Saturday, March 28, 2009

Denise Levertov - On a Theme by Thomas Merton

"Adam, where are you?"
God's hands
palpate darkness, the void
that is Adam's inattention,
his confused attention to everything,
impassioned by multiplicity, his despair.

Multiplicity, his despair;
God's hands
enacting blindness. Like a child
at a barbaric fairgrounds --
noise, lights, the violent odors --
Adam fragments himself. The whirling rides!

Fragmented Adam stares.
God's hands
unseen, the whirling rides
dazzle, the lights blind him. Fragmented,
he is not present to himself. God
suffers the void that is his absence.


It seems to me that Levertov expresses so vividly what Archbishop Chaput depicts from the result of our last election where the electorate including the 54% Catholics voted for 'O': "unless Catholics have a conversion of heart that helps us see what we’ve become -- that we haven’t just 'assimilated' to American culture, but that we’ve also been absorbed and bleached and digested by it – then we’ll fail in our duties to a new generation and a new electorate."

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