[i] See Erich Auerbach’s essay, “The Scar of Odysseus” in Mimesis, Princeton University Press, l953

[ii] From the Hebrew root meaning to explore.

One of the features of biblical narrative, long noted and much appreciated, is its narrative compression, what one critic called its “laconic style[i].” It is this style, for example, that renders the three day trek of Abraham with his son Isaac to the place of sacrifice in a mere one hundred words, or that gives us nothing of what Ishmael and Isaac might have said to one another at the Cave of Machpelah.

 The Jewish tradition has developed a method of commentary and interpretation called “midrash”[ii] that looks at the gaps and densities of the Bible and offers amplifications, often in the form of homily or story. It is in the spirit of midrash that the following story is written and by use of which I would like to fashion a homily, a word from the Greek, meaning a discourse intended for public edification.

The moment I would like to de-compress if not de-construct comes during the Exodus journey after Miriam has challenged her brother Moses’ authority: he has taken a woman from Cush into his tent and Miriam and Aaron protest this arrangement for reasons never given. In response to her outcry, “Has The Lord spoken only through Moses? Has he not spoken through us also?” (Numbers 12:2) Miriam incurs the Lord’s wrath. God wants to put her to death, but Moses intercedes for his sister and influences God to spare her. Not fully appeased,  God still wishes to punish her and does so by causing Miriam’s skin to break out in an ash-like condition, a kind of leprosy, which requires that she be put out of the camp. In Numbers 12:15 we read:  “Miriam was shut out of the camp for seven days.”

 Now it is not clear from the literal text whether Miriam knows the cause of her affliction or the duration of her sequestration. In the midrash which follows I assume that she does not know how long before or even whether she will ever be restored to health and to her people. In that she is like any of us who cannot see into the future and know the outcomes of our travails.  The text tells us only that her confinement ends after seven days.

It is this seven days I find intriguing. In the Bible we read only that was shut out of the camp and on that after a certain time, she was “brought back” to her people. The Hebrew word translated as “brought back” can be used in a technical sense to mean the recovery from leprosy, but it has a more general sense as well, that of being gathered as in this case, gathered back to the people.

At any rate, what is significant from my point of view is this seven day period about which no detail is provided, no sense of the passage or of the shape of this time. It is often so when we regard the illness of others. “O,” we say, “You were in bed for a week?” Or. “You were in the hospital for four days?” Or “ You were in that cast for a month?” The illness of others often gets lumped into a single block of time. Sometime we do that to ourselves, regarding illness and convalescence as a time in which nothing happens, for life—real life—belongs to the healthy. But for the one who suffers this time, the passage of days, has texture and shape, color and depth. In short, illness can tell a story.

Here is my attempt to imagine Miriam’s story. I have chosen to write it in her voice. I call it The Seven Stages of a Healing.

The first day my skin scalded for shame. I had failed. I had fallen, and I was ashamed in the eyes of my people and my kin. In the cloud, God had spit on me and my skin erupted. I was thankful for the shabby tent beyond the encampment where they send the infected and the mad. I was glad there was no one to see me. My arms and hands, my feet and belly, my legs and breasts were withered white; the skin flaked like ash. I was deformed, defaced. I never knew until that moment the secret delight I had taken in my body. Even though it was no longer young, my body had been with me steadily, always. Only once, at the end of my girlhood, did it seem to change overnight, yet even then until now  I was the same inside, in my inner body, in the body of my feelings. The girl Miriam was the same as the woman who had played her timbrel and danced on the far side of slavery, the same as she who had divined water in the wilderness. But this curse on my flesh broke me from myself. There is no loneliness like the loneliness of disgrace. That night I dreamt of Dinah in her tent of shame.

 On the second day, rage. It came up with a blood red dawn. I spat back at God, shook my fist, hurled out my execrations. Fearless, furious. What had I to lose having lost everything? My crime! Telling the truth. I had foregone children and the comfort of a family to be mother and sister to Moses, sister and mother to Aaron, and now to see this Moses take another woman to his tent—it was beneath him. And what of Aaron? What punishment for errant Aaron? And God–this God–who crushes, this vindictive God. My saliva in the dust. I slept that night a woman with no God at all, and I dreamt of Hagar in her furious exile.

