Advice to Prophets
Today the prophets weep,
Victory always seems to go to Evil.
But in the long arc,
If we help bend it,
It turns toward justice.
Weep not, prophets,
Just get to work!
Bob Coughlin
July 4, 2018
[Theodore Parker, Unitarian/Transcendentalist, in his 1853 book “Ten Sermons of Religion”--”The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”]
When I wrote this poem yesterday, I was thinking of some prophetic voices that I have known--Mike Rivage-Seul, Kathy Flora, Brian Rice, Dave Lima, Dolly Mikula, Fr. James Martin, Maurice McCrackin, Marion Bromley, Ernest Bromley, Chuck Matthei, Daniel Berrigan, and many others. What keeps them going in times of such discouragement? Or is that the wrong word? There's a line in Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie: "I am disappointed, not discouraged."
I also thought about the famous line, seen above, that Martin Luther King Jr. borrowed from Theodore Parker, about the arc of the moral universe. What I wanted to add is that we have to do the bending--I'm not sure that it bends by itself. We have to get to work!
