Write for God

William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939

Sometimes I find books and sometimes books find me. I was browsing used magazines at our public library when a new book on sale for a dollar came to me. The slim hardcover’s title, Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats, promised more joy that anything else a dollar could buy. (Of course, I snapped it up. The great Irish poet of the 20th century is always welcome on my bookshelves.)

Here’s one I read as soon as I paid the clerk:

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

“Restriction on free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”
– William O. Douglas

Editorial cartoon by Ollie Harrington

We were watching a documentary about Pete Seeger when the image and amazing voice of Paul Robeson filled the screen. Robeson–a prodigious talent who excelled in fields as varied as the football field, concert hall, movie screen and university classroom–was hounded for his political positions for decades. He was labeled a Communist, a traitor and an enemy, but he wasn’t the only African-American talent who was so victimized by racism that he had to seek refuge among Communists in the Soviet Union.

Poet Claude McKay and cartoonist Ollie Harrington also found exile from a hostile America behind the Iron Curtain. Harrington was a very gifted cartoonist who illustrated children’s books, created an African-American Everyman named Bootsie and crafted fine editorial cartoons like the one above that wonders why we’re neglecting hungry children for the sake of making weapons. That cartoon is as timely today as it was in the 1960s.

Robeson, McKay and Harrington were too smart, too proud, too talented and not subservient enough to make it in a Land of the Free that expected black men to be Stepin Fetchits.

McKay eventually returned to the United States. An agnostic, he converted to Catholicism during his last years. Here’s his “White Houses”:

Your door is shut against my tightened face,
And I am sharp as steel with discontent;
But I possess the courage and the grace
To bear my anger proudly and unbent.
The pavement slabs burn loose beneath my feet,
A chafing savage, down the decent street;
And passion rends my vitals as I pass,
Where boldly shines your shuttered door of glass.
Oh, I must search for wisdom every hour,
Deep in my wrathful bosom sore and raw,
And find in it the superhuman power
To hold me to the letter of your law!
Oh, I must keep my heart inviolate
Against the potent poison of your hate.

According to Brides.com, this Vera Wang gown sells for $9,500.

Cable channel TLC has a reality show titled “Say Yes to the Dress.” I happened to catch an episode today and was shocked at the prices the bridal boutique charged for the wedding dresses the participants were buying. Many of them cost more than I paid for our used car a few months ago. According to a Web site that monitors the average prices of weddings in each community, the average bride in my little Florida town pays from $700 to $1,167 for her dress alone.

It was difficult for me to watch how the brides-to-be were joking about selling kidneys to pay for their designer gowns. The hardest part was understanding how angst over a dress that sells for $6,500 correlates to the process of getting married.

Marriage is sacred, whether it’s celebrated in church or in the courthouse. You find the person you want to spend your life with and you make a commitment in front of your friends and family to that relationship. It’s not about spending everything on your dream dress. In fact, many of the dresses the brides-to-be chose didn’t look modest enough to wear in a house of worship.

What the bond between a husband and wife has to do with wearing a strapless gown that costs thousands of dollars is hard to fathom. In the old days, women married in simple dresses and marriages lasted longer than they do now. When everything rides on the dress and the perfect reception, it’s hard to overlook the days, months and years of marriage that follow.

Our 25th wedding anniversary is coming up this year and it didn’t matter that my cocktail-length dress came off the rack at a department store. I felt beautiful marrying Kevin because I loved him; our relationship is stronger and deeper now than when we married almost a quarter of a century ago.

If the cost of the gowns and the agita over paying for them were substituted for a sound commitment to the marriage, there would be fewer broken marriages and more intact families. It’s marriage itself that is beautiful, not what the bride wears.

The animated film "WALL-E" depicts a bleak future for humans.

During my 9-to-5 life, I do communications for a research institute. This week, I had to prepare a presentation for some of our board members as a way of introducing my ideas for a new campaign.

I opened PowerPoint and did a snazzy 18-slide show with my ideas. Some of the slides were about our new Facebook, YouTube and Twitter marketing. The oldest board member uses all three, which was an indication of just how widespread these tools are.

