There's God in the muck of life
O'Gorman, Ned
THERE'S GOD IN THE MUCK OF LIFE MAKING POEMS, SCHOOLING CHILDREN NED O'GORMAN I do not know exactly what might have been a call in my life, from whatever meddling source. I have not...
...She saw in the poor the reflection of the Incarnate God and found what she saw radiCommonweal 25 March 1994:15 ant with humanity and divine intimations...
...Everything I have done, each thing I have begun and finished, each creature I have loved is within the immensity of God's benevolence and within the sound of his voice...
...Father and I spoke only when we spoke of horses...
...It did not lay me waste...
...I have not the slightest doubt that God in his immense wit and glory cannot but be displeased with Rome's fateful simplicities...
...1 only understood them...
...I collected shells and rocks and spent the happiest hours of my childhood sitting on the topmost branch of a tree reading and writing down lists of words I thought beautiful...
...I wonder if these speculations are an intrusion on the purpose of this essay...
...I was a terrible son to a dramatic and mad father...
...I was being called to Harlem though then, in 1955, during my time at the Catholic Worker, I did not have an inkling about anything but the marvelous present and its way of burning away at my feelings and urging me on toward disaster and discovery...
...It did not exhaust me...
...All of our children come from the oppressed environment of racist America and our tasks are monumental, but I sense glory and joy and freedom all about me...
...I was a wanderer and when I arrived in Harlem in 1966 it became the locus—1 could stay there, labor there, write poetry there, and build something that might be pleasing to God...
...Something in the past years has remained steadfast and absolute and radiant in common sense and that has been the church...
...I was beginning to wander and I did not want to end my life as my aristocratic French uncles did, dead in some sordid place unnoticed by the mice or the constabulary...
...I could have taught but the thought of the academic village and its boundaries bothered me...
...I am an ordinary believer and I do not expect God to bring me, on some celestial tray, his calling card...
...In twenty-eight years I was building a school: the Children's Storefront School that enrolls children from preschool through the eighth grade to give them a healing, liberating, and vibrant academic life...
...I may flail about in the darkness and draw the darkness about me and make it part of my being but at the edges of the dark is the light of grace and suddenly in tides of glory the darkness is swept away...
...I was gathering up the pieces and setting them up in a construction of hope...
...I was a recluse from the beginning, and though I was never strange and moldy in my sensibilities, I could have become peculiar and unmanageable...
...I believe in judgment, sin, free will, and in the mysterious and volatile thrust of the Holy Spirit through the universe and through my obdurate blood...
...It is all a matter, and has always been so, of just what kind of Roman Catholic I am, just what kind of a poet I am...
...Not the church embroiled in endless battles in its quest for temporal power...
...I was, more or less, suitable, but it seemed unwise always to establish limits...
...God, I think, wished that I would get on with it and come to the place where I could work with his outcasts...
...Any call I might have felt came from that fundamental belief that Christ Jesus did live upon this gritty earth and that he was the son of God and that his mother was the Virgin Mary and that he did establish a church...
...I had not yet found a place where I could "be...
...Something had to happen to gather in the loose ends, and during my college years I got to know Dorothy Day, who worked with the dispossessed on the Bowery...
...I never understood my parents or my sisters or my friends...
...I would have drunk too much there and written bad poetry...
...Those are my poems...
...I was being pulled toward some landscape where I could settle down and find work...
...I gravitate toward chaos and something brings me back from it and gives me a construction I can see: my poems...
...I am a poet, a builder...
...Grace at work is an eternal activity within man and cannot be shut down...
...As I moved toward the darkness I was pulled away from it and as I moved against the light I knew that I was pulled toward it...
...I believe utterly and without demur or edginess the entire Nicene Creed and have found it a splendid and delightful thing to believe...
...I was always aware of the existence in the daily comings and goings of my life of the presence of the divine...
...Poetry did, and it still is the thing I do best, but it did not submerge...
...I needed something to consume me...
...I never had a plan and I have never thought ahead...
...I could have married...
...The thinking and planning were being done by the presence in me of a divine urging and I could only respond to it in the darkness...
...If the substance of these reflections is obscure, it is because the whole progress of my life has always been obscure...
...I have not known voices, nor have I known any exact, single incident when I thought I might have been poked by a divine finger...
...I battle against disorder and build something that possesses form and meaning...
...The church NED O'GORMAN, a poet, is the founder of the Children 's Storefront, a school in Harlem...
...So the thin-skinned recluse drifted down to the Catholic Worker house on Christie Street and found there brothers and sisters, folk who were outcast and desperate...
...They searched for a life that had slipped by them in the darkness of their lives, and I was always on the edge of losing it all to distractions of every kind: sex, liquor, poetry, sloth, and reckless ways with money...
...I was born with a thin skin...
...In Harlem I was a broom, a shovel, a small bulldozer getting the place ready, making something occur, but I knew it was the Lord who handled it all...
...I could have gone into the diplomatic corps, and I tried for three months the rigors of monastic life...
...I needed to do a task that spent all my soul's powers and let me do something besides...
...I cannot reflect on my work or on my life until I make it clear where I am in my little universe...
...and my poetry were, no doubt, heading me somewhere...
...16: 25 March 1994...
...I make things, simply that, poems, a school—and hope they hold together...
...I saw in their state my state...
Vol. 121 • March 1994 • No. 6
