Border Crossing
This is about a journey. Four months ago, in a museum in the busiest port in Europe, a port that sits at the crossroads of Greeks, Romans, Visigoths, Charlemagne, and the bubonic plague, I stand beside a glass case that holds part of a headstone. After the inscription, there is the word Nona and the shape of a leaf turned sideways, an image that strikes me to the heart. Nona translates into the number nine, but in many languages, it also means grandmother, and someone named Nona carries the memory of someone who dies at seventeen.
Seven days later, on a silent stretch of the Atlantic, I come across a passage in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light: “All your life you are hungry, and your spirit is troubled as you walk on. But when you get to your destination, the doorkeeper knows you. A torch goes before you as you cross the courtyard. Inside there is a fire and a flask of wine, and a candle, and beside the candle, your book.
You pick it up and find that your place is already marked. You sit down by the fire, open it, and begin the story. You read on, into the night.” And I remember Nona,
the carving on the headstone, and the leaf shaped like a heart.
The map for this journey lies in the teaching of Matthew Fox, a Jesuit, whose Creation Spirituality comes from the wisdom tradition of Israel and the historical Jesus. Creation is the Original Blessing. The Divine is in all things, all things are in the Divine. This is God immanent and transcendent, God as Mother and Father, Child and Parent, mystery and history, beyond word and image. Each person is a mystic, born full of wonder. Each person is an artist, each person a prophet. Each person’s journey unfolds like four-part harmony: delight, suffering, creativity, and redemptive justice, segments spun together like fiber.
It is the journey of Sarah, Elizabeth, and Mary. It’s the journey of John the baptist, the journey of Jesus. It’s the journey of Paul walking the road to Damascus, of Peter in Rome, through two hundred and sixty popes, until now, with Francis from Buenos Aires, the journey from Lent to Lent, being born and dying, and the journey of Joseph, in Genesis, making his way from a pit to the right hand of Pharaoh.
Nine of Joseph’s brothers are jealous of him and hate him and sell him into slavery to a caravan on its way to Egypt, from Gilead: a word that means testimony or witness, east of the Jordan River, in ancient Palestine, present-day Jordan. The camels carry spices, myrrh, and balm, Joseph is seventeen, and the purchase price is twenty pieces of silver.
Thirteen years later, in the thick of famine, the brothers arrive in the kingdom of Pharaoh, looking for food, only to find Joseph elevated over a vast land, a gold signet ring on his finger, the treasurer and vizier, who says to them, “I am your brother Joseph. Is my father still alive?” He kisses all his brothers and weeps upon them, rescues them, and saves them. This is the journey. This is the teaching of gospel truth a thousand years before the time of Jesus.
There is archeological evidence that in the 12th. dynasty of Egypt, in the Middle Kingdom, an outsider, a Semite, rose to prominence and handled its finances and agriculture. Whenever the story is historical or archetypal or both doesn’t matter. It’s the journey we’re on, the story that we write. What border are we crossing, and do we speak the language?
When I read these wonderful thirteen chapters about Joseph, with its intrigue, family dysfunction, hatred, and jealousy, alongside love, restitution, and redemption, I know that the story is speaking to me, about whatever pit I’ve been stuck in, fell into, or was born into: from a childhood surrounded by Black employees whose destiny was entwined with mine: destitution among affluence, the barely literate among the highly educated, and my slow climb to awareness and sorrow, waking up to a bias I’ve carried all of my life, and climbing up walls slippery with shame and guilt. It’s part of the journey I’ve been on, and maybe yours.
I think of Joseph’s movement from the pit into slavery, into prison, his slow, steady work with Pharaoh’s dream of famine, everything undergirded by his tenacious faith in God, and what I see is a story of hope.
The dreams? The immanence and transcendence of the Holy Spirit. Joseph, the precursor of Jesus, is a prophet and mystic, born full of wonder, whose heart is full and open. He has crossed a border, no passport required.
And now, here, today: is there balm in Gilead? Take heart. Show mercy. Do good to those who hate you, give, and a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap.
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