Canter Bridge

When everything is at risk, men become brothers. Warriors are bonded in the act of surviving into a proximity that is rarely equaled in pleasant times.

Chronicles, the post-exilic retelling of Israel’s great Primary History (Genesis to Kings), allows itself to revel in the memory of men whose deeds have been forgotten. Their glory is to have fought alongside David and those battle companions of his who wrecked the Philistine aspiration to dominate all that moved in their strip of the Eastern Mediterranean almost a millennium before the time of Christ.

When one lingers beside the Vietnam War Memorial, one senses something of the evocative potency of names. The heroics and the fear of these men are known to few or to no human memory. Only their deaths are recorded, scented by the poignant knowledge that their deaths did not sow the seeds of a nation’s emergence.

David’s warriors at least had a privilege that America’s fallen in Vietnam did not. Their bravery was rewarded, in the course of things, by the establishment of a Davidic state that persisted for centuries and gave birth to things even better than itself.

Yet we know the defining moment of only a few of them, the constellation of bodies, spears, shouts, and blood that exalted them in Israel’s memory above those who merely fought and those who remained behind. The rest of these men exist in human memory only as names, virtuous by association and by the supposition that they are not classified among ‘the Thirty’ or ‘the Warriors’ by chance or fortunate birth. They did something that led to their enshrinement in these lists.

Yet only names remain.

It is difficult for minds molded by an age as individualistic as ours to appreciate the degree to which a man or a woman lives on in the possibilities he has forged for his children, grandchildren, and the generations—God being merciful—that might follow. We live, we die and—if we speak at all of the continuity of life after our breath has stilled—we bend those words to the articulation of my resurrection or his eternal life or the desired prolongation of an existence for her soul.

We believe perhaps too little in our people and its project to rejoice in its existence as our own, for we are dead and gone or living out there with a finality too severe to see ourselves still here in this son’s achievement, this daughter’s long fidelity, this people’s dawning, prosperity, good wine and adequate bread, its hold-taking of a vision that was sketched only in loose line in the time that we longed for it on this soil.

We do not believe in the sonority of names.

We imagine ourselves too sophisticated for such corporality, too self-realized for definition by a solidarity that relativizes me and assesses my worth in terms of a people’s survival.

In this, we are fools. Fools reading to become wise. Imbeciles needing discernment, vagabonds desperate for citizenship. Lonely people wired to belong.

Impoverished and fat, we have fought too few wars wanting only to have a place in our people’s memory, to have our names pronounced by great-grandchildren who cannot recall what we did.