Saturday, July 4, 2020
Fireworks
The Catholic lectionary was arranged in conjunction with Roman Catholic feasts and solemnities, not American holidays. But after all, since I’m right here in the middle of the middle of the country, and we won’t be watching fireworks of any size, I need to at least say something on this USA Day of Days.
Our friends and family have a few fireworks in store, but none of them are going to reach very high into the sky. I bought two pork butts for 99 cents a pound at Schnucks last night, and a watermelon, but they are for next weekend, not the 4th. I think Chris is smoking something (not like that!) and has invited us to a meal tomorrow night. I hope we can go.
Not sure though, because wearing masks and avoiding human contamination has become, again, the name of the game. I’m sick of it, and not feeling much joy in solitude right now. I have a travel bug tickling first down my right pant leg and then the left. There’s a deep need to hug YOU deep inside my soul.
I want to go to Israel during the good old days, which Amos finally gets to in his book of diatribes.
Good Days are coming!
The plowman shall overtake the reaper.
Harvest will follow upon harvest, rich fruits will follow upon rich fruits. God smiles benevolently down upon us all.
The juice of grapes shall drip down the mountains.
Oh my goodness, what a magnificent sight! Can I just lay down and lick it up? Let it flow over my face and into my mouth? Let me laugh with abandon, not in the inebriation of wine but the Great Drunkenness of the Spirit. God is good, and his mercy pours on us forever.
Plant vineyards and drink the wine
Set out gardens and eat the fruits
I have given these to you and they will never be removed.
Thus saith the Lord.
In a flash I remember the young love of Tommy and Zaneeta, mirrored by her parents’ more mature love in The Music Man. Mayor Shinn and his wife Eulalie host 1912’s Fourth of July festivities in the high school gym and later outside in Madison Park. Of course there are Shenanigans, stolen kisses, and music that rushes joyful through the veins. There be goosebumps.
Fifty years after the Civil War, five years before the US entry into World War I, these halcyon years in Iowa might remind old Amos of those he hopes for in Israel.
The juice of corn shall drip along the prairie. Put on your old straw hat, chew a stalk of ripened wheat, snooze in the afternoon, remember the redemption of Jesus, rest in the arms of God. Listen to the music. Wait for dusk. The fireworks are coming.
I wish. I wait. Be still.
The Lord does speak of peace for his people, to his people.
Kindness and truth SHALL meet
Justice and peace SHALL kiss.
Truth springs out from within the ground
Justice looks down from heaven.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident … all men … Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
My friend Don lives on spring-fed and spring-sustained Lulu Lake in Wisconsin. He takes us sometimes in a small boat to a tangled net of reeds along the shore, where we can see the spring still bubbling, always even on the coldest winter days. This water is pure and cold. It has bubbled for hundreds of years.
In the old days before Amana and Maytag, winter cutters in coveralls wearing heavy gloves came and sliced up the ice. They sold it mostly in mansions at first in Milwaukee and Lake Geneva, then later to everyone, and finally to no one. But I can see their old, unpainted wooden sleds sliding along the ice, sometimes nearly crashing through and killing them all, as I sit in my own silence on Don’s dock alongside the quiet birdsong and blue skies of Lulu now.
So much gone.
But what good is it to weep?
Unless I need to weep! Because then, when I need to weep, it’s all good, and my grief, my saying goodbye to something deep and important whether it’s ever been mine or not… that grief must flow free without clot, passing through my heart. Hiring a mourner never does the trick. I need a few hours alone just to sob without stopping, loud and loud and loud.
This memoried rush of joy and anguish always accompanies me into the Fourth of July. We celebrate surfaces without much thought, the rockets’ red glare and all that, but when there’s time to sit on a silent dock or contemplate a bubbling spring that has sprung forever, then the dead red blood of boys killed in wars fought so long ago, the refusal of some to allow the celebrating of others, the arrogance and shame that separates Americans from other Americans seizes up my heart.
“Conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created … Equal.”
Sorrow and grief, very personal and very corporate, my guilt and your guilt and our guilt, oh! I am caught until I can at last sob awhile, then oh so gradually notice how near YOU have been, all this time, my Lord and my God.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.”
The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.
You speak softly into my sobs. Thank you, Jesus.
People don’t put new wine into old wineskins because the skins will burst, and then the wine will spill out, and the skins be ruined.
And we will have no wine to drink!
Right!
Pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both will be preserved.
“That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation shall have a new birth of freedom. And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
O Lord Jesus, make my wineskin new.
In good time, David. First you must sob out your heart, let it be wrung out altogether by your guilt and grief. And I’ll be nearby preparing both your new skin and all that beautiful Beaujolais, our new wine together, my gift always for all of you.
All? Every race? Every ethnos, every class, moneyed and unmoneyed, man and woman, child and mother, father and child, all of us, Lord? All?
Oh yes! And you haven’t even scratched the iceberg. Every single one of you, immigrants all upon the earth, is a fingerprint, my own fingerprint on the universe. You are neither Dream nor Dot but fearfully, wonderfully Made. Even your deaths are subsumed into my eternity.
I know you full well. I always have, and I always will.
Follow me.
(Amos 9, Psalm 85, John 10, Matthew 9)
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