After Hugh’s death Crosswicks was my base while I struggled to learn about grief, to learn to live with loss, drawing strength from the ancient hills. I knew that I would be moving back to my apartment in New York after Christmas, where my granddaughter, Charlotte, was living with one of her classmates. But for those first months I needed to be at Crosswicks, to feel a part of the rhythm of the land, the turning of the season, the coming of winter and snow and short days and long nights. The first weeks of grief are weeks when one is in shock. I functioned, kept my lecturing schedule. I think I functioned moderately well, but I was, as it were, on automatic pilot.
Christmas was at Crosswicks, with family and friends to surround me with warmth, and then I moved back to our (yes, in my mind, still Hugh’s and mine) apartment on the upper west side of New York. How very blessed I was to have Charlotte and her classmate living with me. And Lena, Charlotte’s fourteen-month-older sister, was just a few blocks away in a Barnard dorm, and the girls, by their very existence, kept me in life. Charlotte’s and Lena’s parents had moved from New York to San Francisco the year before, where Alan is dean of Episcopal Grace Cathedral, and his and Josephine’s distance is made bearable by Charlotte’s and Lena’s closeness to me. It also meant that my children didn’t have to worry about my moving back alone to an apartment I had shared with Hugh for so many years.
Jacob took his tent with him wherever he went. He was always, therefore, “home.” I had to make the move from Crosswicks to the apartment in Manhattan. I wrote, “Despite the visibility of two college students the apartment is very strange without Hugh. I am not sure where I am going to sleep tonight. I had thought the back room with my desk, but I’m inclining more and more to our own bed. We’ll see.” “Our own bed” it was, the king-size bed Hugh and I had bought together while we were still living at Crosswicks. Both box spring and mattress are worn and old enough to need replacing. But not quite yet.
The Colorado trip was for a group of Christian writers gathered together by Richard Foster. Most of the writers I knew and respected; many were already my friends. But that first night I said firmly, “I am not a Christian writer. I am a writer who is a Christian.” There is a big difference. Journal: “ ‘Christian’ writing still makes me irritable, because a ‘Christian’ writer does not necessarily have to be a good writer, and so does not have to serve the work.” And, as I understand the Gospel, the Good News is to be spread, not kept for the in-group who already have it.
Again, I wrote in my journal: “Night before last I dreamed that I was on a freighter-sized boat, and Michael [one of Hugh’s doctors] was the captain. He explained that he captained a ship half the time in order to be an oncologist the other half.
“Last night I dreamed that Hugh was being given a transfusion, but the visual part of the dream was not Hugh, but the crumply, dark red, plastic transfusion bags. Mostly I haven’t been remembering my dreams this summer—and why am I still calling it ‘this summer’ when not only is there snow on the ground here, but summer is fully over and the trees fast losing their leaves in northwest Connecticut?”
And then, “Last Sunday or Monday morning Clyde Kilby died, simply, quietly, in his sleep. Martha went to wake him with a kiss and lo, he was dead. A terrible shock for her, but how good for Clyde, past his mid-eighties, with lung problems which could have given him a suffocating death.” Clyde Kilby, a dear friend, the person responsible for the wonderful collection at Wheaton College of the papers of C. S. Lewis, George Macdonald, Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, among others. The person responsible for my own papers going to Wheaton Library’s Special Collection. Clyde, gone from us. Another in a long line of griefs, though Clyde, like the patriarchs, died full of years.
“Friday night toward morning I slipped into sleep and dreamed that Hugh and I were driving along a country road at night and I thought that the doctors were wrong, that he was in remission, that he was going to be all right. Then I felt something warm and wet, and realized blood was flowing from him, and said, ‘Darling, are you all right?’ and realized that his life blood was flowing from him, and reached over to grab the wheel. It was the first time I have dreamed about him and was, I suppose, a dream of acceptance of his death.”
But later that day I wrote, “And yet today I am incredulous. It is not possible that Hugh is gone, that if I play the piano he won’t come in to me at seven with ice clinking in a glass, that he won’t come out to the kitchen to talk while I make dinner, cutting up celery and tomatoes and lettuce and other goodies to fix the salad. That we won’t travel together, give readings together. No, it is incredible.”
At my next job I went to dinner with a group of librarians and was asked what my life is like, “And I had to say that I don’t know, that without Hugh it is going to be very different. Lecture trips like this give it a kind of consistency. I was thinking last night as I got into bed that I have done this same bedtime routine many a time after a lecture, so it is familiar and comfortable. The only difference is that I can’t pick up the phone and hear Hugh’s voice on the other end of the wire.”
Moving back to the apartment was difficult. Simeon felt displaced picking up his tent and moving from Grandfather Laban’s land. I felt displaced in my own apartment. In order to have my desk in my bedroom, which was essential with the girls in the other two rooms, I had to get rid of the king-size bed. Our building was covered with scaffolding, as it had been for over four years, with the old stonework all being painted, which hadn’t been done since the apartment was built in 1912. Hugh and I had planned to redecorate as soon as the scaffolding came down. Now I would have to do it alone—but the scaffolding was still up. I moved the guest room bed and my desk into Hugh’s and my bedroom with the help of young friends who did all the physical labour.