 The third day I woke in tears. No sobs, no wracking anguish around my heart, but tears all day running down my cheeks. Everything seemed irrecoverably lost. I would never smile into the faces of the women and receive their smiles. Never lead my people in the dance. Never name another child. Never rest in the waters. Never enter into the tent where the white light of God’s presence bathed me in a perpetual peace. Never see the land that was promised. I was sick to my soul. I who had turned my people towards the water was to water turned. I dreamt of Rachel weeping for her lost children.

 And out of tears, a dullness on the fourth day, the dullness of the ground, the desert. Dry and barren. I heard the faraway sounds of a restive people, the cries of children, the grumbling of the herdsmen. They were nothing to me. I ate dust. I wished to die. No sun shone, and the day lasted forever. My eyes were dry. My heart was cold. My womb was full of stones. My soul sank like lead into a leaden sea. I dreamt Lot ‘s wife told me her name, and it was Mara, the bitter one.

 I woke on the fifth day and I was not alone. A shadowy figure haunted the edges of my sight; it riddled me with questions; it showed me the vanity in my pride. How I strutted my place among the chosen three; delighted to hear the old stories told in which I figured so prominently; shaped the rituals so that my songs might be sung, my dances danced. I took the gifts I had been given and made them the sign of my election. The shadowy stranger in the tent showed me my history and I knew I had become an idol to myself. I dreamt that night of the golden calf.

 On the sixth day I was alone again, but this time I was alone like a mote of dust in the desert wind. I could not remember my own name. I was merely a spark, a flicker frail as breath; my breath, faint as my heartbeat, was the simple, recurrent gift of life. I saw that my life was spun from the thinnest thread. Hope was more precious than air. That I was alive was miracle, and the field mouse that ventured under the tent flap, the flies that feasted on my untouched food: these were equal with me in the mystery of life. That night I slept and dreamed I stood in the reeds beside the Nile and waited breathless for my baby brother’s cry.

 Desire woke me on the seventh day, a longing for my brother’s presence, for Aaron’s voice, for the faces of my people, my children. It didn’t matter that my flesh was ash. So was all flesh. I wanted a place, any place, among those I loved and with whom I had journeyed so far. And so I prayed, “Dear God, forgive me. I am not a judge. You have judged. I accept your judgment. Please let me return to my people.”

 On the eighth day, Moses and Aaron came to my tent bearing seedcakes and flowers. I came out and in the morning sun and I saw my skin was scarred but whole. I looked out upon the tents of Israel and saw a radiance above them and within them such as I had never seen. It was as if I were seeing the world for the first time, as if creation had been completed on this very day. And I saw that the people had not set out on the march without me, that they would not leave until my fate was known. I returned to them changed and yet the same, clarified, cleansed, the ash a kind of residue gathered from my pores which now the wind, ruach Elohim, had blown away.

 ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh: Blessed is the nameless name of the Lord.’

 A generation ago Elizabeth Kubler Ross made popular the notion of stages in the process of dying. She did a great good with her paradigm for it made it possible for those in the grips of death and those bearing witness to it to discern the shape of a story, to muster patience, compassion and interest. Though stages, certainly in Ross’ model, have a certain fatality about them, they need not be necessarily fixed in a declension or order. My midrash on Miriam makes no attempt to establish these seven days as a structure of healing; rather I am interested in opening up the notion that illness is a double-stranded tale.

One strand of illness is the tale of the body. That story is often rendered in cold, clear terms by medical language, by the case history, by the fever chart. It is a story reduced often to numbers and jargon in which the patient may feel reduced herself to being a cipher, a set of degrees, white cell counts, polyps removed, stitches sewn. In short, the patient may be reduced to thinking she is only a body, and the body’s  narrative can be depressing, confining, literal, and little susceptible to creative interpretation. It’s hard to make midrash on cancer.  There are not many ways to construe 103.8 degrees of fever. One of the dangers of illness is that we who suffer it and we who attend it may be magnetized by the body’s story and become complicit with the reductions of the medical institution to the point where we may overlook or underplay illness’ second story.

