History and Prophesy

Each moment is sacred, every life precious. Your memories are transports to the past where loved ones gone still live fresh as the first time you hugged them. The bits and pieces of history, both broad and personal, are artifacts to be revered, always.

Past is prologue…

Poets and storytellers are both historians and prophets. Listen to them for what they tell you can carry you through life with a wisdom earned simply by the attention you give and the care with which you carry their messages in your head and heart.

Here is such a story. I give it to you in honor of a week I spent at a writers'workshop at the University of San Francisco with spirits intent on learning to better tell their stories.

She was a tall, elegant woman, with sorrow etched on her beauty in such a way that made her more regal. Her voice carried the soft warm fragrances of cedar from her native country and when she rose to speak of her family’s grief her essence already foretold it to us. We sat in reverence. We sat transfixed.

Her sister was the star, brilliant in mind and person well on her way to a life of promise and fulfillment. She was to be a doctor or a lawyer and hold a high position in Lebanese society. All the family’s resources went to her. Our story teller evidenced no envy in this recital. She was accepting of her status even then, long after the fact. She loved her sister wholly and rejoiced in her promise. Her sister loved her back equally. Theirs was a bond unbroken even years later.

Long after her sister’s murder by her estranged boyfriend.

He had asked only to talk with her one day, seeking for a moment of her time to perhaps say good-bye, perhaps to talk her into one more try. They never found out. He shot her in the head as they sat in his car then took his own life.

Each moment is sacred, every life precious. Your memories are transports to the past where loved ones gone still live fresh as the first time you hugged them. The bits and pieces of history, both broad and personal, are artifacts to be revered, always.

We look on Beirut today and see what it must have looked like in the early eighties when Israel once before used massive attacks in retaliation for assaults against their country.

Past is prologue.

Our story teller related how her grief stricken family, in their tradition, buried her sister’s body in their back yard, in a beautiful garden. Moving on they transferred their dreams upon her. She was to become the star in their firmament and for awhile she tried. Went to school to become a lawyer for she was good with words but somewhere along the way those words called to her.

She was meant it turned out, to be a story teller.

She was meant to tell her family’s story to us that day and to finish her memoir from within the sadness of both her family and her nation. She came to America and went to school late in life. When we met her she was taking a novel writing class to smooth out her story. She was one of us, a soul crying out its story in all its sadness and glory. We were there in San Francisco listening to her, but her words carried us to Lebanon, during that country’s civil war.

You may not remember it, but it looked very much like it is today. One faction, one religious group vowing revenge against another for a long remembered wrong. One side supported by Islamic militants, another supported by the Jewish state. Peace loving families, like our storyteller’s, caught in the middle.

Israeli war ships anchored off the coast rained missiles down on Beirut in the early eighties, hoping to destroy their enemies. One rocket landed in her family’s back yard.

In the aftermath she and her family searched the grounds around their house for her sister’s bones so that they could be re-interred.

Can you imagine their horror and sorrow? Can you feel how hot the earth under their hands and knees must have felt?

She stood there telling us these things. But the one image I carry most vividly is this. She told us how fervently she prayed that she would not be the one who found her sister’s skull. They searched as long as they could and laid her sister again to rest.

Rockets once more fall like hot fire from the sky over Beirut. What peace do you think they find there on that family’s holy ground?

Each moment is sacred, every life precious. Your memories are transports to the past where loved ones gone still live fresh as the first time you hugged them. The bits and pieces of history, both broad and personal, are artifacts to be revered, always.

Past is prologue.

As Santayana has warned us:

Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes.