Roe vs. Wade Is Over!

Today, June 24^, 2022, on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus no less, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the 1973 ruling that took abortion laws out of the hands of the people and essentially made it permissive to kill unborn children at will.  This is a historic day!  From the Catholic News Agency:

The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade in a historic 6—3 decision released Friday that brings a sudden and dramatic end to nearly a half-century of nationwide legalized abortion in the U.S.

 

The opinion, in the Mississippi abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is widely seen as the Supreme Court’s most highly anticipated and consequential ruling since Roe. It not only overturns Roe, the landmark 1973 abortion case, but also Casey v. Planned Parenthood, a 1992 decision that affirmed Roe.

 

"Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority," the opinion states. "We now overrule these decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives."

I thought this might have been anti climatic given the leak of this decision a few weeks ago but frankly when I heard I started sobbing in tears of joy.  So much of my politics, heart, and prayers have gone into this.  And for it to come on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is too much of a coincidence.  It is providential!

In response Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chairman of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities issued a statement:

“This is a historic day in the life of our country, one that stirs our thoughts, emotions and prayers. For nearly fifty years, America has enforced an unjust law that has permitted some to decide whether others can live or die; this policy has resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of preborn children, generations that were denied the right to even be born.

 

“America was founded on the truth that all men and women are created equal, with God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This truth was grievously denied by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized and normalized the taking of innocent human life. We thank God today that the Court has now overturned this decision. We pray that our elected officials will now enact laws and policies that promote and protect the most vulnerable among us.

 

“Our first thoughts are with the little ones whose lives have been taken since 1973. We mourn their loss, and we entrust their souls to God, who loved them from before all ages and who will love them for all eternity. Our hearts are also with every woman and man who has suffered grievously from abortion; we pray for their healing, and we pledge our continued compassion and support. As a Church, we need to serve those who face difficult pregnancies and surround them with love.   

 

“Today’s decision is also the fruit of the prayers, sacrifices, and advocacy of countless ordinary Americans from every walk of life. Over these long years, millions of our fellow citizens have worked together peacefully to educate and persuade their neighbors about the injustice of abortion, to offer care and counseling to women, and to work for alternatives to abortion, including adoption, foster care, and public policies that truly support families. We share their joy today and we are grateful to them. Their work for the cause of life reflects all that is good in our democracy, and the pro-life movement deserves to be numbered among the great movements for social change and civil rights in our nation’s history.

 

“Now is the time to begin the work of building a post-Roe America. It is a time for healing wounds and repairing social divisions; it is a time for reasoned reflection and civil dialogue, and for coming together to build a society and economy that supports marriages and families, and where every woman has the support and resources she needs to bring her child into this world in love.

 

“As religious leaders, we pledge ourselves to continue our service to God’s great plan of love for the human person, and to work with our fellow citizens to fulfill America’s promise to guarantee the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people.”

I wasn’t going to quote the entire response, but every sentence in there is worth reading.  I take humble pride in being one of the millions whose prayers affected this outcome.  Don’t ever think that prayers have no effect.  They do.

The other thing is that now that we have accomplished this milestone, we must prepare for the battle on the state level.  Each state becomes a battle ground, and living in New York, I am at the epicenter of Satan’s reign.  May God give us fortitude.

But for now, for today: Rejoice!

EDIT, 25 June 2022 @ 11:21 AM

It just dawned on me.  What a remarkable confluence of events.  Not only was June 24, 2022 the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, not only was it the Feast Day of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, from whence all compassions comes from, not only was it the birthday of St. John the Baptist, who leaped in the womb, it was the day of peak alignment of the planets.  From Space.com:

https://www.space.com/rare-five-planets-alignment--photo-june-2022 

The rare sight of five bright planets lining up with the moon wowed skywatchers around the world Friday, with some gearing up for more this weekend to see a planetary sight that won't happen again until 2040.

Throughout June, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn have lined up from left to right, in their orbital order from the sun, before dawn in the southeastern sky. Early Friday (June 24), the moon joined the planet parade in an awesome sight captured by astrophotographer Wright Dobbs, a meteorologist for the U.S. National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Florida.

Dobbs?  Does it say his name is Dobbs?  Oh my!  When I noticed all this coming together and  realized it was no coincidence, I literally got goosepimples

Heavenly Father, I am humbled before Your majesty.  Guide us to peace.

Poetry: “Goshawk” by Peter Kane Dufault

A friend of mine sent me an email the other day with an urging to check out a particular poem.  Here is her note:

 

When you have time, Manny, please look at this poem: 

       “Goshawk”   By poet Peter Kane Dufault

I happened upon it and was struck by its excellence yet violence. If you read it, tell me if it reminds you of a dark, shadowy likeness of Hopkins’ “The Windhover.’’ It really seems that way to me, a world without God.

