Often folks ask why folks call Southern Illinois “Little Egypt” and you have to tell them it all started with the year of the locust. It’s not entirely true, of course, but locusts carry forth the sort of poetic resonance the rest of the story holds.
In 1799, this old Baptist minister named — you’ll never guess — “John” saw all of these fertile highlands and lowlands around Edwardsville. “The Land of Goshen.” That’s what he called it. Prior to that — prior to American settlers — a fully functioning Medieval empire existed just to the south at Cahokia: guilds and everything. Truly was a bountiful, fertile land that depended on the flood plane of the Mississippi — much like the Nile, that other great river that only the Amazon properly rivals. Old John Badgley looked out over all of that richness of earth and saw the great mounds of Cahokia. They reminded him of pyramids. From there he called it Little Egypt. A promised land — the sort of place folks could settle when Horace Greeley said “Go West Young Man,” which isn’t the same thing as Manifest Destiny, but it certainly can be related if you think the lands are empty. Little Egypt wasn’t. And neither was the O.G. Egypt.
In the 1830s, a terrible harvest happened in the north and people flocked to Southern Illinois for grain auctions. Remember the Joseph story? Who anticipated famine and stocked up the grain bins? This added to the mythos. Soon after someone bought up a large tract of land and named a town in the southern tip Cairo. That trend stuck later and you end up with Salukis as a college mascot and towns like Thebes, Palestine, Lebanon, Karnak, Alma, Metropolis and other classical names. Memphis Tennessee landed just to the south (which people don’t realize because they hear “Illinois” and think “Chicago”). The region has more in common with Nashville and the Mark Twain national forest than Lake Michigan.
But then you have 1874 when the locusts come in the north. Again, Southern Illinois feeds the country — and eventually the world — during the famine. I tried to incorporate as much of this as possible into the background of Bell Hammers: The True Folk Tale of Little Egypt.
Why do I bring up locusts?
Cause it’s been a rough year, but also a rough decade, for Tara and I. Surviving the Joplin tornado at the start of it and then the intimate connections we had to the Arab Spring in Tunis, Ferguson, several other things, and now the epicenter of COVID in NYC — it feels like the cap at the end of a long ten years of locusts eating what little joys we had scrapped together. It hit us this week that not once, not twice, but four times we’ve been in a city that suffered traumatic events where Theater of War — the public group therapy organization — sent actors to process large trauma though classic plays (Job in wake of the Joplin Tornado, Antigone in Ferguson — Tara’s hometown, Job again with COVID in NYC, The Suppliants in the ICE raids here, etc). That gave us pause: turns out personally, professionally, and in terms of the society we keep we’ve… gone through a little more than average. We love each other deeply, help as many folks as we can, but there’s a deep sadness intimately fused with all of our deep joy. That’s just life, in some ways. At some point, I’ll write about barrenness very honestly and without a filter. Perhaps some other things, though I’ve processed a good deal of it in the album All Who Wander and various stories like Cast (clergy abuse, clergy hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy of we who critique both), The Blissful Dreams of Long Ago (Alzheimer’s), Portrait of the Nonartist (death of fathers while working hazardous jobs), Wilderness (murder), The Elevator Out (meaning in disaster), and The Joplin Undercurrent (the tornado).
In this time, we’ve taken great comfort from the book of Job — which Paul Giamatti performed with Theater of War in Joplin at College Heights — and from Joel, who says:
“So I will restore to you the years that the
swarming locust has eaten,
The crawling locust,
The consuming locust,
And the chewing locust,
You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied,
And praise the name of the Lord your God,
Who has dealt wondrously with you;
And My people shall never be put to shame.“Then you shall know that I am in the midst of Israel:
I am the Lord your God
And there is no other.
My people shall never be put to shame.
“And it shall come to pass afterward
That I will pour out My Spirit on all flesh;
Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
Your old men shall dream dreams,
Your young men shall see visions.
“And also on My menservants and on My maidservants
I will pour out My Spirit in those days.
