A friend to many at Hope Church and Hope College, our friend Jack Ridl offers a few poems and reflections this month. Along with the wisdom of his mentor William Stafford, what follows blesses and teaches and welcomes us all to a new way to be in prayer. (Enjoy the potato pancakes :-)) ~Randy
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About my poem: For a time I brooded about the Biblical injunction to pray without ceasing. I mean, how do you do that? There are snacks to be enjoyed, bills to pay, ice to chip off the steps, some movie a friend said, “You Have to see this one!”, sermons to listen to. I mean c’mon! So as I usually do, I put on my zen lenses, thought about what William Stafford had shown me, and there it was–live within prayer, live prayer-fully, live prayer-like.
About coupling my poem with William Stafford’s “Ask Me”? Stafford showed me in person and in his work another way toward peace, into alternative consciousness, how to brave different but not combative perceptions. For example, in my poem the word “sins” appears. Today I think about taking it out. It’s presumptuous, arrogant for me to think I know what “sins” are. At least I leave it up to the birds to decide, to “twitch” for them, if there are such.
Stafford uses the word “mistakes”– “. . . ask me mistakes I’ve made.” And we rightly assume that he will tell us later on in the poem. In an interview, when asked what he thought sin is, he said he wouldn’t presume to know, that he couldn’t know. If he did presume to know, he would judge in a way that was a form of violence. And so he lets the river answer for him. And note his condition: “When the river is ice.” He’s not suggesting that the river does not speak, but that it does. By asking the questioner to turn to the river he deflects a possible conflict, and offers an opportunity to learn from the river, that “What the river says, that is what I say.”
William Stafford was a member of The Church of the Brethren. Jack Ridl is a member of the Douglas Congregational Church of Christ.
~Jack Ridl
After Reading Dom John Chapman, Benedictine Abbot
“Pray as you can; not as you can’t.”
My prayers will sit on the backs
of bedraggled donkeys, in the sidecars
of Harleys, in the pockets of night
watchmen, on the laps of widows.
They will be the stones I walk by,
the smudges I leave on anything I touch,
the last place the last snow melts. They
will be brown, weekdays, potato pancakes.
They will stick to the undersides of porches,
docks, dog paws, and carpets. When I’m sick,
my cough will carry them. When you leave
in the morning, they will sink into the bed,
the sofa, every towel. I will carry them
in the modesty of my feet. Everything
will be praying: My dog will be petitioning
for mercy when he stops to sniff a post.
Every window in our house will be
an offering for supplication. The birds
at the feeder will be twitching
for my sins. I will say my prayers
are bread dough, doorknobs, golf tees,
any small and nameless change of heart.
When I forget my prayers, they will
bundle up and go out on their own
across the street, down into the basement,
into a small town with no mayor where
there is a single swing in the park. When
I forget, they’ll know I was watching TV,
the sky, or listening to Basie, remembering
the way my mother and father jitterbugged
to the big band station, he pulling her close,
then spinning her out across the green kitchen floor.
—Jack Ridl
from Broken Symmetry (Wayne State University Press)
Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
~William Stafford
Copyrighted in the name of the poet. Used for educational purposes.