Author of "This Ancient Love"

My dear friend Nancy, whom I first met in Yokosuka, Japan in 1962, referred me to a Unitarian Universalist site that has a long article about the author of "This Ancient Love"--Carolyn McDade, who is pictured in the center of the picture below.

From the article "Carolyn McDade's Spirit of Life":

"McDade, now 72, has given her life to what she calls the movement. By that she certainly means the feminist movement that dramatically changed what was possible for women since she was a girl. But she also means a chain of linked, politically progressive causes: She has actively opposed wars, South African apartheid, U.S. foreign policy, and nuclear power. She has worked for economic justice, environmental protection, and the rights of women migrant workers, prisoners, refugees, and lesbians."

The title of this article comes from what they term the UU doxology, which McDade wrote:

Spirit of Life, come unto me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold me close; wings set me free;
Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.

"McDade grew up Southern Baptist in a series of small rural Louisiana towns. When she was just six, the United States entered World War II. That’s when she became a peace activist, she says. The men were gone, the women were doing everything on the home front, and no one was shielding the children from the raw horror of every newsreel and war movie. “I never forgot Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” she says. “No God I had learned about would ever want or allow such behavior, such suffering, such brutality.”"

Another Carolyn McDade website is here.