I Can Go Now

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honkytonks, restaurants and whorehouses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.

               I was very fortunate to attend a private high school where they developed a list of banned books.  It saved me a great deal of time figuring out what to read.  It was on this list I discovered Dostoevsky and Hemmingway, Sartre and Camus.  Yet of all the early discoveries it was John Steinbeck who opened the world of stories and what a book could do.  I ingested most of his works: Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Tortilla Flat, the Red Pony.  Yet, it was the novels of Cannery Row and Monterrey that stole my heart and created a place in me where I could sit with Mac and the boys and know the truth found in star charts and tidal zones. 

              One of the things that made the novel Cannery Row different from the others was that the main character, Ed Rickets, or Doc, was a real person.  He was Steinbeck's dear friend, someone he spent long evenings in serious conversation and other evenings in let's say frivolity.  Knowing this changes how you read the novel; the lines between fact and fiction are blurry.  Events like the great frog expedition or the brawl that broke out in a gathering gone awry because members of the local football team crashed the party at Ed Ricket's house, those might be embellished or spun whole cloth, but the oceanographer, the scientist, the philanderer who was Doc living at Western Biological in Monterrey, that was real.

              Ed Rickets died when his car was hit by a train in 1948.  Six years later John Steinbeck published a sequel to his Cannery Row, the second novel was called Sweet Thursday.  If you know Ed Rickets is dead when Steinbeck wrote the second piece, it changes how you read it. You might undervalue the sweetness of Sweet Thursday if you did not know this was John Steinbeck trying to resurrect his friend, to conjure a beloved, to fill in some pieces that eluded Doc in his life.

              Perhaps most important in the sequel is that Doc becomes smitten with a woman who is his equal in terms of stubborn tenacity. He lets his friend fall deeply in love with Suzy who could go toe to toe with him but not cast a stone.  I like that part of the sequel; I also love the idea of resurrecting someone you love.

              For many I worked and started and stopped and tried different vantages for a novella where my grandmother was a part of the story.  After many years of trying, I realized what I really wanted to do was to sit with her again, hear her gravely profanity laced voice; to run errands for her, to sit with her in the silence of the morning while she smoked Lark cigarettes and drank Hills Bros Coffee and worked the crossword, all the while in her pink house coat and slippers. The novella was simply a means of resurrection. I wanted her to be alive again.

              To understand the story of Jesus being presented in the temple, you need to consider this desire, resurrection.  To see the desire of resurrection, you need to know some of the background of Mary, some of the legends, and why, why would Luke the evangelist begin his gospel with her stories, with Mary's account; why begin the good news of the kingdom of God with her.

              The first legend and it is a beautiful one is that after Jesus died, Mary and the beloved disciple John left Jerusalem, left Galilee and Judea, and ventured to what is today Turkey, to the town of Ephesus.  At the time of Mary's arrival in Ephesus she would have been at least 50, maybe sixty.  Add another decade and that was when, according to the legend, the Apostle Paul and his protege Luke would have visited with her.  They came to Ephesus and spoke with Mary.  Hence, Luke begins his gospel with the stories Mary told him, gave to him.

              The stories of Mary: the annunciation, the Magnificat, Elizabeth and Zechariah, the birth of Jesus and the shepherds, the young boy with the teachers, and our reading today, the presentation in the temple, these are lovely and poignant and poetic.  They are a bit like Cannery Row: a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.  What they are not is a key to the teachings of Jesus or even a complement to them.  They are cherished memories of a mother; they are a beautiful gift given to Luke gathered as he passed through Ephesus.

              This is the first legend that illumines our text.  The second is that Mary would most likely have known Simeon and certainly Anna.  Mary according to legend was a temple attendant, a child given to the temple to help and work and pray.  The tradition is that Mary was so devote, so committed to a life of prayer and contemplation that she refused to leave, to marry when she reached the age.  Hence, Joseph, according to the legend, is a caretaker, an elderly man who agreed to wed Mary more as a ward to protect her. 

              This is important to the story of the presentation in the temple because Mary is not just visiting the temple, she is in essence, going home.  These were her people, her place.  In fact, you can read all the stories of Mary as a persistent attempt to return to Jerusalem.  Again and again, she leaves her place of banishment in Galilee and ventures down south, to Elizabeth, to Bethlehem, to the temple.  More to the point, if the legends are true then Mary appearing with Jesus so Simeon and Anna can see him is not a random occurrence or a chance happening, but a kind gift of a dear friend. 

