We live in a time of great division and polarization, violence and rumors of violence, all with the backdrop of an ongoing pandemic. Election weeks bring out the stress and anxiety of this time and shine a light on the bitter divide that marks our national life right now. Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013) was an Irish poet familiar with the ache of deep civil conflict and strife. For much of his career, deep hostilities and violence in Ireland were in the background. He was able in his poems to shine a light on the humanity caught in the middle of these currents – and point to the deep human longing for justice and peace that so many of us ache for.

Here’s an excerpt from his play: The Cure of Troy. One of the ways to cope with the whirlwind of emotions in tumultuous societal moments is to remember the true north of your heart’s longing – and find strength again in the vision famously articulated by Theodore Parker and echoed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Reckoning where we are and finding again the compass that can point us on our way, we find our feet again and continue the good work of being peace and bringing love and justice into a world aching for healing and hope.

Human beings suffer.
They torture one another.
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

History says, Don’t hope
On the side of the grave,’
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea- change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles.
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing,
The utter self revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
And lightening and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.