Thursday, January 25, 2007

January 25, 2007 : Reverie on the Venite





The witness and the albic dawn of things equally real….

I remember the turgid green of a sea breaking with force against its eastern shore, Cyprus invisible in the far distance. The color was beautiful and the water dangerous. It came to me with the recitation of these words: The sea is his for he made it…. (Venite) I remember the wind. It all surprised me, knowing the Mediterranean to be non-tidal, and nearly enclosed, and so much smaller than the Atlantic and Pacific, despite the stories, I thought of it as placid.

I think about that sea, the symbolism of it, the turgid green danger of life…is his. It’s a profession of faith, a way of interacting with the world. (Clearly there are other ways.) Not the absence of danger, but the belonging of the danger to the source of it all.

The last verse of a lesson appointed for this morning: And after he had taken leave of them, he went up on the mountain to pray. He would have prayed to the him of the sea, words he would have had memorized, the Psalms being his prayer book, though the referenced sea, I presume, was Galilee, a sea also of high dangerous winds sweeping down from Mt. Hermon (Come with me from Lebanon, my bride.... Descend from the crest of Amana, from the top of Senir, the summit of Hermon, from the lions' dens and the mountain haunts of the leopards. You have ravished my heart….) and turgid waters.

The heights of the hills are his for he made them. He went up the mountain to pray, the mountain that was his. It was late; he had crossed the sea twice or at least had moved along the shore twice that day in a boat, so the story goes, and was near Bethsaida (location uncertain) on the northeast of the sea. He went up a hill alone to be united with the one he called Father.

I wonder: Was he there as witness to the albic dawn.