[Note: next new essay this coming Thursday or Friday. FK]
When we started out in late morning from Wisconsin for Mississippi, it was in the low 50’s; when we camped for the night in our little trailer at Rend Lake, about two thirds the way towards the southern tip of Illinois, it was 6:30 PM and in the upper 80’s. Don’t ask about the humidity. It was sweltering and the mosquitoes were still having their happy little party although it was almost October. Although we traveled as modern Man, Homo comfortable-is, we were camping as our ancestors had in the era of the Conestoga wagon over one hundred years before. And although they were of sterner stuff than us, they still must have felt uncomfortable as they ate beneath a sky shared with the insects and the elements. They were in the process of becoming us, busily and relentlessly redefining their relationship with nature, and must have felt, even then, the reason why. They were also re-defining their relationships with their fellow man in a process that often made nature look positively gentle and benign.
We were to see part of that process the following day, as we detoured through Shiloh, Tennessee, at the national monument that was the site of the first major battle of the civil war (so we were told) in the spring of 1862. It was here that both sides realized that they were not in a tidy little scrap that would be settled by a few black eyes. It was here that they realized the hell that they had unleashed in the struggle over the sanctity of the union and the inalienable rights of all people, regardless.
The stories of the three day battle were heart-pumping as well as heart-breaking. After visiting the museum, we saw the movie that precisely depicted in words, maps, and actual photos just what happened at the battle and why. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the cause, it was immediately apparent that most of the casualties were young men with no dog in the hunt other than a sense of regional pride and a false sense of battlefield heroics. Again and again, words written home or in personal journals by young survivors stated that nowhere in any book or tale was the impact of all-out battle even remotely captured. It was chaos, and much more: men prayed deeply between the skirmishes in realization of their possible death, and while in life, many marveled at how sharp everything seemed – how the colors of early spring shined forth, how the songs of the birds were so sweet or chilling, how life itself was so intensely experienced just as it was so much closer to ending.
We walked the cemetery and some of the nearer grounds that clung to the shores of the Tennessee River, the area as a whole decked with woods and farmlands little changed from the year of the battle except for blacktop on the roads. No hotels, no condos, no trinket shops, nothing more had been added outside the immediate area of the museum. Returning to the parking lot, we ran into the curator of the museum, who was leaving the building to take down the American flag before sunset. Even as he spoke in the accent of the South, he wore his US Government suit well, and knew the facts of the battle and of the war itself cold. A shame, we all agreed, that all these young men – 2,700 of them – had to die, buried together in gruesome group trenches before the Union could return to bury its own scattered remains in mostly unmarked graves. The Rebel bodies still remained somewhere in the woods, piled together in the same postures of haste, only bones and brass buttons and belt buckles and lead balls and cartridges left from their lives. It was me who mentioned in this context the current War Between the States – now the Red versus the Blue, marked at that time by the Battle of the Supreme Court. We did not mention sides, but we knew; and in this, he swore that he would never vote for the other side again. Just as many on the other side no doubt would never vote for his side again.
And so we understood almost without words in this most hallowed of grounds how wars started – not how they began in embryo with ideas and moral posturing, but how they actually started: with unbridgeable rancor. It was with this understanding, sitting on us like silent tombstones on earth, that we left the site in silence.
But not for long. I knew that Shiloh was a name from the Bible, and soon had my wife clicking away on her palm computer to find what this place had been named for. Yes, we found, it had been the site of a battle, but the battle was of small importance compared to what was being fought over in ancient times: the Ark of the Covenant.
The Ark of the Covenant: I had first heard of it, heathen that I was, when the Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, came out in the early 1980’s. Even after the movie, I didn’t really know what it was. An ark is a boat, right? I did not see a holy, early Hebrew boat anywhere in the entire movie. Rather, I saw something like a box or coffin that was finally shelved in some massive government storage unit in Washington, DC. Here, the Ark was lost again, now buried under red tape rather than earth and stone. Funny and sadly possible, but still, what was it?
