Sunday Morning Meds--Remembrances

“. . .you thought I was altogether like you.” Psalm 50

When I was a kid, my uncle—a most distinguished uncle—came to visit. I was in high school, and he took me golfing. I’d swung golf clubs since a neighbor put his old set in the junk; but my family was not the country club set. Going to a course would have been, well, out of the question—spendy and even a bit frivolous, I suppose.

After nine holes, he wanted to ride out in the countryside around town where I was then growing up and he had, maybe three decades before. His career had led him afar from town, and it was great joy for him to reminiscence while touring the haunts he’d probably never forgotten but hadn’t visited for years.

“Now go out west of town,” he told me, and I did. He wanted to follow the river, the Onion River, because he said he and his friends used to have so much fun out there. “There,” he said. “See that path through the field?—if you follow that road, you’ll come to our swimming hole.” He was overflowing with memory. “Great place—we used to have so much fun.” He was lost in memory.

Right then I was the same age kid he was remembering, and I remember thinking it odd that he could be so emotionally attached to a bend in the river I’d never even seen, even though we’d both grown up in the same neighborhood and I’d walked parts of that river myself, trapping and duck hunting.

Years before I was alive, there’d been spectacular fun at that spot I’d never seen, a spot no one I knew ever frequented. He knew the world I’d grown up in, knew it intimately; but the place he knew was seemed to me to be a different country altogether.

Sometime ago already, a friend of mine who also grew up in the same little burg, came back here on the edge of the Great Plains where both of us lived. He was depressed because his elderly parents had decided to move. He was afraid his last “home” might well be his last.

I know that feeling. When my parents left the house in which I grew up, a similar emptiness descended, even though they were simply moving to an apartment across town. Years before already my distinguished uncle had prepared me for that leave-taking when I couldn’t help witnessing his reverence for a river I knew, but a spot I’d never visited.

The town my uncle knew wasn’t the place I was growing up back then, nor is it the town this friend of mine doesn’t want to forget. We’re all part of the diaspora, which means none of those burgs is the one that exists in the here and now. The gulf which divides reality and perception is sometimes unfathomable.

I suppose we fashion a whole host of worlds within our own perceptions. I suppose—and this is scary--the God we fashion isn’t necessarily the one who exists through time and eternity. In Psalm 50, a psalm that’s really shocking in places, here’s yet another line to make us sweat a bit: “you thought I was altogether like you.”

He's not. He's forever more.