Do We Listen?

Sometimes in my waking, I find that it is words that stir me.  When last year I thought that my life might be radically shortened by the aneurism that now seems benign, I would take these waking words as legacy, as a gem to polish and display for the sake of its beauty, as a gift I was given to leave behind.  I would gratefully and dutifully rise and write.  More often now when I am stirred by waking words I am fooled by their clarity and brilliance to believe that they are unforgettable, that they will return to me
in the morning, that I can go back to sleep.  In the morning, the threads that are left for me to pull are often too slender for me to retrieve the words, and I find myself with the sense of something precious having been lost.

So this morning when I found the words “low to the ground” spoken somewhere within me, I thought that it must be morning, and I rose from bed.   My decision to rise was reinforced by a glance at the blinds that seemed to be brightened by the approach of morning.   I went to my study and wrote the words on a slip of paper on my desk, knowing their gossamer-thin tether.  I noticed then that it was the four-days-from-full moon, setting two hours before dawn that had brightened the bedroom blinds.  It was three hours before I would leave for a 7 AM gathering; if I went back to bed, I might oversleep and miss it.  So I took my words and went to the basement to light the morning fire in our wood stove, the slow, careful ignition of the fallen wood paralleling the slow warming of my mind and spirit to the words I was given, “low to the ground”.

I thought of crouching in a stiff wind, then as the wind became even more severe, getting down on all fours and clawing into the wind to keep from being blown away, and then finally lying flat, turning my face to the side and hugging my ear to the ground to give the wind the least purchase on me.

Ear to the ground.  As the too – new firewood too – slowly ignited, my mind took its sweet time on this meandering trail of words.  I thought of the time my grade school friends and I had put our ears on the railroad track a full minute after the train had passed, and was just a dot in the distance, and how we could hear the clickety-clack as clearly as we had when it was thundering by us.  I thought of the black-and-white television Indian getting off his horse and putting his ear to the ground to listen for the location of those he was pursuing.  And I suspect it was the memory of that small, round-screened black-and-white television that brought so vividly to my mind one of the most powerful images I’ve experienced.  Explorers had discovered what they thought to be the ruins of Pompeii.  As one of them picked up a rock and began to inspect it, his forehead suddenly furrowed, and he turned his head and began to place his ear to the rock.  He quickly turned his head back and held the rock away, a look of horror on his face.  His companion, witnessing this, looked quizzically at him.  The first man looked at his companion and slowly placed the rock close to his ear.  His companion began to weep.  The sound that they were hearing was now turned up so that the viewers could hear.  It was the cries of the frightened and dying people of Pompeii as the lava approached their town.

We used to be enthralled with the idea of placing a seashell against our ear, and even on the prairies of northern Illinois, of hearing the roar of the ocean.  Perhaps that is why that image of placing a lava rock from Pompeii against my ear and hear the cries of those dying struck me so unforgettably.  It was difficult to listen to the sounds that came from the television.  As I imagined myself as one of those explorers, I wondered whether I would place the stone to my ear.  I wondered whether I would be able to listen to the voices.

And so there by the warming stove, I found it comforting to place my ear to the ground, to the silent soil, to the soil that Kathy tends in the back yard in the moonlight.  Humus. . . human, my mind replied.  Is it human to be close to the ground?  Is it human to hear the cries of those held low, those who have fallen, those crouching, clawing, clinging to the dirt?  Humble.  The Scripture we would be reading at the gathering later this morning, I realized, was about God hearing the cries of the oppressed, the wail of the orphan and the complaint of the widow. 

The Lord hears the cry of the poor, we dare to sing in church.  Do I?  As the cries of Pompeii’s dying echoed in the ears of the actors in that television show fifty years ago, the scene faded to images of Pompeii, actual images of castings of bodies of the dying, preserved by the accumulating ash of the conflagration.  They are not so different from still photos of our living poor, held low in the present by accumulating generations of injustice. 

Oh, foolish God, who created us with bodies that can stand tall, holding our ears as far as possible from the stones that still echo the cries of past poor, from the concrete and dirt on which the present poor fall, sprawl; oh, Gambler God, who would bet the continuation of your creation on our courage to crouch low to the ground, our willingness to hear the cries, to be your ears.  Oh, Good God, weaken our knees.