Coincidence, that tying together of meaningful odds and ends in our lives, never sleeps, for it just so happened that one of the books-on-CD’s I had gotten for our trip was The Lost Ark of the Covenant, by Tudor Parfitt. Yes, you have that name right, and he is as pompous as one might expect for an Oxford scholar with such a name. In fact, this Oxford professor plays on this stereotype, slipping sly jokes and silly, high-handed attitudes to us as if he were a member of Monte Python’s Flying Circus. Hilarious. But the information he gives us in his study, and pursuit of, the Ark of the Covenant, is as thorough as one might expect from an English Scholar.
We learn that even the experts – even the Jewish experts – disagree on exactly what, physically, the Ark was (and perhaps still is). “Ark” can mean both boat on the one hand and cupboard or container or coffin on the other, but it is most probably simply a container, given its context. It was built after Mosses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments – and after he broke the original tablets and remade them – to give the tablets a permanent home. Even then, though, it was described in two ways: one, as a fancy and large box filigreed with gold, and two, as a smaller crate made simply from the wood of the desert tree, the acacia. In either case, it also somehow (in its rather small dimensions) contained the staff of Aaron, the brother of Moses who caused the staff to turn into a snake that ate the staff-turned-into-snake of the Pharaonic priest. More importantly, it contained the essence of the power of Yahweh, the unspeakable and only True God of Israel. From that time, the Ark was carried everywhere with the people by poles on either side, the crate itself covered by a canapé that was not to be removed, even by a priest, on pain of death. Not death from the people, mind you, but death from the power of the box itself.
Thus, for the war-like Jews, the Ark became a holy but fully serviceable weapon of war, clearing away enemies in battle like a sci-fi laser gun. It was carried into actual combat, but was otherwise housed in a temple. For the first several hundred years (or so) after the Jews had taken the Promised Land, the city of that temple had been called Shiloh.
I forget the exact chronology, but at one point, before the reign of David, the Philistines raided Shiloh and stole the Ark. They held it for a year, a year that was filled with plague and pestilence and death, so much so that they willingly returned it to the Jews with fear and trembling. The Ark was then moved about some more before King David held a procession that took the Ark to Jerusalem, during which a man who touched it to keep it from falling fell dead on the spot, where later the great Temple of Israel was built, complete with the Holy of the Holies, the place of the Ark. There it remained, even as the 10 northern tribes of Israel – the “Lost Tribes”- were removed and scattered to the winds by the Assyrians 700 plus years BC; there it remained until the Babylonians conquered the southern tribes in 587 BC. It was then that the temple was destroyed and the world, as far as we know, never knew of the survival, let alone the location, of the Ark again.
Many Jews have long thought that the return of the Ark will mean the end of the old times and the beginning of the Kingdom they thought was promised them since ancient times. Christians, on the other hand, believe the Ark was indeed returned – in the person of the Virgin Mary. It was she who housed the God of Israel and delivered him to the world to start the New Kingdom, which is, or at least has been, not of this world, although Christians, too, await another time here in this world. Still, we wonder – what of the original Ark? What of its power?
In the book, what impresses most is exactly the power of the Ark. It is not startling to learn that the Ark was used by Israel to smite enemies: such is the story of the Jewish relationship with God in the Old Testament. What is startling, at least to me, is the apparent indiscriminate nature of this power, how even innocent people who touch or handle the Ark wrongly, even with good intentions, were instantly killed. The Ark, then, is less like a thinking God than nature itself, a source of raw power that does not care about intentions, but only how it is handled. Yet, such, too, was the law of the Old Testament, where common compassion could be overridden. Think of Abraham with his son Isaac, tied up for slaughter simply because Yahweh demanded it. Think of Job and his afflictions.
But we might see that the God of the old law was such because the people were such. For instance, the women who were stoned for adultery were more often than not integral parts of their small agrarian community - and yet the men, who were also guilty (as it takes two to tango), stoned them with fervid abandon. It was not about compassion with their God, because they had no compassion themselves. It was, in the end, about power and unbending law, just as it was with the Ark.
