Lucky White Girl

The 21st century Christmas may be just what we needed

Somewhere along the line I got the idea that if one were a Christian, then Christmas should be (or could be) a profound spiritual experience --the highlight of one's spiritual life.  Sorta like going to Mecca for Muslims. 

Most Christians think that Christmas is the biggest/most important holiday of the year except for Catholics who believe that the most important day is Easter (the thinking being that while it's a big deal to be born, it's a much bigger deal to raise yourself from the dead).  But I was raised Baptist and, for us, Christmas reigned supreme, so really it's no wonder that my upbringing and every Hollywood Christmas movie ever made make me yearn for an annual yuletide divine revelation that will rejuvenate my spirituality and connect me with the rest of the human race.   I expect to be reminded of the fragility of human existence and the profundity of the human soul. 

Needless to say Christmas these days rarely avoids achieving epic proportions of disappointment for me.  I should have learned this by now: Such intense spiritual experiences come along only maybe once or twice in a lifetime and of course they don't necessarily have to be connected to Christmas.  The average US Christian is much more likely to experience Christmas as a crash course in self-improvement led by an invisible slightly sadistic personal trainer with a sick sense of humor.  In only one weekend you will learn how to deal with an incongruous mix of human beings who wouldn't be caught dead in the same room together if they were not related.  At best it's an exercise in diplomacy at worst, a reminder of how much your sorry ass is lacking in some of the nobler human virtues such as tolerance, patience and magnanimity.

Is this what it's all about?  Is this the true meaning of Christmas?  Maybe in an age of globalization where the local and the global are so interconnected and we all interact with so many different people in so many different places with so many different backgrounds and ideas and cultures and languages and belief systems... maybe this is exactly the kind of Christmas we need.  Forget all that about unity with God crap.  Christmas is about learning how not to kill each other.

Merry Christmas, y'all!

Some (more) thoughts on anger

This is a old post I never published.  I wrote it some months ago back when I was reading a lot of blogs and participating more in the blogosphere.  There were always these melodramatic disputes going on --I just got tired of it.  I have to admit I don't do that much anymore (read many blogs) and I'm a lot happier for it.  Like any community, the blogosphere can get insular and there can be a lot of in-fighting, angry accusations and tearful resignations and it all seems so important at the time but later it seems self-destructive... like a waste of energy that could be better used to fight other battles. I still check in on these blogs every now and then but I don't read them every day (and not surprisingly the last time I checked there was still drama going on).  But finding this post in the archives, I thought that while it's no longer relevant to whatever the issue was at the time, it does contain some good reflections on a difficult emotion.

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There's a lot of anger around these days.  My anger.  Other people's angers.  Some of the blogs I read are really angry.  And here is one of those complicated both are true at the same time things: anger can be righteous and justified and at the same time still be anger.   There are three aspects to this:

• I am not a good ally if I'm exhausted and brow-beaten and want to give up.

• I don't know if I want to be an ally to angry social movements.

• I don't believe I should have to choose between challenging oppression and love.

The first of those points is related to recognizing that anger is spiritually destructive.  It moves me further from God (other people*).  When I see it in myself or others I don't like it and I try to understand it.  I don't generally run away from it.  I don't want to say people shouldn't be angry.  But I do want to say sometimes I need to withdraw from it for awhile.  There is a difference between those two things; it is crucial that you see it.

The second is related to the idea that anger and hostility and violence are tools of the oppressor, not of the liberation movement.  In 1957, Adrienne Rich wrote a poem called The Knight, (a symbol for that which we fight against) and it ends with this question:

Who will unhorse this rider
and free him from between
the walls of iron, the emblems
crushing his chest with their weight?
Will they defeat him gently
or leave him hurled on the green,
his rags and wounds still hidden
under the great breastplate?

We agree that we must unhorse the rider; but we disagree on how. The methods do matter.  I believe that if we do it the second way ("leave him hurled on the green") then we've simply replaced one knight with another and there's some amount of justice in that but it's not a pure justice.  The system hasn't been changed, only the rulers of it have.  It's a superficial change and I can't get very enthusiastic about that.  It'd be like liking what the state of Israel is doing to the Palestinians because I hated what the state of Germany did to the Jews. I believe it's possible; I believe it's necessary for me to hate both.   I don't want to be a part of a movement that replaces one oppressor with another and calls that liberation.