I love it when friends ask me questions on literature.  It pricks something in me to investigate. 

First, you can find the poem at Poetry Nook,  but here’s the poem.

 

Goshawk

by Peter Kane Dufault

 

That harbinger of God's hardness, North

American Goshawk — storm-

grey above, ice-grey beneath — segment

of a winter azimuth — de-

tached herself from this morning and

seized a black hen and caromed

thirty yards through the soft snow, wrenching

feathers and flesh out, too

blood-crazy to kill clean. . . .

 

Tell me

if it's not hard how a haggard

hasn't even the hangman's mercy

but tears the heart out alive — that she

should have been made so;

 

and so, too, that when the dog

ran yapping and drove her off,

the grey crucifer levitated

in such a cold pride of windblown

lightness over the tines of the trees

 

you'd have forgiven her, even

if she could have torn

in that worse way there is:

with a word, never breaking the skin.

I had never heard of Peter Kane Dufault before.  He’s got a Wikpedia entry and a listing in Poetry Foundation, so he’s a poet of some merit.  He lived through most of the 20^th century (1923-2013), fought in WWII, and even ran for Congress on an Anti-Vietnam War platform.  The Poetry Foundation bio note says he was highly thought of by some more well-known poets: “Poets such as Marianne Moore and Ted Hughes championed Dufault, as did New Yorker editor Howard Moss, who published the poet 44 times.”  Poetry Foundation lists six poems attributed to him, but none are as good as “Goshawk.”  Searching the internet you can find some two dozen poems of his.  Again, nothing I found as good as “Goshawk,” but of note you might want to read “After Boxing”  and “Paramath.”   

Perhaps the best of the obituaries is by Brad Leithauser in the New Yorker, published on June 7, 2013, several weeks after Dufault’s passing.  Here’s his opening:

 

A marvellous poet whom you’ve probably never heard of died some weeks ago. His name was Peter Kane Dufault, and at the time of his death he was a couple of days short of ninety. On the face of it, his lack of renown is surprising, for he had some prominent supporters, including Marianne Moore and Richard Wilbur and Ted Hughes and Amy Clampitt. He was also embraced by Howard Moss, the poetry editor of The New Yorker from 1948 until 1987. Dufault published forty-four poems in the magazine, nearly all of them during Moss’s tenure.

Leithauser characterizes Dufault as that poet we’d all wished we had known, a “pure poet” who lived his life in obscurity and simplicity.

It’s tempting to overstate the virtues of the recently dead, so I’ll resist declaring that, at the time of his death, Dufault was my favorite living American poet. But he was certainly among the five or six whose work counted most for me. In one way, he was preëminent: I came to think of him as the Pure Poet. If this was a romantic image, it was a romanticism he encouraged.

Perhaps if one had to reach for what Dufault’s themes centered around, I think this little characterization captures it.

 

He was constantly posing new theological questions, in an era often hostile to poetry of devotion. He looked hard at the natural world, then looked hard at its spiritual implications.

Here Leithauser captures Dufault’s style.

 

I first came upon him in the seventies, in “The New Yorker Book of Poems.” I fell hard for “In an Old Orchard,” with its abandoned farm “still pitifully gathering all / windfalls onto its damp lap of graves,” and looked up his two out-of-print collections, “Angel of Accidence” (1954) and “For Some Stringed Instrument” (1957). I didn’t know then that Marianne Moore had been a fan, but affinities between them were easy to spot: Dufault, too, had an eerily sharp eye for the more idiosyncratic dwellers of the animal kingdom. Manx cats and tarsiers and mud-dauber wasps and mastodons inhabited his stanzas. He was like her, too, in being quite fanciful in his imagery (an old turkey with a head “like a loading-hook from a drowned galleon,” a hefty starling seen as a “sampler-shape whose bid / to be a bird / suffers from thickness of the thread”) while always respecting his creatures’ fierce and inalienable reality: you never had the feeling that his was a denatured zoo, a menagerie of mere symbols. A reader was in danger of getting stung if he mistook one of Dufault’s wasps for an emblem.

It sounds like Dufault’s work is similar to Marranne Moore’s, who had a sharp eye for observation, a precise word or metaphor to capture it, and loved to write about animals for their wondrous nature.  Leithauser continues.

 

In 1993, a book of selected poems, “New Things Come Into the World,” appeared, published by a small press, Lindisfarne, which normally didn’t publish poetry. At that time, I’d never met Dufault, though we’d exchanged some letters. I reviewed “New Things Come Into the World” in the New York Review of Books, writing with that special charged eagerness that comes of introducing a little-known treasure to a potentially wide audience. I called him a “poet of vivid landscapes.” I called him “as fine an ‘animal poet’ as any American now going.” I compared him to Moore and Elizabeth Bishop and Clampitt and May Swenson.

