Sanctuary by Emily Rapp Black

Author:Emily Rapp Black [Rapp Black, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

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How can we envision or conceptualize all the old stories we live with, in, through, and alongside? In Jerusalem’s Old City, it is possible to walk along the sidewalk, look down, and see the ruins and remnants of an even older Roman city, which once teemed with people and industry, drama and passion, spirit and life. All of it is gone now, literally crumbled to dust from which a few bent and precarious-looking pillars rise. Every day people walk along the city sidewalk above the older city, holding cups of coffee and bottles of water, talking on the phone, heading to work, to temple, to the mosque, to church. In New Orleans, they bury their dead above the ground. The living and the dead interact on a daily basis. When I lived in rural Texas, every evening I watched the sun set over the tiny graveyard visible through my office window. These stories connect and intertwine without our thinking about it. When my brother and I were kids riding in the back of our beat-up station wagon, each time my dad passed a cemetery we’d shout, “Hold your breath!” as if the dead buried there might notice us, make space for us before we were willing to have space made. Now when I pass a cemetery, I breathe deeply, wondering what mysteries and stories are hidden there, underground, understanding that the world would not be the world as it is without what the dead had done or left unfinished—mistakes and triumphs I will never know or have any way of knowing. I find this comforting. These stories, known and unknown, bear witness to the interconnection of the living and the dead.

At first glance, the abandonment of Jerusalem’s ghost world below the living world might appear to symbolize progress, or to show how remarkable the modern world has become, having “risen above” its previous primitive ways and habits and abandoning them for a superior way of life, a “better” place in the same way heaven is often described. But the concept of resilience has not always been so deeply connected to that of the triumph of communities or individuals; it has not always been associated with “casting off” the remnants of one life for a new and better one. In the Bible, the word “glory” is often used in reference to everyday, natural objects, things that are rendered fantastic by virtue of the wonder of their mere existence, by their usefulness: the brightness of heavenly bodies, the fruitfulness of a forest, the power of a horse’s snort, the intricacy of design in a well-made piece of clothing. Glory in the everyday items of everyday living.

That abandoned city, that child who no longer lives, that person who helped build your life and give it meaning who has now left your life and possibly the world: they are holding up everything you do now, in this moment, alongside all that ever was or will be. They move beneath your feet, their hearts beating across time and memory.

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