There is room: come, rest, stay A time of grieving and rejoicing
One of the wisest and most beautiful lessons I learned came from a priest I love and is about the difference between a Hebrew way of knowing and a Greek way of knowing. We are primarily inheritors of the Greek way, he told me; we are measurers, analyzers, answerers, probers, provers of things. We have subjects and objects. We prefer certainty. By Allison Seay But in the Hebrew way, knowing is more emotional and invisible, probably deeper and more profound though less explainable. When a Hebrew talked about “knowing” another person, there was a depth about that knowledge: “Abraham knew Sarah,” the priest reminds me, but that is about much more than Abraham simply having information about Sarah. If you asked a Greek, for example, “How high is that high diving board over there?” the Greek might measure angles and distances and respond practically, “It is 18 feet, 6 inches high.” But, if you asked the Hebrew person the same question, he might respond, “If you really want to know how high it is, stand at the base of the ladder, close your eyes, and climb the rungs, slowly and in silence. Make your way by feel alone, without seeing, make your way to the end of the board until your toes curl over the edge. Then, look down. That feeling? … that is how high the high diving board is.” Truly, by the Greek standard, I assure you I know little. Or, I know some things about some things—literature, poetry, a garden— and they matter deeply to me. I certainly do not have “Greek” knowledge about theology, doctrine, whatever they might have taught me had I gone to school properly. I am very much a child of religion, a child of the world. And yet, somehow, dare I say it, I like to think I know enough to Know some things in that other way, things I know are true though I cannot prove them. I heard the poet Li-Young Lee say a beautiful thing I try to remember each morning like a prayer: “The kingdom of God is coming,” he says, “and the kingdom of God is here. The task of the poet and the task of the faithful is to name it.” If I have one task, that feels like a good one. Or, Ernest Hemingway says it similarly, that “all we have to do is write one true sentence… the truest sentence that you know.” Maybe by “know” he means the Hebrew kind of Know. The unprovable but surer, deeper, harder way. And maybe the work is to say what we can, as carefully as we can, to live as harmlessly as we can, to understand what we are able to understand and to appreciate the mystery of what is not ours to claim. I find myself in a peculiar time along with the rest of the world. What is there to say of a pandemic almost over? What true thing might be said that has not yet been uttered? What else to say of masks and distance and lockdown and loneliness and fatigue. What
to say of a virus that nearly undid us, that brutalized us, that robbed us, that killed so many of us. It has been a “nightmare,” except that a nightmare is over quickly and, on waking, nearly forgotten. The Greek way in us might look at data and evidence: at numbers, risings and fallings, rates and ratios. The Greek way in us is interested in cells and transmissions and vaccines and variants. And this matters deeply, for it is the difference in life and death. But this way alone leaves out that important other way of Knowing, which is perhaps more difficult, more inarticulate, more nuanced and also, I am sure of it, a matter of life and death, too. The lifting of restrictions does not perfectly equate to the lifting of a pandemic fog, thick as cloud cover and heavy as steel. I was once a long-distance runner and I am thinking of the way recovery from a marathon takes time well beyond the moment the race is over; there is an immediate relief when one can stop running— the breath returns, water and rest, the people congratulate one another—but there is a much longer time in which the invisible work of recovery goes at its own pace deep in the body: residual soreness, unquenchable thirst, exhaustion and dull ache. When the pandemic is declared “over” it will be a relief in every direction and the Greek ways in us will rejoice at the proof we are given of our survival and triumph. But it will not be the full story, and in the Hebrew way of knowing we will know enough to know the work is not yet finished, or may even start anew. After all, grief does not end with the burial of the dead but, in a way, only begins. Exhaustion and hunger are not cured with a nap and snack, but with extended rest, a depth of care and patience and tenderness, days of good, long meals, and nights of deep and peaceful sleep. And it is here where I think the Church has an important role to play. She rejoices in the chorus of thanksgivings that resound as the world emerges into a post-pandemic world. But she is also a listener for the prayers of the desperate, home for the winded and weary, for the hungry, the poor, the defeated, the conflicted, the bereaved. The Church is in the business of healing and endurance, however long it takes, however long we need, the Church says: come, rest, stay. We at St. Stephen’s Church of course value science and safety and data and protocol; we value knowledge and expertise and research and evidence. We also value the invisible, the incalculable, the unspeakable, the kind of knowledge that surpasses our understanding. And there is room here for all of it—for the multitudes we each carry inside of us, for all that we carry and all we cannot keep holding. There is room here for our Greek and our Hebrew ways, room here for rejoicing and for grieving, for the new and for the old, for all that we know and all that we do not. We say: come, rest, stay.
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Job Number: 395187 • Page Name: 395187_Newsletter_FA.p5.pdf Date: 11-Jun-2021 • Time: 18:32 Page Colors • Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black
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