Another Brother Moses

My wife and I went to the opera recently. Puccini's Tosca on a Sunday afternoon. On the train ride into the city, I offered a synopsis or shortened version of the libretto. Opera people will tell you you should always know the story coming in, otherwise it is just a lot of waving of arms and songs that seem to go on for quite a long time.

As I was going through the three acts (act one Tosca is in love with Mario, Mario helps a man on the run, the chief of police arrests Mario; act two, chief of police tortures Mario so to find the fugitive, Tosca can free Mario if she consents to sleeping with the Chief of Police. Tosca kills chief of police, and the fugitive takes his own life. Act three Mario is executed, Tosca dies), as I went through the acts Kathy was concerned.

Even before I got to Act three, she raised her eyes at me a couple of times. I must admit I was surprised by how little I realized the story is sad. This is Puccini so what do you expect. Happy endings are not his strong suit.  It's like Hamlet but with songs.  Everyone dies. By the time I got to describing the third act I could sense the inevitable.  After the second act, Kathy would say, "well, that was nice.  I'm good.  Maybe we can go before everyone dies?" And we did.

              It does help that Tosca' famous aria, vissi d'arte is in the second act so it was truly all over but the shouting.  Tosca's aria alone is worth the cost of admission.  She pleads with God, asks God, why if she has lived to praise, lived to bring beauty to honor God, why would her life become such a mess, such a tragedy? How does she deserve this?  The question is as painful as the aria is beautiful.  If she has lived a good life of faith, why would violence be her lot, her fate? 

              In the beauty of the moment, and in the pragmatism of my wife, maybe we go before everything falls apart, amid my confusion as to why I would just accept Tosca's fate without concern, into this swirl of possibilities I did what most people do, I took to the well-worn path of many, I thought of Nietzsche's first work, The Birth of Tragedy. I know.  Obvious.  Right?

              Tosca's prayer is his question.  Taking the beauty of Dionysian emotion and swirl of music and dance and heartbreak and balancing this with fate and the inevitable.  Life is both beautiful and tragic.  Nietzsche's great insight that the power of tragedy is not in fortune but fate.  The ancient stories enacted by the Greeks were not mystery plays; everyone knew what was going to happen in the end.  Like Puccini, life is not a happy ending.  The birth of tragedy was found in the actors, how they lived, how they faced hardship and loss.  The surprise of life was not the story itself, but in the actor's courage, heart.  How will you face challenge?  Will you rise above it?

              I remember being surprised in our first church how uncommon this idea was to the members of the small community just outside of Columbus, Ohio.  I was surprised by how surprised they were by tragedy.  Two young girls were killed by their peers.  Terrible.  It was so bad they made a Dateline episode about it.  I remember the heartbreak and the sadness and the tragedy of it all.  But what sticks with me most is the shock.  Growing up in a city, living here so close to New York City and Philadelphia, you develop a hardness, an acceptance, terrible things happen.  In a small town outside of Columbus, Ohio you don't develop a hardness, an acceptance.  Terrible things don't happen.  At least they don't happen here.

              Their disbelief was a great challenge.  Was I wrong to simply accept life as fate, history as tragedy?  Am I yet jaded?  Like Puccini, am I unaccustomed to happy endings? 

              In the last few years as I have researched monuments, memorials, and museums, this question has come up a lot. Should we expect tragedy?  In lower Manhattan there is a provocative memorial to the heartbreak of 9-11.  The design is meant to invite you to enter the memory of the tragedy in your own way, on your own terms.  Two cascading wells leading to darkness.  There is a motion and birth in the water; there is loss and death in the darkness of what we can never find, the end, or reason for the loss. Many have rejected the memorial as an acceptance of tragedy.

              The memorial evokes a question: why are we called to never forget?  Like the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, never forget is an essential meaning.  But why?  Wouldn't it be better to forget?  Grief is so you don't remember loss all the time.  Memory is more than loss.  Shouldn't life have a balance, a courage to match the heartbreak?

              This last July, as part of the research, we ventured down to Washington D.C.  I wanted to see how the Lincoln Memorial talked to the Grant Memorial.  They are at opposite ends of the mall, and they are meant to be balance.  The general and the president; politics and war. One is seated in a chair lost in thought; the other is seated on a horse, an image of calm, all the while surrounded by chaos. 

              I saw this, heard their conversation, and was quite satisfied by what I found, a deep creation of memory, courage, loss, and resolve.  All there.  The memorials talk to each other.  This was very moving and after seeing this, I was good to go, ready to go home.

              But we could not leave yet.  Kathy booked a night tour of D.C.  I didn't want to go.  Already saw what I came to see.  Didn't want to drive around in a bus all night.  Thought it was ridiculous.  So, we went on the night bus tour.  It was fantastic.  Whole different way of seeing the monuments.  The highlight was the memorial for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Shocking.