That second story is the narrative of the soul. What else to call it?  By soul I mean that which suffers the story of the body but can have a different story, a story of its own. It is of this story that Yeats writes in Sailing to Byzantium:

An aged man is but a paltry thing

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

And louder sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.

 The soul lives within a mortal frame but is not determined by it. It has its own song to sing. For the soul, illness, even dying, is not necessarily a limiting narrative; it may be, paradoxically, a liberating one. Those of us who have worked in the healing professions know countless such stories. Terminal cancer, amazing grace. Physical pain, widening love. Loss of faculties, depth of compassion. We are meaning-making beings the philosophers tell us, and nowhere more than in the grips of illness is meaning more necessary. Another word for meaning is story, and where there is story there is differentiation, change, process. Sometimes it is our task as chaplains, therapists, family members, men and women of the spiritual and religious dispensation to help a patient discover the second story, the soul’s narrative, and to give it shape, help it find words, bear witness to it, share it with others. So it is in this context and spirit that I offer the story of Miriam.

And in this light, there is something striking about her story. One of the things that any reader familiar with the Bible is likely to know is the fact that Miriam’s is not the only seven day story in Scripture. The first and most famous, of course, is the story of creation itself. We are left to wonder—at least I am—whether the redactor of Numbers had anything in mind when he or she assigned the duration of seven days to the confinement of Miriam. What would this inspired seer have us think? That in some way we are to imagine Miriam’s time of ostracism, shame, humiliation and physical duress as a kind of time of creation? What a leap of the imagination. What a bold, brace idea. How might this be so?

 Well, perhaps by this allusive number seven, our redactor indeed wished to suggest that there is a second story here, not just the body’s but the soul’s. Might we make our homily from such materials and say that our tradition tells us  that even in what appears to be a dying there is an opportunity to be born.

 And more. For in the experience of a recovery such as many patients are granted and Miriam here is allowed, there is a sense of returning to the world and seeing it afresh, as if it were the first day of creation. In that gladness and relief, we who suffer regard everything that we had taken for granted as something precious and given anew. Indeed the world stands forth for us and we welcome it with praise in our hearts. We have been granted a reprieve and in that reprieve we may grasp both the body’s resiliency—though we have been reminded, too, of its mortality; and as well the soul’s capacity to find even in suffering a story of creation.

 None of us knows the outcome of an illness. It is, to borrow another biblical image, a descent into the belly of the whale. We need our narratives of hope, our tales of descent and release, of outcast and return, of brokenness and restoration. Yet things do not move in circles. The health restored to us has come from a suffering and by that suffering we are changed.

We may do well to ponder the story of Miriam. Perhaps we can use it to help our patients feel less alone, to help them discern in their dreams and their feelings a story they are living through and that lives through them. Simone Weil, the French philosopher of the spirit, wrote once in a passage I can no longer locate that the only question we need to ask one another is this: “What are you going through.” It is this sense of passage that gives rise to narrative, to story, and it is this question, variously couched, compassionately attended, that will help those in distress attend to their soul’s story. This story of suffering borne but not demeaning is an old story, perhaps among the oldest stories of all. We are story-making beings and the meanings we make from our most bitter and challenging experiences sometimes surface not as insights or even as wisdom, but as narratives utterly our own. What we go through goes through us.

The understanding we may reach in our engagements with illness will lose nuance if we allow our stories to be claimed by the body alone. The imagination must inhabit this mortal coil, for it is by imagination—not as fantasy, but as a power which refuses the reductive, the material, the literal—that we are brought in touch with our soul. Each day may be a new day no matter the plot of our disease. Within even that prison, call it Miriam’s tent, we are free to dream, to encounter parts of ourselves, to find and tell a story that is uniquely ours and to which others may draw strength and insight. The tent of Miriam is, for me, the domain in which the soul’s story—its chapters of anguish and illumination—is revealed.