Finally Leithauser felt a certain pride in knowing a poet of distinction that lived in obscurity.

 

Though he slowed down, creatively, in his last decade, he continued to write beautiful poems, and did so, nobly, in an undeserved obscurity. Now and then I’d come upon someone, in person or in print, who shared my enthusiasm, and I’d feel that clandestine bond which comes with membership in a small high-minded club. I felt this keenly when I read Ted Hughes’s blurb for a later Dufault collection, “Looking in All Directions” (2000): “So fresh and new and itself… wonderful stuff. Snatches those uncatchable moments—like snatching a butterfly out of the air—then letting it go undamaged. So nimble and delicate.”

 

###

Now to the poem. It’s an interesting poem.  It's not Gerard Manly Hopkins.  It's very visual, so it captures the reader.  Are there similarities to Hopkins?  This is a very different poem that “The Windhover.”  (I provided a detailedanalysis of Gerard Manly Hopkins’, “The Windhover.”)   It is quite possible Dufault is alluding to “The Windhover” but I just don’t see the interdependence.  Perhaps Dufault’s image of the goshawk “detaching herself from the “winter azimuth” is an allusion to the Hopkin’s image of  a “dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,”  Or it’s coincidental imagery or Dufault just liked the image so much he reinvented it for his purpose.  An allusion is more than just reference; it requires significance, and I’m not getting the significance. 

Other than Dufault's use of alliteration I do not see other similarities.  Dufault does not use any real rhythm, sprung or conventional.  He's very prosaic, modernist, free verse, though his diction is terse, which gives it power, especially for a violent poem.  I'm baffled by Dufault's use of breaking words and phrases at the end of a line.  Hopkins does it to keep meter.  Not sure why Dufault does it.  Perhaps as an aesthetic capturing of the theme of ripping things apart?  That would be skillful on his part. 

Dufault's theme has been done many times: one finds in nature a certain viciousness, (he calls it a "hardness") and one points to God for it, either to condemn God, to "prove" God doesn't exist, or to point to some great spiritual meaning in the act of animals killing animals. 

Can you tell which of the three Dufault is expressing?  I think it's the latter but I'm not sure, and if it is the latter then what is this great spiritual meaning in the act of a hawk killing a chicken?  I've pondered it for a while.  He sees in the hawk gliding above a cross (“the grey crucifer levitated”), which is a nice metaphor, but what does it suggest?  Isn't Christ the one who gets killed and not the killer?

Why is the hawk the "harbinger" of God's hardness?  Is this an allegory?  A harbinger is one who comes ahead of another.  So is God going to come and destroy us?  Perhaps.  Or is the allegory a representation of the Calvinist interpretation of the crucifixion, where God's wrath is redirected on the Son and thereby satisfied?  I don't know.  And is that a reference to God at the end, imagining the hawk killing with a word instead of with violence (“if she could have torn/in that worse way there is:/with a word”)?  God creates with a word; Christ is the Word made flesh.  And why is killing through a word "the worse way"?  You got me. 

This may all hold together and be a great poem, but given that I have all these questions and still can't get beyond the surface events I wouldn't call this a great poem.  I do love how it reads.  Alliteration can be showy and stilted, but when done well as here it really drives the point as in the second stanza:

 

Tell me

if it's not hard how a haggard

hasn't even the hangman's mercy

but tears the heart out alive — that she

should have been made so

 And one marvels at the absolute power of the central violence in that opening:

 

          …de-

tached herself from this morning and

seized a black hen and caromed

thirty yards through the soft snow, wrenching

feathers and flesh out, too

blood-crazy to kill clean. . . .

The alliteration of “feathers and flesh” along with the hard C’s of “caromed,” “crazy,” “kill,” and “clean” adds to the very visual moment of struggle and brutality.  I am glad to have been introduce to Peter Kane Dufault.  I will have to remember him if I run across his work again.

 ###

In my search I found a couple of videos of Mr. Dufault.

First an extemporaneously composed poem criticizing America:

Second, here is a trailer to a documentary movie of his views” What I Meant to Tell You: An American Poet's State of the Union.”

He was definitely anti American, or of a different America to give him his due.  In his obituary Leithauser did say he would have edited out Dufault’s political poems.  They are not that good.  We would have disagreed vehemently, but still in my engagement on his life and this poem I grew to like Peter Kane Dufault.  Yes I can see how he was a “pure poet.”

 ###

Postscript:

I received a reply from my friend who had originally sent me the email on the poem. 

Her Comment:

I looked Peter Kane Dufault’s work up a little more and found that he wrote a poem called ‘’Peregrines,’’ and in that poem he quotes directly from ‘’The Windhover.’’ He had a rich imagination and an exceptional way with words but ‘’Peregrines‘ is not his best work. Unfortunately, this reader found it empty and meaningless. You mentioned that he was anti-American. Do you mean ‘’progressive left,’’ ‘’woke’’ anti-American?

