Tuesday, September 3, 2024
Memorial of Saint Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Post Labor Day and the need to be whole
Brothers and sisters, the Spirit scrutinizes everything. Who knows what pertains to the man except his spirit which is within.
In his 2022 The Need to be Whole, among other moments when he both clarifies and confuses at the same time, Wendell Berry says this, not referring to Labor Day, but it pertains:
All that we hold dear depends upon our determination to hold ourselves as equal to one another. (p. 27)
Because Berry is determined to be as honest and clear as he can be, he goes on to define, in the next 478 pages, nearly all of the important words in that sentence.
We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand the things freely give us by God.
Labor Day celebrates “our determination to hold ourselves.” We are, as Jefferson said, “all created equal.” So the first marchers twenty years on the heels of the Civil War, set their goal in 1882, says Heather Cox Richardson, to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored.”
Two years later Grover Cleveland was elected president with bi-partisan support, and a platform to bring more economic equality in America. “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor.”
Make known to men your might and the glorious splendor of your Kingdom, a Kingdom for all ages which endures through all generations.
Although he won the popular vote he lost the next election in the Electoral College. Four years later he was returned to office in a landslide victory, but Cleveland watched the economy collapse as capitalists pulled their money out of the market. Heather (a prominent American historian) writes:
Cleveland and Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).
They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday. Each year, the first Monday in September would honor the country’s workers.
We struggle defining our categories but generally choose one side or other when it comes to politics or economics. We sometimes get in quite a hurry to make our choice. In Mr. Berry’s book he remembers in Chapter Five, Forgiveness, his boyhood during World War II …
I remember the perfection with which I and my friends sucked up the war propaganda and spouted it as a part of play, an utterly alien, officially sanctioned and sanctified, language of hating.
But as the war and its “labor shortage” wore on—late in the war, I believe, or soon after—German prisoners of war were brought into our neighborhoods to help in the tobacco harvest. One thing that penetrated the numbed war language for me was the hearsay I got of the farm wives who cooked for the prisoners as they always cooked for harvest hands—and who, with their unobstructed hearts, saw them as the sons of mothers. “Why, some of them were just children!”
In that language I heard, the unprescribed, unorganized, unorganizable, unrecruitable tenderness that recognizes the vulnerability of the persons, places, and things of this world. It is this tenderness and nothing else by which we make for ourselves home places and make ourselves at home in them.
I have retained a sort of ache remembering the words and actions of those farm wives. It asks us, I think, for a language able to speak of those things. It tells us, I think, that thoughtful people, before speaking, have got to look and listen through the veils of general purpose until individual faces appear and individual voices are heard. (p 237, The Need to Be Whole)
All of this, and then a parade, with a marching band or two.
The Lord is good to all and compassionate toward all his creation. Let us give you thanks, O Lord.
Happy day after Labor Day.
(1 Corinthians 2, Psalm 145, Luke 7, Luke 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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