Weekday Email to Members and Friends – 2021-05-20
Thursday, May 20th 2021
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church, Champaign
Dear Friends,
We grieve the shootout yesterday morning that left Champaign Police Officer Christopher Oberheim dead, another officer wounded, and a suspect involved, identified as Darion Marquise Lafayette, dead. We pray for all involved, all grieving families, and the Champaign Police family. O Lord, most high and kind God, hear our prayers and make us agents of your peace.
* * *
Last night’s Wednesday Zoom was water on the moon with Janice Harrington regaling us with humor, poetry, and stories. Here are two more of her poems, and two others that sprung to mind when she read to us.
ASH
Janice Harrington
Vernon, Alabama, 1961
I think about that winter in Vernon
when it was just the two of us and cold,
and December sifted snow over the red
dough boards of yard and roof,
and you made the terrible pilgrimage each night
in bare feet from bed to stove, to stoke its embers
and add the meager coal. Afterwards, you shivered
across the linoleum, across its worn and cinder-
bitten roses. Do I remember you leaping
from petal to petal, your sallow feet shining
like beacons? I don’t know. It was long
ago. But I know you climbed beneath
the sheets and “opening your shirt”
placed my hands against your belly.
We lay banked beside each other, unmoving,
asleep in a house as slanted as a cant of snow,
where we were Websta’s gal and her baby girl,
where we waited for the colored serviceman
who belonged to us, until waiting
was also winter, a weather we knew.
How lovely we were then, the two of us,
huddled in that darkness, surrounded
by the dull glowing of red roses
and comet-cinders, cast out and briefly bright.
* * *
REVIVAL
Janice Harrington
Through the cooling dark,
they walk, Lillian, Webster, Riley, Anna,
MacArthur and Eurel, returning
from Heavenly Father and Yes, Jesus!,
from paper fans with little brown
girls in Sunday bonnets “M-hmmmm”
from the communion of sour juice and crackers,
ah weh-lll, from church mothers in nurses’ uniforms and rills of sweat spilling from black brows.
Have mercy on us, Father.
Look down upon us, Father, and give us
your blessing, in Jesus’ name . . .
Above a darkened bough, a wing
beats, and in the pitchy shadows crickets
shrill, and a frog repeats, repeats,
repeats. Maybe Anna holds her father’s
hand. Maybe the boys tussle and pitch
stones into darkness while their mother
watches, humming and holding
her Bible more firmly than an ax handle,
or maybe they go weary on and quiet.
It is only their steps you hear, only shifting sand.
On a rural route, a family walks
while the night begins its long sermon, and the miles go by, and the miles go by.
If an owl calls from that darkness,
then someone will die. If a hound keens
one long, longing vowel, they will shudder.
If a star plummets, that too will have meaning.
This is faith, the road that takes them home.
* * *
Those Winter Sundays
Robert Hayden – 1913-1980
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
* * *
Grass
BY CARL SANDBURG
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
* * *
Much love to you all.
Matt Matthews
matt@firstpres.church
* * *
Enough rain! Sunday weather says partly cloudy with a high of 88 … a great day to join us for a Sunday in the Park at West Side Park at 11 am following the 10:15 am in-person worship. See you Sunday!
