Waiting--Wandering--Welcoming

ProetryPlace Blog 69:     Mass, Musings, Meditations: Waiting, Wandering, Welcoming

(with end notes)

    Fog, mist, cold. The weather last Sunday enclosed us as we drove to early morning mass through the rural countryside on the outskirts of Carrollton. The dismal atmosphere instilled a sense of quietude, reflection and introspection with just a taint of foreboding. Turning into the church drive, we noticed new gravesites in the small cemetery. We parked, entered the still unlighted sanctuary and took our seats on a hardwood pew with time to pray, meditate or doze off a bit.

    Father Rafael, the parish priest, would not appear today. He was on a well-deserved, post-holiday vacation visit to his family in Puerto Rico. A young priest from Atlanta would fill in for him.

    Time for the start of mass came and passed. I took the opportunity of more quiet time to jot down a few notes and ideas. Some minutes later, the deacon took the pulpit to request that those assembled pray for the visiting priest and his safe arrival, since his whereabouts at that time was quite unknown. My thoughts meandered through concepts of waiting and time. I scribbled on small note cards.

Waiting . . . like gravity . . . warps time.

And

thankfully unknown

the scalar

to my vector

    When I read these to my poetry group the next week, the first adage was readily understood and agreed upon. The second statement was obscure for some. For those not familiar with the terms, Webster defines vector as a quantity with both magnitude and direction, commonly shown as a line segment whose orientation represents direction with the length proportional to its magnitude or scalar value. I saw it as a metaphor for life. We have control over the direction our lives take, but rarely determine our own longevity. This thankfully remains a mystery for most as, toward the end, we wait.

    The young priest eventually arrived, bearded, breathless and apologetic, but with no better explanation than that he had overslept. Meanwhile, my mental excursion on the subject of waiting generated this biblical haiku.

impatient souls

await the coming of

the visiting priest

    The homily was delivered with enthusiasm and a few good jokes, but failed to maintain my full attention. My mind wandered back to the dismal cemetery scene that greeted our arrival at the church. Two more haiku appeared surreptitiously on note cards before the collection plate was passed. Later, at home, I added the prose section to the haibun titled Openings.

haibun: Openings

    Our Lady of Perpetual Help, OLPH to all except the parish priest, is a small outpost of the Catholic Church on the rural periphery of Carrollton, Georgia. Cattle graze in fenced pastures across the quiet country road from the humble church. The foundation of the church rests also on land that once was farmed. Land for the church, the rectory and a small cemetery were a gift from seemingly unlikely patrons, actress Susan Hayward and her husband, Mr. Floyd Chalkley, a Carrollton business man and rancher.

    Susan and Floyd lie at rest in a small memorial cove just a few steps from the narthex of OLPH church and slightly apart from the greater church yard that is the final resting place of many departed faithful parishioners. Today, on a gray, misty winter morning, two bright canopies shelter freshly dug trenches and complement the colorful artificial bouquets that perpetually decorate the gravesites.

    During the mass, the good father recites two new names on the list of special intention prayers.

new opening

in the cold December earth

underground passage

new openings

in the quaint necropolis

welcoming old souls

Author’s end notes:

    Modern haiku in English continues to evolve and has abandoned many characteristics of the ancestral Japanese poetry form. Then, what makes it haiku? Brevity, of course, saying more with less by evoking a strong image or emotion for the reader or listener.

    Haibun allows the poet to enhance the verse with a short section of prose to help set the scene or perhaps reveal the poets frame of mind. Prose and poem work together.

    The three lines of my haiku, like the three sections of any story, serve different purposes. The first sets a mood or suggests a scene, a backdrop. The second is a development and link to the third, which concludes, often with a twist.

    The first (opening) lines of these haiku sound an optimistic note—New Openings!—bringing to mind fresh opportunities like a job offering. The second lines are more somber and do an apparent about-face, harking back to the prose section that identifies the openings as fresh grave sites. The third line of the second haiku is a return to optimism, suggesting a warm welcome to the afterlife. The first haiku ends on a more ambiguous note with shades of Dante’s Devine Comedy, suggesting the uncertain direction of the journey of the dear departed.

Richard Allen Anderson     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com     18 January 2015