yesterday and tomorrow

I opened a delightful novel by Umberto Eco again this week; its title is The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, and it is about a man who loses most of his memory. He is a bookseller, and he remembers the plots of all of the stories he has ever encountered, but he cannot remember the events of his life. The following passage has stuck with me since I first encountered it; it is the main character talking to his wife, Paola:

I let myself rock gently until I began to feel sleepy. The tolling of a grandfather clock woke me, and I almost spilled my scotch. The clock was behind me, but before I could identify it, the tolling stopped, and I said, "It's nine o'clock." Then, to Paola, "You know what just happened? I was dozing, and the clock woke me. I didn't hear the first few chimes distinctly, that is to say, I didn't count them. But as soon as I decided to count I realized that there had already been three, so I was able to count four, five, and so on. I understood I could say four and then wait for the fifth because one, two, and three had passed, and I somehow knew that. If the fourth chime had been the first I was conscious of, I would have thought it was six o'clock. I think our lives are like that - you can only anticipate the future if you can call the past to mind. I can't count the chimes of my life because I don't know how many came before.

Reading this passage started me thinking about time, and my strange relationship to it as a widower. I think Eco is right; we can only anticipate the future if we can recall the past. But at the same time, I have had to form a new relationship with my own past. Before my wife Becky died, I was quite comfortable anticipating the future. I am sure my vision of the future was not unique; it entailed growing old with Becky and watching our children flourish in their own families and careers. Of course it would be work; college educations and weddings and family vacations are expensive. So much of our energy was spent in the early days of our marriage looking far into the future to these happy times.

Cancer interrupted the flow of my history into my imagined future. I woke up knowing that I was hearing the fourth chime, but instead of hearing the fifth chime, I heard a cuckoo. This was not what was supposed to come next. There were more children to have, more students to teach, more trips to take, and one horrible word eradicated it all.

In one sense, this was liberating. The time Becky battled cancer was in so many ways the happiest time of our marriage. We could not live in the future anymore; it was simply too scary. Whereas before we talked about where we would travel when our children were in college, now we would not make plans more than a week in advance. Who knew what would happen then? And so we appreciated more fully the blessings of every day. We held hands in the grocery store, and made the purchasing of green beans an expression of our love. It was not always idyllic, of course, because there was too much stress and terror involved also, but cancer attached us more seamlessly than we had ever been before.

Since Becky died, I have been forced into a new relationship with my history. Partly, I must do this because my past no longer leads to my anticipated future. I must also do this because in many ways my history is less real to me than before because the person who could verify it is no more. I wonder how many of my memories are real because Becky was constantly correcting me in stories. Did it happen the way I remember? I certainly remember Becky wearing a blue dress on our first date, but she swore up and down that she wore that dress for our third date. Or am I not remembering a disagreement correctly? Maybe we quarreled about whether she wore this dress to a wedding and she said, “how could you forget it, I wore it for our first date.” I don’t remember these details as well as she did. How much of my own history is a collection of misremembered details? I guess I get the last laugh. In my memory, she wore the blue dress for our first date, and so from now on, she will have done so.

In there is the clue to what I really miss. I miss having her around because she knew the story of my adult life as well as I do. (“Ha, better!” she would say if she could) It is the intimacy that I miss. Maybe that is why I am closer to my mother than I have ever been. If my twenties belonged to Becky, the years before that belonged to my mom. I need her now because she can tell me I am who I am because she knows I was who I have been.

Who else can provide me this intimacy? What I need to know is not just the facts of my stories, but that I am a valuable and lovable man. It is this need that more than anything else has called me back to a spiritual journey. For God has been the constant in my life, even during those times when I would not acknowledge it. The creation story promises me that I was created in God’s image, and that I am good. Isaiah promises that God has known me and molded me from before the time I was born. Jesus promises that God knows every hair on my head.

I love a little passage in Jeremiah (25:6-15) that is like so many in the Bible because it seems to ramble and have no point, and it only reveals itself in its own time. Jeremiah is not the most popular guy in Israel. He has been foretelling the downfall of the current king and the destruction of Israel by the Babylonians. And so he is in prison. While there, the Babylonians are at the gates of the city, and all of Israel is about to be lost to the Jews.

This message came to me from the Lord, said Jeremiah: Hanamel, son of your uncle Shallum, will come to you with the offer: “Buy for yourself my field in Anathoth, since you, as nearest relative, have the first right of purchase.” Then, as the Lord foretold, Hanamel, my uncle’s son came to me in the quarters of the guard and said, “Please buy my field in Anathoth, in the district of Benjamin; as nearest relative, you have the first claim to possess it; make it yours.” I knew this was what the Lord meant, so I bought the field in Anathoth from my cousin Hamamel, paying him the money, seventeen silver shekels.
When I had written and sealed the deed, called witnesses and weighed out the silver on the scales, I accepted the deed of purchase, both the sealed copy, containing title and conditions, and the open one. This deed of purchase I gave to Baruch, son of Neriah, son of Manseiah, in the presence of my cousin Hamamel and of the witnesses who had signed the deed, and before all of the men of Judah who happened to be in the quarters of the guard.
In their presence I gave Baruch this charge: Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Take these deeds, both the sealed and the open deed of purchase, and put them in an earthen jar, so that they can be kept for a long time. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Houses and fields and vineyards will again be sold in this land.

In Israel, under Jewish law during Old Testament times, anytime land was to be sold, it must first be offered to family members for purchase. But who would be so silly as to purchase land in Jerusalem right before it is about to be captured? Who would have felt the wind blowing on shore from Katrina and purchased land in New Orleans? Jeremiah knows the end is at hand; after all, he is the prophet who was been predicting it all along. And yet, God knows that the end is not really the end. Buy that land, and put the deeds in the safest place you can find. For in God, we find not only our history but the promise of our future. God invites me not only to experience the pain and the anguish of loss but also to purchase my life anew even when I cannot see what possible good can come from that. My eyes see the end as only the end; I trust God to see the time when houses and fields and vineyards will exist atop the devastation of my life now. Sometimes I cannot generate that hope from within.

Left on my own, I am in the same predicament as the man in Eco’s novel; I do not know the chimes that have come before in my life. Left on my own, I do not know that another chime will ever ring. But then, when I allow myself time to be quiet, I hear the tiny voice from within me with a simple message: “You are never alone.” My history is with my future in the earthenware jars kept safe by the God who knew me before I was born and promises to redeem my future.