The third is related to my belief that even though I have rarely encountered it in my own life, I know there is a third way.  I know that though it has been used disingenuously as an excuse in the past it is possible for a person to reject the path of anger and still challenge hegemony.  I know that my own privilege makes that choice more accessible for me than for other people, but I think I can be a good ally regardless.  I know this is possible because, though he died a long time before I was born, I know Martin Luther King Jr was an advocate of that third way and it can be done.  This, I truly believe.

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* I believe the opposite of Satre.  I think God (not hell) is other people and on the rare occasions I use the word God, this is usually what I mean.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Here's a good gift idea for anyone on your list who's spiritually inclined.  Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.  It won the 2005 Pultizer Prize for fiction.  I'm going to give it to my friend Eve, the pastor of the Mennonite Church here.  I can't decide if I want to give her my copy with its dogeared pages and hightlighting or if I should buy her a new one so she can read a clean version.  I like sharing used books among friends, especially close ones because it's interesting to see the parts they thought were especially good --which passages spoke most to them personally, ya know?  It's a nice experience, a kind of literary intimacy.  On the other hand, it can also be distracting to read a book that's got a lot of notes and stuff already in it and there's something to be said for reading a clean version to put your own highlighting and dogears in and then comparing notes afterward.

I think I'll go with the former just so I can re-read this copy over the next few days.  I had a lot going on when I read it the first time so I read it in spurts, which is fine too because it's one of those books that breaks up easily into nuggets that are good to chew on for a bit, but now I'd like to spend an entire day with it again to get the parts I missed.  Sometimes you miss the connections when you pick a book up and put it down again a hundred times in the course of a reading.

The book is a letter from a dying man --a minister in a long line of theologians-- to his young son: partly reflections on life and spirituality, partly stories of his childhood and his father and grandfather, and partly him trying to work out what to do about his own relationship with his estranged god-son (note god-son, not the son to whom the letter is addressed).  It's like reading the journal of a very thoughtful, considerate, exceedingly honest friend whose writing mirrors the mental process of working things out inside their own head.  I like that sort of transparency in writing wherever I find it.

And then there are these wonderful insights such as this one that I thought was very cool:

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable --which I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.  ... Maybe I should have said we are like planets.  But then I would have lost some of the point of saying that we are like civilizations. The planets may all have been sloughed from the same star, but still the historical dimension is missing from that simile, and it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important.... (197-198).

I really like that idea of continuity.  It's a novel idea to me --continuity with other generations-- because in my own life I seem so different from the rest of my family.  Then again who knows?  There were so many of them I didn't ever get to know really.  Especially my grandma Getty.  (She died when I was eight) Sometimes I think we would have a lot in common if she were around today.

"We all live in the ruins of the lives of other generations".   Wow.  I mean even literally my being here today was a result of my grandmother making the decision to leave Scotland and come to the Americas.  She wasn't thinking of me necessarily.  I'm sure she was thinking of a job.  I'm standing in the midst of the remains of her dreams for a better life in the New World.

In a way then I'm right where she was all that time ago.  I could leave this country and go to Colombia or Spain and build my life there and whichever thing I choose is going to lay the foundations for my kids.  They'll (probably) either have Latin American ancestors or European ones.   And they'll live their lives surrounded by the consequences of my dream of leaving the Empire.

See?  You could write several posts just about any one particular reflection contained in this book.  It's like a good collection of spiritual reflections written in the form of a letter.  I think I'll try to check out her other book, Housekeeping to see if it's just as good.

Una prueba, segunda parte

I have been feeling pretty down these past couple of days.  Ever since finding out about the Fullers but also because of some recent conversations I've been having with people here that got me thinking.  It's really hard for us to understand Millard Fuller's and Clarence Jordan's teachings about the economics of Jesus.  People seem to believe that the economics of the marketplace is the only economics possible.  They can't imagine alternatives!  How scary for us humans not to be able to imagine alternatives to any given situation!  The idea of starting out with nothing and trusting that God will provide just sounds like it doesn't make much economic sense.  At least to North Americans it doesn't.  Something like that goes against everything we've ever been taught about the world. 

