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…And out came another horse, bright red, and its rider was given the duty to take away peace from the earth and set people killing each other. He was given a huge sword… Revelation 6:4
Thus skulks the verbiage of our news media upon the unknowing: the second rider of the Book of Revelation blowing up, maiming, terrifying the sleepless populace in their bunkers. It’s the figure of War: evil, grim, nasty, come to foist the unspeakable upon the precarious balance of power. Negotiating tables, around the world, jaw with double-speak. No one wants war, but it’s here.
Russia wants the Ukraine, badly…
At 7:20 A.M., I awoke with this healing dream:
It is evening. I’m walking outdoors, anxious. My tooth aches and my dentist’s office is closed for the day. Out of the blue, another dentist sees my distress and offers his treatment: laughing gas. Despite its unfamiliarity, I agree. After injecting my body with the tiniest of pinpricks, the tooth pain is gone, and we resume walking.
The dream’s time, evening, suggests my waning energies, all the more depleted by my terminal illness. My toothache, a disorder that pains me, suggests my inability to chew deeply through experiences, to avoid matters that command my attention, even hold anything in place—an irritant that sours my mood and plunges me into self-pity: nothing matters other than the diseased tooth.
The toothache also suggests weeks of being out of sorts, soured by my new symptoms and side effects of a new drug.
The dentist, unknown from reality, suggests “a power greater than myself that can restore me to sanity,” or in other words, the Sacred disguised beneath the practitioner who knows my distress and offers specific help, laughing gas. The numerous pinpricks, barely felt, suggest cues toward deeper practice of the Twelve Steps and the rediscovery of the joy of living.
My healing astounds me and together, we walk into the evening, enjoying dusk’s sky-colors through bare branches of trees.
(Sir Humphrey Davy, early nineteenth century English chemist and inventor, colloquialized nitrous oxide into laughing gas, a reaction caused by inhaling it.)
Steal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus,
Steal away, steal away home,
I ain’t got long to stay here.
So opens the Negro spiritual sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers from Nashville’s Fisk University. Within its plaintive melody glints the souls of the oppressed.
The spiritual was first heard around 1862, sung by the enslaved Wallace Willis, sent by his Choctaw freedman owner to work at Oklahoma’s Spencer Academy, a boarding school for the forced assimilation of Choctaw boys. The listener was the school’s superintendent, the Presbyterian minister Alexander Reid, also a trained musician. He perceived this spiritual and others “Uncle Wallace” had composed as far superior to the repertoire that the Fisk Jubilee Singers were taking on tour at that time, and he later sent them copies. Acclaim met their performances in this country and abroad.
Whatever the origins of Steal Away, its lyrics speak of huge yearning for deliverance from oppression, only found in the saving power of Jesus.
Whether the spiritual had been previously used by enslaved blacks as a code for escape or for secret meetings, whether remembered by “Uncle Wallace” from his experiences confined to his Mississippi plantation, I was unable to discover.
Still the heart-cry echoes of the afflicted around the world:
My Lord, He calls me
He calls me by the thunder
The trumpet sounds within-a my soul
I ain’t got long to stay here
Heart Whisperings 