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Archive for December, 2010

at night: Psalm 134

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 15, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The night trembles with specied ambiguity.

It is the time of darkness, yet a candle shines the brighter for it. The dark’s terrors stalk most lethally at night, yet church and temple double their welcome to those who gather then.

Night, like a desert, seems a deathly void. Yet as for those who patiently search the desert’s mysteries, so does night offer a thousand fascinations to the eye that accommodates itself to the night-time’s odder shades.

The night, whether for those who stand at orders through its long stretch or for those who gather to worship at its unrushed hours, is a time to bless the One who made both night and day, then refashions them before our astonished eyes with each turn of the globe.

Come, bless the LORD, all you servants of the LORD, who stand by night in the house of the LORD!

Lift up your hands to the holy place, and bless the LORD.
May the LORD, maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion. (Psalm 131:1-3 NRSV)

Night is a time to bless and a time to receive YHWH’s blessing.

Night is not merely the Nothing that its hurried dismissers, intoxicated by the day’s glare, claim it to be.

The night caresses its own glow, brilliance, blessing.

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Jonah’s lament: Jonah 2

Posted in textures, tagged , , on December 14, 2010| Leave a Comment »

The narrative of the great fish sent by the Lord nicely brackets the odd prophet Jonah’s lament. In the first verse of the second chapter of the book that describes this prophet’s mishap by bearing his name, the great fish sent by the Lord swallows Jonah up. In the last verse of the same chapter, the fish spews the remarkably undigested Jonah out onto dry ground.

In between and from the stomach of a fish, Jonah looses a lament that settles comfortably into the contours of lived distress, whether that of an individual sufferer or of an exiled nation:

Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying, ‘I called to the LORD out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?’ The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God. As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the LORD; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty. But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the LORD!’ Then the LORD spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land. (Jonah 2:1–10 NRSV)

Jonah’s complaint takes into account both divine protagonism in his calamity and the unthinkable tragedy of separation from the divine.

The lament, for all its unsettling interweaving of realism and poignance, does not go unanswered. Though majoring on his own incapacity, Jonah also registers two divine movements: the Lord hears and the Lord brings his life up from the pit.

So do the laments—and so does Jonah—provide a ray of hope to the suffering person and the exiled people: First, God may hear again. Second, the Lord may lift this other life up from its pit, turning despair into sacrifice and weeping to thanksgiving.

Biblical prophetism makes uncommon cause with a saying that nearly achieves the status of a folk proverb: you just never know.

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Germany meets England in America’s heartland

Posted in legacy on December 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »

A worthy contingent of the ‘Pennsylvania Hoys’ in due course made their way to the farmland of north central Indiana. The fertile soil might have put them in mind of Pennsylvania, though it spread north, south, east, and west as far as the eye could see rather than just to the edge of well-weathered mountains with odd names like ‘Mohantonga’.

The winters were in parts savage and benign similarly to those that had bedeviled life back in the Appalachian hills. Yet the names of the neighbors, some of them at any rate, were different. They were English names, like ‘Laturner’. Lydia Hay’s parents still clung to the older spelling of the family name. Born in Wells County, Indiana, Lydia had no memory of Pennsylvania hills. They were as alien to her experience as the Old Country village of Rohrbach, Pfalz, was to her parents, now a generation or two removed from Europe.

Lydia grew up to marry Jesse Franklin Laturner fifteen years after the old men had returned from Gettysburg and other oddly named killing fields. Jesse came into Lydia’s purview as the the son of the splendidly non-Germanic Henry and Nancy Wilcoxson Laturner. Five of their eight children were women.

Of these, three had multiple husbands. The sported names like Sechler, Vagus, McBride, Brand, Holcomb, and Crickmore.

They weren’t in Kansas anymore, these Laturner brides. Empires met, and kissed, in rural Indiana.

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