool of your own black vomit
at the Chelsea?
Happy Birthday Sylvia—
The same year, you dewy goddess,
you emptied the medicine vials
and crawled under your mother’s porch.
Not ships passing in the night,
but traversing the same black ocean
away from home
to something else.
Did you find what you were looking for
in worship and whiskey,
in broken love and madness?
As Dylan moldered under Laugharne,
Lady Lazarus, you wrote.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
But laying your head in an oven
is no art
and posthumous poems
no resurrection.
How black the night, dead poets,
how black the night?
—Patrick Murfin