Esther and Paper Clips

“And who knows that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?” That is what Mordecai tells his cousin, Esther, who had been in his care as a daughter for many years before becoming queen. She has the chance to save the Jews, her people, and Mordecai tells her that perhaps she became queen exactly for this reason.

I love this story, and was delighted this morning that it was my Bible reading for today. But it is also a dark story, a story of powerlessness and bigotry and hate. First, Queen Vashti is deposed simply because she does not follow her king’s/husband’s commands. Then, the king searches for a new wife from all the beautiful women in the land, and the book of Esther describes in great detail all the preparations each woman made before being presented to the king. Eventually, the king chose Esther, a Jewish girl with no parents. (Mordecai encouraged Esther to put in an application). Only he does not know her history. He knows only that she is the most beautiful of all the women presented to him.

And then his closest associate, Haman, who is to the king what Cheney and Rumsfeld are to George Bush, decides to kill all the Jews in the land. The reason isn’t clear (perhaps Biblical scholars know it, but I do not), but the king goes along with it. He has better things to do than to worry about these kinds of details, and he trusts Haman to do the right thing.

So Esther is in an awkward position. She is the only person who has the opportunity to save the Jews, but doing so is risky. First, nobody knows she is a Jew. Second, she is not permitted to approach the king, her husband, unless he asks for her. She is surrounded by eunuchs and ladies in waiting and has her every need cared for—but she rarely sees her husband. To go to him is to risk death.

Mordecai comes to the king’s gates to beg for the life of his people. He cries out all day and night. Naturally, Haman is annoyed, so he decides to build gallows on which to hang Mordecai—as if killing him in the same manner in which his people would be killed is not enough.

Eventually, Mordecai sends a message to Esther, telling her what is happening and asking for her help. The whole plot is, of course, a complete shock to Esther, who seems to have nothing to do all day except to hang out with her entourage and get bathed and massaged and pampered. Esther responds, I want to help, but what can I do? If I ask the king to see me, I risk my life. Even if he will see me, what will happen when he learns I am Jewish?

And then Mordecai says a curious thing, something I had not noticed in earlier reading of this, my favorite book in the Bible. I have focuses always on his line, “And who knows that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?” To me, that line says so much about what it means to be a person committed to a life of social justice. We have to be prepared, spiritually and emotionally, to respond to injustice at any time, to take whatever risks need to be taken.

But before this line, Mordecai says, “Do not think because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape? For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish.”

First, he says, don’t think you can escape the fate of your people. Don’t think that just because you are a queen now that you are not, first and foremost, a Jew. Then—and this I find most curious—“For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your family will perish.” Why would Mordecai say such a thing? The situation is grave, and Esther truly is the Jewish people’s only hope. So why would he tell her that if she doesn’t save the Jews now, someone else will later?

Mordecai had vision beyond what those of us who are not as close to God can have. He knew Esther had a chance at becoming queen, or at least, that she should try. He knew only she could save the Jews, knew even that she was meant to save the Jews. But he was her father, and he loved her, and wanted to make sure she went about this with the right kind of integrity and humility. You are a Jew, and don’t forget it, he tells her, and then, he reminds her that the story of human history is much larger than this moment, that is started long before either of them were alive and will go on for generations beyond them, whether or not they die at this time. Can you imagine having that kind of faith to say something like this?

The statement must have humbled Esther—she has no right to think that her action couldn’t be completed by somebody else later in history—but it must have also must have made her realize how lucky she was to be there, in a position to affect the human story.

And so she does. She goes to the king, and he decides to see her rather than killing her, even though she’s broken the law by requesting the meeting. She prepares three large feasts for him and his men, including Haman, before finally breaking the news to the king that Haman has planned to kill her people.

Later, in a crazy plot twist, the king learns that years before, Mordecai had saved his life. The king prepares a horse and royal clothing so Mordecai can be paraded through the country to be honored by everyone. And, Haman is hanged on the gallows made for Mordecai.

But there is more. When Esther finally agrees to request the salvation of her people, she says to Mordecai, “Go, gather together all the Jews who are in Susa, and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will fast as you do. When this is done, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish.”

Esther does not go alone into the king’s chambers when she finally approaches him. With her are all the Jews, fasting and praying for her, and her maids, the women closest to her. They know she is in danger. They know there is a good chance she will die trying to save them. And so they fast and pray.

