a meditation i wrote a good while ago. in case you need something to read today.
Like Men Who Dream: a meditation on Psalm 126
Adonai, my God, what have we done? I have seen it with my own eyes: this grown man splayed in the dirt, saturating the ground beneath him – whether tears or urine I cannot tell. He has seen his daughter raped in his own kitchen; his firstborn son bestialized by men with muddy faces. He doesn’t feel the hook ripping his nostril; he shall feel the shackles shred his ankles for six-hundred miles. We are being taken to Babylon. I am sorry for our existence.
Clive Timothy Huggins – he is my father.
He called me from an airport last night to ask how I’m doing. He loves me, just how much I cannot tell – it’s hard to measure a man’s heart. I know where he eats his meals, how he looks at his wife as she nourishes him with food and smiling. I can imagine the way he held me when I was born. He must have cried and laughed, which, I suppose, was the same note, but for the life of me, I cannot remember what that must sound like. I do not remember. So I’ve been searching for my father; specifically, I am searching for his laughter.
I was twelve when he taught me how to wrestle. He placed my left hand on his shoulder and his on mine. I think I giggled, but it was a nervous giggle – such intimacy between a man and a boy. He told me to lean my head into his right collarbone, to push my feet away from the center of gravity and trust the weight of his leaning against me. We began to move, circumscribing the center of this warm circle, a peculiar dance as we swiped at each other’s knees with our free hands. I was a wisp of a boy then; he could have pitched me to the ground.
I spent the next six years captive – to peers, to acceptance, to the search for a home, to silence. A silence like my father’s. Whether he caused it or I, I cannot tell. Is silence passed through our seed? Is it the shame and sorrow that empty our mouths of laughter?
I was seventeen when I left home, eighteen when I was converted, nineteen when I returned home, now a man, the same as my father. Head full of books, heart full of blood, bones full of laughter. It must have been some holiday – the whole family was gathered in the living room. We were all surprised by the scene, I think, such an unfamiliar stage for our family. So I acted. I stood, moved to the center of the room, flexed knees, pumped shoulders like pistons, and called my dad to the ring. We would wrestle.
It was a beautiful silence that tethered: dad startled by the call; mom tickled by the invitation; sisters embarrassed by the testosterone. It was a call to restoration, a revival of joy lost to the misfortunes of my adolescence. I placed my left hand on his shoulder; he on mine. Leaned in, his collarbone imprinting my forehead. I pushed slightly with my feet, daring to trust the weight of our dependence on each other. My right arm tensed, remembering the lessons from years ago, ready to swipe as we circled each other. He squeezed my shoulder, a silent summons to begin the dance, but as I swiveled to step, left foot suspended for a split-second, my father forsook the formalities of childhood. He swept my crossed-up legs and tried to swat me to the ground, but I was grown then, a wisp no more. I regained my footing, clothed him with chest and arms, and began spinning, an awkward bundle of father-and-son flailing clumsily. The room became a blur of brown rug and oak veneer and my father’s hair and I could smell his sweat and hear my mother’s gasping and the blood rushing into my cheeks and I was in love, wildly as we fell to the floor in a beautiful heap, free from form and pattern and expectation. Free from silence: my father was laughing. Such unexpected joy, it sounded like home. It was like a dream.
On some winter day, a shadow blankets the camel’s carcass, then colors a ravine with shades of brown and darker brown. A piece of rain drops on a bone, and then another. The shadows are spreading, clouds falling on the Negev like some god has split the seam of time. And the drops strike the bones, a steady staccato, clapping and clinking and rattling like they’re coming to life. And the drops turn to rain, and the rain unites streams with streambeds. The streams soak the sides of the gulleys so that the mud is too much weight to bear, and the sides are splitting and the Negev cannot contain the flood of noise, and if anyone were there to hear, it would probably sound like laughter.
