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We are communities in time and in a place, I know, but we are communities in faith as well — and sometimes time can stop shadowing us. Our lives are touched by those who lived centuries ago, and we hope that our lives will mean something to people who won’t be alive until centuries from now. It’s a great ‘chain of being,’ someone once told me, and I think our job is to do the best we can to hold up our small segment of the chain. That’s one kind of localism, I guess, and one kind of politics — doing your utmost to keep that chain connected, unbroken. Our arms are linked — we try to be neighbors of His, and to speak up for his principles. That’s a lifetime’s job.

Dorothy Day

CLXII

Once more he felt a boy again;
As though beneath the harvest wain
He was asleep, by that old stream,
And all these things were but a dream—
The King, the squire, the hurrying ride
Unto the lonely quagmire side;
The sudden pain, the deadly swoon,
The feverish life from noon to noon;
The tending of the kind old man,
The black and white Dominican,
The hour before the abbot's throne,
The poring o’er old books alone,
In summer morn; the King again,
The envious greetings of strange men,
This mighty horse and rich array,
This journey on an unknown way.
   Surely he thought to wake from it,
And once more by the waggon sit,
Blinking upon the sunny mill.
   But not for either good or ill
Shall he see one of all those days;

William Morris The Earthly Paradise 

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