When a River Tries to Kill You.
On panic-buying mercy and stockpiling grace.
When you are raised in a city, you lay claim to a street or a sidewalk. You claim it by the frequency of your presence. You are familiar with its heaves and know exactly where Goldenrod will poke through the chain link fence from the neglected lot, given over to what blooms beneath a city.
Beautiful things are always growing in the wake of our rapture, evidence the earth decries and eschews our obsession with boundaries. Vines climb up and over our walls. Dandelions crack pavers in half. Proof that life persists despite our decay, or maybe even because of it.
As a child, I did not have a street, I had a river whose headwaters trickled down from the soaked underbelly of a town called Union. If you too have forgotten how rivers are born, it is like this: sandstone and granite collect meltwater and rainwater into underground pools called aquifers wherein the water rises like a dark choir until it surges and permeates the soil. Rills tumble into streams, ponds, lakes, and impossibly, a river swift.
My river was like many rivers, colors drawn between stones like a silk dress, painter’s palette slipping through a southern current. The magnetism of those waters drew the neighborhood kids from their Playstations and Nintendos, and in the summer we would wade into the bend to build dams, or raise cairns just to knock them down with smooth stones plucked from the mud.
The river tried to kill me once. That is a baptism worth telling you about. I slipped from my father’s hands into the current. It’s that simple. That’s how close death is–shadow to skin. I kicked off of what I expected to be the riverbed, but there was only a forever mouth that crept up my legs with the cool tongue of deep waters. The smell of mortality was in my nose, metallic, the silty copper of my new atmosphere.
The river gave me up, sputtering, coughing, shot out from a gully like a newborn from a mother with wide hips. My father hauled my wet screaming body into the air like a midwife and we clung to a dry-rotted basketball we found spinning by the riverbank earlier that day. And it goes like this. Old timers know that miracles are made of ordinary things and that is exactly what makes them divine. Like the deflated lung of a ball. Like spit and mud on the eyes.
My father swam us to the shallows and the ball drifted off. I remember in my half-drowned stupor, wishing I held onto the ball like some hoarder of merciful tools. It is a habit for some of us, I think, to hold onto the mechanisms of grace rather than the meaning of it. To ignore the aftershocks of miracles. To swoon over mercy but refuse to be made of it.
I do not know if we need such a desperate baptism for life to mean something–if we must return to the sun soaked world with a fistful of riverbed gravel as evidence of our resurrection. But maybe. Maybe we are supposed to swim back to the fringes of mortality and run our fingers along the texture of grace. To remember its ordinary bravery and let it slip off into the current like some old miracle ball.
What I am trying to say is that good miracles should open us. And if they break us, they should break us open into a grove, that goodness might multiply five thousand times.
I am trying to say that mercy is a vine, growing over fences. That grace is a root fracturing hardworn paths. That resurrection is a river-soaked walk back home, drying in the afternoon sun.
That baptism is a return to the water.
A return.
A return.