Issachar is a strong ass couching down between the sheepfolds:

And he saw that rest was good, and the land that it was pleasant; and bowed his shoulder to bear, and became a servant under taskwork.

GENESIS 49:14–15

Issachar was Jacob’s ninth son, Leah’s fifth. We know that after the brothers were reconciled, Issachar and his four sons emigrated to Egypt with Jacob’s family. But so did Joseph’s other brothers. And as with most of them, we know little about Issachar.

It is frustrating to have so little information about Joseph’s brothers. We know more about Leah’s first sons—Reuben, the compassionate one; Simeon and Levi, who slaughtered Shechem; Judah, who was honest and pragmatic. Of Dan and Naphtali, Gad and Asher, Issachar and Zebulun, our knowledge is scanty. Joseph is the one who engages our attention, whose progress we follow, as he moved through vicissitude and the foibles of fortune into full humanness.

And little Benjamin: Even when he is a grown man he is referred to as little Benjamin, the youngest, the baby. When Joseph kept Simeon hostage in Egypt, and sent for Benjamin, the boy would hardly have been a boy any longer, but we still think of him as little Benjamin.

Little Benjamin was rooted in the land of Canaan with his father. Born on the way there, he had never known the land of his grandfather Laban, where the other brothers had been born and grown up. We do well not to worry too much about the chronology of the twelve brothers. The story of Joseph is as much story as history. Jacob thought of little Benjamin as a child, and so should we—little Benjamin, Jacob’s last treasure, precious, probably overprotected. His trip to Egypt, at the command of some great, unknown lord in that distant land, was the strangest thing that had ever happened to him.

But for his father, Jacob, it was a terrible wrench, an acute fear that he would lose Benjamin as he had lost Rachel, as he had lost (he thought) Joseph.

Rachel was buried on the way from Laban’s land to Isaac’s. Jacob knew the place where her bones lay. Fairly frequently in my journal I referred to Saint Margaret’s graveyard and the bones of my forbears buried there. I wrote, “What does a cemetery mean nowadays? Every once in a while I have a fleeting wish that Hugh was buried over in the Goshen graveyard and that I could go visit the place of his mortal remains. But I don’t need a cemetery. His garden is the right place for his ashes; and our life together in Crosswicks, in the apartment in New York, is more than enough of a ‘memorial’ marker. Every room is full of his presence. I can’t believe that our bodies are anything but gone when they are gone, and my hope that our soul, our us, for want of a better word, is not annihilated, is a hope, not a rigid or legalistic system of belief.”

My parents are buried side by side in a graveyard in Florida, not little Saint Margaret’s graveyard, but a larger one, along with many of my aunts, uncles, cousins, relations, ancestors. One of my cousins, a retired physician, visits the cemetery regularly, and I know that he makes sure that the family plots are properly tended, and I am grateful, for when I go south I do not go to the graveyard. That is not where my parents are. I touch my mother when I put on the piano music she played; when I serve dinner in bowls she used; when I put flowers in her vases. My father is with me when I sit at my desk which was his desk, when I touch his books, when I look at his portrait, painted before I was born, before the war which destroyed his health, a portrait of a vibrant young man in an apple orchard in Brittany, who had just come back from an assignment in Egypt and was wearing a dashing hat he had bought there, and whose eyes are full of life and fun and depth. That portrait is an icon, as my mother’s music is an icon.

So we come back again to the question of the soul. Where is Hugh’s Hugh? I remember looking at my father lying in his coffin when I was seventeen and thinking, “That is not Father. He is not there.” And then asking myself—and God—“Where is he?” And believing then, as I do now, deep in my inmost heart, that God still has work for us to do, and the reality of my father, of Hugh, of all that cloud of witnesses, is still real, alive in a way we can’t even begin to understand.

But how often God speaks to us in the darkness.

The March after Hugh’s death was bleak. I wrote,

It has been a long, cold winter (it is snowing again today), a winter of inner and outer chill. A winter of hard work (too much out-of-town lecturing), revising the book; being grateful beyond words for family and friends. A winter of absences: Hugh’s absence; God’s absence.

Then last week came an experience where God’s hand was so visible that it was impossible not to recognize it, and out of tragedy came shining affirmation.