              A big part of the shock was the Egyptian motif.  The large stones leading to the large statue emerging from another large stone is all very reminiscent of Karnak and Luxor and the Valley of the Kings.  Dr. King is almost pharaonic, and the stones around him create the aura of desert and Egyptian temple. Yet, he is not Egyptian.  He is not a pharaoh, and the mid-Atlantic is not very desert-like.  There was, though, something Egyptian happening, but it wasn't clear. 

              All great pieces of art should draw you in and then let you emerge with more questions than answers. The one question that came to mind as I contemplated this memorial was this: if not a pharaoh, how about a Moses?  Is the Egyptian motif to lead us unto the Exodus?  Is the life and death of Dr. King a moment of being led unto freedom, the same way Moses led the children of Israel out of slavery?

              This question and all these images and art and bus tours, even the opera and Mr. Nietzsche came to me, I believe, because scholars like to compare the feeding of the five thousand, the miracle of Jesus at Tagbah, the bread, the fish, scholars like to say, Jesus is being like Moses, this is an echo of manna in the desert, the quail, water from the rock.  Jesus is taking care of the people the way Moses did. He is leading them to freedom.

              Not a stretch really.  Moses fed the people in the desert; Jesus feeds the people in a deserted place.  Moses was leading people to a promise land, God's kingdom.  Jesus tells people the kingdom of God is at hand, sees the people as sheep without a shepherd.  Crowds follow him.  A lot of people followed Moses.  Jesus is often cranky in the gospels; Moses was cranky.  The Sermon on the Mount is a new way of living the law that Moses gave.  There is a Moses-like quality to this story.  Yet, as is often the case with the gospels, similarity doesn't lead to easy answers. Jesus is not a new Moses.

              Yet, since July I have wondered is Dr. King?  Is he in a sense our Moses?  He wasn't a president or a general like the other monuments on the mall.  He was not in a war or gave birth to the nation.  Didn't write the Declaration of Independence.  His death was tragic.  The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a monument to tragedy.  But then, Kings' monument is not tragic.  Somber.  Yes. There is a deep seriousness to his gaze.  A struggle, for sure; courage, yes, but not really heartbreak. It is as if he is looking forward, beyond this time, this moment, to a future.

              Interesting that his memory is about to become history, the past.  He is moving from a living memory to a historical figure right now.  The people who marched with him are dying.  This too is an echo of Moses.  He could see the promise land, but he could not enter it.

              Yet, what jumped out at me as I rambled through the monuments and the echoes of Moses, rode the night bus, listened to Tosca's plea about grace and goodness and tragedy, what jumped out at me was the very un-Moses direction of Jesus when he fed the 5000.  Unlike Moses, Jesus called on the disciples to feed the people.  You feed them.  Jesus didn't start with prayer; he started with direction.

              Only when they balk and protest and confess their inability, only then does Jesus feed the people.  It is as if his miracle is a fill-in, a response to failure. The miracle wasn't meant to be.  Jesus wanted the disciples to care for the people, have compassion for the crowd, provide food for the hungry.

              I don't think Jesus was a new Moses.  Doesn't really work beyond this story.  Jesus was more of a one-person-at-a-time-sort of healer.  Didn't really do much for the crowd except tell them stories they didn't understand. 

              I like the idea of Dr. King as our Moses.  A leader of the people showing them the way to freedom.  His dream is a kind of promise land we long to see in our lifetime, a place where we have the courage to rise above tragedy, hardship, and loss.  That America would indeed be a land of the free and a home of the brave for all, not just some. 

              Standing in the massive stone megaliths and the statue of him emerging, looking stern, I have no doubt we have work to do, strides to make, barriers that yet need toppling.  The Memorial to Dr. King looks unfinished, almost as if the artist is handing the chisel to the next generation.  “You finish it.” 

              What really strikes me though is our reading today.  "You feed them."  It was supposed to be us, not Jesus.  No manna from the sky or quail or water from the rock because God provides, not even a prayer of Jesus to feed the people.  What really sticks with me is a new kind of Moses.  Not Jesus.  Us.  We are supposed to be the one who says, "we can feed them.  We can do this."

              Is that not the legacy we are to remember?  We can do this.  A new kind of Moses.  Someone who walks beyond the confines of race and class, gender and identity, someone who says, we can leave the slavery of our fears and strife.  Life is hard, tragic even, but we will rise above. We shall overcome.  We feed them.  We love.  We stand side by side, hand in hand.  We can.

              If you are in Washington D.C., take the night bus.  You might see something.  Amen.