The current financial crisis here in the U.S. has brought to my mind some of W.H. Auden’s lines on the Great Depression. They come from his 1933 poem, “Here on the cropped grass…”:

Europe grew anxious about her health,

Combines tottered, credits froze,

And business shivered in a banker’s winter…

Very few poets can be topical this way and create a successful poem, as Auden does here, I believe (though he did exclude this poem from later collections). The lines preceding these are memorable as well; they provide a wonderful description of the difficult years of the early 1930’s. But because they pertain less directly to today’s financial crisis, I will simply encourage you to find the poem and read it in its entirety. Try a good library and see if they have Auden’s great volume of poems, On This Island (titled Look, Stranger! in Britain), or read it in the wonderful collection of his writings of the 1930’s, The English Auden.

Now we await the unfolding of history to see if this current “banker’s winter” will last - and whether we can stave off a depression.

One of Minnesota’s most famous and gifted citizens, Garrison Keillor, has written about the I-35W bridge collapse in his newspaper column, The Old Scout. As usual, our reigning politicians are on the receiving end of his barbed wit.

Here’s a brief excerpt. Keillor’s tongue is firmly in his cheek as he writes about his choice to travel down to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, which requires crossing other “structurally deficient” bridges:

The day when we look to big government for solutions to our transportation problems is gone. Our governor has twice vetoed a 7.5-cent increase in the state gasoline tax to pay for road and bridge repair. He believes it is dumb. So it’s up to us to solve our own problems. Rochester is 88 miles away. Northwest Airlines offers seven flights daily for a round-trip fare of about 500 bucks, or slightly more than the fare to New York. You want to visit Rochester, pay your own freight. Don’t expect Minnesota to take care of you.

I wanted to share the quote below from my pastor, Clay Oglesbee. It’s from his blog, Soul to Sole:

Humility is a matter of claiming in our own current awareness that which we have done or said and lived to regret, as well as that which, wisely anticipated, we do not wish to experience in the future.

This quote from the Bible caught my eye for what it says about winter - a season that is fast approaching. It concerns what makes a “capable wife.” Let’s de-gender that and consider the “She” below to be any “capable person”:

She is not afraid for her household when it snows,
for all her household are clothed in crimson.

Proverbs 31: 21