Singing the Living Tradition : Reading Number Six Sixty-Six

It is Sunday and I am sitting in a pew. The list of hymnals are posted on the wall at the side of the altar. I thumbed through the hymnal, SINGING THE LIVING TRADITION and my eye spied a reading that was numbered 666. It is as follows:

THE LEGACY OF CARING

Despair is my private pain
Born from what I have failed to say
failed to do, failed to overcome

Be still my inner self
Let me rise to you, let me reach
down into your pain
and soothe you.

I turn to you to renew my life
I turn to the world, the streets of
the city, the worn tapestries of
brokerage firms,

drug dealers, private estates
personal things in the bag
lady's cart

rage and pain in the faces that
turn from me
afraid of their own inner worlds.

This common world I love anew,
as the life blood of generations
who refused to surrender their
humanity
in an inhumane world,
courses through my veins.

From within this world
my despair is transformed to hope

and I begin anew
the legacy of caring.

-- THANDEKA (née Sue Booker)

There was a time when I was able to look at a poem and analyze its meaning. It's been a long time since I had dared do something like that. Do I still have the ability? I think so. Is my outcome valid? That I sincerely question. The author, Thandeka, was born in 1946 in New Jersey. Her mother was an artist and teacher and her father was a Baptist minister and seminary professor who had studied with Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich at Union Theological School in New York City. [ This information came from Wikipedia]

Her education is listed as:
Claremont Graduate University (Ph.D.)
UCLA (M.A.)
Columbia University, School of Journalism (M.A.)
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (B.A.) [Wikipedia]

Her occupation is listed as theologian and activist [Wikipedia]

And she is known for contemporary affect theory, critical vision theory, theology, and philosophy [Wikipedia]

I use the pronoun she because she appears to be a Black female.

I tread lightly on analyzing the possible meaning of someone who is (a) not of my gender, (b) not of my race, (c) not of my religious background, and (d) educated at a different level than I. I can use the skills that I have and define the terms that she has used. I can never be quite sure how much power or impact the individual words might carry in her perception.

But, here goes. Before I begin, I want to look at the nouns and make sure I have a general grasp of their meaning. I will take them in the order they are written and will use an online dictionary for a brief definition or a synonym. I will make them singular if they are plural. And I apologize in advance if I had missed one.

Legacy - anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor

Caring - the practice or profession of providing social or medical care (as an adjective it is a feeling or showing of care and compassion)

Despair - loss of hope; hopelessness

Pain - physical suffering or distress, as due to injury, illness, etc.

Inner self - ego, mind, soul, spirit, subconscious

Life - the condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally

World - the earth or globe, considered as a planet; or a particular division of the earth (e.g. the Western world)

Street - a public thoroughfare, usually paved, in a village, town, or city, including the sidewalk or sidewalks

City - a large or important town

Tapestry - a fabric consisting of a warp upon which colored threads are woven by hand to produce a design, often pictorial, used for wall hangings, furniture coverings, etc

Brokerage firm - a company of agents who buy or sell for a principal on a commission basis without having title to the property; or the company of a person who functions as an intermediary between two or more parties in negotiating agreements, bargains, or the like

Drug dealer - a person who sells illegal narcotics

Private estate - ownership of tangible or intangible property by an individual entity, rather than by the state or a common owner.

Bag lady - Slang: Offensive. an unsheltered or homeless woman who lives and sleeps on city streets or in public places, often keeping all her belongings with her in shopping bags

Rage - angry fury; violent anger

Face - the front part of the head, from the forehead to the chin

Life blood - the fluid that circulates in the principal vascular system of human beings and other vertebrates, in humans consisting of plasma in which the red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are suspended; or the vital principle; life: (e.g. The excitement had got into the very blood of the nation)

Generation - the entire body of individuals born and living at about the same time:the postwar generation; or the average span of years between the birth of parents and the birth of their offspring, in accordance with various disciplines, as in human population studies, which typically cite a generational range as 20–35 years, and in the classification of Generations X, Y, and Z, which loosely frame periods of 15–20 years

Humanity - all human beings collectively; the human race; humankind; the quality or condition of being human; human nature

Hope - the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best

Next, I want to see if any of these words is repeated:

Despair is the first word of the poem and it appears again three lines from the bottom

Pain appears three times; private pain, your pain, and rage and pain

Life appears as my life and life blood

World appears five times; twice as world, and once as inner world, common world, and inhumane world

Anew is used twice; the first time in stanza six with "I love anew" and in the last stanza "I begin anew"

Some words can be synonymous. Rage, for example could be associated with pain. Legacy is handed down from the past and is connected with generations.

In the first three lines, the poet personifies pain and despair as being the creation of her inaction; failure to say something, failure to do something; or failure to defeat something.

In the second stanza the speaker seeks to connect with the entity called inner self. Inner self's physical location is at a superior position to that of the speaker since the speaker must rise to it. The speaker would actually rise above the position of inner self and then 'reach down' into its pain. The speaker's purpose for doing this is to provide a calming or tranquilizing effect to an entity of despair and pain.

In the third and fourth stanzas we learn of another reason why the speaker is attempting this connection with the entity of inner self. As she calms the pain and despair of inner self, she hopes that somehow her life will begin again as clarified by the phrase "to renew my life." At the same time, the speaker looks at urban life with words such as streets, city, tapestries, brokerage firms, drug dealers, private estates, personal things, and bag lady's cart. The synecdoche--a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa--are terms that are used to describe the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the privileged and the enablers. There is extra meaning in the phrase "tapestries of brokerage firms". Tapestries are hand-made and in this instance, the threads might be the diversity of all life at different states of existence. The word brokerage contains the word 'rage' within it. Brokers are persons who buy and sell for a commission. One might say that drug dealers do the same. The main difference between the two is that brokers would probably not have any dealings with the bag lady's cart, whereas drug dealers are unaffected by a client's socio-economic status.

In the fifth stanza, the speaker notes that life on the planet has turned away from her. They note that she is in communion with her inner self and that she is attempting to calm it. Every human on the planet has its own inner self, but these persons fear their own inner lives. Note, also that in the fifth stanza, the poet went from describing herself as having an inner self, but the inner selves of others are referred to as inner worlds. In this instance, the author goes from describing herself as a single individual yet recognizing that the collective's individual selves make up an inner world. She makes a connection between herself and humanity.

In the sixth stanza there is mention of a common world. A common world is shared equally by all (community, nation, culture). The common world is also in contrast to private estates and personal things. Common carries a double-entendre as it can also mean coarse, vulgar, lacking rank, station, distinction, hackneyed, trite, of mediocre or inferior quality; mean; low; etc. I believe that the "I love anew" is connected with the "renew my life" of stanza three. The poet feels the life blood in her that carries the DNA and history of her people; a people who refused to relinquish their benevolence, compassion, empathy, friendship, generosity, goodness, goodwill, or kindness in a world in which they were mistreated.

In the seventh stanza, the speaker realizes that her world consists of things that are both bad or ugly as well as valuable and vital. She is able to find or separate things that work as tools that could change her sadness into wishes for positive and happy outcomes in life.

And, in the end, she recognizes the positivity of her rekindled spirit and holds it as a compassionate practice for generations to come, much as those "who refused to surrender their humanity in an inhumane world" had done.

I hope I have done this poet justice.