The sun rises three days later, and with it, the head of a crocus. It’s pink like the wild mustard and hollyhock across the stream. The Jerusalem sage grows near the water’s edge, reclining like some resting prophet. Its sibling, the Jerusalem spurge, carpets the nearby ground, mingling with asphodels and narcissi and purple irises, crown anemones, corn poppy, adonis, buttercup – all red, and the red everlasting, the “dam hamakabim” – blood of the Maccabees. Cyclamen crawl on rocks and stony hillsides. Wild oat and barley and quaking grass are already growing, preparing to nourish the gazelle and ibex and goat and sheep that have smelled the water and are sniffing the red carpet. Even the jackal will be allowed to drink.
This is the Negev, restored to glory, sharp in its redness. The air is sweet and thick like the pomegranate, bell-shaped, stitched across the landscape.
In the year 537, we were released from captivity, free to go home. It was impossible. Impossible.
It was so unexpected, so unfamiliar, so intimate, so right – we blushed in its abundance. At first, we laughed like a barren-wombed Sarah, the shock of it so steep, but that gasping turned into giggles and shouts, the sound of Sarah thick with child: Isaac, son of laughter. We were in love.
That day is a memory now, a moment of deliverance so remarkable that even our enemies were constrained to confess the name of our God. That name, that name, “Adonai,” so hard to pronounce these days – I think we have swallowed it with our pride. That day is gone. We are left with a small remnant, so many stayed in that land, and of those who decided to return, well, we were lucky to survive the desert. We have tried to rebuild, but even the dung and the mud seem sad, and they cannot hold things together. We have managed a temple, but it is not Solomon’s. It is so plain. And we have sinned in our complaints.
Tomorrow, tomorrow, though, is the tenth day of this seventh month, and the high priest will seek to make atonement for our sins. Yom Kippur, and we are frightened, but we are in need of restoration.
Our priest will prepare the sacrifice, and he will prepare himself: an ephod of gold and a band of blue and purple and scarlet, fine twisted linen. Stones so colorful you can taste them: ruby, topaz, emerald, onyx, jasper. And the robe for the ephod, all of blue, the hem stitched with bells and pomegranates. When he hears the bells, our God will know that he’s approaching. And what of the pomegranates? I do not know, only that the Lord wants them there.
Adonai, my God, please accept this sacrifice:
When the priest entered the sanctuary, we were quiet, and as he descended deeper into the sea of curtain, quiet turned to silent, save only the echo of some flailing bells. We stood there, a sorry family, tethered to God by a man daring to approach the face of God. He would know either violence or glory, and probably both.
The bells had all but abandoned our ears when they began to ring louder: the sound of shaking. And as each curtain parted, the bells pealed louder, and the priest, his glorious robe stained with blood, stood before us again, and he pronounced our restoration. God accepted our sacrifice.
I fell into laughter, embarrassed by the goodness of it all, by the character of my Lord and God. We are loved. And this joy, this joy is no mere emotion – it is so much bigger than that. So much bigger than nostalgia, so big that it clothes all our sorrows and doubts and shriveled dreams. This joy is a story. It’s a story that will captivate the memories of my children and their children after that. A story planted in the character of our God. Now and tomorrow, this is our hope.
Five hundred years later, those children, now grown, sat on a beach. An intimate gathering, thirteen men, close as brothers. They had been scattered for two weeks: healing the sick; setting free the oppressed; restoring the fortunes of the outcast; wiping mud from the eyes of lepers, men who grunted like beasts. The men were scattered, but not alone; they traveled in pairs, and they took nothing with them but the joy of each other’s company, and the joy of the one who sent them out. They sowed seeds, sometimes on fertile soil, sometimes on hard; they laughed and they cried; they skipped and at times shook the dust from their feet.
