Although
I’ve never been in an actual desert, I feel I know it. I’ve been in the sparse steppe of Central
Anatolia and know that once you are out hiking in a landscape that appears
barren, every outcropping and every tree infested with mistletoe, the shape of
every hill, every delicate flower—numberless as the stars—that pops up in
spring, every feature of the ground’s face is loved more in a land of
ostensible lack. I know the desert
because I live in Flint—a
desert—no sand but acres of emptiness without living water. I follow the waterways every day, tracing the
meandering line of Gilkey Creek down to the Flint River,
thinking about Abraham and yearning to hear the Word of the Lord.
Talk
about a failed life. Abraham was
75. He and Sarai had no children, and he
was still living in his “father’s house” at the time the Lord told him to “Go
from your country and your kindred … to a land that I will show you.” He set out from Ur,
settled in Haran, but quickly headed south
again: Shechem, Bethel,
Negeb, Egypt,
Hebron. Abraham became a restless wanderer on the
face of the earth, like Cain, except he hadn’t killed his brother and he
refused the false safety of cities, preferring instead the rugged high country
Canaan to the lush Jordan
plain. Displacement from country and
separation from kin seemed necessary for Abraham to hear God speaking. But how could he be sure it was God and not
the desert wind picking up the songline of his own desire for the blessing of
offspring? I don’t think he could be
sure … nor do I think we need to be sure when we set out. All travel is, to some extent, directionless. All travel is, like Abraham’s, in one sense a
travailing that is intimately connected with the quest for birth. Yes, even at the age of 75, even at the age
of 100. Even at my age of 52: yes, I, too, want to be born again. And Abraham’s journey was perilous. He knew men would try to kill him because of
his beautiful wife: “pretend you are my
sister,” he told Sarai, not once but twice!
She was given away to Pharaoh in Egypt and to the King of
Gerar. In both cases, God intervened and
rescued the matriarch. Raiding tribes
carried off his nephew, Lot. Water was always in short supply and the need
for grazing land became ever more important as Abraham’s flocks increased. He moved in stages, weaving a path across the
land that had been promised him (“how am I to know that I shall possess it?”)
between places where he’d built altars that commemorated times when the Lord spoke,
the Lord appeared, the Lord promised.
For
Abraham (and probably for Muhammad, too) the life of vital experience,
symbolized by the journey, would not have been possible without the song—the
voice of God in his ears singing: “I
will make your seed like the dust of the earth—could a man count the dust of
the earth, so too, your seed might be counted”; “Look up to the heavens and
count the stars, if you can count them … so shall be your seed.” Is the desert sand and sky empty or
full? We can ask the same question of
any dry patch in our own lives and journeys.
In Abraham’s life, God’s voice becomes more than the desert wind but
grows a body. He visits Abraham in the
form of three men who lunch with him under the terebinths of Mamre, and they
announce the good news of Isaac’s conception.
Abraham knows these men are from God, and they intervene to change the
couple’s ideas about what is possible for them.
Sarai (inside the tent) laughs when she hears the news, thinking to
herself, “After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure, and my husband is
old?” The men hear this, but instead of
repeating Sarai’s exact thoughts, they merely ask Abraham why Sarah doubts that
she can conceive when nothing is impossible with God. In doing so, they gesture to the secret
well—Sarai may not be as shriveled as her despair suggests. Hagar, too, threw down her empty water-skin
and cried, thinking her boy would die.
But God opened her eyes to a nearby well. There is always a well in the desert, but we
need the seeing eye God and his songline to lead us to it. We drink and know that we are forever old and
young, barren and fruitful.
In Australia the
aboriginal people believe that a songline, also called a dreaming track, is one
of the paths across the land which mark the route followed by localized
“creator-beings” during the Dreamtime.
The paths of the songlines are recorded in traditional songs, stories,
dance, and painting. And aboriginal
people make pilgrimages in which they chant the place names of their songlines
as a way of restoring meaning to their lives and of keeping the land alive. For most of us, sadly, I doubt there is much
connection between the place we live and our habit of being in that place. Our concern is simply to move as quickly (and
freely) as possible from one place to another.
We are bereft of rituals of entry that allow us to participate fully in
the places we inhabit. Israel became intimately linked to Canaan (the
promised land) through a song, and I believe each of us must approach Flint, for example,
through a vision or a song that we find uniquely appropriate to it. When I met my husband, the head archivist of
the Genesee Historical Collections
Center, we would take
walks through all the gloomiest neighborhoods, and he would tell me nonstop
about the buildings and the factories and the railroad lines that were once in
the places we traversed. I will never
forget the feeling of walking through time, and I envied his experience of this
place as so deeply layered.
But his song
couldn’t work for me, and I didn’t find my Flint song until a group of students
and I wrote an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, to Flint; and
now I will forever connect that play with its axial word, “nothing,” to a city
where everyone is thrust out of work, out of families, out into a forlorn
reality as ostensibly blank as the desert or as barren as the heath. We can numb ourselves with drugs and habit or
we can set out, every day, to see, like the prophets in our religious
traditions, whether anything can come from nothing (silences, poverty,
nakedness, namelessness), whether it secretes any rare love or resilient truth,
or whether there is any virtue or opportunity in a return to ground zero.
