After spending time as a seminary professor, parish pastor, and writer of Biblical commentary and sermons, Elizabeth Huwiler
moved to Elm Grove, Wisconsin, to spend time with aging parents, where she has returned to her English major roots and is
writing creative nonfiction, flash, and prose poems.
“Seventy years later, he
was still telling the
story, still clinging to
what details he could
remember”
> whether that night or the next morning.
Seventy years later, he was still telling the story,
still clinging to what details he could remember or
improvise. This is one of the events that made my dad,
one of the stories he needed to have remembered, and a
story much of which I have forgotten.
Dad also dropped hints of another storm, but did
not honor it with a story. He was in the navy in World
War II, on a ship in the Pacific, and there was a typhoon.
All I know about that storm is that it occurred, and for
the rest of his life, Dad was glad not to live on a ship or
an island, vulnerable to the storming sea.
The story from up north, and the hints of the
typhoon, help me to understand tiptoeing in the basement, when I longed to be dancing with raindrops.
Violent storm images evoke for me “Canticle of the
Turning,” a paraphrase of Mary’s song, the Magnificat. It
is about God turning the world around. My favorite lines
are:
From the halls of pow’r to the fortress tow’r, not a
stone will be left on stone.
Let the king beware, for your justice tears every
tyrant from his throne.
And the refrain:
My heart shall sing of the day you bring. Let the
fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near, and
the world is about to turn.
The song helps me to reinterpret an academic
article I read a while back, which claimed that in ancient
Hebraic world view, there was a harmony between the
natural world and the social world, a way that upsetting
the social hierarchy would put the entire cosmos in
jeopardy. The author found the evidence in Proverbs, but
used it to understand the frequent “destroy the wicked”
imprecations in Psalms. It was a way of making sense of
what looks (from a love-your-enemies Christian slant)
to be mean and vindictive. “Zap the wicked” translates to
“maintain the cosmos.”