The Bells

Church Bells

Saturday is always movie night; it has been for decades, when the children were put to bed and my wife and I had time to quietly share a meal, it was dinner and a movie or better known as … Sanity night. Last weekend, the first weekend in Advent, the children all grown and left, we watched a movie about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, America’s poet before and after the US Civil War, the most acknowledged contentious period in US history …

… until now.

As a writer I tried my hand at poetry, rather I made an attempt that still mocks me; it proved impossible to find words that rhymed with ‘orange’ and ‘purple’. However, poetry isn’t about rhymes; it’s not even about rhythm. It’s about the adjectives. It’s also about the timeliness … and timelessness … of the words, because if we listen closely, Longfellow taunts us from the past. His most memorable verse, a Christmas poem put to song is Christmas Bells, my favorite rendition sung by the late Nat King Cole.

Civil War Cannon

Written in the last year of the US Civil War, Longfellow spoke about the ties that bind us as a people: the song of American brotherhood: “Peace on Earth, good will to men.” Yet, the cannons thundered; they drowned out the carol … God’s song … God’s words … God’s promise, while amplifying the brashness of men. How far are we from such days or are we as Americans not learning from our history, ironically a brief moment in the age of the Earth.

And in my despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said;

“For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of Peace on earth, good will to men!”

How do we, no matter our political beliefs, square the circle the damage we’ve done – are doing – not just to each other but to ourselves as a nation? Whether we look at the upcoming administration as a win or a loss, even after the dust settles, we still deride; we mock and distance from each other. We’ve learned nothing from the divisiveness we’ve cultivated over the last decades.

As the most humane season comes upon us, will we further drive the wedges that split us? We allow the rhetoric of fools to seize upon our hearts and squeeze what little compassion and understanding from reuniting us as fellow Americans who share a journey to the grave.

How did mid–1800s America reach the level of animosity we’re seeing today? News took days, weeks, MONTHS … to travel the gap from California to the east. People kept their thoughts to themselves when in opposite land. Yet, early Americans became divided … over emotionally charged topics. What charged them passionately? Simply put, time across distance. Are we so different today? With feelings so near the surface, facts dismissed for fabrications, misreports.

As we watched the Longfellow movie, I was struck as I am when watching such period pieces – no phone calls, no internet, no television … namely no distractions. In those days, on any given night we could look up at the sky and see the stars, indeed the Milky Way, without the corruption of city lights. We could engage in uninterrupted sleep, unhindered by the sounds of cars screeching brakes; the sad wailing of a train’s horns; or airplanes on approach overhead. We could eat as a family, talk of our day, crack jokes at each other’s expense, and know … honestly know, our siblings and what they dreamed of, feared, made them laugh or cry. We could engage in being a family, for good or not so good exchanges of ideas.

There’s no longer any time across distance; we don’t comprehend the gaps anymore because information is so readily available at any time. Television has replaced colloquy. People at dinner aren’t staring down at their plates, their heads are bowed in reverence to their cell phones. No wonder we get so emotionally wrapped around the axle; we can’t even look at our spouses, children, parents, in the eye. Why? Because the family’s facts would rob us of the cell phone’s entertaining conjecture. People text across the table instead of speaking words. Simply put, today what divides us occurs in no time across no distance. Weird.

Which begs the questions: Why do we dislike each other so much? With so little time, how will we remedy the situation? Do we need a dinner table to stretch from Montauk Point to Attu Station, that winds south through the Appalachians and north to the Great Lakes, before dipping back to the Rocky Mountains? Do we need a lesson in how to communicate without texting, voicemail, or email? Do we need to learn to speak less maliciously, while not caring about being offended?

Perhaps it is long past time, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, to correct our direction. We’re all Americans, ladies and gentlemen; it’s our heritage; we know the words:

“With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds …”

Selfishness, sarcasm, dismissiveness, judgement, these are not in the song; they don’t rhyme with any words resembling those found in brotherhood. If we examine ourselves, we can maybe … just maybe, hear the words Longfellow closed his Christmas Bells out with:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

the Right prevail,

With Peace on earth, good will to men.”

Merry Christmas to all and a blessed New Year to come.

Merry Christmas to All