Think about it:  Every detail of our lives can be posted on Facebook, our goofy moments end up on YouTube and Twitter lets everyone who follows us know when we’ve finished our morning coffee. The millions of YouTube  hits for Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent in a matter of days is a sign that technology is making us a very small global village. Ironically, we can all look at the same video globally and yet never talk to our next-door neighbors.

I have to admit that I use YouTube as my personal jukebox. When I’m in the mood to hear Charles Aznavour, I can log in and call up his stunning performance of “She” in Carnegie Hall. It always puts me in a better mood.

Another clip in my favorites is from Will Ferrell’s Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. The dimwit news reader accidentally pelts a biker with a burrito and the biker punts the anchorman’s pooch over an expressway as payback. (Trust me, it’s very funny and very harmless. The biker is Jack Black and Baxter, the dog he kicks, is obviously a stuffed animal as he’s plummeting from the overpass.) When I need a little jolt of laughter, I can watch Baxter sail over the guardrail.

Sometimes you need a shot of Aznavour and sometimes you need Baxter sailing over the expressway to make your day.

Technology is a fine thing and I love nothing more than to learn to use a new gadget or a new medium. I am concerned about the very young or the very lonely who use these tools as substitutes for human interaction. We are becoming a nation of tuned-in people who have tuned out of empathetic, one-on-one relationships.

My twins are of the opinion that text messaging is more personal than phone calls. After all, they are the first generation that has made this mode of communication theirs. Those of us who are older can’t understand how they can prefer terse, misspelled words from phone to phone over hearing someone’s voice on the other end. (Our great-grandparents probably thought the same about the advent of the telephone versus just visiting someone.)

On Facebook, you can poke a friend by sending a quick message.  I found out that my oldest daughter had cut her foot and gotten six stitches when I saw it on Facebook. She was going to call me after posting her news, but I saw the post first.

Twitter keeps those who follow you up on any detail you choose to share–in 140 characters or less. Most of the messages I receive run along the “having a vanilla shake right now” trajectory. There are only a few people I follow from my phone; I read everyone else’s updates on the Web. I would Twitter my day away on insignificant matters if I allowed every tweet to make its way to my phone.

How much time do we spend on technology and how much time do we spend reaching out to others with our undivided attention, a hug or a handshake? Humans are social animals and, without socialization, we become feral beings.

In the animated film WALL-E, our planet has been stripped of life and humans live in space stations where all of their needs are taken care of. They’re obese and overly dependent on technology and entertainment. You can watch WALL-E with your children and be entertained (the little robot is darned cute) or you can ask yourself how much of its techno-barrenness is at work in our lives now.

I’m just as guilty as everyone else when it comes to relying on technology. I send e-cards and emails more often that I visit those I love. Our lives are busy, I know. Still, we should make time for a little glimmer of human contact to induce us to take a break from beeping, buzzing things in the virtual world. An unexpected benefit of attending Mass is that everyone is asked to turn off electronic devices and concentrate on paying homage to God for an hour on Sunday.

Instead of a tweet or a poke or a text, reach out to someone you love in real time, face to face. Tell that someone that he or she matters to you–and mean it. It will mean more than an e-card, I promise.

Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem

We live in Pinellas, the most densely populated county in Florida. About 940,000 people are crammed into 280 square miles. Travel in any direction means congestion and careless drivers who speed and run red lights.

Yesterday evening, it took us about an hour to travel about 12 miles to an interfaith assembly and to enter the church that was hosting it, but the trip was worth our time and effort. We took part in FAST (Faith and Action for Strength Together), a community coalition of churches and synagogues that press elected officials to support social justice initiatives. 

Our Catholic church was one of 35 congregations taking part with those of other Judeo-Christian houses of worship. Our bishop offered the closing prayer, a rabbi conducted a Holocaust-remembrance prayer and a gospel choir from a large African-American church warmed up the crowd before the event. It was a blessing to see so many people of faith in one room as part of what FAST termed a Nehemiah Assembly after the Biblical figure who restored the walls of Jerusalem and assembled the people in the Old Testament.

