LIFE Lines

Findings & Keepers

Thanks-Giving

The board of Belfast's Thanksgiving Square includes people

of all faiths and cultures, but the patron is Myrtle Smyth, a

woman intent on spreading the message that thanksgiving

can heal. In 1999, Smyth attended the Thanksgiving World

Assembly in Dallas, Texas, where leaders met to talk about

capitalizing on the good things in life. That experience

encouraged Smyth to continue her quest to establish a

Thanksgiving Square in her native Belfast, Ireland. The

Thanks-giving Square in Dallas, Texas, was established

in 1964. Their website is a reservoir of formation about

Thanksgiving worldwide. For more information,

use this link: Thanks-giving Square

Groundbreaking New Art Thanks-Giving

“If you look at drama in Shakespeare’s day, or

the novel in the last century, or the movies today,

it suggests that an art enters its golden age when

it is addressed to and energized by the general

audiences of its time. In a golden age of poetry

the audience will not be just the workshop, where

poets write for other poets, or the classroom – both

of which have provided crucial sanctuary to poetry

during the past half century. Its audience will lie

also in that world of non-poetry readers who come

to discover its deep sustenance. “To have great poets,

there must be great audiences too,” Whitman said,

and then he wrote for them.

Groundbreaking new art comes when artists make a

changed assumption about their relationship to their

audience, talk to their readers in a new way, and

assume they will understand. When Melville wrote,

“Call me Ishmael”; when Whitman wrote,

“I celebrate myself and sing myself,/ and what I assume you shall assume”; when Baudelaire wrote, “Hypocrite lecteur”;

when Frost, in the first poem of his first book, said

“You come too”: each seemed to make transforming

assumptions about his audience. Their direct address

was address made somehow more direct. It held,

succeeded, and literature was changed."

John Barr, 2005

Mother’s Evening Prayer

O gentle presence, peace and joy and power;

Life divine, that owns each waiting hour,

Thou Love that guards the nestling’s faltering flight!

Keep Thou my child on upward wing tonight.

Love is our refuge; only with mine eye

Can I behold the snare, the pit, the fall:

His habitation high is here, and nigh,

His arm encircles me, and mine, and all.

O make me glad for every scalding tear,

For hope deferred, ingratitude, disdain?

Wait, and love more for every hate, and fear

No ill, - since God is good, and loss is gain.

Beneath the shadow of His mighty wing;

In that sweet secret of the narrow way,

Seeking and finding, with the angels sine:

“Lo, I am with you always,” – watch and pray.

No snare, no fowler, pestilence or pain;

No night drops down upon the troubled breast,

When heaven’s aftersmile earth’s tear-drops gain,

And mother finds her home and heav’nly rest.

Mary Baker Eddy