Last night I rented a documentary called Paper Clips about a group of kids in Tennessee who decided to collect a paper clip for the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. They wanted to be able to visualize six million—they lived in a town of just over 1,000, and couldn’t picture what that number meant. They choose the paperclip because it was used as a secret symbol of solidarity with the Jews, clipped to the coat pocket, during the Holocaust. The project grows and grows as more and more people, including several Holocaust survivors, hear about what they are doing, until, eventually, in a town smaller than Morris, Minnesota, where I live, the kids had collected thousands of letters with heartbreaking stories of war and hate and intolerance and more than 29 million paperclips, many of them donated in memory of someone lost.

In the end, a German couple purchased and donated a rail car that had once transported Jews to the death camps and found a way get that car to that little town in Tennessee. The whole town chips in to build is a permanent memorial in Tennessee, with 11 million of the 29 million paperclips collected housed inside the car for the 11 million people the Nazis killed.

The story is beautiful because of the ways the kids’ lives were opened by the project—soon, poor, Baptist kids from Appalachia who had never met a Jew were visiting Jewish families for Friday dinner, and Holocaust survivors who had never left New York since coming to America were visiting their little town in a little valley in Tennessee. Other survivors were writing their stories, sometimes for the first time, and entrusting them to these school kids, and German school kids were sending them paperclips with notes asking for Anne Frank’s forgiveness. I have to admit I found the whole premise pretty suspicious when I rented the video—what good can collecting paperclips do?--but by the end of the movie, I was really moved.

Embedded in that documentary were the stories of survivors who, in small and large ways, had resisted as much as they could, even though they didn’t have the power Esther had. There were stories of Germans who wished someone had stopped what happened. And there was hope that these kids might actually go on to do something even bigger to fight the intolerance and hate in our world today now that they had seen the ways that intolerance had played out in the past, even though they were poor, rural kids from Appalachia.

I want to be a resister like Esther, to recognize the moments when I can be of use, and to be prepared for those moments. But I want to do it right. I want to do it with humility, to remember, as Mordecai told Esther, that if I don’t do it, somebody else will. I am a part of the stream of history, so I need not feel that any action I do or don’t take is the only way something will get done. At the same time, I am here now, so why should I turn away?

And I must not do anything alone. I need to work in community, to know that there are people working beside me just as the Jews across the land prayed and fasted while Esther made her way to the king, just as those kids in Tennessee worked together, drawing in a larger and larger community of people who wanted to end bigotry and hate.

And, finally, I need to do it hopefully, to weather the times when there are no paper clips coming in, so to speak, or when a letter arrives from someone who believes the Holocaust didn’t happen, or when I am faced with real danger as Esther faced the first time she approached the king.

And although I don’t expect some great, cosmic reversal, I do want to have my eyes open enough to see the hope that is there in every small and large action, even when the change is not immediate.

God, Children, Priorities

I am getting over a week-long illness that literally knocked my breath out of me. It was by far the sickest I’ve ever been, with the exception of an operation I had in college, and it came about a week after almost all of my friends or their children had been sick, a week of providing dinners and babysitting and other kinds of help. Of course, as always, that help came back to me tenfold when it was my turn. I am back to work now, almost completely well, thanks in part at least to the love everybody showed me this past week.

Finally feeling better enough to be back to something resembling a normal routine, I read the week’s Bible passages this morning. The gospel reading reminds us, among other things, that whoever welcomes a child into her life welcomes God. On that note, I have three stories that I will just leave here, not bothering to interpret them, except to say that they are wonderful testaments of God working in our lives through children:

I am lucky to have many little people in my life, including two sisters that remind me a great deal of my sister and I at their age—a 5-year-old watchful, quiet, but confident girl who is classically pretty, as the photos and stories show I was as a kid, and her 3-year-old sister, who is cute, expressive, loves to show off, but will become suddenly timid if too many people are watching her—the way I remember my sister as a toddler. Their parents, who are friends of mine, have always been very clear with them about the fact that girls can marry girls or boys, and that my ex and I were married just like their father and mother were married. I have wondered whether and how my friends have explained our break up to their daughters, but I have never asked.

My friend called me this week with this story. She was a little hesitant to tell me about it, knowing it would make me sad, but she said, “It was just such a perfect moment, I couldn’t keep it from you.” Apparently, the 3-year-old realized recently that my partner and I were no longer living together. She asked her mother why, and her mother said, “They decided not to live together anymore.” The little girl said, “But I want them to live together!” Her mother said, “Well, they decided that wasn’t the best thing.” She said, “But I want to make cookies at their house!” Her mother promised her that she could still make cookies with each of us at our separate houses, and she dropped the subject. It has been more than a year since we made cookies together—at the time, she was only two, and could barely get the sprinkles on the cookies—but apparently, she remembers the day.

