How unexpectedly formative it can be when tiny, lingering buds of childhood awareness around identity break out of their dormancy and begin blossoming into a fresh new sense of selfhood, even at an advanced age. Well-intentioned comments about which side of the family my physical features favored had caused my childhood sense of identity to waver between my parents' two surnames – maternal “Brown” and paternal “Keeney.” Must I choose one or the other? No, when I discovered resemblance with Job Harman's facial features I recognized similarities with both these familiar surnames and the re-discovered “Harman,” too! Plus “Hamlin,” “Hassell,” and more than a dozen other surnames just by including all those that go back to the generation of great-greats! I felt as though I were meeting myself again for the first time. I am not just Jerry Delano Keeney but, by simply acknowledging only the surnames of my great-grandparents’ generation, I am Jerry Delano Nicholson/Hamlin/Harman/Brown-Reddick/Hassell/Reagan/Keeney.
My primary objective in this book is to publish my great-great-grandfather Job Harman’s poems, simply to make them available to Job’s descendants and to the wider public. I do so to honor Job’s own stated purpose in writing the poems: that “the silver lining of the cloud is presented to the view.” Every generation can benefit from new discoveries of “the silver lining.”
A complementary objective is to bolster our understanding of the poems by providing context from Job’s family history, his personal experience, and his historical period. Throughout, I will also point out key ideas underlying Job’s thought to identify significant sources of the vitality pulsating through these poems. Here, in these signs of underlying Source, lies the Spark in Job’s poems that has ignited a “golden current” of fresh, transformative insight. I hope it will kindle in other readers as well this golden Energy for meeting life’s challenges and opportunities with fresh Wisdom.
As I read Job’s poems, I ask myself, Is this “golden current” in us the Wisdom that will one day bring to its full completion the Mystery that is the Great Covenant of Blessed Being whose Beauty we are invited to Become? This “Golden Current” courses throughout the Cosmos, and it is coursing through our lives at depth.
One of Job’s signature poems, “Let Wisdom Speak,” directly encourages us to hold heart and mind open to transcendent Wisdom. Doing so will pose probing questions and yield tantalizing promise. We read these poems best when we read deeply and follow faithfully where the light of sincere and honest inquiry may lead. Only then may we exercise personal agency that can bear the fruit of a Wisdom quest, whether in Job’s poetry or in Wisdom’s myriad self-disclosures elsewhere in our lives.
What might Wisdom say to me, if I relinquish distractions and let Wisdom speak its own Mind … in me … precisely here in this magnificent vessel of Being that we inhabit in our own selves and within the universal Covenant of Being?
My intention in writing about his poems and his life is to honor Job’s little word “let” in this book’s title poem, “Let Wisdom Speak.” Let is so small a word and yet can be so great an act of the soul. To “let” is to relax into active receptivity toward the approach of Wisdom’s Light and, like a sentinel, alert the heart to welcome Grace’s gift of Wisdom and “let” it speak its word. To “let” is to consent so that Wisdom may find a live response in us that can expand its Presence in the world.