FAST’s leaders select a few issues each year to present to legislators for their funding and attention. This year, discipline in schools, affordable housing and issues related to crime were on the agenda. We sat with fellow parishioners to support FAST, which brings faith-based strength to its advocacy on behalf of those who are at society’s bottom rungs.

The county’s sheriff, elected officials and a representative from the school board were asked publicly to support several FAST proposals and they could only answer “yes” or “no” to each question. They could spin and explain in brief segments only. Most of the invited officials agreed to support FAST but, as a longtime resident of Pinellas who used to work in county government, it was those who didn’t attend who concerned me.

A county commissioner who supports social justice efforts still has six other commissioners who can overrule him. The same for a mayor with a city council that doesn’t agree with his or her stance. Meanwhile, affordable housing is a crisis in our overcrowded county and certain neighborhoods see eight-year-olds gunned down while they sleep because of drug thugs who rule the streets.

As the elected officials could see by scanning the pews at the church where the event was held, people of faith come in all colors and religious denominations and, yes, we vote. As one body and with God before us, we came together to speak out for social justice in our community.  May we see our efforts bear fruit in a more just community for all.

A delicacy from the Mexican restaurant that used to be our old apartment in Queens, NY

In the dark comedy Grosse Point Blank, a hit man who wants to get out of the business tries to visit his boyhood home. When he finds the address, he sees that his house is gone and, in its place, there’s a 24-hour convenience store. He remembers that his old bedroom was where the microwave ovens and frozen burritos are at the store. As Martin Blank, the hit man, John Cusack says, “You can’t go home again, but you can shop there.”

I had a similar experience taking a virtual Google Maps tour of my old neighborhood in Queens, New York. I found the Italian drugstore, and the site of the former German deli and Chinese laundry. My school and church, St. Bartholomew, are still there and look just the same, thank God. In fact, the church looks even more beautiful than I remembered.

It was only when I found the four-story building where we lived that I had a Grosse Point Blank moment. The first floor of our apartment building, where my family and my aunt’s family lived, is now a Mexican grocery store and taco stand. The awning has our address and the front window of the grocery store is my aunt’s former bedroom window that faced the street. (My sister surmised that our aunt’s spirit is still in her old apartment and is probably badgering the Mexican restaurant’s staff about brewing coffee the right way.)

The building’s facade from the second to the fourth floor looks exactly the same, so I had a case of deja vu at the same time that I had a Martin Blank moment. I suppose the frozen burritos at that grocery store are now where my old bedroom used to be.

If I ever get to go back home to Queens, I may stop in and shop there.

The Elmhurst branch of the Queens Library, New York

Books have always meant a lot to me. They’ve been companions, teachers and entertainers. My grandfather’s stash of books was the first place I remember being wowed by print and pictures before I could read. I couldn’t help but beg to be taught to read when I was four.

There is no Frigate like a book/To take us Lands away, wrote Emily Dickinson. Books can take us places within our imagination that will never be visited if we’re watching a movie, playing a video game or mindlessly tuning into network TV. The synapses that fire in our brains when we’re deep in a book are dormant when we’re passively watching a sitcom.

I’ve been a reader since I was four and one of the places that seemed like paradise to me when I was young was the Queens Library’s Elmhurst branch in New York. The fairy tales and saints’ biographies I read were checked out of this little neighborhood library that had been built in 1906 with Andrew Carnegie’s millions.

To a kid who loved books, but whose family didn’t have much money, the public library was a feast and a Godsend. After parochial school ended, my sister and I could go browse shelves and come home with an armload of books that didn’t cost us a cent. (Our cents were spent at the candy store near the school. We ate candy while we read, which our teeth will attest to now. By the way, my sister is still a reader, too.)

The Elmhurst branch library was within walking distance and it stocked what seemed to me to be all the knowledge in the world. I read everything:  novels by Jerzy Kosinski that were way above my grade level, true-crime stories about the FBI, biographies and, yes, fairy tales. The more I read, the more I realized how much more there was to read.

