Variation on a theme of Sappho

Except for one, we only have fragments of Sappho’s poems. Among the best known is Fragment No. 104A, which Anne Carson translates into English in this manner:

Evening you gather back all that dazzling dawn has put asunder: you gather a lamb gather a kid gather a child to its mother

I remember that when we were small, after sunset, Mother would call us children – scattered about the neighborhood – back to the house for Angelus and supper. In this fragment, Sappho contemplates a similar situation. However, the one that gathers those that the morning had scattered – the animals that needed to graze, and the children who had gone afield to their games — is the evening, the night falling, time itself.

The gathering, the counting of those under one’s charge, the assessing of gains and losses, pertain to such as a shepherd. If time does this, it is not directly but through the compulsions that it imposes, at the end of every day, month, week, year, at the end of every life.

In fact, time does not shepherd as much as ask for the record. Truth to tell, someone else gathers the lamb and kid and brings the child back to its mother – evening merely signals the moment when one does this. Which task does not belong to just anyone, but only to him who truly cares. Goodness makes one a shepherd.

Now I understand the passage in the Gospel of John in which Jesus declared:
“I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf catches and scatters them. This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I will lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock, one shepherd.”

Birth sent me out into the world, just as the dawn drives the lamb and kid out of the pen and the child out of its home. I find life a long day’s journey into night. Often my voyage contends with crosswinds – the world and its false conception of happiness that, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, consists of wealth, honor, fame, glory, power, pleasure; the spiritual forces that try to sidetrack my will; and myself, that which Richard Rohr calls “the ego that hates losing – even to God.”

I hope that, in the evening of my life, at the end of my journey, I may be brought to the happiness that I have been seeking, the uncreated good, God himself. I believe that this will happen only if all along I had shunned the wolf and followed the Good Shepherd, Christ himself.

With Christ there can be no evening star. Because, as the Exultet puts it, the hymn of praise sung before the paschal candle during the Easter Vigil, Christ is “the one morning star who never sets.”

Of course, the morning star and the evening star are one and the same – which for me is Christ, who never really goes away, who has such compassion for humanity, of which he is a part, as to die for it, who reappears in the end to gather us all together, in the same way that in Sappho’s poem, Hesperus, the evening star, gathers the lamb and the kid and the child back into its mother’s arms.