Such it is that we see Jesus shame the men when they go to stone the woman adulterer as they always had, according to the old law. Such it is, then, that the new Ark is in the frame of a woman of compassion, the mother of God who wept at the torture and death of her son. This son was the man who had, in the mind of the Pharisees, broken the law by proclaiming a new law, a law written not on stone, but in the heart.
Perhaps it is that we do not want to find the old Ark of the Covenant. Perhaps it is that Shiloh, Tennessee was rightly named after the first Keep of the Ark. Perhaps it is that when the law is written not in our hearts but in stone, the power of the Ark returns to punish all those, innocent and guilty alike, who violate that chiseled law: Though Shalt Not Kill. Certainly, the fury of war that was fully unleashed at Shiloh sent a swath of destruction greater than any natural tornado or monsoon through the settled lands of the United States. The ancient Ark, we might say, is the terrible swift sword whose truth, whose wrath, goes marching on. Such it is if we close to the greater part of the law and choose the easier, the older path of blind righteousness.
Regardless, the power does not end. On our way back from Mississippi, we hit that same divide of weather that separated cold from hot in central Illinois. The winds increased so that the trailer swayed dangerously on its tether, just as a wall of clouds rose from the edges of the hazy heat and the blue sky. It was a scene that could have been from the movie “Moses” starring Charlton Hesston. The power and glory that creates and destroys universes on a whim does not end with the coming of the new Ark. Rather, it seeks to bring us in, trembling as we are, from the cold of Mount Sinai. Here, Justice is leavened, and sins are forgiven, not in weakness but in wisdom.
I do not know which side of the stormy wall we now live in, and perhaps, as with the people of the old law, it is not our conscious choice. Shiloh and the thousands of largely innocent young men buried there are a testament to that. We can try to choose the intent rather than the letter of the law by not picking up that first stone, but sometimes it is out of our hands. We are still a people of a flock, and sometimes, as in the days of old, power strikes and we are like lost sheep scattered by the storm.
When we started out in late morning from Wisconsin for Mississippi, it was in the low 50’s; when we camped for the night in our little trailer at Rend Lake, about two thirds the way towards the southern tip of Illinois, it was 6:30 PM and in the upper 80’s. Don’t ask about the humidity. It was sweltering and the mosquitoes were still having their happy little party although it was almost October. Although we traveled as modern Man, Homo comfortable-is, we were camping as our ancestors had in the era of the Conestoga wagon over one hundred years before. And although they were of sterner stuff than us, they still must have felt uncomfortable as they ate beneath a sky shared with the insects and the elements. They were in the process of becoming us, busily and relentlessly redefining their relationship with nature, and must have felt, even then, the reason why. They were also re-defining their relationships with their fellow man in a process that often made nature look positively gentle and benign.
We were to see part of that process the following day, as we detoured through Shiloh, Tennessee, at the national monument that was the site of the first major battle of the civil war (so we were told) in the spring of 1862. It was here that both sides realized that they were not in a tidy little scrap that would be settled by a few black eyes. It was here that they realized the hell that they had unleashed in the struggle over the sanctity of the union and the inalienable rights of all people, regardless.
The stories of the three day battle were heart-pumping as well as heart-breaking. After visiting the museum, we saw the movie that precisely depicted in words, maps, and actual photos just what happened at the battle and why. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the cause, it was immediately apparent that most of the casualties were young men with no dog in the hunt other than a sense of regional pride and a false sense of battlefield heroics. Again and again, words written home or in personal journals by young survivors stated that nowhere in any book or tale was the impact of all-out battle even remotely captured. It was chaos, and much more: men prayed deeply between the skirmishes in realization of their possible death, and while in life, many marveled at how sharp everything seemed – how the colors of early spring shined forth, how the songs of the birds were so sweet or chilling, how life itself was so intensely experienced just as it was so much closer to ending.
