The Universalist poet Edwin
Markham may not be lauded in historic anthologies enumerating and canonizing
others as great, but what he once wrote that once resonated with so many, often
refreshes and astonishes me anew. He was a poet beloved by regular people. I
think that was because he guided the gospel plow, tilling the fields of
wonderment. He tilled those fields knowing very well the sorrows possible in
this life. But he also knew his calling, where, to paraphrase Parker Palmer,
his gifts met the world’s needs. Markham wrote poems and parables to aid the
sorrowed and downtrodden in reconnecting to the marvelous and the beautiful for
comfort, renewal, and energy for cultivating social justice. He was a
twentieth-century psalmist for the common person.
“Victory In Defeat” The Shoes of Happiness (1915) NY:
Doubleday, Page & Co.: 99.
Defeat may serve as well as
victory
To shake the soul and let
the glory out.
When the great oak is
straining in the wind,
The boughs drink in new
beauty, and the trunk
Sends down a deeper root on
the windward side.
Only the soul that knows the
mighty grief
Can know the mighty rapture.
Sorrows come
To stretch out spaces in the
heart for joy.
I spend a considerable
amount of time with people in their hours of defeat, so it is fortunate
that I’m quite personally familiar with that sorrow’s ground. Joseph is my
model on taking the long view, where in a terribly tense scene in Genesis, he
reveals who he is to his brothers – his brothers who sold him into slavery –
and he observes, if I hadn’t come here, how could I help you now? (Genesis
45:1-15). Edwin Markham knew his Bible, and I like to imagine the host of
Biblical characters and contemporary social activists he had in mind when he
wrote “Defeat may serve as well as victory/To shake the soul and let the glory
out.” After loss, the soul is like some wet dog out of a rainstorm, shaking
itself off and in that fervent affair some of the brilliant and beautiful truth
of being is revealed.
Those of us who struggle
with and have known great sorrow may search for meaning – or wait for it, if we
take the long-view. But this is where true strength is made, through a life
that has no easy button, a life that meets resistance, disappointment, loss.
Why? Because we’re meet resistance when we strive to make a dream real,
disappointment when we’ve stretched for the beautiful and grown in its light,
and loss because we have loved deeply, cared deeply. “Only the soul that knows
the mighty grief/Can know the mighty rapture.” I’m not speaking here of chronic
depression or other long-term illness; I’m speaking about our human
inheritance. These hearts that love can also lose the people we love, the work,
the geography of our soul. These souls that dream of justice and equity and
compassion meet resistance because living justice, equity, and compassion is
not cost-competitive, efficient, or our current social model of success.
Still, the question of “why”
arises in those hours of first sorrow, the yearning we have to make sense of
and shape our lives into a good story. So Markham offers his meaning-making
he’s wrestled out of his own disappointments, losses, and defeats: “Sorrows
come/To stretch out spaces in the heart for joy.”
In this struggle we can grow
stronger, dream more vividly, reach more deeply in drinking in and appreciating
beauty, provide more shelter, and rejoice in the splendid miracle of the day.
Comments