Refractions

In "What Am I Without You?", (New Yorker, June 12, 2023) Jiayang Fan writes of her relationship with her mother in its different eras. She tells the story of a Jehovah's Witness visitor her mother calls "Missionary Lady", whose mission is her mother's salvation. Jiayang finally asks her mother, "Did Missionary Lady accomplish her mission?" Her mother replies, "It's a good story, but a story can't save me." What if a story, a good story, is the only thing that can save me, save you, save us? What if the story is all we have? It started, after all, with stories: Adam, Eve, Abel, Cain, Noah, Sarah, Abraham, Isaac (barely), Esau and Jacob tumbling in the womb, a blessing, a limp, Rachel and Leah (it's complicated), Joseph and slavery, Shiprah and Puah, Moses, Miriam, Aaron, Joshua, judges, kings and prophets at loggerheads, exile and return, Ruth and Boaz, Samuel, Jonathan, David, Bathsheba, Uriah, Solomon, Song of Songs, Herod,

Like a triumphal return  but without the needy anxious edge  of vanity.    The truth of me known,  yet you welcome  as if there were none better.  Forty years’ worth  of dreams of the place before,  of going back there,  now I dream my return  to this place I have never been.  Weeks of vivid nights, dreams of this place and that,  of every place I have spent my heart –  and now, this dream,  this vivid night, this warm welcome home  to this eternal place,  this new,  this now, this I, this Thou.

Mist makes silver light –  at the shore,  in the trees –  the ancient breath of angels  muting the noise of colours  into silent black and greys,  softening silhouettes  of limb and leaf,  a frosting of early summer’s silver light  astride the inland sea.  Lake Superior, June 2023