In the drizzle, inspiration

What burns in this chalice, this sacred bowl, this cup o'erflowing with welcome and promise? What means this religion of ours, this attempt of humans, temporal and finite, to express the eternal and infinite? How do we discover the larger truths out of our smaller selves? How shape we symbols which inspire?

I stood, last night, in drizzle-rain, stood near UAW Region 1-C. We were leaving the hall, friends of a fallen comrade, leaving a time when we sought to be together to comfort brother and son after death of sister and mother. We had had a moment together to celebrate one of our own, and to accept the challenges of keepin' on without her in our midst.

I stood in the drizzle-rain and walked on the slick bricks around the Sitdowners Memorial. I saw there all those who struggled for human progress in all the ways we have and do. My dad was present in my ruminations, telling me and my brothers that we weren't welcome around the shop when he was on strike. "We get rough sometimes," he said, and he didn't want to scare us if the men on the picket line felt they needed to jostle (or overturn?) a car.

I felt the presence of Mother Jones, too Mother whose grave I discovered on the ride from Flint to St. Louis a few years ago. Imagined the friends from 'round the world whose names I had seen on the visitor register that day--people I hadn't spoken to in years, but whose visit to that memorial was held closely in the little daily register barely kept safe from the elements.

I stood a few years ago before the Rosa Luxemburg-Karl Liebknecht  memorial in Berlin. A flame burns there, too, and the stones bear a motto: "The Dead Remind Us." That flame reminds me of all those who have struggled that I might enjoy the prosperity and freedom that I so take for granted.

"If I stood out in the rain-night, my only light a candle, a million miles away, would you lay down your fire as I lift mine? Will you not kill again?" Cindy Kallet sees in tiny fires of all our candlelit vigils the possibility of the end of all the fires of war.

And I see, now, in the Sitdowners' Flame something of the possibility, for all of us, of a day when we all might know work that bears dignity, leisure that restores, community that heals and builds, creativity that liberates imagination unto the infinite.

I stood in the drizzle-rain, and was blessed.