It's really hard for us gringos (and others, but I speak from this particular perspective) to get our heads around the idea that we can't control everything, that we are fully and completely dependent on God.  We want to be in control of our lives.  We don't want to have to depend on anyone for anything.  We don't want our bread daily, we want fifty years worth.  We want to store it up under lock and key and save it.  We want security, not vulnerability.  We want to be independent, not to rely on God.

And the idea that everyone should have the same amount?  No way.  We totally don't get that!  Some people deserve more.  Some people deserve less.  It's the (North)American way, right?  The hardest parable in the Bible for us has got to be that one about the landowner who goes out to contract workers for a day's work in the fields and he starts out in the morning and finds workers who agree to work for a set amount, say $20/day.  And he goes out again at noon and finds more workers who also agree to work for the same amount.  And he goes out again at 6pm and finds more workers who also agree to the same amount and at nightfall he gathers all the workers together and to those who started work at 8am he gives $20 and to those who started work at noon he gives $20 and to those who started work at 6pm he gives $20.  And to us that story just grates on our ears, we can't bear to hear it.  We can barely understand it.  Don't the workers who started at 8am deserve more money?  How can the landowner pay everyone the same?? It's not fair!

It is fair.  All the workers have families.  All the workers have to eat.  All deserve to eat.  All deserve to have a house.  All deserve to have good health care.  But we who live in a meritocracy cannot wrap our heads around that idea.  It goes against everything we thought we knew about the world.  It turns the world upside down.

But that's what Jesus did.  He turned the world upside down, especially the world of the ancient Roman Empire.  And how ironic that the society that probably most resembles the ancient Roman Empire is the contemporary Estadounidensian Empire (us) and the teachings of Jesus are just as difficult for us as they were for the Romans.  If Jesus lived in the contemporary US, we would also sentence him to death. 

The kingdom of heaven is not a meritocracy.  It's so hard for us North Americans to comprehend.  God makes no distinction between the deserving and the undeserving.  And that drives us nuts.

So I understand that it's hard for us norteamericanos.  It's hard to imagine that we who have so much don't deserve it after all.  That Jesus calls us to a different kind of economics.  I know it's hard. 

I feel really sad that we don't understand this more.  I really, really wish we did because it's very important.  Look, if you build houses for people because that's your business to build houses and it just happens to be your selling point is that these houses come with low or no interest ... well, that's fine, but it's not radical.  It doesn't change the world.  It fits within the current economic system.  It fits within the economics of the marketplace.  If that's what you want to do, fine. 

But if you build houses for people because everyone deserves a house, because everyone no matter who they are deserves to have a simple, dignified house... well, that's radical.  That changes the world.  That changes people.  They're two very different things.  I know the Habitat of the late 70s and early 80s was definitely the latter case.  I'm just not sure yet which the Habitat of today is.  Do Habitat people still think like Millard Fuller?  Or has the persistent pull of the mainstream finally pulled them away?

Una prueba

And as soon as I posted that previous post, the resolution I made within it was immediately put to the test.  I resolved not to lose faith if individuals disappoint me, not to retreat from the call to community just because my particular community failed. 

Last night I couldn't sleep.  I stayed up reading, knitting, and writing.  The book I was reading was "Love in the Mortar Joints" by Millard Fuller.  What I was writing was the post below.  The book is the story of Fuller's personal transformation, how he came to Koinonia Farm, how he met Clarence Jordan, how eventually he founded Habitat for Humanity.  In it, he talks about the economy of Jesus, the call to discipleship, the impossible hardness of Jesus's words and what he asks us to do. 

So this morning I go to Koinonia's website to find out about visiting when I get back and I'm reading through the news clippings when I see this.  I didn't know anything about it.  I'd never heard.  And they certainly didn't mention it during the orientation!