One of my babysitting gigs this past week was for my friend’s two little girls, 1 ½ and 4. We had a great afternoon playing in the yard and baking. On our way back to their house down the block, it began to sprinkle. The four-year-old pointed to the street and said, “Isn’t that funny? The street looks like a dog’s back, except that it’s hard instead of soft, and we're riding it.” I looked down, and she was right—I could see how the slight curve of the road where we were standing and the dark drops of water on the gray cement looked exactly like a dog’s back.

And, finally, one of my little 4-year-old friends spent a couple nights in the hospital due to a breathing problem suspiciously similar to mine this week. I watched his 2 ½-year-old and 6-month-old brothers while his parents went to the hospital on his last day there to meet with the doctor about checking him out. I bounced the baby on my knee while his brother climbed onto the couch and jumped off over and over, his diaper hanging half off his butt. I would have stopped him (and eventually did manage to change the diaper), except his parents, my friends, are exactly the kind of parents I hope I’ll be, layed back about the little things that most parents would be uptight about (they have to be this way—they have three boys under 5!) When the 4-year-old came home, he ran into the house and straight for the baby. I was a little startled, and, on instinct, pulled the baby away from him and said, “Be gentle!” But he put his hands on the baby’s cheeks and leaned in and kissed his nose and said, “Hi! Hi! Hi!” Then the middle brother joined in the chorus—“Hi, hi, hi!” he said—and ran over to me and the baby, too, squeezing in and throwing his arms around both of his brothers. I waited for the baby to scream, but when he didn’t, I relaxed and leaned in and pulled all three kids into my lap. When we all disconnected from the hug, the baby was smiling from ear to ear.

I am reminded of two stories Kathleen Norris tells in her book _Dakota_, which has had a huge influence on my life. In one, a little girl she meets during one of her visiting writer gigs on the Dakota prairie writes, “When my third snail died, I said,/ ‘I’m through with snails.’/ But I didn’t mean it.” In the other story, a little girl handed Norris a drawing of a whale with the sentence, “God is love.” At that time, Norris had been dreaming of a monster-God in the form of a whale, and she was a bit startled by the connection. “I just love that whale,” the little girl had said dreamily.

Images are powerful and communal but also intensely personal—as are losses and reunions and memories. Adults can’t encounter their lives as children, but we might benefit from pulling back once in awhile and seeing what is in front of us in the way a child would see it—life goes on (we can make cookies anyway); it is easier to move forward than we think if we see our movement through lenses of creativity (the road becomes a dog’s back, and we are riding it); there is pure joy in being well and alive and together.

During one of my feverish dreams this week, I worried about all the work I needed to do, everything I was missing by being sick. I was awake and asleep all at once, nervous and irritated and frustrated at how hard it was to breathe.

And then I fell all the way asleep—or perhaps woke up all the way in a way we are usually not awake—and my mother, who has been dead for more than 20 years, was standing in front of me, handing me a colorful spiral that had been drawn by a child and was, as she said, “the answer you are looking for.”

I took the spiral in my hands. It was a kind of hierarchy, living, breathing, moving—the Divine was the outer circle, sea-blue, and beneath it was my health, and beneath that, my friends and family. Beneath that were the words “community/justice” in bright yellow, and then there was white space in the middle of the circle with child drawings of simple things like flowers and rainbows and hearts floating in the white. At the bottom, there was the word “job.”

“But this isn’t an order that makes sense,” I told my mother urgently, and she said,
“Everything is connected to everything else. Your job is only important in that it girds up the other things.”

I woke up and dragged myself to my writing desk and drew what I remembered of this spiral using Crayola markers I have secretly stashed in a drawer. When I finished, I realized the drawing was eerily just like what I’d dreamed, and that, of course, my mother was right. I am lucky to have a job that does connect me to my experience of the divine, that involves meaningful relationships and allows me to work for justice—but it is only important insofar as it supports the fully tapestry of my life. When it impedes my connection to the divine or my health or my relationships or my justice-seeking, then the balance is off.

But I digress. I added this story not because I wanted to delve into the spiral itself, an image which I will no doubt contemplate for a long time, but because I am touched by how simply it was created and recreated using the tools a child would use. Perhaps God is most alive and clear in the heart of a child.

Well, that was more interpretation than I’d meant to provide, and I hadn’t meant to include the dream here, or the spiral, without more reflection. But I have done what our little friend did on our walk home—named what I saw, risked being told it was nonsense.