The poet-biographer Carl Sandburg is best known for his gentle spirit. Poet laureate under President Kennedy, he read some his work at Kennedy’s inauguration. Yet beneath that gentle veneer is a compassionate heart, a champion of the poor and downtrodden, and one whose early works were more of a conversation about our assumptions, our privileges, and how much of real people’s lives we continue to miss.

I will quote from Sandburg’s poem titled “The Eastland” which starts out talking about the worst civil maritime disaster in American history.

I will begin with what Sandburg’s reaction to today’s Gospel might have been had he been a cub reporter for the Chicago Times writing about the beheading of John the Baptist. Here’s an adaptation of Sandburg’s poetry:

Let’s be honest now

For a couple of minutes

Even though we’re in Jerusalem.

Since you ask me about it,

I let you have it straight;

My guts ain’t ticklish about what happened to John the Baptist.

It was a heck of a job, of course

Beheading a prophet because the governor’s wife was sleeping around

And didn’t like what he had to say.

The SS Eastland was a passenger ship used for tours in the Great Lakes. On July 24 1915, a Chicago corporation held a picnic for its workers. 2,500 people were on board that day. The company photographer wanted all the families wearing their Sunday best outfits to move to the top deck for a photograph. Most of the people were low income black families. Even though it was moored to the dock, the Eastland rolled over killing 844 people. The boat was overloaded to begin with. The corporation wanted a nice photograph for their annual report. Like the beheading of John the Baptist, the result was ghastly.

How often does our attention focus on the high profile news articles while the real injustice and the real crimes pass us by? How many Eastlands and John the Baptists and child militias of Joseph Kony do we have to read about before our heart will truly break, and we can see the real disasters all around us every day? Here is what Sandburg says where he compares the spectacular news and death toll from the Eastland disaster with what he sees every day going to work:

Well I was saying

My guts ain’t ticklish about it.

I got imagination: I see a pile of three thousand dead people

Killed by the con, tuberculosis, too much work and not enough fresh air and green groceries

A lot of cheap roughnecks and the women and children of wops, and hardly any bankers and corporation lawyers or their kids, die from the con-three thousand a year in Chicago and a hundred and fifty thousand a year in the United States-all from the con and not enough fresh air and green groceries…

If you want to see excitement, more noise and crying than you ever heard in one of these big disasters the newsboys clean up on,

Go and stack in a high pile all the babies that die in Christian Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago in one year before aforesaid babies haven’t had enough good milk;

On top the pile put all the little early babies pulled from mothers willing to be torn with abortions rather than bring more children into the world.

Jesus, that would make a front page picture for the Sunday papers

The poem goes on to talk about all the people going to work every day: the prostitutes, the laborers with their broken bodies, the children who work in factories and the women who dig through garbage barrels for food. Here is how it ends:

By the living Christ, these would make disaster pictures to paste on the front pages of the newspapers.

Yes, the Eastland was a dirty bloody job –bah!

I see a dozen Eastlands

Every morning on my way to work

And a dozen more going home at night

We construct our lives around a series of myths and beliefs. They help us cope with not just information, but emotional overload. They can blind us to reality causing us to ignore the violence around us or worse, to retreat from it in safe cocoons. Some of the myths and beliefs we live by have no basis at all in the Bible. Some of them help us justify our sense of privilege and place in the world above that of others.

Let us pray: Lord, save us not just from our unbelief, but from our beliefs. Save us from the beliefs and myths we have constructed that keep us safe and insulated from the hungers and needs of others. Save us from our need for privilege and security. Save us from the myth that because there is so much ignorance and greed and crime and violence in our community that we are overwhelmed and paralyzed by it all; that we cannot do anything about it. Save us from the assumptions that because our buildings are not finished, we must wait to try anything until they are completed. Save us from seeing only the spectacular while we miss the everyday disasters and violence all around us. Open our eyes Lord. Break our hearts Lord. Help us to be your hands and feet in this community. Save us Lord, from ourselves.