The scaffolding remained, but old traditions were gone forever. New ones came in to take their place. One evening I wanted to have some friends in for dinner. So did the girls. So we had a combined dinner party. To my joy the girls loved this chronological mix, and we got in the habit of multigenerational dinner parties, assembling together as many decades as possible. As has always been my bargain, I did the cooking, and the girls cleaned up. I’ll cook for almost any number (my record as of now is fifty-eight) as long as the kitchen is taken care of after dinner.
How wonderful it is for me to have these splendid young women doing a good job of “bringing me up.”
What would have happened to Jacob after Rachel’s death if he hadn’t had the support of and the responsibility for his large family?
My granddaughters and their friends keep me in the midst of things, help me to live in the chaos that comes when we rearrange beds and desks, and try to clean and polish the old apartment.
Jacob didn’t have any such citified problems. His home was his tent wherever it was pitched. He had no phone. No warm bathtub in which to relax and ease sore muscles. No beds with sheets and blankets. What must the smell have been like?
But grief is grief, in the desert, in the city, in a tent or in a hotel.
And Jacob came to his father in Mamre, where Abraham and Isaac sojourned. And Isaac was a hundred and eighty years old. And Isaac gave up the ghost and died, and was gathered unto his people, being old and full of days, and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him. And Jacob dwelt in the land where his father was a stranger, in the land of Canaan.
Another death, another grief. But Jacob and his family settled down in Canaan, and there the younger children, Joseph and Benjamin, grew up. It was home to them, as Grandfather Laban’s land had been to the others.
One day Jacob asked Joseph to go check on his brothers who were tending their father’s flock in Shechem.
Where? I thought, startled as I read that. Yes, it appears to be the same place where Simeon and Levi murdered young Shechem, the prince of that land. There are many things in Scripture that are not to be understood, perhaps because so many years have passed that things have been left out, or added to, or shifted ar
ound. Or perhaps we are simply expected to understand, as Jesus expected his listeners to understand when he referred to passages in the Old Testament.
Joseph went to do his father’s bidding, but he could not find his brothers.
A man asked him, “What are you looking for?”
And he said, “I’m looking for my brothers. Do you know where they’re feeding their flocks?” And the man said, “They’ve left here. I heard them say, ‘Let’s go to Dothan.’ ” So Joseph went after his brothers and found them in Dothan.
And when they saw him from a distance, before he came near them, they conspired together to slay him. And they said to one another, “Behold, here comes the dreamer. Let us slay him and cast him into some pit, and we will say, ‘Some evil beast has devoured him, and we shall see what will become of his dreams.’ ”
When Reuben heard this he was deeply disturbed. Was more murder going to be piled on top of the murder of Shechem and his people? He said,
“Shed no blood, but cast him into this pit that is in the wilderness, and lay no hand on him.”
Reuben’s plan was to rescue his brother from the pit later, and return him to his father.
We are not told which of Joseph’s brothers were in on the conspiracy to kill him. It is easy to suspect Simeon and Levi who were already killers, and perhaps the place itself reminded them of murder: Shechem. But only Reuben opposed them. Surely the sons of the two maids would have been jealous of Jacob’s rank favouritism of Rachel’s son. Benjamin was too young to have been with the older brothers, wandering with their flocks far from their home tents to find fresh pasture.
There seems to have been little discussion about whether or not to kill Joseph. Only Reuben pulled back in horror. Surely we should remember him well because he tried to save the adolescent boy. But when it came time for the ancient Jacob to give his blessing to his sons, Reuben still had to pay for having gone in to Bilhah, Rachel’s maid, Jacob’s concubine. A taboo broken is a taboo broken, and throughout the legends of many cultures this appears an implacable law: Break the taboo, and no matter how ignorant you are, no matter whether or not the taboo was broken inadvertently, whether or not you meant well, retribution will surely follow.
So Reuben was to suffer. It happened that
when Joseph reached his brothers, they stripped him out of his coat, his coat of many colours that he wore, and they took him, and cast him into a pit; the pit was empty; there was no water in it.
They sat down to eat bread, and looked up, and saw a company of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead with their camels, bearing spices and balm and myrrh, on their way to carry it all to Egypt.
The Ishmaelites, descendants of their Grandfather Isaac’s half-brother, Ishmael. It was a small world. Wherever you turned you were apt to encounter at least a distant cousin.
Judah, Leah’s fourth son, the younger brother of Simeon and Levi who slaughtered Shechem,
said to his brothers, “What profit is it to us if we slay our brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites, and let not our hand be upon him, for he is our brother, and our flesh.”
Judah’s suggestion was pragmatic rather than compassionate.
And his brethren were content. Then the Midianite merchants came by, and the brothers drew and lifted Joseph up out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver, and they took him with them to Egypt.
Where was Reuben during this transaction? The next verse of Scripture says,
And Reuben returned to the pit, and behold, Joseph was not in the pit, and Reuben rent his clothes. And he returned to his brothers and said, “The child is not! And I, where shall I go?”
