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Fractions
“Fractions” is a funny and a serious poem.
I’m making fun of the way we tend to stay in groups that look just like us. We forget what we have in common with our fellow man when he looks, acts, or thinks differently. When we reduce ourselves to any one ‘common denominator,’ (political party, ethnicity, age, sect, etc…) we tend to perch there, growing so identified with that one factor that we miss out on making wider human connections.
Community suffers when we grow narrow and suspicious – filtering everyone through the small portal to reality where we feel safe. We may be right about some one thing, but miss the whole symphony of truth. We could be freed by Truth in its full, divine proportion, but instead we accept the narrow experience of self-righteousness as a substitute. Soon, we’re blinded to the beauty of the dance of freedom going on around us to that heavenly music we refuse to hear.
I suggest, in a tiny way, a remedy for this sad situation. Look for the word ‘rest,’ and think how important is the rest – the silent pause – in music. Without it, an unending series of notes – even though good in themselves – would become an unbearable monotony. Such is the conversation, for example, of ‘fractions’ who are not free to range through Truth, but merely repeat the single note of their one truth endlessly. I implore them to rest – to cultivate interior spaciousness and receptivity – by opening to the Divine Proportion, who alone orders all things well.
This is my appeal to the practice of Sabbath-keeping which is, I believe, the key to participation in the Divine Proportion, and to the development of greater capacity for Truth and for Christ. Read more about the Eucharistic Sabbath in Souls at Rest, from Angelico Press.
Fractions
Numerators perched
above their partners,
clutched tight to small lines
of perfect division;
Linked, by reduction,
to a few,
safe within family and clan;
Arrayed in long, straight lines
of equality – thus
true, as true can be,
righteous community.
Dimly aware of some far-reaching unity,
nevertheless, suspicious birds are these –
distant relations may not make the cut.
(One-half still subtly snubs
Nine-eighteenths, for instance,
and quietly considers Fifty-hundredths
pretentious.)
Ranged, as they are, on lines parallel,
they might be music,
but a monotonous sort,
brooking no interference
with their small perfections,
and no rest.
Alert, alas, they dare not stand down,
but now and then one falls,
or flaps away and,
except he perishes,
joins friendly flits and joyous gyrators
who form, around the staff,
a symphony of hearts that beat
within confines more whole,
more generously proportioned.
A divine Ratio seeks to reunite
the feathered flock beneath His brooding wings.
All the poems are now in one volume, and I’d love for you to have a copy! Click on the cover to buy it, and click here for the recordings of all the poems.
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