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Posts Tagged ‘Bill Griffin’

Joy – Hope – Peace – Love

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , , on December 17, 2011| 2 Comments »

Every Christmas for almost thirty years, Linda and I have sung with the Elkin Community Chorus.  This year marked the 51st annual performance of the Chorus, originally founded by Fran Greene, currently directed by David McCollum, and open to all comers . . . that is anyone who wants to commit every Thursday night to rehearsing Christmas anthems beginning way back in October.  Gets you in the spirit early!

This year’s Chorus has been a special joy for me for many reasons, but one is that David selected a piece by me for us to perform.  In 2010 my friend composer and director Mark Daniel Merritt asked me to write lyrics he could work into a Christmas suite for our semi-pro choral group Voce.  We premiered The Wanderer’s Carols last Christmas at Biltmore House, and this year on December 4th one hundred of my friends and neighbors in the Elkin Community Chorus sang the first movement, The Birds’ Carol.

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The Wanderer’s Carols
Music by Mark Merritt Lyrics by Bill Griffin
[copyright 2010]
Movement 1
The Birds’ Carol

“Morning!  Morning!” trills the lark,
“The Babe brings gold to the sky!
A song of light now showers the earth,
And we shall know God this day.
.    Now is the dawn of our new life,
.    And we shall know God this day.”

“This coat I wear,” caws the rook,
“So black, so heavy, so grim.
Only One knows the way to make it bright –
The Child who reclaims us from sin.
.    He lifts our burden upon himself,
.    The Child who reclaims us from sin.”

“Come rest with me,” coos the dove,
“In this humble stable take ease.
Kings and shepherds together embrace
The Prince who unites us in peace.
.    You make us one in all the earth,
.    O Prince who unites us in peace!”

“I . . . Thou, I . . . Thou,” vow the geese
From dark earth to heaven above –
“May we join with Thee in a world made new;
May we fly forever in love.
.    Give us wings of Your perfect light,
.    And we’ll fly forever in love.”

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I’d like to share some thoughts about the background of these lyrics:

The Lark   –   Joy

In England the Sky Lark is known for its towering display flight, greeting the morning with loops and aerobatics, all the while filling the sky with its exuberant warble.  A fitting welcome for Christmas and the newborn Babe!

Our own North Carolina Meadowlark also sings a welcome to light returning to the earth   –   its melody seems to chant the words, “Spring of the year!”

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The Rook   –   Hope

Every one of us encounters darkness during our lives; there is no one that does not shoulder some burden.  The Rook proclaims hope in the coming of the Child who will take our burden upon Himself.  The One who can bring light into our darkness.

The English Rook is first cousin to our American Crow, both of them highly sociable and intelligent creatures.  If you’re smart, you know you must look beyond yourself for the hope of salvation.

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The Dove   –   Peace

The Dove has symbolized God’s promises since ancient times   –   picture the bird clasping an olive branch as it returns to Noah and the wanderers.  Today there is no more universal image of peace than the Dove.  In this verse, the Dove affirms that the peace of this Prince is promised to all people of whatever station in life, exalted or lowly, king or shepherd.  If we are to be united in all the earth, it will only be through Christ’s peace.

The Rock Dove is native to England’s cliffs and coasts, but after being imported to the new world it has become ubiquitous wherever there is human habitation   –   we call it a “pigeon.”  From the eaves of an abandoned building, doesn’t the sound of that cooing evoke peacefulness and home?

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The Geese   –   Love

Next time you hear a pair of Canada Geese flying overhead honking back and forth (the male perhaps slightly lower pitched than the female), imagine that they are not only calling to each other but also to their Creator   –   “I, Thou . . . I, Thou.”

For me these Geese are a powerful symbol of love.  They mate for life and may live twenty to thirty years in the wild.  They constantly watch out for each other.  They protect their goslings most ferociously.  And when I hear their call through the trees at dusk, it reminds me that the love of our Creator surrounds us and lifts us up.

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If you would like to listen to the choral group Voce performing The Wanderer’s Carols (with harp accompaniment and boy soprano), please follow these links:

THE WANDERER’S CAROLS

1 – The Birds’ Carol

2 – Beside the Manger

3 – The Wanderer’s Prayer

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Dropping My Stone

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , on June 19, 2011| Leave a Comment »

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

Remember Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse?”  In each of us exists the ingrained capacity to self destruct.  When you stand at the precipice looking down, the imp urges you to take one step closer to the edge.  You know you’re driving, but you think you’ll have that one last drink.  You’ve typed it and you just know you shouldn’t hit SEND, but you do.  The rational mind recoils, but the id whispers, “Why not?”

