Weekday Email to Members and Friends – 2020-05-25

Monday May 25th 2020
A Special Memorial Day
Emailer from
Matt Matthews
 
To Members and Friends of 
First Presbyterian Church
Champaign, Illinois
 
Dear Friends,
 
Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, IL. At 13, he drove a milk wagon. He spent two weeks enrolled at West Point but failed math and grammar. He worked as a farm laborer in Kansas. Was a bricklayer for a time. A coal heaver in Omaha. In 1945 he moved to Flat Rock, NC. He was in his late sixties. His wife raised famous goats, which sounds like a Marx Brothers’ joke. The goats were famous because they held milking records. She bred them to be strong, productive, old. 
 
I’ve walked through the Flat Rock house and grounds many times. I’ve met some of Mrs. Sandburg’s goats. We saw a play on the grounds once, a reading of his Rootabaga Stories. His wife was the former Lilian Steichen; her brother was the famous photographer Edward whose son Alfred married Georgia O’Keefe, which is another story. Sandburg called his wife Paula, and interestingly, she never allowed a single drape, blind, or window dressing of any kind to be hung in their Flat Rock home, which they called Connemara. Mrs. Sandburg said windows frame the beautiful world, and the beautiful world ought not be covered up. Suffice it to note their rural estate did not border meat factories or laundromats. 
 
I digress, again.
 
A big piano fills the front room of Connemara. I’ve seen the guitar on which Sandburg composed his folk tunes. I’ve looked into his bedroom. I’ve walked through his voluminous book collection. 
 
He won the Pulitzer prize thrice. Twice for his poetry and once for the biography of Abraham Lincoln during the war years. Lincoln, as you historians will know, only a few generations before Sandburg, lived just over two hours away in New Salem, IL. 
 
I have a point and I’m almost there.
 
Sandburg as an old man wrote late into the night. He slept until noon every day. His breakfast was to be left on a tray at his door; whomever brought it was never to knock. He wrote about a third of his published work in the Flat Rock house that once belonged to the treasurer of the Confederate States of America, a cause that couldn’t have been farther from Sandburg’s heart. The NAACP counted Sandburg as one of their champions, and he was, staunchly.
 
He loved America. 
 
He wrote powerfully about Chicago, the city in which he took his first newspaper job. The City of Broad Shoulders, he called Chicago. Player of Railroads, he said. Did he know Rev. George McKinley’s son (our pastor who built our current sanctuary), William, who got rich with the Illinois Traction System? Did he know Chicago-born Robert Henry Allerton, whose nearby estate brings such joy to me and Rachel? (The peony garden is alive with color right now!) 
 
Sandburg knew a lot of people. Befriended the little man, spoke out against big business, championed the rights of the worker. 
 
And he was a great writer. 
 
Stormy, 
 
husky, 
 
brawling,
 
Chicago. 
 
 
Why all this blather about Sandburg? 
 
Because he wrote what I think is the perfect Memorial Day poem. It is a truth, a memorial, a warning, a prayer.
 
Let me know what you think.
 
 
 

Grass

BY CARL SANDBURG
 
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
                                          I am the grass; I cover all.
 
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
                                          What place is this?
                                          Where are we now?
 
                                          I am the grass.
                                          Let me work.
 
 News:
 
CU-Better Together Coming together to fight hunger and give hope to school families in need. Here is the sign up for the Interfaith Alliance. Please share widely. Thank you!
https://www.signupgenius.com/go/20F044EAEA822ABFA7-cubetter
 
Good Word:
 
Proverbs 1:7 (King James Version) (Notice I keep repeating this.)
 
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.
 
Let us pray:
 
A Prayer by an Unknown Confederate Soldier. 
 
I asked for strength that I might achieve;
I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for health that I might do greater things;
I was given infirmity that I might do better things.
I asked for riches that I might be happy;
I was given poverty that I might be wise.
I asked for power that I might have the praise of men;
I was given weakness that I might feel the need of God.
I asked for all things that I might enjoy life;
I was given life that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing that I asked for
but everything that I had hoped for.
Almost despite myself my unspoken prayers were answered,
I am, among all men, most richly blessed.
 
Much, much love to you all.
 
PEACE,
 
Matt Matthews
Cell: 864.386.9138
Matt@FirstPres.Church


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