We walked the cemetery and some of the nearer grounds that clung to the shores of the Tennessee River, the area as a whole decked with woods and farmlands little changed from the year of the battle except for blacktop on the roads. No hotels, no condos, no trinket shops, nothing more had been added outside the immediate area of the museum. Returning to the parking lot, we ran into the curator of the museum, who was leaving the building to take down the American flag before sunset. Even as he spoke in the accent of the South, he wore his US Government suit well, and knew the facts of the battle and of the war itself cold. A shame, we all agreed, that all these young men – 2,700 of them – had to die, buried together in gruesome group trenches before the Union could return to bury its own scattered remains in mostly unmarked graves. The Rebel bodies still remained somewhere in the woods, piled together in the same postures of haste, only bones and brass buttons and belt buckles and lead balls and cartridges left from their lives. It was me who mentioned in this context the current War Between the States – now the Red versus the Blue, marked at that time by the Battle of the Supreme Court. We did not mention sides, but we knew; and in this, he swore that he would never vote for the other side again. Just as many on the other side no doubt would never vote for his side again.
And so we understood almost without words in this most hallowed of grounds how wars started – not how they began in embryo with ideas and moral posturing, but how they actually started: with unbridgeable rancor. It was with this understanding, sitting on us like silent tombstones on earth, that we left the site in silence.
But not for long. I knew that Shiloh was a name from the Bible, and soon had my wife clicking away on her palm computer to find what this place had been named for. Yes, we found, it had been the site of a battle, but the battle was of small importance compared to what was being fought over in ancient times: the Ark of the Covenant.
The Ark of the Covenant: I had first heard of it, heathen that I was, when the Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, came out in the early 1980’s. Even after the movie, I didn’t really know what it was. An ark is a boat, right? I did not see a holy, early Hebrew boat anywhere in the entire movie. Rather, I saw something like a box or coffin that was finally shelved in some massive government storage unit in Washington, DC. Here, the Ark was lost again, now buried under red tape rather than earth and stone. Funny and sadly possible, but still, what was it?
Coincidence, that tying together of meaningful odds and ends in our lives, never sleeps, for it just so happened that one of the books-on-CD’s I had gotten for our trip was The Lost Ark of the Covenant, by Tudor Parfitt. Yes, you have that name right, and he is as pompous as one might expect for an Oxford scholar with such a name. In fact, this Oxford professor plays on this stereotype, slipping sly jokes and silly, high-handed attitudes to us as if he were a member of Monte Python’s Flying Circus. Hilarious. But the information he gives us in his study, and pursuit of, the Ark of the Covenant, is as thorough as one might expect from an English Scholar.
We learn that even the experts – even the Jewish experts – disagree on exactly what, physically, the Ark was (and perhaps still is). “Ark” can mean both boat on the one hand and cupboard or container or coffin on the other, but it is most probably simply a container, given its context. It was built after Mosses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments – and after he broke the original tablets and remade them – to give the tablets a permanent home. Even then, though, it was described in two ways: one, as a fancy and large box filigreed with gold, and two, as a smaller crate made simply from the wood of the desert tree, the acacia. In either case, it also somehow (in its rather small dimensions) contained the staff of Aaron, the brother of Moses who caused the staff to turn into a snake that ate the staff-turned-into-snake of the Pharaonic priest. More importantly, it contained the essence of the power of Yahweh, the unspeakable and only True God of Israel. From that time, the Ark was carried everywhere with the people by poles on either side, the crate itself covered by a canapé that was not to be removed, even by a priest, on pain of death. Not death from the people, mind you, but death from the power of the box itself.
Thus, for the war-like Jews, the Ark became a holy but fully serviceable weapon of war, clearing away enemies in battle like a sci-fi laser gun. It was carried into actual combat, but was otherwise housed in a temple. For the first several hundred years (or so) after the Jews had taken the Promised Land, the city of that temple had been called Shiloh.