And it shall come to pass
That whoever calls on the name of the LordShall be saved.”
The thing that sticks out to me most about this is (1) God is restoring all of the years that a plague took away and (2) does it by means of his presence — his suffering presence in and among us, in our midst.
I take heart knowing that God suffers more in our world than we ever could in his, as I once said in my poem Dead Christ. But also…
There’s something beautiful about God giving us back the years the locusts have eaten. It’s a year of the locust. A year of plague — longing for Passover. A year of the body of God on a slab and no resurrection in sight.
It’s been. A year.
The Cost of COVID cannot be overstated here or, frankly, elsewhere. We had lifelong partners die of the disease in Joplin. Our eye doctor and longtime supporter was forced into retirement there as well. We lost a regular contributor to the journal to the disease.
The biggest loss was colleagues in NYC:
- Of 20 in one sector, 16 left the city leaving only 4.
- Of 12 artist chaplains, 8 left the city leaving only 4.
Here in NYC, we lost so many neighbors that every few blocks, we had two or three refrigerated trucks full of bodies outside. For some reason, many who have read our updates regularly still use the tone of surprise when we say that, so we say it again in hopes that people will realize just how bad this got when our hospitals reached capacity. It was bad. A parking lot the size of a football field three blocks from our house was used for even more bodies. We lost our pizza chef a block away, we lost our downstairs farmer friend — wife of a dear friend and of another chef. We lost a cousin to a dear friend. We lost a deli owner. We lost one of the key actors in our broader network, a professor at NYU.
ICE took this as an opportunity to conduct illegal raids on our neighbors and so many in the neighborhood geared up with literature on how to keep people safe within their constitutional rights. I witnessed yet another illegal search down at the pier. I’ll remind you of what the Bible teaches on immigration and also of our vulnerable neighbors (since this is the moral law site). We, frankly, found it disgusting that they would use national sickness and death as a shield to hide their overnight creation of orphans. So we lost neighbors that way. And their children lost parents, which will now burden the already stressed foster system. Which will, in a few years, further stress the already stressed homeless resources.
We lost tons of businesses, which I think everyone feels.
But it’s also been a decade.
Tara found out that nuclear waste in her local creek may have contributed to her diabetes as well as cancer in her family and friends around the same time Michael Brown was shot near her family home. We were in Tunis working with Bible smugglers just nine months before the Arab Spring. Suicides, prison sentences, mom’s house caught fire, both dads got cancer, lost all but two grandparents — two of whom I was interviewing for Bell Hammers died before I finished. Crazy tragedies hit so, so many people we love and much survivor’s guilt accompanied it: especially when Hurricane Sandy hit NYC in the midst of our survey trips before we had ever moved.
Yet here we are, thriving through the pain.
I take hope knowing that God was here the whole time, going through it with us, going through worse than us. Incarnation is more than Attic tragedy when it comes to the dark, the abyss, nihilism. Because only after the heat death of the universe can we ask why we had a universe to die in the first place. Only then do we realize that the root cause of the existence of creation retains the power of creation, of donating Being to beings: that the God who made the world once can make it new again. And I believe that the historical evidence makes belief in the resurrection of Jesus logically necessary, since Dr. Wright’s work has yet to be disproven.
I take heart knowing God will restore the years the locusts have eaten.
We look forward to that kind of resurrection both now and not yet.
To be like King Lear’s family and reject resurrection? Well you end up losing not only a chance at new life, but even of the aboriginal image of God that gave you life in the first place.
So yes. The locusts have eaten much. This was sort of the year of the locust. But he will restore. He will restore.
And, in perfect timing, we came across an Andrew Osenga song that reminded us of the promise:
…Which reminded me of the Chesterton quote on Crusoe:
These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour and tone of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, “Robinson Crusoe,” which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.
But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe’s ship. That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion. I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in Milton’s Eden): I hoarded the hills. For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another one.
Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before I could think: that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now. I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it.
Take heart, friends: there’s life after “life after death,” and all things will be saved from this wreck.
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