I can't say one way or the other how I feel about the case in terms of who's in the right and who's in the wrong; I have no idea.  All I know is that it felt very weird to discover this all of a sudden (even though it happened over a year ago) and I felt disappointed that no one said anything about it during the orientation week (when one of the talks was on Millard Fuller and Clarence Jordan and Koinonia).  All I can say is no matter whose version of events is true, they're both really, really sad.  And I'm really disappointed.  But regardless of all of it, regardless of how it makes Habitat look and how it makes Mr. Fuller look, it doesn't change the fact that for me this internship has been what it has: a spiritual re-awakening.

Every smack of the hammer, a prayer

“When you ask the Lord for a job to do for [Her], you can count on finding employment” –Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity

A few years ago I had a job to do in Colombia and it was the most difficult thing I’d ever done in my life.  It was a very formative time for me spiritually.  I’d long ago discovered a more mature and complex concept of God so that I no longer considered myself an atheist or agnostic but it wasn’t until I moved to Gainesville in 2000 that I discovered a faith community that made it possible for me to consider Christianity. That faith community was Catholic and even though I never made it official (got baptized in the church), I have ever since considered myself catholic at heart.  Regardless of whatever disagreements I have with the Catholic Church as an institution (and there are many disagreements!), it is a particularly Catholic theology and a particularly Catholic ritual (the mass) which speaks to my soul. 

But one day something happened: I lost that community, which was quite small, just two other people really who had some stuff going on between them that I got in the middle of and so it didn’t work out.  The friendships collapsed and when that happened I feel like I left Christianity for the second time in my life (the first being when I was about 12 and decided I was too old for fairy tales and cartoon theologies). I didn’t stop believing in a God but I did leave Christianity.  By this time though, I was in Colombia and it was easy to bury oneself in the work there.  I had sorta hoped that I would find a new spiritual community there but that didn’t work out either.

I went into a great dry period in my life.  I returned from Colombia depressed, lonely and very hurt. I was very disappointed with these first introductions to Christian communities.   Why had God shown me the beauty of this way of life only to remove the source of that beauty? I came back to Gainesville and picked up where I had left off when it all started some years earlier: I went back to school.  I rarely attended mass and I neglected the spiritual.

It is in this context that I encounter Habitat for Humanity, that large, well-known organization I had always heard of and used to consider volunteering with until I decided that I’d work for smaller, more “radical” organizations.  I never thought I’d end up working for Habitat but here I am on this internship this summer, an internship ironically funded by Coca-Cola that great corporate abuser of human rights in Colombia.  When I applied, I was thinking about practical things: experience for a job after I graduate in the fall. When I got accepted I never thought that this would be my third introduction to Christianity. But that’s exactly what it has become.

I discovered this during the orientation week when Maximo told us the story of Habitat. I knew vaguely that there was some connection with Koinonia but I didn’t know much else about it. Imagine being all the way in Costa Rica and hearing Clarence Jordan’s name again for the first time in years!

Clarence Jordan was a Baptist preacher, one of two very influential Baptist preachers in my life* (neither of whom I encountered by the way while growing up in a Baptist church!)  Jordan founded Koinonia Farm which I had visited and wrote the CottonPatch versions of the New Testament, which I had read during my second introduction to Christianity years ago. Also during orientation week I attended the Wednesday devotional at the office and was surprised by the radical-ness of the theology and so moved by the beauty of it that I had a hard time concentrating on not crying so people wouldn’t think I was “emotionally unstable”, a fearsome psychological term often put on the emotionally expressive people artists tend to be. I laugh and cry easily, especially when I am witness to something so powerfully human, so powerfully divine. I fought back the tears so hard during that service that I prayed no one would speak to me because I was sure my voice would not work. When I least expected it, here was this thoroughly mature, hard to ignore, theoretically complex and extremely difficult theology and a Christian community trying to follow it! It was without doubt the most powerful spiritual moment for me since entering the desert period. Never had anything I have ever encountered in my life been so doggedly persistent as this God and this theology. It won’t leave me alone.

So where does that put me now? I’m still going through what Dorothy Day called the “long loneliness”, the human isolation and alienation that comes from not having a spiritual community. But I’m becoming convinced of two things: one, that I want to become a follower of this Christ and two, that I cannot do that in isolation.