But they were back together now, reclining on a quilt of sand cooled by the wind from the lake. They formed a circle, and the fire in their midst warmed their shins. They cast ash-red shadows on the beach as they broiled fish, and when they finished eating, they began to tell their stories. And each story was a small miracle, whereupon they laughed in amazement. And of all the men, the one who laughed the most, his name was Jesus. Such a deep laugh, deep enough to split his sides, and he pitched backward into the sand and laughed until he cried, unabashed, unashamed. And he looked at the stars, and he remembered a promise made to Abraham and his seed after him. This was his story.
This was the story that led him, one year later, to a barren hillside. No grass, just dirt. Cracks radiated and scattered from a piece of wood staked into the earth as if this place were the center of gravity, and all the world were tethered to it. It was no surprise to Jesus when a soldier placed his left hand on his shoulder, leaned in, and drove a spike through his wrist. No surprise when he was lifted heavenward and air flooded from his lungs. This man of sorrows, well-acquainted with grief, knew it was coming. His eyes glazed over like drawn curtains, and he was meeting face to face with his God and Father, but his hands, splayed to the wood, were empty of sacrifice. Only himself. No bells to announce his arrival, just the deafening decibel of death – sin is loud as hell. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And he died.
The same soldier speared his side, and a stream of water ran down his thigh and through his toes and into the cracks in the dirt, and some blood, red like pomegranate, stained his waist, and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.
Two thousand years later, and I sit in some pew, the wood groaning beneath my weight. All these beautiful people around me, these brothers and sisters, but my insides are parched, and from the looks on their faces, theirs are, too. Staring at the colors on the map in the back of my Bible, tracing my finger around the Dead Sea and into the Negev. It’s brown, just plain brown. This is obviously the summer map. But I’ve heard the story of the rain and the pomegranates, and if I could find a red pen, I’d color it, and I wouldn’t worry about the lines. I’d make it a deep red, redder than pomegranate, redder than the words on page nine hundred eighteen, one page after death:
Dad, I’m twenty-six now, and I’ll be headed home soon, shouting for joy. I’ll place my left hand on your shoulder, lean in, and whisper to you, “The Lord has done great things for me, and I am glad.”
Posted by ghetto monk at February 15, 2004 01:07 AM | TrackBackI am fascinated by your meditations and the fact that they often include aspects of the violent power of God. I usually just skip over that part of who God is - but you connect to it in a way that is very real and beautiful.
I can't believe you wrote that at twenty-six.
Thanks.
you beautifully bring these truths about our God alive...this verse and your meditation on it were what i needed to hear at this moment in time. i wonder at a God who brings light out of the deep darkness, who creates a world out of formless space...and can raise up for himself an army from a desert of dry bones. how could we resist but abandoning ourselves to a "God that gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were." (Rom. 4:17)
Posted by: kelly at February 16, 2004 07:45 AMi'm glad that's a rhetorical question, as i'd hate to have to expose myself by answering; it would be pretty shameful all the justifications/answers that i have come up with over the years for resisting the abandoning. thanks for stopping in, kelly.
Posted by: jeremy at February 16, 2004 11:58 AMthank you.
Posted by: hill at February 16, 2004 12:07 PMyou're welcome
Posted by: jeremy at February 16, 2004 12:35 PMyes, i suppose the wonder is that we spend most of our time resisting...sometimes it is clearer and easier to abandon oneself though.
Posted by: kelly at February 17, 2004 06:35 AMhello jeremy. remember when you put on those jeans without the legs and danced around my sleeping mat on the floor? that was weird.
Posted by: wingate at February 17, 2004 08:23 AMHey jeremy. I must confess I have almost not yet finished one of your posts, because I pay for each minute online here in Ceiba, but I like to read. I take it you're studying in Vancouver?
Back in the day, I was really encouraged by your ghetto monk story. will and kim honeycutt brought it from Stl.
wow. thanks, tom. where were you with will and kim?
so i live in spokane now, though i'm likely driving up to vancouver to visit the new l'abri branch in a few weeks. if you'll send me your e-mail address, i'd be glad to e-mail you some stuff if you have the ability to download and/or print out, saving valuable currency.
take care,
jeremy