Where to listen

 

She’d told me about the school she’d attended as a little girl, almost ninety years before. She spoke of the humiliation of losing, so quickly, her free-flowing long hair, felt the absurd foreignness of having to speak a language she didn’t understand. All of that in a big reservation school, the school at the agency, the school her parents insisted she attend. She held very few memories from that place that were a joy, but she remembered how her father would come to visit almost weekly.

She was a child there. She was being shaped into adulthood.

Years later, after nurses’ training in Rapid City, she’d returned to the Agency hospital, same town, the hospital where she worked on the same reservation where she was born and reared. First school, first job—home, in a way, even though she lived a half day’s ride away. She wanted to show me all of that, wanted me to see what I could of her childhood really, and, at the same time, history of her people.

Sometime previous I’d asked her to take me to her precious places, those places where significant things had happened in her life, the really important things. I wanted to see those places with her. It was a joy for her to remember and for me to watch and feel her explain.

First stop was a cemetery, where we hunted down her grandfather’s grave. She knew where it was but hadn’t stood there before. Then we drove on, all the way to a long crooked finger of land so high above the river it didn’t go under when the Army Corps of Engineer’s finished the Big Bend Dam, far down river. It was the far eastern bit of reservation just off Hwy 212. A little park just off the road is hardly elegant, but the great blue lake the river formed is gorgeous, so elegant against rough-hewn reservation boundaries that it looks like Disney.

“There,” she pointed straight into the water. “All of that life, so much of my history, our history is lost forever beneath the water.”

Who in South Dakota could stand against the dams 75 years ago when they were built? Who didn’t rejoice with the kid waterskiing directly over the old Agency on that perfect summer day? What on earth is not to like about Lewis and Clark Lake?

That moment returned to me last week when Wright Thompson says a similar thing in  his new book, The Barn: A Study of a Mississippi Murder. Floods explode down, into, and through the Mississippi Delta area, he says, and have for more than a century. Flooding has destroyed whole river towns. swallowed them up beneath rampaging water and mud that swamp alleyways and streets and bury businesses and churches. In some locales, Thompson says, locals swear “they can hear church bells ringing when the currents move right.”

It's a beautiful image, isn’t it?—the sense that when the currents are just right you can hear church bells from churches long buried in the deep?

I’d like to believe that because that reservation memory came back to me in a torrent when I read it in Thompson’s book, at least something of what my Native friend was trying to teach me got home. 

I know lots of empty places where I swear I can still hear distant church bells.

Sunday Evening Meds--from Psalm 4

“Let the light of your face shine upon us, Lord”

 Like all of us, Moses’s brother Aaron stumbled through a life far less than perfect. Because he conceded to the Israelite mob that demanded an idol to worship, Aaron was almost single-handedly responsible for his brother’s wrathful smashing of the God-inscribed stone tablets, not to mention God’s wrath on his own chosen people.  No one ever mentions Aaron in a roll call of the saints.

 Yet, Aaron’s words ring throughout millions of church fellowships around the world every week.  The Lord told Moses (see Numbers 6) to have Aaron bless the Israelites with words that you can still hear almost any place two or three are gathered to worship God: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. . .”

 If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a million times.  King David likely did too.

 And maybe that’s why the line itself has lost its visual character; simply said, I’ve heard it so often. Just for a moment, it’s helpful, I think, to create the picture this famous benediction offers. Penitents, millions of them through the ages, are on their knees (it’s almost impossible not to see them in some kind of supine position physically) and in some kind of darkness, waiting for a brightening glance of Godliness, just a glance.

 Now delete millions of those people from that image and picture just one penitent. Put yourself there, on your knees, eyes slightly arched but staring downward in helplessness, a nervous shakiness in hands and arms and legs in anticipation of a passing glance, and repeat: “Let the light of your face shine upon me, Lord.”

 I dare say that the only people who can effortlessly create that image of themselves are those who, for whatever horrifying reason, have spent time themselves in that position.  Those who, like me, have never suffered significant bouts of abandonment or grief or despair have trouble creating an image of so great a helplessness. After all, I might say, I’ve got fairly substantial bootstraps to prove my internal strength. What I’ve done, I’ve done on my own.

 It seems so medieval almost, doesn’t it?—the image behind the blessing; so, well, Islamic:  hoards of people, face to the floor, hoping for a fleeting glance from the King of Creation.  Good capitalists create their own fates, after all; we seal our own successes with the sheer tonnage of our personal industry.  We make our fate.

 But the line we repeat so often—and hear repeated as a blessing to us—offers a wholly different portrait.  There isn’t a dime’s worth of self-sufficiency in David’s abject request here: “Just a glance, Lord.”

Embedded in the old line is something of the sun, of course—God Almighty as iridescent force whose rays bless abundantly. And what David wants, as has each and every one of us who’ve been in that abjectly needy, is but a glance of divine favor, a glimpse of light in the darkness. We’re not even asking to meet God’s eyes; the line begs for something to take away those heavy shadows, just a glance.

 It’s so medieval, so lords and serfs, country manors fortified cathedrals. It’s so impotent, so paralyzed, so defenseless. It’s so blasted un-American.

 And yet I know—I really do—that such helplessness is what He wants. “The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. . .”