              Such a gift makes Simeon's words more tender than maudlin.  I can go know; I can leave this earth because you have shown me the Messiah; I trust this is the child of God because this is the child of Mary.  Read in this way we can see Anna's appearance would have been a treasured memory Mary took with her.  A story she held on to for a long time and then gave to Luke, almost as if it were the last treasure of her childhood in the temple, Anna saw my child.  If Mary is like us, then when she tells Luke this story it is as if she is being transported back to her youth, to a place of great joy.

              I believe this is the best way to read Simeon's warning about Mary's soul being pierced.  This is her prophecy.  She must have remembered these words as Jesus was crucified and his side pierced; his suffering and death was in a sense hers as well.  Parents suffer when their kids suffer.  A part of her died with him don't you think.

              Considering these legends and the question (why did Luke tell these stories, include them, give them so much of his gospel?), I just can't help but believe it was resurrection.   Mary was in a sense resurrecting Jesus in the telling.  As she remembered his birth and childhood, it was as if he was resurrected in the telling.  In this way her stories become a kind of bookend, birth and death, for sure.  But also, a bringing to life one who was lost. Paul and Luke coming to Ephesus, hearing Mary's stories, it was as if she let them feel her devotion, her love, her faith.  In this way the beginning of Luke is a long preparation to hear the good news.  Knowing her stories changes how you read the gospel.

              A favorite movie of mine is a Christmas movie, It' a Wonderful Life.  I love it.  I can watch it anytime of the year.  Quote lines from it all the time.  Can't help but think of Zuzu when a flower loses its petals or Janey when someone plays Hark the Herald Angles.  The last line is a treasure, “no man is a failure who has friends.” 

              A few years ago, though, I learned something about the movie that changed the way I see it.  I always thought Frank Capra's movie was about dashed dreams and disappointment and the weight of failure.  I don't want any plastics I don't any ground floors I don't any marriage, do you hear me, Mary.  I thought it was about how hard it can be to find joy, to trust your heart.  And it is all that.  But it was meant to be something more.

              What I didn't know was that Frank Capra made that movie for veterans, for the folks returning from WWII.  It was a kind of poem, a tone, a quality of light meant to welcome home folks who felt they had lost their life, lost their innocence, wondered if life could ever be good again, let alone wonderful.

              It's a Wonderful Life was an attempt to resurrect folks who felt dead inside.  The movie was meant to conjure good memories, to show "all is not lost, hold on, don't give up."   The movie has this power for non-veterans too but knowing what he intended the movie to do changed the way I watch it. Now the wish of George Baily, I wish I'd never been born, this wish takes on a whole other poignancy when you consider things like survivor's guilt, the long absence, the way people may not recognize you.  Capra made the film as a gentle call, come home.

              I may be reading this in a bit, but a part of me believes that when Mary told Luke her stories, once she offered the treasures of her heart, it was then, that she too could depart.  She could in essence go home.

              Sometimes when I consider the last four years, I see it as the life that was lost.  The pandemic and other events took away the ease, the normalcy, the habits in so many ways.  Traditions, jobs, routines, some have returned, some have not.  I hear people talk about "getting back."  And that is fine.  There are somethings I would like to get back to.  But what we might really need is a bit of resurrection.  We need "a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream."

              For some of us we may need the tender mercy of Frank Capra saying, "come home; it's alright."  Some of us may need the treasures of Mary, her stories, to find our way back to the temple again, to return to the habit and simple routine of worship. 

              Take a moment and look around you.  You might see folks you know; folks you don't know.  There may be gaps in pews where you remember who is not there; you may never know who was lost.  No matter what you see consider the people around you as trying to find their way, make their way back to life, maybe even experience a bit of resurrection.  Some of you don't need any assurance, some may need a great deal.

              What we all need is to remember: here, together, in the beauty of the hymns and anthems, in the wisdom and mercy of the word, in the common voice of our prayers and confession, here is where we will find the messiah, the son of Mary, the one who will lead us to hope and light.  And remember this most of all, we find the child together.  Mary, Joseph, Simeon, and Anna, they were together in the temple and so are we.  Amen.