Last Friday I was scheduled to take the shuttle to Boston to speak at Simmons College Friday night and Saturday morning. I planned to spend Saturday afternoon with Danna.

Danna was a young friend who had cancer. She had come through a double mastectomy and chemotherapy with shining faith. She lived near Boston and was a member of a prayer group that was very dear to me, young women, all of the age to have children still at home, who met together to pray, and who had avoided the many pitfalls to which prayer groups are prone.

One of Danna’s amusing but apt suggestions was that all prayer groups should read John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. A creative idea. That book certainly points out the pitfalls of spiritual pride!

Danna and I wrote regularly. In one letter she quoted Woody Allen. I can’t remember the exact quote, but it was something like, “Life is full of anxiety, trouble, and misery, and it is over too soon.” She added, “I love Woody.”

In the early autumn she learned that her cancer, which was thought to be cured, had metastasized to the liver. We all knew that things were not good, but it looked as though she might have a year or so more of full living.

So I planned, after my Saturday morning talk, to spend the afternoon with Danna, and then I was to stay over to preach on Sunday morning and take the shuttle home. I was staying with Ethel and Paul Heins, who for so many years were, one after the other, editors of Horn Book, and friends of children’s literature and its writers.

On Wednesday I got a call saying that Danna’s condition had deteriorated, and she was in Massachusetts General Hospital, but was still looking forward to Saturday afternoon.

On Thursday at two in the afternoon I got a call saying that Danna’s blood pressure was dropping rapidly and could I come. Now.

I walked home, stuffed a few clothes in an overnight bag, and somehow managed to catch the 3:30 shuttle. I was met by one of the prayer group and her husband and taken directly to the hospital, where I was able to be with Danna and her husband and eldest son, and the members of the prayer group, all of whom were there, caring, praying, and all of whom mentioned God’s amazing timing in having me scheduled to be in Boston just at this time.

Ethel and Paul were gracious and kind about having me arrive a day early—and concerned about the reason. It had been planned that Danna’s son would pick me up around ten o’clock Friday morning, but he arrived much earlier, while Ethel and Paul and I were having breakfast and we drove right to the hospital. It was apparent that Danna was dying.

I wrote,

It was, in a powerful way, like living through Hugh’s death all over again. But I am grateful indeed to have been privileged to have been with Danna as she left this world, and to be with her husband and son.

I did the jobs at Simmons, preached on Sunday, and stayed to preach at Danna’s funeral on Monday. The timing was so incredible that it is impossible to put it down to coincidence. Suddenly, in death and tragedy, God was revealed.

Danna was a person with a shining spirit, a deep gift of prayer, a merry, bubbling laugh. It is somehow right and proper that God should have chosen her dying as a vessel to reveal the love of the Maker to us all.

Timing. We all saw God’s hand in the timing of my trip to Boston. Months later I wrote in my journal:

Each time I write the date I am aware of the passage of time, swift as white water. Time in which strange and irrational things happen, like the deaths of Danna, Gloria, Jean. Cynth had a timely death. [I had just come from the memorial for a beloved ninety-two-year-old cousin.] The house in West Price Street (in Philadelphia) is full of memories. I wrote large chunks of The Small Rain sitting in the downstairs window seat. Before Hugh and I were married I could always call, “Is it all right if I come down for a while?” I left Touché [my dog] there while I went to be with Hugh in Washington. Sleeping in “the little room” where I have so often slept was poignant. Up early, and off to the airport. And here I am in San Antonio.

The time in each day is precious and precarious. No one knows when some accident will shatter time, some tornado, or heart attack, or gunshot. Perhaps that is why music is so necessary, with its ordered building and structuring of time, and even when there are dissonances or odd chromatics or modulations, they emphasize the exquisite ordering of time.

Cynth had twenty-two years more than Hugh did. Hugh had twenty years more than Danna or Jean, and well over a decade more than Gloria. How many people get ninety plus years of time that is rich and full of quality as Cynth did? Yes, we can truly say that it is quality and not duration of time that matters—and yet untimeliness is a warping of the music, or a violin string breaking in the midst of playing.