So I am praying to find a community.  And this time I’m trying to remember that a community is made up of individuals, all of whom have failings and that sometimes those communities don’t work out. But that even if that is the case, you should be careful not to reject the God, not to reject the theology that brought you to that community and most of all, not to reject your own spirituality. That’s what I’ve done for two years after I left Colombia. And that’s why I am in the desert.

I am going to try again. I am going to try to learn how to listen again. I am going to try have ears to hear and eyes to see. I am going to try again to learn how to pray. I have to do a lot of thinking about what prayer is exactly because I think it’s something more complicated than we usually give it credit for.

Chile has a saint, a couple actually. One of them is St. Teresita who is from Los Andes which is also where the second of Habitat’s housing projects here is located.  Tomorrow I think I will go there just to see.  Pilgrimages sometimes help in these sorts of situations.  Lots of people leave prayers for St. Teresa there at the shrine written on scraps of paper. Maybe I’ll leave mine.  I wish I knew how to pray! Maybe praying is like hammering and I’m a bit rusty at both.  I think one needs to practice to get good at it. I need practice at both.  Make every smack of the hammer a prayer.
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*The second being Martin Luther King Jr.

"Living close to the ground": on embracing -and balancing- anger

Those back and forth posts about politics, religion and spirituality (see post and comments below) have me thinking about my own spirituality lately, so this is going to be one of those confessional posts.

I have been developing a very bad temper over the past 2-3 years.  It came out again this morning as I was biking to class --I didn't want to go.  There's a beautiful thunderstorm coming and I wanted to stay home and drink a nice cup of coffee and watch the rain.  GIL's gone off on an errand and so I have some alone time.  I like to do these deep check-ins with myself every now and then.  But I couldn't this morning.  I had to go to my stupid class (I took a mental health day two weeks ago so I couldn't take one again today). 

So I get on my bike and go and I'm sorta running late but I make good time on the 3 mile trip and I get to campus and I come to an intersection where there are no cars in sight (this is on campus, okay?  The roads are blocked off during the day to private vehicles) and I see the motorcycle cop on the corner but I do a little rolling stop anyway (as opposed to a complete stop where the wheels stop turning) and of course he gives me a ticket.  Shame on me for not thinking of course he's going to be a jerk; he's a cop ferchrissakes!

And I get really, really angry. 

The spiritual side of anger

Over the past year my spiritual side has been languishing.  I've been in the desert.  The God-within and I have circling each other warily for some time now without speaking.  The reasons for this I think are complicated and anyway what's more interesting to me now than how I got here is how do I react to being here and maybe even, how do I get out? 

So one of my resolutions for the new year is to address that question.  Expect more posts on spirituality.

Along those lines, here's something that's been troubling me lately.

Gloria hallelujah!

Ok, I admit I am truly desperate if I end up going to the local spanish language evangelical church just to hear a few precious words of spoken Spanish this morning because here there are no telenovelas, no AM radio stations, no "Sabado Gigante!", no nothing in Spanish here in north Florida. 

I go and because I look "American" they explain that the English language service was at 8:30.  No, I say, I want the Spanish.  No I don't want a translator.  Yes, I'm understanding ok.  No, don't give me the visitor's packet.  Don't make me stand up and say my name and welcome me as a first time visitor.  Oh no, please don't pray for me! 

Dios mio!  Are "Assemblies of God" Pentecostal?  It doesn't say Pentecostal anywhere but they have a Pentecostal magazine in the lobby.  Are there other women in pants?  Am I the only woman wearing pants?  Oh shit, I just realized my shoes are flip flops!  I only have two pairs of shoes, sneakers for running and flip flops for everything else.  I didn't even think about my shoes.  I sit on my feet.  I think about all the Evangelical churches I had to sit through in Colombia.  I think about opening myself to another culture within my own country.

The man behind me is singing very loudly off key.  I hate singing in church.  There are no hymnals; they project the words on a big screen positioned at the front of the church.  If I don't sing they'll think I don't understand and come over and offer me a translator again.

I sing.

