Thomas J. Grady
The Priest Today The priest bTings his people not <mly the hope that someday-maybe some ja1路 daythings will be clijfe1路ent but also the knowledge that here and now there is someone 'Who cares, someone who bea1路s the burden of thei1路 lives.
North of San Francisco, near the giant trees of Muir Woods, fronting the ocean is a mountain called Mt. Tamalpais. In a poem titled "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings," poet Lew Welch has a refrain: "This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go." The refrain is repeated after every verse. And the verses say that mankind follows the sun, always moves westward. But here, at the west coast where the headlands fall into the sea, man stops. The Irishman, the Slav, every man stops. The clouds swirl around Tamalpais like drifting incense. The sea lays stones and shells like jewels on the shore before the mountain. And the waves drop their white heads like worshippers. The last refrain has a subtle change: "This is the last place. There is nowhere else we need to go." There is something sad in the last refrain: There is nowhere else we need to go." The poet knows that there are ships and there are planes and that there is westward traffic. But somewhere, somewhere, he says, man must stop. Why not where Tamalpais sings, where the mountain clutches the earth and raises its head to the sky, where the sea turns gold, where the 123