I had expected that going back to the house on Price Street, so full of memories, that Jean’s untimely death might send another wave of grief breaking over me. But no wild sobs have come, no torrent of tears, only a few dry little grunts and groans as I am getting ready for bed. Maybe it’s that the emotions of a year ago are too intense, that they would let loose a storm, a rushing waterfall too violent to be poured through the fragile body. I am very carefully not remembering exactly what was happening a year ago today. Something deep in my body is doing the remembering that is too painful for my conscious mind.

A friend struggling with depression said to me, “I just want things to be normal.” And I thought: What is normal? Normal is the reality of living with precariousness, of never knowing what is around the corner, when accident or death are going to strike. Normal is cooking dinner for friends in the midst of this precariousness, lighting the candles, laughing, being together. Normal is trusting that God will make meaning out of everything that happens.

So Jacob had to let Benjamin go.

He took the boy in his arms, holding him so tightly that the boy thought his ribs would break, and it was a long time before he understood that his father was weeping for Joseph, the brother who had so long ago been killed by some wild beast. The older brothers had brought home his bright coat stained dark with blood.

They had lived well in Canaan. Jacob’s tents were large and comfortable. His flocks and herds had increased. The older brothers were married; their tents with their wives and children stood nearby. They were not prepared for the failure of the crops, for animals dying from hunger and thirst because the pastureland was brown and sere and wells were running dry. Benjamin had never been hungry before.

The corn the brothers had brought back with them from Egypt was soon gone. Jacob instructed his sons to return to Egypt to buy more. But there was one condition, Judah protested—they had been told that the lord of the land would not even see them unless they brought Benjamin. “We must take Benjamin, but I will be surety for him,” Judah promised.

So, weeping, Jacob sent them off, bearing gifts (bribes) for the great man in Egypt.

What a strange adventure for Benjamin—his first time away from the home tents, not quite sure what had happened to his brothers in Egypt, or why they had been accused of being spies, or why Simeon was jailed there, or what the money in the bags was all about, or why the great man wanted to see him. But the anxiety of his brothers was palpable.

To leave home, to go into the unknown, is a kind of death. Did Benjamin know that? Are all these other little deaths in life preparation for the death of the body?

Joseph was not yet through playing cat and mouse with his brothers. Was it merely revenge, to pay them back for their betrayal of him? Or was Joseph, too, unsettled and disturbed, seeing his brothers unexpectedly after all these years? Did he, remembering his dreams of the stalks of corn bowing down before him, find the fulfilling of these dreams irresistible?

Cat and mouse. While Hugh was dying, while one thing went wrong after another, to the consternation of his doctors, it seemed that some malign power was playing cat and mouse. Cat and mouse all over the planet. Terrorist attacks in Paris. Strange, deranged men stalking and killing young women. A horrible fire in a South African gold mine—a terrible disaster in an already beleaguered country. We seem to be surrounded by a horror and a hissing and an everlasting reproach.

What is that normal my friend was looking for?

The powers of darkness are at work. Another word for them is echthroi, Greek for “the enemy,” and the echthroi, too, are fighting the light.

Lady Julian of Norwich wrote,

He said not, “Thou shalt not be troubled, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be distressed,” but he said, “Thou shalt not be overcome.” It is God’s will that we take heed to these words, that we may be ever mighty in faithful trust in weal and woe.

How were Benjamin’s brothers to be faithful, taking the youngest away from their father, to a strange lord who had already shown himself to be erratic and unpredictable? As soon as the brothers arrived they were taken to Joseph’s house, and again they were terrified. Benjamin was dazzled with what seemed to him to be a palace. His brothers were again speaking all at once, explaining that they had returned the money they had found in their sacks.

And Joseph’s chief steward said,

“Peace be to you. Fear not,”

speaking in the familiar words of angels all through the Bible, “Fear not!” He went on,

“Your God, and the God of your father, has given you treasure in your sacks.” And then he brought Simeon out to them.

Then they were given water, and their feet were washed [prefiguring Jesus’ washing of his friends’ feet], and their animals were given provender.

When Joseph came home, the brothers gave him the presents they had brought, and bowed themselves to the earth before him.

How many of them remembered Joseph’s dream, and that this was the fulfillment of it?

Joseph asked them how they were. Then he questioned, “Is your father well, the old man of whom you spoke? Is he still alive?”

And they answered, “Your servant, our father, is in good health. He is yet alive.” And they bowed down their heads and made obeisance.

