It took a long time for Joseph to turn from being spoiled and arrogant to being humble and loving. But that’s all right. The promise is not that it will be easy but that it will be wonderful.
JOSEPH’S SERVANT
He is a strange man. Kind to me always. To all of us. There are no floggings in his house. We eat as well as he eats. Better, because we eat together and are merry while he, perforce, eats alone. He has more power than Pharaoh, but he is a Jew. He eats alone.
He is a strange man. In his house we are given an atmosphere for merriment. He likes to hear us laugh, though he seldom smiles. He likes to hear us make music; sometimes he even beats out the time, but he does not sing. He gives us freedom, but, despite his power, he is not free.
Asenath, his wife, is beautiful and loving. Their sons are bright and full of laughter. Are they Egyptians, or are they Jews? They go to the great stone temple with their grandfather, the priest of On. They watch the rising and the setting of the sun and sing the hymns. Sometimes I hear them talk about their father’s God as of a distant stranger. Do they know who they are? They are still too young for such questions.
He is a strange man, their father. Always it is as though he is waiting, waiting, but for what? He has everything a man could want. Always it is as though something is missing, but what could it be? He works hard, from sunrise to sunset, overseeing, supervising. He is fair. He cannot be bribed. I know, because when a man with heavy gold earrings and much wealth tried to buy, at a high price, more than his share of corn, I saw my master white with anger. He flung the proffered money at the man’s feet, turned on his heel, and went into the counting house.
He is a strange man, attractive to women, though he does not seem to realize it, or, if he does, he will have none of their wiles. It is not unusual for the privileged and powerful to add a beautiful woman or two to their privilege and power. But not my master, Joseph, who each night retires with his wife Asenath to their rooms. We servants are sent away, even the two body servants, that they may be alone.
He is a strange man. When he eats his meals alone, it is as though he is waiting for someone to join him. When he rides his beautiful black mare, it is as though he is looking for someone to ride beside him. He does not speak of what it is that is missing, not even to Asenath, I think. But there is always an unfilled space at his side, even when he plays with his boys.
And now that space is filled with ten strange men from Canaan, men with dark beards half hiding their faces, and with dark eyes, dark as my master’s. He speaks to them roughly, as I have never before heard him speak to any of the hungry people coming to Egypt to buy food. Who are they, that they make him weep? Yet, after all his roughness, he sends them away with their sacks filled with corn and wheat, and, after they are gone, he is restless. He has, for what reason I cannot guess, kept one of these men behind as a prisoner. The man is treated well, given fine clothing to wear, the best of food and wine. But my master does not visit him. He gives orders that the man be treated as an honoured guest, and he knows that no one would dream of disobeying. And the man asks no questions. He does not ask why he is being held in a single, though spacious, room, with guards to see that he does not leave. He does not ask why he is given silken garments and delicacies to eat. Why does he not ask? Strange, indeed.
Yes, he, too, with his lack of questions, is a strange man, as my master is strange. My master paces when he is not working, paces, back and forth as though waiting. Sometimes Asenath has to call him three times before he hears. His work goes on. He does not slacken. But he paces.
And then at last the bearded men return, and with them a younger one, and my master prepares a great feast for them, and heaps food on the young lad’s plate, and looks at him with hungry eyes. And then, again, I see those great eyes fill with tears, and he shouts at us servants, raising his voice. “Leave us!” he cries. At first we are too terrified to move. “Leave us!” And so we go.
And now the empty space is filled. He waits for unseen guests no longer. For the men from Canaan are his brothers, and now I hear him sing, at last I hear him sing, thanks and praise to his God who makes patterns of the stars in the sky and patterns of the people on earth, and with his patterning has brought twelve brothers together.
Benjamin is a wolf that raveneth: in the morning he shall devour the prey, and at night he shall divide the spoil.
GENESIS 49:27
Jesse, the father of David. In Judah, Jesse is rooted and so, ultimately, is Jesus.
Benjamin was uprooted. Over and over throughout history the Jews have been uprooted, taken from one land, forced to live in another, in exile. By the waters of Babylon have they hung up their harps, strangers in a strange land.
Joseph’s aloneness before the return of his brothers is almost as incomprehensible to us as it was to his servant.
We live in an uprooted society. For Hugh and me Crosswicks was a place to put down roots, to belong to a community, a community that was rooted in the white spired church at the crossroads.
Joseph, despite his feelings of alienation, despite being strange in a strange land, had nevertheless put down roots in Egypt. He was rooted by his work, which he could not leave. He was rooted by Asenath and his sons, whom he would not leave. He did not consider going back to Canaan and his father’s house, the place of his coat of many colours, and of his grand dreams which were now being fulfilled.
Instead, he begged his brothers to go back to Canaan for their father, Jacob, and to bring him back to Egypt.
