Words to honor the watershed events of life--birth, coming of age, marriage and death. Inlcudes services for adoption, divorce and memorials. Index of authors, first lines and subjects. For ministers, hospices and more.
What are the great occasions in human life? Birth, maturity, marriage, and death: these are the four corners of human life. These are the crystallizing events, the distinguishable days, the great occasions.
In these pages, Carl Seaburg has brought together over 650 pieces of writing to commemorate these moments. Poetry and prose, the work of writers as diverse as Aiken, Pound, Dickinson, Seneca, Blake, Buddha, Brontë, Marcuse, Stevens, Sexton, Tagore, Lippman, Sandburg, Sarton, Pasternak, Lao Tzu, Yevtushenko, and Yeats—the rich expression of human appreciation and celebration of our own great occasions. These then are the acts and words which proclaim it is good to exist, to know the pleasures and duties of maturity, to live companioned, and to experience life in its sorrow and joy.
A Unitarian Universalist minister, Carl Seaburg served parishes in the three northern New England states and worked as an editor for Beacon Press, before his death in 1998. He was the author of Boston Observed and the co-author of Merchant Prince of Boston and Medford on the Mystic.
For The Occasion of Birth
An eye comes out of the wave
Give back life for life
We take the future from ourselves
Yourself! Yourself! Yourself, for ever and ever
The egg has a mind
For the Occasion of Coming-Of-Age
The lords and owners of their faces
Now there is time and Time is young
And meet the road—erect
For The Occasion of Marriage
Such music in a skin!
Love's characters come face to face
The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea
We are those two natural and nonchalant persons
Love is the great Asker
Love has the longest history
For The Occasion of Death
The long custom of surrender
Agonies are one of my changes of garments
Looking at death is dying
Egypt and Greece good-bye, and good-bye Rome
The goal of all life is death
Praise to our fairing hearts
The future is worth expecting
What the grave says, the nest denies
Absence becomes the greatest presence
Woods where the woodthrush forever sings
Out of the white immensities always young
The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions
Appendixes
A. A Ceremony of Adoption
B. A Rite of Divorce
C. A Memorial Service
You might also be interested in:
