Sunday
As I was working on today’s post about Hagar’s banishment into the wilderness, I got word from one of our dearest Sewanee friends that her husband, unexpectedly rushed to the hospital last week for emergency heart valve surgery, is dying. While God in the story consoles Abraham (not Hagar) that “I will make a nation of him,” right now all I can think of is Hagar’s sense of betrayal and abandonment:
So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept.”
This poem by Stacey Zisook Robinson, which I found on line, captures the pain of the moment. Her speaker, listening to her child cry, fails to find comfort in promises of a better future. “What of glory in a thousand years,” the speaker cries out, “while you thirst and I despair?” Words of consolation are no more than “tarnished gold and stolen silver.”
At such times, heaven feels “absent and empty.” Pray for our friends and all of us who love them.
Hagar’s Song: A Poem for Parashat Vayeira
By Stacey Zisook Robinson
I hear the desert when you cry –
wide and open,
empty as Heaven.
I cannot hide from it,
neither the desert
nor your tears.
The angel bade me “Stay!”
with words of tarnished gold
and stolen silver.
What is greatness
laid against your pain?
What of glory
in a thousand years,
while you thirst and I despair?
I hear heaven when you cry –
absent and empty,
an echo of angels
and the glory of God.
