Enough

By Andrea Lingle

Humanity was created to be encircled in God's love and to encircle others in that love.

–Larry Duggins, Together, p. 11

There was a tangle of bushes beside the path they had been walking. The bushes towered over their heads, brownish grey at the bottom where they collected the kicked-up dust. Their leaves, brilliantly green where they met the sky, twisted like the arms of insistent children, demanding to be picked up. In the brightness of day, they had been topped with little yellow flowers. A little too cheerful for the circumstances. As the sun had dropped behind the abandon pasture, too picked over to be visited by even the least picky shepherd, she had folded her body down behind the smiling faces of the plants. Her son sat beside her, his arms clasping his knees. He was quiet, but his dark eyes were not closed. He was watching the flowers fade from yellow to black in the fading light. His eyes did not show much these days. When he was a little boy, his dark eyes had been soft and warm. His quick smile lighting his eyes and her heart. Then the other had come. Then she had watched him grow into a still, quiet boy. Stretched to the dimensions of a man. The laughter of their home had not been for him or for her. It had been reserved for another.

Now they had gone. To search for a place. To make a home. They had been wandering for a few days, unsure of where to go, unwilling to think too far ahead. No one wanted the fatherless. Her son was the son of none but a woman. And what did that count for?

The sky glowed deep blue and the yellow flowers had gone black. She hadn’t seen it happen. Was it sudden? Was it so slow she hadn’t noticed the last bit of color retreat against the night? When had her son’s eyes closed? He was lying back, hands clasped under his head, a silent outline of darkness in the darkening night. He hadn’t said goodnight. He hadn’t said goodbye. But she had seen his feet swelling. She had seen that his cracked lips didn’t bleed. They would not survive here much longer. Perhaps she would not have to face the dawn.

There are moments in life too dry to be called anything but sorrowful. One part of the practice of praying the rosary is to contemplate the sorrowful mysteries: the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging, the Crowning With Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, and the Crucifixion. Why? Why do that? What is there to gain by focusing on that which is painful? When Hagar and Ishmael were driven out into the wilderness, they became two of the countless persons displaced by humanity’s ubiquitous belief that there isn’t enough. There can’t be enough blessing for both sons, so we must drive one away. There won’t be enough resources for tomorrow, so we must build barns. There isn’t enough love. There isn’t enough hope. There isn’t enough grace.

How often have we, in our faith communities, counted the cost of love as if grace is a scant draft from a miserly God?

Hagar, Ishmael, the Sorrowful Mysteries, the cries of black and brown bodies, refugees, tents at the borders…these all cry out—why do you insist that there isn’t enough?

There was a rustle. A scratching of wings against branches that became a beating, then a splashing. Hagar scrambled to her hands and knees and scuttled toward the noise. The tangled branches left deep scratches along her arms as she pushed them aside. They had grown over the well. Doubtless when the grass and the shepherds returned to the pasture, the branches would be cut away, but in their absence, the precious water had been shrouded. Someone still used this well because the jar had an inch or so of water in the bottom and the rope was neatly coiled nearby, but their comings and goings hadn’t repressed the growth. The jar gurgled as it filed with water.

Her laughter rang through the night air. Echoed by the stars.