Wednesday, September 2, 2020                    (today’s lectionary)
Ruined honey
I could not talk to you as spiritual people but as flesh,
as infants in Christ. I fed you milk.
From a short story, “Our Day of Grace,” by Jim Shepard from The Best American Short Stories of 2019, here are letters from two Confederate soldiers and their wives at the end of the Civil War. Their letters keep on crossing in the mail.
Wednesday, November 30, 1864 … a letter from Hattie: “ˆI dreamed of you last night. You were warning me that our hens were finding the strawberries as fast as they turned red. I have to be mindful of scanning old scenes of our pleasures. That temptation for me is like rowing near a waterfall. If I get too near, I will be swept over the edge. We are never ready for bad news, though we know tragedy can lurk within any unopened envelope. Your brother has been saving a bottle of honey for your return, but when he checked it, it had candied.
618,222 men died in the Civil War. This estimate was accepted for more than a hundred years, but now it turns out to be too low.
Perhaps you still cannot eat the solid food of Christ:
The loss, the grief, the pain of Christ crucified.
We plant and we water, but always it is God who makes the growth.
More accurately 750,000 soldiers died. Or more. That means 37,000 more widows, and 90,000 more orphans.
Her husband writes back to her, thinking on paper about the war.
Perhaps both nations must be destroyed when we consider how much corruption runs riot in high places, and that it may be that our country’s day of grace is passed. But he also says that he will all the same see the thing play out or die in the attempt.
Could there not be another day of grace for these wives and soldiers, for their children, for the country, for the widows and orphans?
We are all God’s field, all God’s building.
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.
God looks and sees all mankind.
And now the Lord himself comes down
To bring glad tidings to the poor and proclaim liberty to the captives.
What surfaces when the bullets have done their damndest? Almost always, there arise our better angels, as Lincoln called them before any of this disaster even got started. And afterward, it was the non-combatants who continued to hate. In the armies themselves medics carried both gray and blue to the doctors’ tents. Wives and children, waiting, took their fears constantly to the Lord in prayer. And in all, it is God who makes the growth.
I think that I have never been more reconciled to my lot. But when I stand by the fire or sit for our meals, I think of you. You created this version of me, and now you are gone, and I must manage my resentment and dismay.
The soldiers learned to write from their hearts while they waited for their battles to begin.
Wednesday, November 30, 1864 … Dear Lucy. Our forces are arrayed in all directions, and we are being ordered up to our positions. The air is hazy, our bands are playing. I regret having provided you only stray glimpses into my interior with its changeful exaltations and deprivations, and its clues as to the secrets of my heart already vanishing.
I am sure many soldiers went, like Jesus, to deserted places around their camp to pray. Of course they prayed from fear, but they also prayed from confidence, the best kind of confidence, the confidence that surpassed understanding and trusted God no matter what, confidence that began and ended with hope.
I recognize it’s all our task to argue not against heaven’s hand, but to bear up and steer onward. And I see that hope calculates its schemes for a long and durable life, and presses us forward to imaginary points of bliss and grasps at her possibilities, and so ensnares us all.
Karen Carlson wrote about “Our Day of Grace,” struggling to end her thoughts with hope. I’m not so sure she does, but I appreciate her connecting some historical dots.
I wonder if there ever was a day of grace, as the nation was conceived in slavery. There are those who say slavery was America’s original sin; I think it was more like a birth defect, scoliosis or a club foot, something that could have been largely corrected in infancy but wasn’t, and thus resulted in a far more traumatic procedure later, a procedure that was less than successful. It took about a dozen years for the hopes of reconstruction to be abandoned, and for the South to reestablish racism as culture. And every fifty years or so, we fight the same war all over again, in a different guise.
I think I share all of this with you to say, as our politics rain down on all our heads like fire and hail, that God whispers in our ears, “Listen to your better angels.” Love your neighbor, love yourself. And above all, love the Lord your God with all your strength. This is our act of worship.
            (1 Corinthians 3, Psalm 33, Luke 4)
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