There’s a new translation of the Hebrew Psalms by Robert Alter, reviewed in the New York Review of Books. I read the review while Marin and Matteo slept across the room, in our log home which we’re living in hoping to sell after a couple of years of occupancy against capital gains tax. A long story, rendered absurd by the housing bubble bursting and the coming recession... The next installment of the story is our new name for the house, “Radon Ranch.” Radon is heavy, stays in the basement from which it seeps, and where we, recently, no longer sleep. It’s a non-stop slumber party on foam on the living room floor, or at least until next week when our “consultant” Bill Reynolds will have the last word on remediation.
The Psalms have a very warm place in my heart. They have been my strength and my shield. My first adult memory of sensing an opening universe of hope and clarity around religion was when our Yale Chaplain took a group of us up to Weston Priory in 1973, a monastery of a dozen creative, thoughtful Catholic monks living together in Vermont, and we arose at 5 am and chanted gently together, breaking the silence of the long sleep
“Calm is the night O Lord,
as we wait for you,
all the stars are laughing at our wonder.
Wait not in vain for the sun shall come,
You shall know within you
his ever stirring presence.”
The beauty of the Vermont hills, the quiet of the community, the snow, the chants, the connection to ancient things, the strangeness, the calm about leaving the world behind, it all won me over. I have lived many years in the anteroom to that blessed community, using the songs that they used and memorized, the Psalms.
The first autumn that I lived in Alaska, 1998, I was looking for work but not too hard, I lived in a 12x20 dry cabin 7 miles outside Palmer at the end of the road, a setting where, from my loft, I had a view across the Matanuska River valley into the Talkeetna mountains. There I would sit for hours. I practiced meditation, I fasted, and I chanted those same Psalms, which I had memorized at another monastery, Christ in the Desert, 12 miles off the road from Abiquiu, New Mexico, in 1984.
In that cabin, as Christmas approached, I wrote daily Advent meditations to Jann’s daughter Lara and to Dick and Anna’s daughter Caroline (god daughters, both), meditations on the Psalms and on life and on Alaska. It was exciting to get up every morning before dawn and to write to these friends, to print off the reflection, write addresses, affix stamps, and to take the precious cargo down to town later to send off, three or four days in advance of when I hoped the girls would be reading them.
James Cone was on the Bill Moyers PBS interview program last night with a reflection on the importance of telling one’s life’s story truthfully, no matter how difficult it may be.
He started off speaking about his idea that Lynching and Crucifixion interpret one another. For Cone, Americans need to see that the hangman’s noose is our own home-grown participation in killing God (or wilfully destroying the sudden opening to a healing, blessed community that was made available by the Emancipation Proclamation) through terrorizing liberated blacks into subservience through selective lynching.
One of Cone’s other books has to do with Gospel Music and the Blues. He said that when people can take the random details of their lives, however dark and tragic, and put them into a narrative, they achieve a kind of transcendence both through the telling, and from the story. When you can tell the story, you are more than the story. You create it, you can transcend its negative power over you, and you can be illuminated by its redeeming aspects. This, according to Cone, is how the most difficult blues laments (like “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching, powerfully sung by Billie Holiday on Moyers show) work: by bringing your suffering or anger into words, you and your listener are empowered, even ennobled.
Cone’s whole argument on Moyers boiled down to this: the powerful will lash out, evil will be visited on the young, the women, the poor, but when they can talk about it, and sing about it, they will have the victory.
“What about the lynched men?” asked Moyers. “They are not dead,” Cone shot back, “their parents, their siblings, their friends live on, and the unmasking of evil deeds will bring new life to those whose bodies are sacrificed.”
Part of this depends on a belief in life after death, I suppose. But the practice of writing, of singing Psalms at dawn, the practice of breathing and giving thanks, of stretching your body, the practice of longing for justice and keeping alive the stories of injustice has its own glorious heritage.
I wonder how an Advent discipline of writing might use the Psalms, use this wonderful/ terrible time in America’s political history, this moment as we Alaskans make plans to survive peak oil, this time when Marin my wife sits at the dining room table in Radon Ranch knitting mittens (Mittens! I never even knew she could knit!) with a red stag design on the back. Would trying to tell our story mean anything, triangulating off the Hebrew songs and the Unitarian seven declarations, a half mile from Wal-Mart in the snows of Birch Hill outside Fairbanks, just 50 miles from a wilderness that stretches away to the very top of the frozen world.
Big plans. “Ha!” says Matteo, who is breaking out into his own world just now. When we “say grace” every night at supper, we light candles to the things that we’re grateful for. Recently, he’s been lighting his and saying, “crazy world.” If already Teo is giving thanks for the absurdity of it all, why on earth would he cede even one moment of his first Advent as a verbal person for his Papa and Mama’s furtive late-night attempts to make sense of things?
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