Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 42

 “These things I remember as I pour out my soul: 

how I used to go with the multitude, leading the procession to the house of God, with shouts of joy and thanksgiving among the festive throng.”

 

Those who don’t know David’s deep sadness in this verse are truly blessed, but I can’t believe there are many.

 

A decade ago or so I took a trip from Sioux City, Iowa, to Billings, Montana, up the Missouri River valley through the magnificent country explored 200 years ago by the Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery.  Much of that territory hasn’t changed dramatically; there are no cities to speak of, and most of the towns are dying and have been for a century or more.  Agriculture reigns throughout that region, even though making a living is just as tough as it ever was.  But the great joy of traveling the Lewis and Clark Trail a century after they did is that so much space, so much grandeur is still there waiting to awe.

           

I left the river and angled through “Indian country” on my way home, stopping at the 125^th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Little Big Horn, and then visiting a desolate place called “Wounded Knee.”  The whole trip was, for me, an epic journey, resulting in a novel—and more.  I fell in love with territory that keeps me dreaming of a life out there somewhere in the humbling reverie of so much open space and such a big, big sky.  These very words are part of that trip’s legacy.

           

One moment, however, was purely personal and unrelated to history or landscape, a moment in the Black Hills, where the Schaap family vacationed when our kids were kids.  Camping in the Hills was always a joy, the children so young they could spend all day on a beach no larger than a backyard and not complain a mite. 

 

I intended to drive through Center Lake campground, where we always set up our tent.  But when I passed the lodge and store at Sylvan Lake, I was time-capsuled back to a moment when I stood in that very store and watched my two tow-head kids trying to determine which of the little Black Hills curios they were going to lug along home. 

 

The memory was crystal clear, almost a vision--their blonde heads, their innocent indecision, and myself, a young father who knew, honestly, little more than joy and pride and the wide horizon of expectation.  I too, it seemed to me, was an innocent back then.

 

I didn’t go in the store that day, just drove by; but when I came to the Center Lake turnoff a few minutes later, I didn’t go to the campground either but headed in the opposite direction. A visceral grief so profound I almost cried hit me like some unseen Black Hills bison.  

 

Ubi sunt, that grief is called in literature—a grief of soul at the transience of life, of my life and yours.  I know what what ubi sunt is. I taught literature for a lifetime; but that I knew it in a textbook didn’t heal the sad pain that came over me.

 

Today, remembering that moment, I can’t help but think about how much deeper Lakota grief must be for those Hills, the Paha Sapa, because Native memories are so much richer and so much more profound.  That’s another story for another day.

 

David’s lament in Psalm 42 has within it the same profound lament for how things were and how those things are no more.  His may well be the original ubi sunt.

 

Put yourself in a grand memory, a place and time now totally unreachable. Think of the Lakota at Pine Ridge, not that far away, remembering the joy of Paha Sapa.  Think of me turning away from Center Lake. Remember David and that unforgettable mad dance of his before the ark. That’s what’s haunting him, and that’s why he needs God. 

 

As I do.  As you do too.  As all of us do, I think.