(View the YouTube video and hear the song)
LEAVES OF GRASS
Excerpts from “Faces” By Walt Whitman
Sauntering the pavement , or riding the country by-roads
--lo! Such faces!
Faces of friendship, precision, caution, suavity, ideality;
The spiritual, prescient face—always welcome,
common, benevolent face,
The face of the singing of music- the grand faces of natural
lawyers and judges, broad at the back-top;
The faces of hunters and fishers, bulged at the brows—the
shaved blanch’d faces of orthodox citizens;
The pure, extravagant, yearning, questioning artist’s face;
The ugly face of some beautiful Soul, the handsome detested
or despised face;
The sacred faces of infants, the illuminated face of the
mother of many children;
The face of an amour, the face of veneration;
The face as of a dream, the face of an immobile rock;
The face withdrawn of its good and bad, a castrated face;
A wild hawk, his wings clipped by the clipper;
A stallion that yielded at last to the thongs
and knife of the gelder
This face is a life-boat;
This is the face commanding and bearded, it asks no odds
for the rest;
This face is flavor’d fruit, ready for the eating;
This face of a healthy and honest boy is the programme
of all good.
These faces bear testimony, slumbering or awake;
They show their descent from the Master himself.
Off the word I have spoke, I except not one –red,
white, black , are all deific;
In each house is the ovum—it comes forth after a
thousand years.
Spots or cracks at the windows do not disturb me;
Tall and sufficient stand behind, and make signs to me;
I read the promise, and patiently wait.
Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that
other people won’t feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
Its not just in some of us, it’s in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
We unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others.
Imagine that the world is a circle, that God is the center, and that the radii are the different ways human beings live. When those who wish to come closer to God walk towards the center of the circle, they come closer to one another at the same time as to God. The closer they come to God, the closer they come to one another. And the closer they come to one another at the same time, the closer they come to God.
St. Dorotheus of Gaza, Monastic, c. 500 – 560
It takes a lifetime to really understand that God is in what is standing in front of us. Most of our lives are spent looking, straining to see God in the cloud, behind the mist, beyond the dark. It is when we face God in one another, in creation, in the moment, that the real spiritual journey begins.
Joan Chittister, Called to Question
FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY
Blessed be the mind that dreamed the day
The blueprint of your life
Would begin to glow on earth,
Illuminating all the faces and voices
That would arrive to invite
Your soul to growth.
Praised be your father and mother,
Who loved you before you were,
And trusted to call you here
With no idea who you would be.
Blessed be those who have loved you
Into becoming who you were meant to be,
Blessed be those who have crossed your life
With dark gifts of hurt and loss
That have helped to school your mind
In the art of disappointment.
When desolation surrounded you,
Blessed be those who looked for you
And found you, their kind hands
Urgent to open a blue window
In the gray wall formed around you.
Blessed be the gifts you never notice,
Your health, eyes to behold the world,
Thoughts to countenance the unknown,
Memory to harvest vanished days,
Your heart to feel the world’s waves,
Your breath to breathe the nourishment
Of distance made intimate by earth.
On this echoing-day of your birth,
May you open the gift of solitude
In order to receive your soul;
Enter the generosity of silence
To hear your hidden heart;
Know the serenity of stillness
To be enfolded anew
By the miracle of your being. To Bless the Space Between Us, John O’Donohue
