"Today, August 7th is the 9th anniversary of the death of Ladon Sheats...." Dennis Apel Guadalupe CW
Frank Cordaro
http://lacatholicworker.org/2006/03/05/ladon-sheats-talk-now-online
Remembering August 6-9 and Ladon Sheats by Ched Myers, August, 2006
http://www.chedmyers.org/system/files/Transfiguration%20and%20Disfiguration%20-%20Remembering%20Aug%206-9%20%2526%20Ladon%20Sheats.pdf
Seek First the Kingdom: The Life and Death of Ladon Sheats
http://www.chedmyers.org/articles/radical-discipleship/seek-first-kingdom-life-and-death-ladon-sheats
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dennis Apel <jda...@yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 12:12 PM
Subject: Ladon Sheats
Today, August 7th is the 9th anniversary of the death of Ladon
Sheats. Attached is a memorial written by his friend Rubem Alves,
Brazilian author, philosopher, and poet. It's a good remembrance...
We read it today at a memorial at his grave site. Thought to share
it.
Dennis Apel <jda...@yahoo.com>
Beatitude House
Guadalupe Catholic Worker
4575 9th St
Guadalupe CA 93434
Phone: 805-343-6322
----
THE MAN I NEVER SAW BUT ALWAYS LOVED…
Inside the crater of a volcano that died 500,000,000 years ago, at the
top of a mountain from where far horizons are seen, I plant trees for
friends that have died or are about to die.
For my friend Ladon Sheats I planted a tree known as liquidamber. The
sapling has grown into a tree over eighteen feet high.
The strange thing about our friendship is that we never met. Only once
did I hear his voice over the telephone. I was in the United States
and called him from a payphone. We talked. I was free to fly anywhere
I fancied. He, a caged bird serving sentence in a penitentiary.
August 1976. From the United States came a note written on a pad sheet
torn in half:
“Dear Rubem Alves: Your thoughts in ‘Tomorrow’s Child’ have had a
profound influence on my life. Your capacity to summarize… the clarity
with which you express yourself are beautiful gifts. For this I am
very grateful to you. Affectionately, Ladon Sheats.”
The sender did not tell me who he was. I held the message in my hands,
not knowing what to think. A few days later I received a letter from a
friend with the explanation.
This message was written from a prison in Alexandria. Ladon Sheats is
serving a sentence for having participated in a protest at the
Pentagon against nuclear weapons.”
***
While putting some old papers in order, that message fell into my
hands again. A token of friendship sent by a man in prison. In prison
because he had been faithful to his conscience. My hands touched that
message as if it were something sacred. The prisoner had only written
it to say “Thank you” for a book I had written. Yet, as I wrote the
book, it never occurred to me that it would go to prison. There, he, a
prisoner, had taken to heart what I had written, even more than I
myself did. But who was that man?
Ladon Sheats had lived as a traditional American citizen. He had been
a member of the Strategic Air Command-SAC, the U.S. Air Force’s
sinister organization responsible for bombings and for the atomic
missiles to be launched against the Soviet Union. He had been a SAC
member and an IBM marketing vice president.
Suddenly, though, his eyes were opened and he realized the
monstrousness of that death machine. Thus, he did what many mad
mystics had done before: Buddha, Jesus, St. Francis – he left
everything, resigned from IBM, sold his possessions, and joined a
group of people that had chosen a strange form of expressing their
spiritual convictions: they peacefully invaded nuclear installations
where atomic bombs were stored, knowing full well that their action
would land them in prison. They invaded so as to be arrested. It was
their way of publicly demonstrating their repudiation of that
insanity.
For a long time we carried on a correspondence. Allow me to quote from
his letters.
***
They had just served one month in jail for having invaded an
installation with atomic silos near the Canadian border. As they were
released, they did the same thing all over again. The first sentence
had been too mild… He told me what they did as they prepared for the
second invasion:
“On weekends we indulged in a bash – fresh asparagus and spinach
salad, pizza, beer, etc., etc., and long walks in the cool spring
weather. The dawn of the 27th was fantastic. We were so thankful to be
able to return to the missile site… located quite close to a wildlife
sanctuary where blue egrets, Canadian geese, deer and thousands of
land and sky creatures abounded. We then stood on the concrete covers
over the missiles… singing, reading the Holy Scriptures, and parts of
your book ‘I believe in the Resurrection of the body,’ which a couple
had discovered during their last stay in prison. Your thoughts
nourished our spirits, Rubem. You were there with us. Reflecting on
your image of the body as a kite and singing a hymn – this is how we
‘jumped the wall, in communion with the Southern lapwings that flew
freely entering and leaving the forbidden place where the missiles
were. Their piping sounded as if echoing the nostalgia in our hearts…”
***
For this second trespassing he was sentenced to six months detention.
At the end of this period, he wrote me:
“November 20, 1986: Rubem, in a few hours my journey will take me
beyond these bars… into a winter night, when I will joyfully smile at
the stars for the first time since May. I will travel by bus to Texas
for the celebration of my father’s 78th birthday. (…) After Texas
everything is uncertain. I may go to Pittsburgh to help in a shelter
for the homeless… or to a monastery on top of the Rocky Mountains to
nourish myself with silence and solitude. Whatever the path I will
take, music will be the same. As the Russian poet Y. Yevtushenko said,
‘It is not possible not dance.’ Rubem, do you have any plans to come
to this country in 1987? I laugh just to think that our paths may
cross…”
(Undated) “It is a cold afternoon, snow storm… that leaves me the
only alternative of staying home… but not alone. ‘Bach: Greatest Hits’
keeps me company (How many hundreds of times I’ve listened to this
album?)… and the incense clouds that rise... bringing into this room
a multitude of loved people… memories of past time. And yet, there is
a huge empty space in my heart – ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desire’…
yes…yes…but isn’t it true that there is also an inescapable solitude
in the ‘joy of desire’?