I forget the exact chronology, but at one point, before the reign of David, the Philistines raided Shiloh and stole the Ark. They held it for a year, a year that was filled with plague and pestilence and death, so much so that they willingly returned it to the Jews with fear and trembling. The Ark was then moved about some more before King David held a procession that took the Ark to Jerusalem, during which a man who touched it to keep it from falling fell dead on the spot, where later the great Temple of Israel was built, complete with the Holy of the Holies, the place of the Ark. There it remained, even as the 10 northern tribes of Israel – the “Lost Tribes”- were removed and scattered to the winds by the Assyrians 700 plus years BC; there it remained until the Babylonians conquered the southern tribes in 587 BC. It was then that the temple was destroyed and the world, as far as we know, never knew of the survival, let alone the location, of the Ark again.
Many Jews have long thought that the return of the Ark will mean the end of the old times and the beginning of the Kingdom they thought was promised them since ancient times. Christians, on the other hand, believe the Ark was indeed returned – in the person of the Virgin Mary. It was she who housed the God of Israel and delivered him to the world to start the New Kingdom, which is, or at least has been, not of this world, although Christians, too, await another time here in this world. Still, we wonder – what of the original Ark? What of its power?
In the book, what impresses most is exactly the power of the Ark. It is not startling to learn that the Ark was used by Israel to smite enemies: such is the story of the Jewish relationship with God in the Old Testament. What is startling, at least to me, is the apparent indiscriminate nature of this power, how even innocent people who touch or handle the Ark wrongly, even with good intentions, were instantly killed. The Ark, then, is less like a thinking God than nature itself, a source of raw power that does not care about intentions, but only how it is handled. Yet, such, too, was the law of the Old Testament, where common compassion could be overridden. Think of Abraham with his son Isaac, tied up for slaughter simply because Yahweh demanded it. Think of Job and his afflictions.
But we might see that the God of the old law was such because the people were such. For instance, the women who were stoned for adultery were more often than not integral parts of their small agrarian community - and yet the men, who were also guilty (as it takes two to tango), stoned them with fervid abandon. It was not about compassion with their God, because they had no compassion themselves. It was, in the end, about power and unbending law, just as it was with the Ark.
Such it is that we see Jesus shame the men when they go to stone the woman adulterer as they always had, according to the old law. Such it is, then, that the new Ark is in the frame of a woman of compassion, the mother of God who wept at the torture and death of her son. This son was the man who had, in the mind of the Pharisees, broken the law by proclaiming a new law, a law written not on stone, but in the heart.
Perhaps it is that we do not want to find the old Ark of the Covenant. Perhaps it is that Shiloh, Tennessee was rightly named after the first Keep of the Ark. Perhaps it is that when the law is written not in our hearts but in stone, the power of the Ark returns to punish all those, innocent and guilty alike, who violate that chiseled law: Though Shalt Not Kill. Certainly, the fury of war that was fully unleashed at Shiloh sent a swath of destruction greater than any natural tornado or monsoon through the settled lands of the United States. The ancient Ark, we might say, is the terrible swift sword whose truth, whose wrath, goes marching on. Such it is if we close to the greater part of the law and choose the easier, the older path of blind righteousness.
Regardless, the power does not end. On our way back from Mississippi, we hit that same divide of weather that separated cold from hot in central Illinois. The winds increased so that the trailer swayed dangerously on its tether, just as a wall of clouds rose from the edges of the hazy heat and the blue sky. It was a scene that could have been from the movie “Moses” starring Charlton Hesston. The power and glory that creates and destroys universes on a whim does not end with the coming of the new Ark. Rather, it seeks to bring us in, trembling as we are, from the cold of Mount Sinai. Here, Justice is leavened, and sins are forgiven, not in weakness but in wisdom.
I do not know which side of the stormy wall we now live in, and perhaps, as with the people of the old law, it is not our conscious choice. Shiloh and the thousands of largely innocent young men buried there are a testament to that. We can try to choose the intent rather than the letter of the law by not picking up that first stone, but sometimes it is out of our hands. We are still a people of a flock, and sometimes, as in the days of old, power strikes and we are like lost sheep scattered by the storm.
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