The other brothers paid little attention to Reuben’s anguish. The next verse is:
And they took Joseph’s coat, and killed a kid from their flock of goats, and dipped the coat in the blood. And they took the coat of many colours and brought it to their father, and said, “This we have found. Tell us whether it is your son’s coat or not.”
And Jacob knew it and said, “It is my son’s coat. An evil beast has devoured him. Joseph is without doubt rent in pieces.”
And Jacob rent his clothes [as Reuben had done] and put on sackcloth and mourned for his son many days.
He would not be comforted, but said, “I will go down into the grave mourning for my son.” And his father wept for him.
It is not a pretty story, but we are so overfamiliar with it that repetition has blunted the ugliness of what the brothers did. Joseph was a spoiled adolescent; they had cause to be jealous, but not cause to do what they did. And had it not been for Reuben and Judah, they would certainly have had Joseph’s blood on their hands. Had they forgotten Cain?
What a rude awakening for young Joseph. Had he suspected the depths of his older brothers’ resentment? What a shock to the pampered adolescent, first to be flung into a pit, then to be sold into the hand of strangers. Who kept the money?
Sometimes terrible things are redeemed in unexpected ways. This sudden and violent separation from everything known and loved and familiar was the beginning of Joseph’s growing-up. This beginning of the breaking of the pampered pet was essential to his development into a mature human being. Likely the Ishmaelites were rough with him. He was, after all, a purchase, a commercial property, and that made him a slave. At least his life was spared.
But to Jacob, to the women, Joseph was dead. Now a new and terrible grief was added to Jacob’s grief over Rachel. In my journal I wrote, “Grief is different from unhappiness. In unhappiness one is stuck in time. In grief time is totally askew. Christmas at Crosswicks was only three days ago and it was years ago. Coming to Maplewood to Maria and John and the babies is a parenthesis in time….It is time I started saying ‘this winter’ and stopped saying ‘this summer.’ ‘This summer’ was so fiercely intense it’s hard to get out of its grip. Especially since out of its grip means out of my life with Hugh and into a new life where I’m still groping my way.”
So Jacob, too, because of Joseph’s death, moved into a new way of loss. How could his other sons comfort him? Did he turn to little Benjamin?
The older brothers carried the burden of what they had done, but how painfully it weighted their consciences we do not know. Reuben, it would seem, was filled with pain and regret for having failed to rescue Joseph and return him to his father. The others may have felt that they were fine fellows for having spared the braggart’s life, for having sold him into Egypt rather than murdering him. In any case, life had to go on, there was work to do, flocks to tend.
And where was God, the Maker of the Universe who took Abraham out to ask him if he could count the stars, who sent the ram in the bush to spare Isaac, who wrestled with Jacob, during all this? Thoughts of God seem to be singularly absent in Jacob’s sons, and if there is any sense of God at all it is the tribal god, the one god among many gods, the masculine deity who is around to help his tribe. To the casual reader this rather chauvinist figure appears to be the God of the Old Testament. Our visions of God are partial and incomplete at best. But the God who shines through the Old Testament is the mighty Creator who made the brilliance of all those stars he showed Abraham, the God of the universe.
There have been many times in history when people must have wondered what kind of God we Christians have—for instance, when crusaders slaughtered Orthodox Christians in Greece; when the Spanish Inquisitors burned people at the stake for tiny differences in interpretation of faith; in Salem where a woman could be hanged as a witch if an angry neighbour accused her out of spite. Perhaps God needs less of our fierce protectiveness for his cause, and more of our love to El, to each other.
Did Simeon and Levi think they were doing God’s will when they slaughtered Shechem? Did the brothers even consider what God would think of their selling Joseph into Egypt?
Did Reuben turn over his anguish to God when he was unable to save his brother? Perhaps he wanted to unburden himself to Bilhah, but whenever he ev
en turned in the direction of Bilhah’s tent his father’s suspicious eyes were fixed on him. Bilhah’s consolations were denied him forever.
BILHAH
There are advantages to being a woman and a slave, a foreigner with gentler gods than the harsh man-god of my mistress, a warrior god who helped them slaughter my people, take over our land, leaving the ground slippery with blood lapped up by their wild dogs.
Those few of us who were left were taken into captivity, and because I was young, my courses having started only a few moons before, and comely, I was chosen to be a slave girl for the master’s favoured wife. Not much older than I am is she, and beautiful, with heavy curling hair the colour of dark honey, and amber eyes made darker by the long black fringe of her lashes. She treats me kindly, if casually, and I am no cause of jealousy to her; my own beauty, prized by my tribe, not being as appealing to the men who killed my father and brothers as to those slain men who were dazzled by my pale curtain of hair bright against copper skin, my firm young breasts, and long straight thighs.
It has not been bad here. There are servants under me, not slaves, yet less free than I, who must do my bidding or feel the lash, though I discourage that.
No whip has touched me in my long years among these strange people. And I have had hours of precious solitude, particularly during those two nine-moons when my body held my master’s sons.
Ish, how she wept, my mistress, she, the younger, the more beautiful, the more desired of the two sisters. But it was the elder one, with her strange eyes looking in different directions so that you never knew what she was seeing, who gave birth to sons.
Sold into Egypt Page 4