When you’ve heard the verse I quote above, isn’t your first response usually something like, “Oh, those bad, bad hypocrites.”  Last week I read an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by James Taranto about Anthony Weiner (who is apparently possessed by the largest and most perverse imp in the Western Hemisphere).  Weiner’s fellow Democrats have denounced his transgressions, but somewhere soto voce you know folks are saying, “At least he’s not a hypocrite. . . . Especially one of those family-values conservative hypocrites.”  Does that mean Liberals have no moral values to transgress in the first place?  Weiner, in his public life, was an adamant feminist and would most vehemently denounce anything that degraded or subjugated women.  And so, about those tweets and photos . . . ?

But Jesus’ challenge to the Pharisees isn’t about hypocrisy.  It’s purpose isn’t to condemn.  After the self-righteous slink away, doesn’t Jesus look up and say, “Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?” She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.”

Rather than hypocrisy, I say this story is about humility.  And I define humility as mindfulness, specifically being mindful that we share common desires, weaknesses, and failings with every other human creature.  My sister Mary Ellen, as a psychologist, uses mindfulness techniques to treat a number of emotional and psychophysiologic distresses. It can’t be an easy process.  At least to me, it doesn’t seem to come naturally.  How effortless is it for me to tool down the highway recounting to myself all the bad qualities of someone who’s done me wrong, enumerating all the reasons I’m justified in despising them until I enter some anti-Zen state of sour despairing mind-crud.  Practicing humility and compassion by comparison seem like work.  Mary Ellen, help!

Does any of this provide context for the poem I’m featuring today?  Perhaps just this: that every fault I see in people and in the society around me, every screwed up priority, every exploitation, every just plain meanness, I see in myself as well.  Here, today, I’m dropping my stone.

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little mouse
(garbage)

What we throw away:
shall I make a list?
The brown spot and the whole
apple around it;
the purple spot

and the addict’s arm
and the whole man.  Mostly
what’s hard to look at or easy
to look past.  An empty wallet full
of bus rides home; the child

crying in the detergent aisle;
a dark man who laughs
in another language.  Thinking
we can have what we’ve killed
to keep.  And my soul, too,

is small and gray
as all the rest.  Yesterday
I nibbled crumbs and was happy
until someone told me
they were crumbs.

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[from little mouse,© Bill Griffin, Main Street Rag Publishing, 2011; first appeared in Iodine Vol 10 Nr. 1, Spring/Summer 2009]

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Traces

Posted in Imagery, tagged , , , , on June 5, 2011| 2 Comments »

Linda’s sister Jodi is a National Park Service ranger in the New River Gorge.  In addition to some of her jobs like cultural and historical interpretation, wildflower walks, and storytelling, she’s also a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School: she teaches people visiting the backcountry to Leave No Trace.

Is it really possible to leave no trace of your passing?  Whether it’s an afternoon in the Greensboro Arboretum or ten days on the AT, can you really return from a place with no evidence you were ever there?  In years past the NPS and other outdoor organizations had less ambitious slogans:  Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires; Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute; Take Only Pictures, Leave Only Footprints; Pack It In, Pack It Out.  But no trace at all?!  Even if all six billion of us recycled, composted, and travelled everywhere we went via shank’s mare, just the act of breathing in and out sends billows of carbon dioxide like a blanket into the atmosphere.  Leave No Trace — are you kidding me?

I wrote this poem, little mouse (trace), with my son and daughter in mind.  At different times one or the other of them has taken extended wilderness treks with me, and we’ve struggled to practice the best stewardship over wild places that we can.  (Margaret’s famous quotation upon reaching a road crossing with a refuse bin and over a pound of garbage in her pack:  “Trash cans rock my world!”)  But the world I want to leave them is not one with a few nice paths through the woods free of candy wrappers.  It’s not just the expectation that a few hikers will know how to erase the marks of their stay when they break camp.  It’s more like some crazy hope that all of us, every one, will retain an acute awareness of our traces right in the very places where we live.  That we’ll regret the unavoidable scars we leave on the earth.  That we’ll celebrate together when we can heal one.

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little mouse
(trace)

I want to leave the earth and climb
the snowbank cumulus, kick
my boots into the billow, lean
against my sassafras stick and rise.
Rain licks the slickrock clean

of my prints, greenbriar weaves
wild drapery up the wall, hickory sprouts
through the sidewalk.  I want to leave
no trace of my passing, no more trail
than the cursive of a slender tail

in dew.  Morning sun drinks that cup
and learns a word I never spoke,
someone’s new word for love.  I
want to be no more I but we – creature
loam bud feather; let roots translate

the phosphorus of my dust to fruit.
If you look for me a wren calls.
If you listen the poplar turns to honey
in the sky.  Drink deep this cup.  I want
to leave the earth to you.

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[from little mouse, Main Street Rag Publishing, 2011]

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