“And you shall dwell in the land of Goshen, and you shall be near me, you and your children, and your herds, and all that you have, and then I will nourish you, for there are yet five years of famine, lest you, and all your household, and all that you have, come to poverty. And behold, your eyes see, and the eyes of my brother, Benjamin, that it is my mouth that speaks to you. And you shall tell my father of all my glory in Egypt, and shall haste and bring my father here.”
“All my glory in Egypt.” Joseph wanted his father to know. How human was the great man!
And Joseph flung his arms around Benjamin’s neck and wept again and then he kissed all of his brothers, until their eyes lost their terror and they were able to speak with him.
The land of Goshen. That was where Joseph asked Pharaoh to let him settle his father and his brothers. Crosswicks sits high on a ridge a mile from the village of Goshen in the Litchfield Hills. It is a land that was colonized in the very early eighteenth century by people deeply steeped in Scripture. Canaan is not far away from us, and Bethlehem not much further. But Goshen is our village, where the beautiful old colonial church stands with its white spire, the highest spire in the state, not because the spire is unusually tall, but because Goshen is the highest (and coldest, and windiest) spot in the state.
How different it is in every way from Goshen in Egypt, where Benjamin was to plant new roots. Even after two visits to Egypt I find it hard to visualize the land of Goshen in which Joseph settled his family, because our rolling green dairy farm hills are imprinted in my mind’s eye.
Goshen, a land of welcome. In gratitude, Pharaoh opened wide his arms and invited all of Joseph’s family to come to Egypt. Benjamin, who had lived in Canaan all his life, was journeying into the unknown. Hugh and I took our children and moved them from Goshen back to New York and the world of the theater where we all had to put down new roots. New York is the place of my birth, and so it will always be home, but in leaving Goshen and returning to the great city we were moving into the unknown, not knowing what the future would hold. Of course we never know. Futures are roughly and irrevocably altered by unexpected accidents, betrayals, illnesses. What we have is this day, this moment.
Joseph moved his family to Egypt, to the land of Goshen, and there Benjamin and his brothers were able to put down new roots. But all earthly roots are only fibers, tender and temporary. Ultimately, another pharaoh down the line would be threatened by the prosperity of the Jews, and then would begin the great epic of
Moses and the Exodus.
After Hugh’s death once again I moved into the unknown. I stayed in Crosswicks until after Christmas, then moved back to New York and the scaffolded apartment and a new life with college students, and how blessed I was to have them there.
Then, at last, the scaffolding came down, and I had to think about redecorating the apartment, something which Hugh and I knew would have to be done as soon as the scaffolding was gone, and the rain stopped seeping into the living room ceiling. Why does everything take at least twice as long as it is expected to take? Charlotte and I lived out of boxes and in chaos for well over a year. Redecorating was complicated by a leak in the washing machine in the apartment above us, a slow leak which declared itself by blowing out our kitchen lights. We had to wait for leprous looking walls to dry before we could do anything about the kitchen. But now it’s done, and it is beautiful—or, at least, it’s almost done. But it’s finished enough to be comfortably livable, and for us to resume our multigenerational dinner parties. Perhaps the rooms, clean and light, do not look as they would if Hugh and I had done them together, but that’s something that’s no longer possible. It is perhaps more of a women’s apartment than it was, but then, Charlotte and I are women.
One night as I was getting ready for bed after a dinner party, during which many people had commented on how lovely the apartment is, I thought to myself, “I hate the apartment this way. I want it all back exactly the way it was.” I knew this was irrational. I knew the apartment was lovely. And suddenly I realized that of course what I wanted was not the apartment back the way it was. I wanted Hugh back. Once I realized that, I was able to let it all go and take a good hot bath and get into bed and read and relax before going to sleep.
It is helpful that sometimes we can understand the real motives underlying some of our irrationality. I think Joseph always knew that he would not feel complete until he had been reconciled with his brothers.
As I continue to move out into the unknown the only thing I know is that I still believe with Paul that all things work together for good to them that love God—not just in this mortal life, but in God’s ultimate purpose for Creation which we are called on to observe and contemplate. It may be that our contemplation will involve great pain. And sometimes our pain will be deepened as we struggle to remember that its purpose is love.
I am grateful that I was able to honour my promise to Hugh all the way to the end, to be with him when he died. We had promised each other no death-prolonging machinery, and with all my heart I thank the doctors who allowed him to die when the time came for death, a good and holy death, a beginning of a new journey.
Paul goes on to ask,
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?…Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Powerful words. Words of high poetry and truth. Words to hold on to. Words which I have held to for many years.
