Homily for the Memorial for Senator Eugene McCarthy
For a long time I wondered
if there was real significance to the fact
that most of Israel’s prophetic words
are remembered and written as poetry.
This is what I came to.
The prophets lived in an oral culture.
Things had to be remembered for a long time
before they were written down.
Biblical language, even as narrative,
is economical in the extreme.
Poetry, with its economic use of words,
with parallelism, and internal rhyme,
can be remembered with greater ease.
“There is an appointed time for everything,
and a time for every affair under the heavens.
A time to be born, a time to die;
a time to plant, a time to uproot the plant…”
We hear this passage from Ecclesiastes one time,
and we remember its phrases, its structure.
Although as my ability
to remember decreases
in a scary way, reminding me of its importance,
there is a second, perhaps more important reason
that the prophets used poetic language.
Poetry forces one to be
economic with language,
to express feelings and sense observations in a direct, nuanced manner.
There are a hundred ways to be angry about injustice
and no prophet can be a generalist —
he or she has to nail it, get it right.
Listen to Amos:
“Thus says the Lord:
For the three crimes of Israel, and for four,
I will not revoke my word:
Because they sell the just man for silver,
and the poor man for a pair of sandals.
They trample the heads of the weak
into the dust of the earth
and force the lowly out of the way.”(Amos 2.6)
I listen to Eugene’s speech at the time of the primary in New Hampshire.
As I listened to him speak,
they were like the words of Amos.
Words carefully chosen,
prophetic words — words of frustration, of anger, of grief and conviction
that we were on the wrong path as a nation,
that this war did not and could not make sense.
Eugene was a prophet for us and for the nation.
He was paying attention to the word of the Lord.
It is not an accident that Eugene was also a fine poet.
Poetry was the way that he could make sense
and write about politics, about the vocation of statesmen,
about the way that human beings
find and lose each other,
about longing for peace and searching for God.
Eugene was never sentimental about anything,
whether of Saint John’s or politics, or his faith for that matter.
As Father Colman Barry’s novitiate classmate
Eugene was invited to do the first reading
at the 50th anniversary celebration of Colman’s vows as a monk.
When he saw that this first reading was from the prophet Isaiah,
and contained the word “Zion” in it,
he wasn’t sure that he could read it:
he would have no truck with Zionism
or the politics of the state of Israel.
Colman had to do quick damage control to get this liturgy to move forward.
More rapidly than other forms of literature,
poetry unmasks sentimentality.
And if you don’t believe me,
just read a Hallmark card.
We are truly blessed with the life of Eugene McCarthy.
A prophet, a statesman, a poet, a husband, a dad,
a man of faith in God and profound hope.
And these are not in the order of importance.
I want to close with these words from “The Maple Tree.”
The maple tree that night
without wind or rain
let go its leaves
because its time had come.
Brown veined, spotted,
like old hands, fluttering in blessing,
they fell upon my head
and shoulders, and then
down to the quiet of my feet.
I stood, and stood
until the tree was bare
and have told no one
but you that I was there. ”
Abbot John Klassen, OSB
January 23, 2006
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