And Joseph lifted up his eyes and saw his brother Benjamin, his mother’s son, and said, “Is this your younger brother, of whom you spoke?” And he said to Benjamin, “God be gracious to you, my son.”

Joseph was overcome with emotion and left them, because he ached to embrace his brother; so he went into his chamber and wept there. Then he washed his face and controlled himself, and the meal was brought in.

Joseph was served by himself, and the brothers were served by themselves, and Asenath, Joseph’s wife, was served by herself,

because the Egyptians might not eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination unto the Egyptians.

And later it became an abomination for the orthodox Jew to eat with the unorthodox.

How strange human customs are! When my daughter, Josephine, and her husband, Alan, an Episcopal priest, visited acquaintances in Israel, they were served food and drink, but their host and hostess would not eat with them, because that would have been an abomination to these orthodox Jews!

In my church, the Episcopal Church, it is only in recent decades that God’s table has been opened to people of other denominations. And half a century ago a convicted murderer could confess, repent, and then be welcome at the altar rail, but a divorced person could not. In many places we still hold to the kind of division into differing denominations that my Baptist mother-in-law grew up with.

Not long ago I talked with a friend and he told me about reading a Metropolitan Opera bulletin and checking the names of all the singers he knew to be Christians. His question was not, Are they good singers, serving their art to the best of their ability? but, Are they Christian? And as we ate at a table with a group of people there was a conversation about whether or not a certain doctor was a Christian—not was he a good doctor, but was he a Christian? Isn’t this reversed way of looking at things the reason that so much Christian art isn’t very good art? That if you’re a Christian that is all that matters? Christian or no, if you are a pianist you have to practice eight hours a day or you won’t be a good pianist—or a good Christian. We are not very rational, we human beings who are called to observe and contemplate, but who often get wound up in customs and laws and dogmas and are blinded to that which we are supposed to see.

And Asenath, too, ate alone.

ASENATH

And who is the God of the gods?

Is there a God who orders the gods, chastises them for their jealousies and their outrageous demands?

My husband would say that his one god is this god, but his god, too, has limits—is the god of the Hebrew people only. Does he not care for all the rest of us, whether we live or die? This god my husband obeys does not hear the cry of anguish of the Egyptian mother whose child is caught by the crocodile. Only his own people matter to him.

So, he, too, is a god among many gods.

Is there a God whose mercy is over all?

I did not think these thoughts until I was given by my father, Potiphar, to be Joseph’s wife. My father is priest of On, and his god is Ra, the sun god. My father is high priest, and has served Ra all his life, Ra who gives both life and death. It was a strange thing to me that I was given to the Hebrew, and it was a mark of how highly the Pharaoh regarded this strange man.

At night we lie together, we know each other. We have our sons, and what must they think about all these strange gods, each one more important (in someone’s eyes) than another? There are many gods in Egypt, many priests who serve them, but Ra is the sun. Without Ra it would be perpetual night. Without Ra the Nile would not know when to flood and fertilize the land.

What did it mean to my father, the high priest, to give me to a man whose god was not his god?

My husband is a good man. He is fair. He is just. But he is seldom merry. Sometimes he has laughed when he has played with our sons, tossing them in the air, delighting to hear them shriek with pleasure, knowing themselves safe in his strong arms. With me he is always courteous. At night, when Ra has turned away, my husband brings up from me strange depths of delight, and I please him, too. This I know by his sighs of fulfillment, by his arms that remain around me as he falls into a deep sleep of contentment.

Do our gods know each other? Are they friends? In the darkness when Ra is behind the earth does he laugh with Joseph’s god at our lack of understanding? It is not just Ra—this god of Joseph’s whose name is unwritten, unspoken, and unpronounceable. In Egypt we have many gods, gods of the underworld, gods to lead us in this life and to lead us in the afterlife. Vultures and crocodiles and the strange black dog, Anubis. A jackal, some say. And there are the goddesses, too, of fertility, fertility for the crops, and for the people, too. Too many gods.

But it was a strong and strange thing for me to be given to Joseph—the Hebrew, the one with the most alien of gods—a tribute to his power, to his ability to rule with justice and not with pride. One might suppose he would have been a threat to the Pharaoh, but he was not. He did what needed to be done and at the end of the day came quietly home to play with our sons, to eat alone, to sleep with me.