Sunday Morning Meds--"from whence"

 

“I lift up my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from?” 

Psalm 121:1

I wasn’t sure where my daughter’s question came from, and I was busy thinking of something else at the time. That’s why I didn’t give her a very good answer, not a fatherly answer anyway.

“When you were my age,” she said, sort of laughing, “did you ever think that the world was just going to come to an end?”

My daughter is 30. When I was that age, my wife and I had her. But right then I couldn’t remember ever thinking the world was in imminent danger of coming to an end. I smiled and said no, rolled my eyes, and turned back to the computer screen.

Later, I couldn’t sleep.

I was a kid, but I remember learning to crawl under my school desk should nuclear holocaust come to small-town Wisconsin. I grew up in the Cold War, when either the Soviets or some unthinking President was capable of pushing the wrong button or the right one wrongly.

I remember walking on a football field during the Cuban missile crisis and having a profound talk with a kid about whether or not we’d ever have a season. We both knew football was a metaphor; we were talking about the end of the world.

I remember the comet Kohouteck and Y2K. I remember a number of primitive eschatologies—Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth, for instance—that ordered our days by manipulating ancient calendars suggested in the minor prophets. End-times theology is big business today, everybody and their dog wanting not to be Left Behind.

I believe my daughter’s generation lives in more fear than mine did because I was reared with more freedom than her kids will ever see. When I was ten, my friends and I took our bikes down to Lake Michigan and lost ourselves and our inhibitions in endless woods. Today that land is private property; but today, no parent would allow her ten-year-old kid that kind of freedom.

The parade of perspective students will start any day now at the college where I teach, and with them come loving, helicopter parents, moms and dads who ask more questions about college than their children do. I never visited the college where I enrolled. My parents drove me there—500 miles—then left. That was it.

As I write, a congressional election looms. The war in Iraq isn’t going well. Even the President wishes we were no longer there, I’m sure. But in order to keep his party in office, he and other Republicans are making sure the American people know that the Democrats, should they win, will cut and run; when they do, the Islamic extremists will terrorize us, even here in a woebegone corner of the rural Midwest. Fear sells.

So this is a better answer than my eye-rolling, Andrea: yes, I’ve felt that way. We all have. We’ve all been afraid. Even the psalmist.

While the psalms tell us bountifully about God, they’re even better at telling us about ourselves. You’re not alone—in more ways than one.

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This meditation, like the others that appear here on Sunday mornings, is a replay, a thought of mine twenty years ago. I could edit it for these days because fear is as prevalent today as it was when my daughter asked the question. Even though the specific fears--of violence, Covid, loss of culture, hatred, nationhood, even faith--rise from different sources, the fear she may have felt is just as real, as is the psalmist's false flag, because that's the intent, I believe, of the line that begins a wonderful psalm--121: No, our help doesn't come from the hills, it comes from the Creator God who's made the promises we all need to remember to ward off the shivers that rise so plentifully from the base camps of our lives: "My help comes from the Lord, who made the heavens and the earth."

The Lord will keep you from all harm—

    he will watch over your life;

8 

the Lord will watch over your coming and going

    both now and forevermore.