When Paul speaks of angels and principalities and powers as trying to separate us from the love of God he is, of course, speaking of fallen angels, of the principalities and powers which have chosen to follow Satan rather than the Lord of Love. There are true angels, such as the three who came to Abraham; Gabriel, who appeared to young Mary; the angels who ministered to Jesus in the garden, and who have unfailingly followed their calling to be “ministering spirits.” There are principalities and powers who eternally worship the Creator with hymns of joy. What God has created is good, and it is a part of the fallenness of all of Creation that some angels, as well as human beings, have turned in pride away from the Creator. But the good angels are more powerful, the great principalities and powers are more loving, than all the fallenness and pride put together. We cannot be separated from the love of God.
Ye watchers and ye holy ones,
Bright seraphs, cherubim, and thrones,
Raise the glad strain, Alleluia!
Cry out, dominions, princedoms, powers,
Virtues, archangels, angels’ choirs,
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
Crosswicks is a place of roots for me, but it is also a place where I have known great pain, where I have clung to the strength of Paul’s words. Four times in two years the phone rang to tell us of the death of close friends, deaths which would alter the patterns of our lives. Whenever the phone rings at an unusual hour my heart catapults back into the cold white grief of those phone calls. On the fourth evening of every month when I read the first lines of Psalm 22,
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I am back in that strange room in the conference center the night after I learned of Hugh’s cancer.
I remember a long-gone winter night when I sat waiting by the fire until two in the morning while a blizzard raged outside, and I waited for Hugh to come home. He had set out in the early afternoon on an errand of mercy, to drive a friend at a time of crisis a hundred miles north, into the teeth of the blizzard. I fed our children, put them to bed with the usual stories and songs and prayers, fed and walked the dogs, put the cats in the cellar for the night, kept feeding the fire. A little after two the dogs jumped up, tails wagging, and Hugh staggered in, exhausted, hungry, needing to be fed, loved. And our roots went even deeper into the land of Goshen.
But no place is safe, not even an isolated, dairy farm village. In the late fifties it seemed that war with Russia, nuclear war, was imminent. At school in the village the children were taught to crouch under their little wooden desks, their hands over their heads, in case an atom bomb fell on the school. As if that would protect them! What insanity! In the spring when the lilacs bloomed I wondered if there would be another spring, if Goshen would still be there, if we would ever smell the spring fragrance again, hear the peepers singing in the marsh.
Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Whatever happened, God would be with us, as God was with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace.
There are happier, more placid memories. Seeing my daughter Josephine kneeling beside the old wooden cradle in which her baby brother lay. (A snapshot of that is framed and on the wall.) Meals around the table, holding hands as we sang grace. Watching my mother walk down the lane, picking an assortment of weeds and wildflowers with which she always managed to create a beautiful arrangement.
The old house, like most old houses, is full of the richness of living, of joy and tears, birth and death, marrying and burying.
Five years ago Bion and Laurie moved in. Laurie had finished her hospital internship and residency. There is an excellent hospital in the nearby town which has attracted a group of fine physicians. Our son said, “Well, Mother and Dad, you taught us about multigenerational living.”
And what a blessing it is to have them there. After Hugh’s death there was no way I could have kept Crosswicks on my own. It would have had to be sold. And now it is Bion’s and Laurie’s home, and the pattern has changed as the pattern changed for Jacob when he moved with his sons from the land of Canaan to the land of Goshen. No mention is made of Dinah in this move. We do not know what happened to Dinah.
Jacob and his sons and their wives and their children and their flocks and their herds moved to the land of Goshen. But their roots, their hearts, were not in Egypt, but in the land from which they had come, from home. In his last days, Jacob asked to be taken home to be buried. And so, later on, did Joseph.
Years ago when my children were young, my mother did not want to come to us, to Crosswicks, for Christmas, and I did not understand. She loved us and the children. I was her only child, our three children were her only grandchildren. Why didn’t she want to come?
After Hugh’s death
my daughters each urged me to come to them at Christmas. I love my daughters. I love my grandchildren. But I didn’t want to go to them at Christmas. It was a strong, visceral feeling. I needed to be where my roots are. At last I understood my mother.
It was the famine that drove Jacob away from home and into the land of Goshen. He was an old man, and before he died in that foreign land he gathered his children about him. Jacob had not only his own twelve sons, but Joseph’s two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, who appear to have been favoured above the children of all the other sons, who are not even mentioned when Jacob dispenses his blessings.
When old Jacob saw Joseph’s sons he asked who they were, and Joseph replied,
“They are my sons, whom God has given me here.”
Jacob was deeply moved, saying,
“I had not thought to see your face, and lo, God has let me see your children also.”
And he called the boys to him to be blessed.
The blessing harks back a generation; just as Jacob replaced his elder brother, Esau, when Isaac blessed his sons, so Jacob gave primary blessing to Ephraim, the younger of the two boys, once again overturning the rule of primogeniture.
Sold into Egypt Page 18
