How I interact with the Bible has changed in many ways over the years, but one way that has always been there, and now is mostly everything to me is letting the evocative nature of OLD words run away in my imagination. When I hear a phrase or a word that seems like it is dropping down into my heart from far off, but feels very imaginable, or reminds me of other things that make layers like an opera cake, that is really it for me. That’s all I’ve got. It’s enough though. A recent example:
This year on Good Friday, at the Stations of the Cross service, I heard Martha say “If they do this in the greenwood, then what will happen when it is dry?” Jesus is speaking to the women on the road as he is carrying his cross outside the city. When I first heard it, I heard greenwood as one word or one thought because of reading The 13 days of Christmas by Jenny Overton to the kids. There is a day the boys go to the greenwood and cut branches, and also because of The Once and Future King by T.H. White and the way Wart plays in the greenwood. Very Old English! So greenwood at once caused me to imagine a whole beautiful woods, full of animals and ferns and berries and all kinds of trees. I thought about the words like that, if they can do this terrible thing, even surrounded by such beauty and complete vibrancy, then what terrible things will people do when that greenwood is destroyed, burned, cleared...it made me aware of the escalation of violence in the world as the world itself, the greenwood is turning dry and brittle.
Then I went and looked up the verse as it had reverberated through my head for a few days. And it was more like, “If they can do this to a green tree, then what will they do when the tree is dry?” And that was more personal, Jesus, being the green tree, a young man and being killed, being snuffed out. And so many young men in their very prime of life being snuffed out by violence. Everytime a black person is murdered by police, a green tree, gone. The senselessness of it within the tree metaphor is newly realized. Like Ocean Vuong said about George Washington, “If someone cuts down a fruit tree, that’s a red flag for me.” It’s just wrong.
Then there is the Greenwood Massacre of 1921. Imagine that. If they can do that at Greenwood? What will they do when it is burned and gone? And suddenly time shifts again and the green is already gone and we are way in the dry.
So much to grieve in that station of the cross. And freshly grieve with the killing of Daunte Wright.