Elected exiles

After I Peter 1:1-2 

Chosen, called out,

exiled, far from home,

we are the elected exiles,

living each day is dispersion,

by the waters of Babylon,

strangers in strange lands,

yet strangers called out,

selected, chosen. It begs

the questions: elected

to what? Chosen for what?

Alien and dispersed, why?

Whats and whys may not

be clear, but we know

the elector, the chooser,

the architect. We are

chosen in foreknowledge 

by the spirit, Father, sanctified

by the Spirit, baptized 

with the blood of the Son.

We are the elect. We are

the dispersion, living †he new,

living in the old.

 

Photograph by Francois Hoang via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

A Review of Thin Places & Sacred Spaces: Poems, edited by Sarah Law – Steve Knepper at New Verse Review.

 

In the Letting Go – poem by Martha Orlando at Meditations of My Heart.

 

Squirrels, Love Poems, and Jesus – Megan Willome.

Exotic, toxic city

After Daniel 1 

An exotic, toxic city,

a city alien to belief

and faith, a city

treasuring gods

of stone, gods of clay,

gods of metal.

 

An exotic, toxic city,

welcoming new citizens

who bend the knee,

rewarding those who

reject their own 

for the dazzling array

of wealth and power.

 

Yet even here, here

in this citadel of destruction,

and false worship, four

decline to eat what the city

offers, the king’s food, 

to show where life and

sustenance are born.

 

And it’s not from 

this exotic, toxic, city.

 

Photograph by Jisun Han via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Culture shock

After Daniel 1

To have everything,

family, wealth, position,

youth, privilege, and

in a moment all is

lost, wiped away,

taken to exile, 

the life before erased.

 

Given a new name,

a pagan name, implying

protection by a god

of clay and stone, 

identity stripped away

to be remade with

a new reality, worldly

cosmopolitan, sophisticated,

empire-oriented, internationalist,

globalist.

 

Four resist, with respect.

Four resist, faithful not

to a nostalgic idea or

a memory of what was

lost, but to what they

knew in their heads and 

what they knew in their hearts

to be true.

 

Photograph by Jose Lopez Franco via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"Between Two Millstones" by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

In February 1974, writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) was expelled from the Soviet Union. After years of his writings being published in the West, the triggering event for the Soviet government was the publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s highly detailed account of life in the Soviet prison camp system. 

The writer was flown to West Germany, beginning an exile that would last until 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the restoration of his Russian citizenship, and his eventual return. But in 1974, his wife and young children had to be allowed to leave, his rather large archive of research materials, notes, and other documents had to be smuggled out, a place to live had to be found. He also had to navigate life in the West, survive the machinations of unscrupulous people disguised as helpers, and deal with a news media he found horrific.

Between Two Millstones, Book 1: Sketches of Exile 1974-1978 is the first of two volumes on the 20 years he spent in the West. Translated by Peter Constantine. The account provides a story of an internationally famous author bewildered by Western culture and society. He was at first embraced by the Western news media and intellectuals; he was something of a problem and embarrassment for the Richard Nixon / Henry Kissinger plan for détente with Soviet Russia. 

The media the intellectual elites soon discovered, however, that Solzhenitsyn was not the Western-style liberal they expected; he was first and foremost a Russian, and a conservative one at that; the man actually worshipped faithfully in the Russian Orthodox Church. He learned quickly to distrust the news media in all of its forms

Solzhenitsyn must have kept meticulously detailed diaries or have a phenomenal memory, or both. The memoir covers an almost daily account of his first five years outside of Russia. He had to give countless interviews. He had to find a place to live, considering Switzerland, Norway, and Canada before finally deciding on Vermont in the United States. He had to deal with the constant propaganda efforts of the KGB, the Soviet counterpart to the CIA. And he had to gather together his archives, visit universities and research centers, and somehow find time to help his wife raise their children.

Solzhenitsyn and his three sons about 1975

It’s no wonder he often felt caught between what he called two millstones – the millstone pf the Soviets and the KGB, and the millstone of unending pressure from elements of Western culture, and Western culture itself. 

I have read most of Solzhenitsyn’s works (including all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago) and his two earlier memoirs, The Oak and the Calf and Invisible Allies. I had believed that his falling out with the Western news media and intellectual elites stemmed from his 1978 Harvard commencement speech, published as A World Split Apart. More than one pundit observed that Solzhenitsyn had done something at Harvard that no one ever had done anywhere before – he gave a commencement address that was remembered a year later.  What Between Two Millstones makes clear, however, is that the falling out between the writer and western news media happened much earlier, almost as soon as he arrived in Germany.

Solzhenitsyn in 1974.

