Sunday Sermonette

Loren Eiseley 


We're off to a slow start. Proud Ugandan has been ill, and I've been preoccupied. Proud Ugandan tried to post, but it did work for some reason. All this is par for the course. What I don't want to do is to monopolize the converation. But I've been told (not by Proud Ugandan) that "white people take up a lot of space" and frequently more directly that I talk too much. None of that will take Proud Ugandan by surprise, so I thought I might as well post.

A recent post at Dave Pollard's wonderful blog How to Save the World praises of the American scientist, poet, writer Loren Eiseley. Eiseley died in 1977 but his books remain in print and there are many Web sites to discover his eloquent writing online. Pollard is often moved as much by Eiseley's prose and his poetry, and presents a few selections of his prose as poetry. This one seemed appropriate for a Sunday Sermonette:

"the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing"

Let men beat men, if they will,
but why do they have to beat and starve small things?
Why? -- Why? I will never forget that dog's eyes,
nor the eyes of every starved mongrel I have fed from Curacao to Cuernavaca.
Nor the drowning one I once fished out of an irrigation ditch in California,
only to see him limp away with his ribs showing
as mine once showed in that cabin long ago in Manitou.

This is why I am a wanderer forever in the streets of men,
a wanderer in mind,
and, in these matters, a creature of desperate impulse.

It is not because I am filled with obscure guilt
that I step gently over, and not upon, an autumn cricket.
It is not because of guilt
that I refuse to shoot the last osprey from her nest in the tide marsh.
I posses empathy;
I have grown with man in his mind's growing.
I share that sympathy and compassion
which extends beyond the barriers of class and race and form
until it partakes of the universal whole.

I am not ashamed to profess this emotion, nor will I call it a pathology.
Only through this experience many times repeated and enhanced
does man become truly human.

Only then will his gun arm be forever lowered.

Both Proud Ugandan and I have at times in our lives been deeply motivated by Christian faith, and both of us have changed course. Many religious people argue that morality requires religious faith. That doesn't seem the case, and mostly it seems futile to argue with religious zealots. However thoughtful believers have taken the time to consider Eiseley, for example this page.

In this passage Eiseley makes compassion central to his and our own humanity. These are not words of an immoral man left compassless by being unthethered to religion. They are words of a person taking his humanity seriously in composing a life; knowing his life is but a small part of all creation.