It was raining on the road to Emmaus, and not very glorious,
and one of them kept humming a rain song
that was popular in the seventies, and thought to himself,
“How strange it is, in the midst of wonder and misery,
that I remember a dusty car radio, and this song
playing as a friend’s mom drove us to a soccer game.
Did the Rabbi ever speak of this, how we
can be distracted by inconsequentialities?
Only now I suppose we should call him a prophet.
Not a parser of the personal mind but a loud proclaimer
concerned with nation states and communal fervor.
Providing midrash for the moment, one might say,
not wondering why certain songs get stuck in your head,
why there’s a soundtrack to a rainy day, or why a rote prayer
over bread gives such comfort with its familiarity.
If it weren’t raining we might stop to eat, enjoy a nibble
beside the road. I’m hungry now, although last night
if someone had offered food I would have turned away.
Funny how the mere rumor of His rising from the tomb
makes me ravenous. There’s an inn up ahead
where we can be dry from the rain and break our fast
and listen to water drum along the eaves
and I can tell this stranger we’ve met
about that song from the seventies,
and maybe even hum a line or two for him.
Why do I think that he already knows it,
and might have caused its resurrection?”
Illumination
I find this to be a delightful thought. Christ plays in our memories, is responsible for the little resurrection of some occurrence or image or song that floats back into our consciousness, for no reason that we can discern. Resurrection is certainly a big event, but if it was only a big event it wouldn’t mean much in the day-to-day. Most of our lives are spent in simple acts – making breakfast, commuting, staring at computer screens, humming some half-remembered song. It’s true that we’re shaped by outsized moments, but most of our shaping comes from very small things. Twiddly thoughts, internal monologues, recalling some story we’ve read or watched on TV. It’s like the difference between an earthquake cracking rock and a stream slowly eroding a stone.
I also always want to bring the Gospel story into the present moment, somehow, or bring the present moment to the Gospel. As if time doesn’t really matter, or has no settled progression. After all, the events of the resurrection reverberate eternally. And God, being eternal, exists outside of time. Those moments when we touch the divine are timeless, and we might sit with God and look in at time, and see all events happening at once, across millennia and generations.
Historicity can become a form of limitation, and its claims to exist within a reasonable universe are disproven by the simple act of borrowing some idea of the past and bringing it into the present, or placing some image or song from the 1970s into a disciple’s mind. We know little of real history, since we didn’t live through the events, and even our personal histories get forgotten and reinterpreted. Every historian brings a set of assumptions to their work, and distort our ideas of the past, often without acknowledging it. A song is much more innocuous than an ideology. I’d rather have it playing with the past than I would a set of theories, based in our current prejudices. If only scholars could acknowledge that their scholarship is a kind of delightful game. To me, that would increase its value, not make it valueless. A game, a song, something we sing back and forth across time, walking along in our own little worlds of meaning, feeling our little, ordinary resurrections.
KPB Stevens 