Poetry and Prayer—Day 6: March 3

Written by: Julia Smolucha

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent by John Milton

God: consider us. Hold us this day. Bend our soul toward you, this day and the rest. As sun rises, make us of use. And stand sentinel over our day and night. Amen.

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Shafts of Light, XI: Raoul Wallenberg

July 11, 2021

Schindler’s List is three hours and seventeen minutes long, all black and white. Its palette is dark and grim. Just two brief slashes of red. To see the little girl in the red coat, in her singular humanity, is God’s calling to each of us.

Shafts of Light, X: Berlin Wird Mauerfrei

July 4, 2021

In late 1989 Don Dale was in Berlin as a student. He reports that in a world before google maps you need only listen to geolocate yourself within the city. Had the hammering away at the Berlin Wall become just a hushed battering in the distance? You were probably half-mile from the wall. But when the belt and wack of the hammers became a deafening roar? The wall was just around the corner. At all hours of the night from November 9, 1989 onward, the wall was slowly being chipped away, piece by piece.

Shafts of Light, IX: Václav Havel

June 27, 2021

Finally, in 1975, he decides he’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore, and he writes a letter to Communist Party General Secretary Gustáv Husák which became famous and incendiary. He complained about “the aesthetics of banality,” and “the cult of right-thinking mediocrity” in the Communist Party and just completely slandered the whole regime. He called Communist Czechoslovakia “Absurdistan.” Communism, he said, was “a monstrous, ramshackle, stinking machine.”

Poetry and Prayer—Day 6: March 3