If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking

(Road to Town, woodcut by Gustave Baumann, 1881-1971,
German-born American artist and puppeteer)

The opposite of cruelty is not simply kindness or the end of the cruel relationship. The opposite of cruelty is hospitality.

This is the conclusion reached by the philosopher Philip Hallie (1922-1994) after he studied what the villagers of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon had done during the Second World War. Le Chambon was located in a part of France under the close eyes of the Nazis. All the Jews found in the area would be deported to the extermination camps in the East.

The residents decided as a village to provide food and shelter and comfort to any Jews knocking on their doors. Risking their lives, they saved more than 6000 Jews.

But their enduring hospitality did more than save lives. For example, writes Hallie, “the morning after a new refugee family came to town they would find on their front door a wreath with ‘Bienvenue!’ ‘Welcome!’ painted on a piece of cardboard attached to the wreath. Nobody knew who had brought the wreath; in effect, the whole town had brought it.”

“The people of Le Chambon,” wrote a woman years later who had been saved as a young girl, “showed to us that life can be different, that there are people who care, that people can live together and even risk their own lives for their fellow man.” The people of Le Chambon gave their guests hope for the future.

If I can stop one Heart from breaking,
I shall not live in Vain:
If I can ease one Life the Aching,
Or cool one Pain,

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again,
I shall not live in Vain.

~ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), American poet

(To read more, see Philip Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There)

Often after a Public Event

(Morning Sun, woodblock print by Gustave Baumann,
1881-1971, German-born American artist and puppeteer)

“There can be no Friendship where there is no Freedom,” wrote William Penn. “Friendship loves a free Air, and will not be penned up in straight and narrow Enclosures. It will speak freely, and act so too: and take nothing ill where no ill is meant; nay, where it is, ’twill easily forgive, and forget too, upon small Acknowledgments.”

~ William Penn (1644-1718), English Quaker and founder of the colony of Pennsylvania

OFTEN AFTER A PUBLIC EVENT

often after a public event
a pretty girl curly black hair
framing literary ambition
or a shy tall boy black curly
hair burning with sympathy

will say something in a foreign
accent to me we are from bosnia
hungarians or jews my mother
was born near your city back then
it was another country

now we are from here
what should we do with our accents

do like me I say
keep talking

~ Andrei Codrescu, born in 1946 in Romania, American poet, essayist, and novelist

Spring

(A Lilac Year, woodcut by Gustav Baumann, 1881-1971,
German-born American painter)

“Hopkins would never settle for being a dreamy little nature poet, a devotee of the pretty, and therefore a pretender of love. For how can you love weeds and thrush’s eggs and not love man? If God delights in the making of chestnuts, the more does he delight in making beings who can delight also in his making of chestnuts and everything else. Therefore, man, his labor and his ingenuity, must also be praised; for the quirky beauty of man’s own creativity, as evinced in sickles and ice-tongs and flails and adzes, reflects its source, the beauty of God.”

~ Anthony Esolen, from his book Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature

SPRING

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

~ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J. (1844-1899), British poet whose work has had a profound influence on modern poetry