I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the Elmhurst branch library, even though I haven’t visited in decades. In researching the location on the Internet, I was dismayed to learn that the Queens Library is facing budget cuts that threaten its availability to serve kids as hungry for knowledge as I was:

Queens Library has sustained $5.6 million in cuts and is facing $11.8 million more in reductions this year. If these additional cuts take effect, they will devastate our neighborhood libraries. We’ll lose six-day service, which we fought so hard to restore, with every community library closed all weekend long, and some left with less than five days of service. All of our programs and services, including after-school and ESOL programs, will be reduced. And we’ll have fewer books, DVDs and other library materials available. We can’t let this happen! Our voices must be heard. Please join us in advocating for Queens Library today!

Think about it:  the one place in the neighborhood where kids can feel safe after school, where they can learn and get lost in literature and where they are surrounded by learning is going to limit its services. Instead of spending time at the library on Saturday, kids will be left with few options for learning opportunities. My library didn’t have DVDs or videos or a coffee shop:  It had books.

The Queens Library has a Web site where they are asking New Yorkers to contact their legislators. It’s shameful that a place with such a long history of educating the community and such a vital service that plants the seeds for future learning has to beg to keep its doors open.

Libraries in many communities are facing the same budget shortfall, but this one touched me because it was the one place that meant so much to me. I arrived in Queens as a nine-year-old who spoke only Spanish and, when we moved out of Queens when I was 13, I was fully fluent in both English and Spanish. I learned the language by reading endlessly at the Queens Library’s Elmhurst branch.

The prospect of having children like me in the ethnically diverse neighborhood of Elmhurst not have this library as a resource would be a tragedy.

"St. Katherine Drexel: Friend of the Oppressed" by Ellen Tarry

When I was in parochial school, there were two young-adult series that I loved reading. One was Andrew Lang’s series of fairy tales that were coded by colors; for example, there was the Blue Fairy Book, which was my favorite, and 11 other fairy tale collections with different colors on the covers.

I didn’t realize as I read them that they were Victorian tales from a time when children actually used to read for entertainment, although the woodcut illustrations of pining princesses and evil dwarves might have been a clue that they were from another time. I remember entering the public library with such joy at knowing there would be another fairy-tale collection book in a new color just waiting for me to check it out.

The other series I loved were the Vision books published in the 1950s by Farrar Straus & Cudahy. These were biographies of saints and martyrs designed to enlighten Catholic kids who might have immersed themselves a little too deeply in fairy tales. (Who, me?) I may still have one or two of them on my shelves, although several floods in basements and Florida homes might have put an end to them.

I learned about St. Isaac Jogues, who converted North America, and about my patron saint, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. Each book began with the saint’s or martyr’s childhood so that we young readers could realize that they had once been kids, too. I met St. Therese of Lisieux and St. John Bosco there, too.

My favorite book in the series was about St. Katherine Drexel, who had been raised amid wealth and who had given up all of it to enter religious life serving Native Americans and African Americans during a time when they were the targets of discrimination. She was canonized in 2000, so my favorite biography told her story long before she was declared a saint. I loved reading about her work founding Indian missions in the West and about her struggles serving the poor.

By coincidence, the very same book I loved when I was a child was written by Ellen Tarry, an African-American author whose autobiography I’m going to read next. I only heard about Ellen Tarry’s role in the Harlem Renaissance and in the Friendship Houses founded by Catherine de Hueck Doherty very recently when I was researching another topic. (Ellen Tarry was a fascinating woman who had converted to Catholicism at 16 and whose career included several books for young readers. She died three days before her 102nd birthday last September.)

I never forgot the subtitle of Tarry’s book on St. Katherine Drexel:  Friend of the Neglected. To this day, any mention of St. Katherine Drexel is always coupled with that phrase.

I was gratified to see some of those wonderful Vision books in a Catholic catalog we received at home recently. Ignatius Press has several of these books in new editions for today’s kids. They would make wonderful First Communion presents for children learning about their faith.

The Vision books allowed us to lose ourselves in fascinating stories of holy people who had sacrificed for our faith. Unlike the series of fairy books I used to devour, they made a positive change in my life. By learning more about the people who built our church, I learned that those who served the poor like St. Katherine Drexel or who had the courage to face savagery like St. Isaac Joques had been real people with struggles tempered by prayer.