The memoir also provides a deep understanding of Solzhenitsyn experiences as he began to write his fictional account of the rise of the Bolsheviks and how they seized power in 1917. Doing research at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, he’s shocked to learn that the first revolution of 1917, in which the tsar abdicated and Alexander Kerensky took over as national leader, was not the glorious moment he and many other Russians had believed it to be. In fact, that revolution was just as much responsible for the eventual tyranny of communism as the second revolution of 1917, that in November that was celebrated as the founding moment of Soviet Russia. 

Between Two Millstones is for admirers of Solzhenitsyn, for critics interested in his writings, and for historians who want to understand a short five years that, in their own way, contributed to the ultimate dissolution of Soviet Russia.

Top photograph: Solzhenitsyn at his home in Cavendish, Vermont.

Scattered

After Nehemiah 1:1-11

Scattered across geographies

and boundaries, moved

beyond rivers and seas,

the exiles wander in memory

of a reality lost, forced and torn

away. The memory is of stones

and flowers, of winding ways

and streets, alleys filled with

the shouts of merchants and priests,

children calling out their games,

of sounds of horses and cows herded

with the sheep, and the quiet of houses,

homes behind walls.        

It is all a memory now,

waiting to become a hope.

Photograph by Lode Van de Velde via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Poetry of Displacement and Exile

“The need to destroy yourself and the need to survive fight each other like two brothers who’ve gone out of their minds. We hang up the soul’s clothes in the closet but we haven’t unpacked all its bags. Time passes and the way to deny exile is to deny the country we’re in, its people, its language, to reject them as specific witnesses of a mutilation: our own country is far away, what do these gringos know about its voices, its birds, its mourning, its storms.”

Argentine poet Juan Gelman (1930-2014) wrote those words in 1980, and in wrote them where he was currently living – Rome. With the disappearances and presumed deaths of his son and daughter-in-law at the hands of the military regime, Gelman fled for a safer place. And while exile was a safer place, it was also its own kind of prison.

The military junta ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. It was a brutal and murderous experience, especially for those suspected of left-wing or progressive political beliefs. Thousands of people were arrested and “disappeared,” including Gelman’s son and daughter-in-law. She was pregnant at the time, and, as it turns out, was allowed to live until she gave birth and then killed, the baby given to friends of the military regime. Gelman found his granddaughter 30 years later.

It’s difficult for those of us born and raised in a 241-year-old still-functioning democracy to imagine what drives a person to exile, and then what exile means for day-to-day life. It’s difficult to imagine thousands of people being arrested, and then nothing ever heard of them again. Escaping from one’s one fear of arrest and death is a miraculous thing, but then one must deal with the conditions of escape, being a stranger in a strange land, separated from the streets you know, the home you know, the church you attend, the grocery store where you shop, the holidays you celebrate, and often the very language you speak and understand.

Juan Gelman

This is the plight of the refugee and the exile, difficult even in the best of circumstances. While the United States is a nation of immigrants, and that would include refugees and exiles, but they have likely been a small portion of the overall mix. We contemporary Americans do not know what it means to flee the physical destruction of our land or the destruction of a murderous military regime.

Part of Gelman’s coping mechanism was poetry, including the invention of different personas for himself and “discovering” these lost poems. Reading them in the collection Dark Times Filled with Light is to read the struggle with the pain of personal loss and the pain of loss of self. He felt displaced, knowing the people he walked among in exile could not possibly understand his grief and loss, no matter how much they might sympathize with him.

Early On the Soul Begins to Hurt

Early on the soul begins to hurt / pale /

in the wavering light to explores your not being here /

the heart rises with misgivings /

goes over the sky like the sun

in daylong search / day in or day out / it burns

freezing / as if its bones thrown out

of joint / or like an unsaid word

where i try to march against death /

sould you harmonize harmonies that barely

make it across the world’s width /

broken / it broods over

what you left me / night on its feet

In exile, Gelman had his own separation from the life he knew, as well as the permanent separation from his children. The military regime robbed him of his day-to-day life, but it also robbed him of a future. And what he had to hold on to, he writes, was the determination never to accept the deaths of his son and daughter-in-law until he saw their bodies or their killers.

At Tweetspeak Poetry today, the discussion is continuing about Dark Times Filled with Light, led by L.W. Lindquist. Please visit the post and consider adding your voice.

Top photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Exile

Wanders

a desert the same

as an orchard

hot wind blowing

searing the face

the hands

wanders alone

in crowded streets

in forest solitude

never a resident

never a part

only a lone

others wander

nod when passing

joy in the sorrow

found

Photograph by Xoan Seoane via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.