I feel growing doubts about Jesus’ passion. Certainly, much of what
is said was invented after things happened, don’t you agree?
‘Not my will but thy will’ – this seems to have been copied from a
play…Do you believe in this?
This text falsifies what happened, which for Jesus must have been very
painful… the darkness of not knowing. To have doubts about God…But
where are the scores for these love songs that invite us to sing? Love
is in my heart…I feel inside a profound connection of all this with
life. And yet…How are we to sing the notes? Where is the choreography
for this dance?”
***
“I stood at the window this morning…I watched the presence of the sun
lighting up the dark skies behind the trees wrapped in many sheets of
snow…How long has it been there… millions of Saturday mornings, and I
saw a little rabbit… jumping and jumping in this dawning light. And a
lone aspen shining with pink reflections… I felt the aspen’s warmth
burning me and entering into my bones… aspens that covered these
mountains in times past …”
***
This has been a hard year for me, Rubem. I was in prison most of the
spring and summer for the crime of praying in the places of darkness…
My last praying presence… was at an Air Force base in South Dakota,
where atomic bombs are kept ready for being loaded into B-1 bombers. I
then went to southern Georgia to take care of an old friend who was
dying of cancer…so that he could fulfill his wish to die at home. They
were hard months, Rubem, but also filled with precious memories of
this friend who lived under the shadow of slavery as a crop sharer…Tom
had a strong faith, and his tranquil acceptance of death is a source
of inspiration for me.
***
“After months of tension I am here again at the Rocky Mountains…in
this valley I love…where there is a trapist monastery. For over 18
years I have been a friend of this small group of twelve monks. I have
no interest in monasticism, but I love this valley for the opportunity
of silence and solitude. Next week I’m going to trek on the snow and
climb the mountain until a very high plateau, for a week of silence
and solitude. Yes, the same cabin where I stayed last year, from where
I wrote you soon after. There I’m going to listen again to the music
of the future.
***
After some months I received a letter from a woman I did not know. She
was writing at Ladon Sheats’s request. He was dying and asked her to
write me. Cancer – and he refused any kind of treatment. He wished to
die as he had lived, free and without fear. It was a ‘good-bye’
message. I then wrote him telling him that I was going to plant a tree
for him in a place of silence where the tree could see the distant
mountains. I told him how much I loved him. And that I would miss him.
I also told him how much I admired the way he lived, his integrity,
his courage, and his love of solitude. I took leave from whim with
tight hug, telling him that we would meet soon.
***
In one of his letters he told me that they had marched to the atomic
silos singing the hymn “The Lord of the Dance.” It was his favorite
hymn. This hymn came from a small religious community known as
Shakers, which lived in New England in the nineteenth century. What is
curious about this community is that their worship services were dance
orgies.
The song’s original title is “Simple Gifts.” Some years ago, while
visiting the village where the
Shakers had lived, I bought a “Simple Gifts” CD, of true simplicity.
Flute and guitar. This theme is so simple and so beautiful that it has
been used in different musical contexts.
Aaron Copland, the American composer, made this hymn into the
last-but-one movement of his symphonic piece “Appalachian Spring.” But
this theme won universal recognition with the dance show “The Lord of
the Dance” (there is a DVD) and Michael Flatley’s fantastic
performance. At the opening of the show, a little nymph plays the
theme on a recorder…
***
Many years have passed. I’ve grown old. I’ve changed. As a snake, I
have shed skins many times so as to live. Anyone who is afraid to shed
the old skin ends up imprisoned in a sarcophagus. My ideas have
changed, my way of writing also. I have written many books for
grownups and for little ones. But the ideas of this book remain alive
in me.
Mosaics are artworks. They are made from shards. In themselves, the
shards mean nothing. They have no beauty. But if an artist assembles
them according to a vision of beauty, they become transformed into an
artwork: a mosaic.
Music is a mosaic of sounds. Notes are sound shards. They are neither
beautiful nor ugly. But if a composer organizes them into a “phrase,”
they are transformed into themes. Sonatas and symphonies are made from
intertwined themes. We are made of shards also. In his “The Unbearable
Lightness of Being,” Milan Kundera compared life to a musical score.
According to him, the human being, guided by the sense of beauty,
transcends a random event [a shard] to make from it a theme, which
will then make part of his life’s score. He will return to the theme,
repeating, modifying, developing, and transposing it just as a
composer does with the themes of a sonata. We are a spiral, similarly
to Ravel’s Bolero.
The variatiom-form of the mosaic or sonata, if I were to write this
book today, would be different. But the theme would be the same. If I
did not rewrite this book published in 1972 – I was young - to adjust
it to my new style – now I am old – it is because Ladon Sheats. It was
Tomorrow’s Child as it was published 37 years ago that Ladon Sheats
loved.
***
Whenever I listen to the song “The Lord of the Dance” – in the
“Simple Gifts” CD, in “Appalachian Spring,” or in the recorder playing
by the little girl, I think of Ladon Sheats.
The tree is there on the mountain, rising to the skies. Whenever I
look at the liquidamber I remember Ladon Sheats, a man I never saw
but always loved…
***
(Rubem Alves, April 18, 2009, on my 75th birthday, 150 km away from
the liquidamber under which I and Ladon Sheats meet each other from
time to time…)