The Land of Milk and Honey
July 11, 2008
I wondered what the bees were doing there.
A normal person would wonder what the dead man was doing there.
It’s amazing what you get used to.
But there he was, propped upright in his open coffin, leaning against the vandalized grave. He was pretty nearly a skeleton, though his suit was rather well preserved. A swarm of bees danced all around his head, content but not far from menacing. Their frenetic flights to and from their macabre honeycomb, and their loud heavy droning, put me off from my first instinct to close the lid and push him back into his grave with a quick, stingless blessing.
But I remembered what it was like so many years ago, as a novice beekeeper in the monastery, when on a wintry day I tried to give the bees their sugar water, the seasonal substitute for flowers. I slipped on the ice, the jar fell and jolted them, and I couldn’t make a quick getaway because of the icy ground and my long black robes. Thirty some stings later, mostly on my frostbitten head, I was free from their attack. An angry bee is an angry bee, in the dead of a Baltimore winter or here in the heat of the tropics.
Another huge drone overhead. American Airlines passed above, almost at arms length, as it traced the final quarter mile of its journey from Miami to Port-au-Prince. An hour and a half journey, but a world away.
I pictured the people in the plane above- a score of missionaries, a handful of deportees, not a few business people, and many home-comers. How many would scratch below the surface of what it is really happening here, East of Eden, where poverty and violence give a poisonous fruit from the tree of death.
So, the peasants had seen the bees entering and leaving the grave through a small crack. They knew it meant honey. Can you imagine being that desperate for honey that you think nothing of disturbing a dead man’s rest, and scraping the honeycomb from his coffin?
Do dead men really tell no tales?
They tell of hunger, of revolutions that happen for simple food and water.
“Let them eat honey,”
They tell of magic and mystical beliefs, where honey from the grave is a manna from the realm between the dead and the living.
In front of the coffin is a makeshift hive. This is about the only normal and redeeming part of the image: the attempt to attract the queen, and thereby the whole swarm, into the normal way of sharing human company.
I offered to come with another, honey-fee coffin and bury that man (for a second time.) “Can’t you see he doesn’t need to be buried. He is just bones for burning.”
The bees started with death and ended with something sweet. A strange image for strange times, but it oddly speaks of something timeless. Flowers are as rare in poverty as they are in winter.
There are other forms of death that are worse than “our sister, death of the body.” The death of the will to live, the death of hope, the death of joy. This kind of death turns people into walking dead.
I have a friend named Semares. I stopped to see him recently. His once bright eyes are empty now. They say lightening never strikes twice in the same place, but it isn’t true.
When he was a boy, begging on the20streets, he got caught in gunfire and lost his leg. But he rebounded, and refused to accept his limitation. How he used to hop and jump into my truck when we pass by, swift as a deer, bright white teeth forming a quarter moon smile! Believe it or not, he formed a team of one legged soccer players- he proudly carries their picture with him! And they are a force to be reckoned with.
About six weeks ago, a truck lost its breaks. Semares was In the crowd. His good leg was crushed, his belly ripped open. Everyone who was around him had to be scraped up with shovels. As a lone survivor. he told me “God saved me because I never once told a lie”. He looked at me with no expression, without a smile, with no light in his eyes. How do we, his friends, light his heart again? Can we catch the light for him? I wish I could pass him what’s left of my own.
Felix is upstairs as I write this. I don’t=2 0know him, I only know that he needs a Good Samaritan. He needs friendship and trust and prayers and a lot of time to heal. Felix was kidnapped about 10 days ago, and when he could come up with no money for ransom, he was very badly beaten and thrown into a cesspool to drown. Who can doubt hell’s fury. His jaw has been rebuilt and wired. Not to worry. We bought gallons of Ensure and fruit juices for him. It will be a long time before he can eat.
His eyes are also empty. Any wonder? Setting bones is the easy part. Trying to restore light to the soul is the most difficult of arts.
Yes, who can doubt hell’s fury.
Who can doubt how poverty and violence can tear the hope, joy and life out of people.
But who can doubt heavens thunder?
The booming protests against those who would humiliate and disgrace the image of God in the human heart!
Who can doubt the power of heavens light, a light sometimes beaten to weakness, feeble in the darkness, and nearly gone- but which, St John promises, may spend a season as ember, but it will spark and reignite and burn brightly, never to be overcome?
Who can doubt the heavenly strength clearly present in those who seem so weak, yet manage to keep going against all odds?
Who can doubt the power that heaven gives to you and me, the lucky and the strong, to redress the wrong, and restore the inner light of joy?
Yes, at the east, in the garden of Eden, there is an angel, with a flaming sword guarding the way to the tree of life. The foe will perish, the friend will pass. The land of milk and honey is just a flaming sword away,
Fr. Richard Frechette CP
Port-au-Prince, Haiti