dedicated today for all who work to ease suffering and grief
image and poem below the fold
Ned Lamont, right, who is challenging incumbent Democratic U.S. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman for the Democratic senatorial nomination in Connecticut, and Michael Schiavo, left, the husband of the late Terry Schiavo, smile at the start of a news conference in Hartford, Conn., Friday, July 28, 2006. Schiavo spoke on Lamont’s behalf at the news conference.
(AP Photo/Bob Child)
A Psalm of Life
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
“Life is but an empty dream!”
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
“Dust thou art, to dust returnest,”
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act to each to-morrow
Finds us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,–act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing
Learn to labor and to wait.
– – –
a personal note: In response to a timely reminder about the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki yesterday from Peace Voter, I mentioned that I’ve only really ever applied the term “hero” to one person – the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton. He earned that distinction with his pioneering study of the survivors of Hiroshima described in his book, “Death in Life.”
I first heard Lifton speak in 1980, at a symposium on nuclear weapons and nuclear war organized by Physicians for Social Responsibility, and still listen to the cassette tape that I made of his talk on my small recorder.
Lifton’s most important contribution can be summarized in a simple phrase – “we must work to find meaning in our grief and suffering.” That’s a heroic task.
I’m generally reluctant to call anyone a “hero,” mostly because I think the term is overused, and is meaningless. I also think the term creates false walls among us, that’s it’s antithetical to the notion of equality and personal power.
So, I offer this picture of two people – who we know here in our community, and who many of us have met, talked, and worked with – in a, for me, badly needed spirit of hope. They’re both very much in our minds today, not so much because they’re the heroes, but because we all are.
