The Apology
21/Apr/10 00:37 Filed in: Reflection | personal
I am not exactly the poetry sort of a guy, but as a teenager I came across a piece of poetry in an English Lit class that was so powerful to me and my situation then, and is probably just as meaningful today.
First let me explain what it means to me. As a teenager, life was difficult, very difficult. Some of you know my history. At 16 years old, as a volunteer on the local ambulance squad, I performed CPR on my mother for several minutes before the ambulance came and another 11 minutes in the ambulance until arriving in the ER at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Warwick, New York. She had tried to end her life by taking over 44 valium at once. God was good, her life was spared and I only bruised three ribs, nothing broke.
It was at that time that my stepfather had decided to adopt my brother and I. I was 16, Bernie was 12. We were okay with the adaption until we found out that my stepfather, not telling us, had decided that we would have to have our last name changed to Kent. To keep ‘peace’ in the family with a suicidal mom and an insistent step-father, we went to court and watched my father fight to keep us and lose. It was a landmark case, you would know it if you were an adaption lawyer; normal law abiding dads don’t usually lose contested adoptions. Heart wrenching, gut aching, devastating, to say the least. In March of 1978 and for 10 years after that Robert E McGurty became Robert E Kent until ten years later when I changed back to my birth name. My brother Bernie is still Bernie Kent.
During those difficult times, my solace was the Waywayanda State Park (yes, that is the real name!); about a three minute walk from my doorstep in Highland Lakes, New Jersey. Sometimes those walks were only a few minutes, sometimes hours, and even sometimes, with a sleeping bag, tent and basic food in tow, they were for days. Those walks were life saving, salvation to the soul if you will.
As I would walk the beautiful unpolluted, unspoiled Waywayanda State Park I could fully connect with the first paragraph of The Apology by Ralph Waldo Emerson (2803-1882) who said:
Think me not unkind and rude
That I walk alone in grove and glen
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.
Sometimes you just have to get out of the stinking, freaking rat race and get alone to connect with God, the God of the wood, metal, rocks, paper, scissors, and everything else you can imagine and even cannot.
Go for it, walk alone in grove and glen!
Men are counting on you fetching His word and delivering!