Page 182 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

Without knowing that in Jewish tradition, a cemetery is made sacred for burial by walking its

perimeter seven times, one of us had imagined the five of us walking the circumference of the

burial ground. So, we walked slowly, sometimes in silence, sometimes singing, picking up trash,

stopping again to lay pebbles and white roses on top of toppled stones.

Being in the midst of violent devastation can feel like being swallowed by an undertow. No

sooner do you poke your head up than the current of outrage and sorrow grabs your feet with

the weight of generations and pulls you back under. On that afternoon the only lifeline was a

hand and pebble placed on a stone, the ancient words of mourning spoken among strangers, a

chant, a rose, a restless silence offered in the presence of the undertow’s power. The wind, in

her own way, was sweeping through like sweet medicine.

We had intended to be at the cemetery incognito. Yet the next day, we found ourselves on the

front page, above the fold of the Philadelphia Inquirer in a large photo of the five of us praying

amidst the toppled stones. That drone camera had taken our photo had been taken from above.

The caption read, “Visitors pray amid the damage.”

I saw it then, in that moment when our gathering was shown to us from a distance. We are

visitors, guests on this earth, borrowing time from a slice of eternity. And there’s sure damage all

over, ancient and modern, the unquiet dead calling out from their forgotten hiding places, and

the current deluges of hate, anger and fear in their daily cataclysms of destruction. And then

there’s the circle of prayer, that geometry of wholeness called into the middle of all of it, as

witness and legion singing and silent, never a solitary venture, for even if you are alone on a hill,

the air and the ground and the sky are singing with you.

“Visitors pray amid the damage.” It’s a good job description for our time.