Sunday Morning Meds--Order

“He covers the sky with clouds;

he supplies the earth with rain,

and makes grass grow on the hills.”

Psalm 147:8

They were African-American kids, and that was a big deal to a white kid who’d never met someone with black skin—or yellow for that matter.  They were African-American, and they were from some juvie home; and when they bought a park sticker the long-haired social worker in the front seat of the big SUV told me that the whole bunch of them had earned this trip because they’d kept their rooms clean.  They had canoes.

I knew it was stupid to put those canoes into a roaring Lake Michigan, but I didn’t say a thing because I didn’t want to be someone’s old Aunt Minnie.

So they took those canoes into the park, down to the beach, and into the water.  Fun.  Some of them got out a ways and tipped, and four of those kids drowned, black kids from the city.  I’d sold them the sticker.  I pointed their way to the water, their grave.

I was 18, and the boss chewed me up and down for not telling them it was flat-out idiotic to put those canoes in the lake.  I grew up on the lakeshore.  I knew.

That night I went home, told my parents—it was all over the news.  What I didn’t tell them was that I’d played a role, sold them the sticker. 

Later, I took out a sheet of paper.  I don’t know why.  I took out a sheet of paper, sat at the dining room table, and wrote some things down because it seemed the right thing to do.  Put it on paper.  Make some sense of it. 

Writing was certainly not something I was planning to do at that point in my life.  So where did this impulse come from, this desire to pull out a pen and write, to talk on paper? 

Almost every year I get papers like the one I must have written from students who are doing the same thing, writing through trauma, or horror or sadness or fear. One of the last years, a young woman described her dissolute father, a carousing, pathetic drunk in a bad essay, but wonderful therapy.  She wanted to put it down, to squeeze memories into a form she could hold in her hand. She wanted to write it, assuming that what she wrote, even how she wrote, would help her see, to mark out some out some territory of her own the way prairie settlers used to mark property lines right here where I live.

Writing—even the words I’m typing right now—require us to make sense of nonsense, to create some semblance of order out what can seem to all of us an endless ocean of chaos. If we write, we think we can maybe make some sense. And we can.

What seems like a video in verse eight of Psalm 147 had to be shot out here on the plains, where the sky is wide enough to frame thunderstorms. It’s not a still shot because there’s story here in a single verse:  clouds, then rain, then greening grass on the hills, all of it, sky to earth, straight out of an Ecology 101 textbook.

God almighty brews up clouds and gives them a squeeze.  They weep and just like that the earth is renewed, emerald hills dance with joy.

It’s that simple. God’s mighty hands order our lives. I know that.

But I keep pounding the keys anyway, human as I am; and the letters continue to appear right now, a blinking cursor birthing them, one after another. My imagination passes over a verse of a psalm, tries to make sense of its 18 words, and a 40-year-old memory from a lakeshore comes back to me, a dark night in June at a family table with a single sheet of lined paper, and the faces of four black kids in the back of a truck, kids who kept their rooms clean.

Even as I write, I’m trying to make sense of it all, trying to give it meaning.

Forty years later, I still need the rain. But then, don't we all?