The Beggar & the Strange Mirror

The Hunger

If you have a granny still living in their old home with the shag carpet and the wood paneling on the walls, a small kitchen with vinyl flooring, a low TV set, and frilly white curtains, then you are likely familiar with a particular location in their home by the front door or in the living room. A small table upon which you will find the family bible(s) and on the wall behind the table an array of family photos, past and present.

Looking at the wall long enough reveals a collection of faces familiar and sometimes identical to one another. An echo of you across time in both directions. Faces that watch the coming, going, rejoicing, and grieving. Filling the room, even when no one is home.

The wall collapses all the generations living and dead. You’re claimed whether you like it or not. You didn’t choose these people, they chose you. Our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off!¹

The Searching

The land sleeps but when the red-tipped cross-shaped flowers of the dogwood bloom photographs are taken beneath its branches in grandma’s back yard. A reliable tell to know spring has arrived.

Swollen buds burst with blue, yellow, and green. Singing stops. Sunday’s best exchanged for work clothes. A pilgrimage to the graveyards for cleaning the gravestones of our ancestors, scraping the lichen and grime from their chiseled names of granite, taking care of those who took care of us. Wrinkly-cold fingers, sun-warmed neck, and hard work. The quilt covered ground boasts a feast inviting us to commune with our friends and family, living and dead.

Packing the cooler and starting the car, a final glance is given to papa’s grave, remembering him present with us just last year. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh.² We dip into the same bowl at each feast. We slice the same ham. Drink the same punch.

The Void

No more pews. No more hymns. Only the feeling that something was here once but isn’t anymore. We are standing on an old cracked foundation, but where did the house go?

Digging through the ruins we find a tarnished mirror that gives us fragments of what once stood inside the house: shelling beans, spades at the dining table, and a spinning vinyl plate.

The house we are looking for can’t be rebuilt. The tall pines that surround us vault into the night sky. Are those candles in the shards? Is that singing?

The Finding

A poor man from a wasted land
Did live in famine days,

He scratched and scrounged within the sand
And moved in hungered haze.

Sustained alone on pies of mud,
Washed down by bitter drink,

Made by hands of honest blood,
In realm gone past the brink.

'Til one day found by lady fair
Who gave him blessed bread;

He ate it all and then did swear
To see his people fed.

They saw the bread with hungry eyes,
Then turned without a word,

For men who've only eaten pies
Find holy bread absurd.

He gathered crumbs, blessed the dirt,
And cultivated yeast;

His stubborn blood would not desert
Until his kin would feast.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field.³