My reply:

I really enjoyed "Peregrines"!  It's a poetic ramble, a jazzy improvisational piece that streams language around an emotion and theme.  It reminds me of the Beat poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti in particular.  I have a secret crush for that poetry.  It's lesser poetry than more structured and sculpted but I find it fun.  My trash food addiction!  ;)

Dufault is an old time Liberal, someone of the Beat Generation.  I think that's a good analogy.  He’s definitely progressive and definitely "woke" but aren't they all?  In music he would be like the folk music types.  In fact he reminds me of Pete Seeger.  And amazingly they lived almost the exact same years (1919-2014).

Sunday Meditation: When the Lord Established the Heavens

Today’s most interesting reading I find is the first reading.

 

 Thus says the wisdom of God:
            "The LORD possessed me, the beginning of his ways,
                        the forerunner of his prodigies of long ago;
            from of old I was poured forth,
                        at the first, before the earth.
            When there were no depths I was brought forth,
                    when there were no fountains or springs of water;
            before the mountains were settled into place,
                        Thus says the wisdom of God:
            "The LORD possessed me, the beginning of his ways,
                        the forerunner of his prodigies of long ago;
            from of old I was poured forth,
                        at the first, before the earth.
            When there were no depths I was brought forth,
                    when there were no fountains or springs of water;
            before the mountains were settled into place,
                        before the hills, I was brought forth;
            while as yet the earth and fields were not made,
                        nor the first clods of the world.

            "When the Lord established the heavens I was there,
          when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep;
            when he made firm the skies above,
                        when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth;
            when he set for the sea its limit,
            so that the waters should not transgress his command;
            then was I beside him as his craftsman,
                        and I was his delight day by day,
            playing before him all the while,
                        playing on the surface of his earth;
                        and I found delight in the human race."      

-Prv 8:22:31

So the passage is spoken from a first person perspective.  Who is this person speaking?

 

Happy Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity!

Notable Quote: What the Church Needs by John Henry Newman

Here is another distinctive quote by this wonderful prose writer.

 

“What we need at present for our Church's well-being, is not invention, nor originality, nor sagacity, nor even learning in our divines, at least in the first place, though all gifts of God are in a measure needed, and never can be unseasonable when used religiously, but we need peculiarly a sound judgment, patient thought, discrimination, a comprehensive mind, an abstinence from all private fancies and caprices and personal tastes,—in a word, Divine Wisdom."

 

In the first main clause he provides a list of negatives (“not, nor, etc.) of what the Church doesn’t need.  Then he pauses with a subordinate clause qualifying those negatives before he gives a second main clause providing a list of what it does need, including an “abstinence” which is another form of negation.  Then he tops it off with a summation, “Divine Wisdom.”  That is just so beautiful. 

Sunday Meditation: Speaking in Tongues and the Tower of Babel

Today’s most important reading I believe is the first reading.

 

When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled,

they were all in one place together.

And suddenly there came from the sky

a noise like a strong driving wind,

and it filled the entire house in which they were.

Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire,

which parted and came to rest on each one of them.

And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit

and began to speak in different tongues,

as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim.

 

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven

staying in Jerusalem.

At this sound, they gathered in a large crowd,

but they were confused

because each one heard them speaking in his own language.

They were astounded, and in amazement they asked,

“Are not all these people who are speaking Galileans?

Then how does each of us hear them in his native language?

We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites,

inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia,

Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,

Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene,

as well as travelers from Rome,

both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs,

yet we hear them speaking in our own tongues

of the mighty acts of God.”

        -Acts 2:1:11 

What is interesting is that the Vigil reading to Pentecost Sunday is different, and it’s Genesis 11:1-11, the passage pertaining to the Tower of Babel.   Let me post that side by side for your comparison and meditation. 

The whole world spoke the same language, using the same words.

While the people were migrating in the east,

they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.

They said to one another,

"Come, let us mold bricks and harden them with fire."

They used bricks for stone, and bitumen for mortar.

Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city

and a tower with its top in the sky,

and so make a name for ourselves;

otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth."

 

The LORD came down to see the city and the tower

that the people had built.

Then the LORD said: ""If now, while they are one people,

all speaking the same language,

they have started to do this,

nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do.

Let us then go down there and confuse their language,

so that one will not understand what another says.""

Thus the LORD scattered them from there all over the earth,

and they stopped building the city.

That is why it was called Babel,

because there the LORD confused the speech of all the world.

It was from that place that he scattered them all over the earth.

        -Gen 11:1:11

So in what way is the diversity of language central to both passages?

Happy Pentecost Sunday, the birthday of the Church.