Canter Bridge

It is difficult to take the measure of rubble.

One cannot tell where one wall ended and another began. To guess the function of the buildings that are now this pile of stone is the stuff of speculation. One can only wonder who lived here, who died, who loved, who screamed, who longed for something better than this mountain of rock and dust.

When Ezekiel turns to his ‘restoration project’ in chapters 40–48 of the book that bears his name, he is in Babylon and Jerusalem is rubble. Yet he turns with odd precision to measuring the exact contours of this room and that portico in a Jerusalem that stands square and towers high in his vision of Jerusalem reconstructed.

He does not measure rubble. He locates a street, a house, an entranceway, all of which shall one day catch the shadows of passersby on their way to important things, men and women who no longer recall that one day only shapeless dust and mounds of rocks with the occasional detritus of Babylon’s weaponry lay scattered on this place.

Precise angles like Ezekiel’s do not matter when everything has been lost and all has been leveled. So does Ezekiel rebuild not only a city’s architectural lines but the mentality of a people, its capacity to imagine, its strength for hoping.

In a far different venue—though perhaps not as distinct as we imagine—the apostle Peter sketches out a different kind of rebuilding project. To those worn thin and low by the mindless nuisance and the occasionally violent fury of powers that are impatient with the eccentricities of the Christ thing, he writes:

Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering. And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.

It is strange how apocalyptic seers can look upon a generation or so of exile as a brief moment, how a scarred bishop can tend to his flock’s trauma with revisioning phrases like ‘for a little while’.

Yet this is the stock in trade, the imaginative rhetoric of those who see shapes in what for the rest of us is the mindless, gaping, formlessness of rubble.