Finding this series in a new catalog was like meeting an old friend. The outside may have changed, but the bond I shared with these narratives back then is stil there. Now, more than ever, St. Katherine remains a friend of the oppressed. I learned that during a time when my reading choices were more simple, but their effects were more permanent.

The documentary "Witch Hunt" on MSNBC

When I was in high school, our history teacher organized a trip to Salem, MA. We visited the Counting House and the House of the Seven Gables that figured in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s magnificent novels; both locations brought literature alive to a book junkie like me.

We also stopped at the Salem Witch Museum, a somewhat cheesy attraction with exhibits about the 1692 witch trials that killed 19 of the accused in the gallows or under pressing stones. Religious hysteria, a land dispute gone wrong, bored girls and the stifling atmosphere of a town where everyone had to conform led to the accusations, trials and deaths that Arthur Miller brought to vivid life in The Crucible.

Many of those that weren’t hanged or who didn’t suffocate to death under stones pressed upon their chests also paid a heavy price.  I never forgot the story of Dorothy Good, who was chained in a dark prison with her mother for nine months. Dorothy was five years old when she went to prison. Years later, her father asked for assistance caring for her in her teen years because her time in jail had left her mentally ill.

Arthur Miller’s play found parallels between the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy era in the 1950s when those accused of Communist sympathies lost their careers or their reputations. We would like to imagine that our society will never see the likes of the 1692 witch trials or the 1950s House Un-American Activities Committee, the hammer that Joseph McCarthy used to batter his opponents.

Witch hunts are not the stuff of ancient history, though. MSNBC aired a gripping two-hour documentary on April 12 that told the unbelievable story of innocent people accused of unspeakable acts–without proof and without recourse to anyone who would listen. Witch Hunt focuses on events at Bakersfield, CA in the early 1980s when an overzealous district attorney and badly trained police investigators and social workers embarked on a reckless crusade against child sexual abuse.

(MSNBC will also air Witch Hunt at 3 p.m. on Sunday, April 26, according to the filmmakers’ blog. The documentary’s executive producer and narrator is actor Sean Penn. For a trailer and more information about the film, click here.)

Witch Hunt follows several people who were accused of abusing their own children as part of eight sex rings. Medical exams and evidence on hand could have confirmed that nothing had happened, but the task at hand by the politically ambitious district attorney was to gain convictions so that he could look tough on crime.

Children who are now adults recalled how police and social workers took advantage of their innocence to ask for confirmation that their own parents had raped them or used them in satanic rituals. (California was also the site of the infamous McMartin preschool sex scandal that resulted in more innocent people losing their freedom and dignity to baseless accusations.)

The stories of the 46 people victimized by the events in Witch Hunt are chilling. Innocent people spent years or even two decades in San Quentin, one of the worst prisons in the country, after they were convicted. They had to fear hardened criminals whose code makes them particularly vicious against those jailed for crimes against children.

The victims of the Bakersfield witch hunts suffered the humiliation of being wrongfully accused of the most heinous crimes against their own children–by their own children. Their losses were compounded by knowing that words put in their children’s mouths were used to convict them.

The central character in Witch Hunt is a feisty little man named John Stoll, who was convicted in 1985 of abusing his own son and some of the boys whom he allowed to use his pool. The documentary shows his release from prison in 2004 at the age of 61. The Innocence Project secured his release.

The most frightening aspect of Witch Hunt is that Ed Jagels, the district attorney who presided over this travesty of justice in the 1980s, is still in power in Kern County, CA.

Witch Hunt is a gripping documentary about a time when the imagined sexual abuse of children took the place of accusations of witchcraft or Communism to poison a community that fell under the wicked spell of a figure in power who played upon their worst fears.

The reputation of the Salem elders who hanged innocent people and of McCarthy’s henchmen left a dark blot on our history pages. It’s a shame that the modern equivalents of McCarthy are still overseeing justice in Bakersfield, CA.