They don't stop singing.  They sing and sing and sing.  True to evangelical form they have a drum set and saxophones.  The cymbals clash around us, drowing out the human voices.  Everything is amplified and the sanctuary is filled with a great cacophony.  I can no longer hear my own voice.  The song never ends.  One song flows without pause right into the next.  All the words are the same: El Senor is worthy of praise.  Praise the Lord.  Holy, holy, holy.

We pass an hour just singing.  When the sermon finally starts I make a note of the time so next week I can come later.  The first thing the preacher says is that they have a worship service in English at 8:30 for any English-speaking visitors.  He repeats this information in English. Then he starts the sermon by having us open our Bibles --oh crap! I forgot to bring a Bible!  I ALWAYS forget to bring a Bible when I go to church!  I am a good medieval Catholic peasant.  I never associate going to church with a particular reading material.  I figure they're gonna just tell me everything.  And they do which is good because there are no Bibles in the little wooden pockets built into the backs of the pews.  I worry someone will come offer to share with me but no one does. 

The pastor reads a passage about Elijah visiting a land suffering from famine and asking a poor widow and her child for food and water.  The widow says she has only a tiny bit of flour and some oil, she was going to prepare a last meal for herself and her son before they die.  Elijah promises that if she feeds him too the tiny bit of flour and oil would not diminish until the rains come again.  The woman accepts.  The pastor spends an hour talking about this virtuous mother who has not let circumstances diminish her morality.  He ends the sermon by asking the women in the congregation what kind of mothers they are compared to this one? 

Even though I am focused on the still miraculous process of listening to the once foreign sounding babble transform itself into meaningful words and the words stringing themselves into coherent, sense-filled sentences, I start looking for the appropriate time to escape.  I'd been there over two hours and that's way past my limit for such things.  Those people over there are leaving, I think.  But the pastor is praying I can't walk out now.  He prays and prays and prays.  I think if one judges my Spanish abilities by how much I understood cliche ridden prayers, it would be a highly misleading assessment.  Ok, as soon as the prayer's over I can leave.  Bendito es El Senor.  Bendito sea su nombre.  The prayer seems to be winding down.  Gracias, Senor!  Gloria, hallelujah!  Bendito es El Senor.  Bendito sea su nombre.  Amen.

I walk out into the flooded daylight and turn my bicycle towards home resolving to myself in Spanish that I WILL go manyana mismo to the Latino student center.  There has to be something else.

If a messiah speaks in the desert and no one hears him do you still have a religion?

You know Ash Wednesday is not really a Holy Day of Obligation?  It's true.  You don't actually have to go to mass today.  So I'm not.  I'm not because I'm tired of it.  I'm tired of going to masses and hearing terrible uninspired sermons filled with meaningless cliches and I'm tired of feeling alienated, angered that this ancient religion has turned 180 degrees and is now the religion of the rich who see no conflict between driving to church in their BMWs and listening to the 2,000 year old words of a crazy wild eyed radical impoverished social outcast messiah of the 1st century.  And yes, it's true that the beauty of the communion, the body of Christ,  is still apparent to me and can never cease to be so no matter how flawed we 21st century humans may be, as everyone lines up and despite everything --despite nuclear war and mass murder and slavery and ethnic hatred and colonization-- despite everything terrible that we have done, we go anyway up to the altar --we are not worthy, Lord, but only say the word, only say the word-- and despite everything we eat the body of Christ and try again. 

Hope is revolutionary. And I am in love with the revolution. 

But that doesn't mean I like to go to North American masses.  I don't like to go.  I go instead to homeless shelters to confess my sins.  And lately I don't go anywhere.

It's a terrible day for writing.  That part of me from which stories and poems and essays spring is sleeping late today and shows no signs of getting up, having its coffee and doing its morning excercises. 

Maybe it's because I am feeling anxious in anticipation of an upcoming visit with my family.  It is impossible for me to fit into the box they have carved out for me and it is impossible for me to show them my own I have carved out for myself.  I'd rather just be invisible.

Statistically speaking, it's probably more likely that things will get better from this point than it is that they'll get worse. 

T. S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us