u5 - The Monday Morning Memo

Don Quixote de La Mancha (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605)

Second of the Seven Stories

“The LORD said to Moses,
‘Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten
can look at it and live.’ So Moses made a bronze snake and
put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake
and looked at the bronze snake, he lived.”
– Numbers 21, in the Torah

Dean Kermit Allison, sculptor of the Quixote that looks toward Dulcinea from deep in the valley of Engelbrecht (Broken Angel), affixes the snake to the pole of Quixote’s lance. It is with this lance that Quixote attacks the Windmill.

“But hear what? Hear what? The Bible is hundreds upon hundreds of voices all calling at once out of the past and clamoring for our attention like barkers at a fair, like air-raid sirens, like a whole barnyard of cock crows as the first long shafts of dawn fan out across the sky. Some of the voices are shouting, like Moses’s voice, so all Israel, all the world, can hear, and some are so soft and halting that you can hardly hear them at all, like Job with ashes on his head and his heart broken, like old Simeon whispering, ‘Lord, Let thy servant depart in peace’ (Luke 2:29) The prophets shrill out in their frustration, their rage, their holy hope and madness; and the priests drone on and on about the dimensions and the furniture of the Temple; and the lawgivers spell out what to eat and what not to eat; and the historians list the kings, the battles, the tragic lessons of Israel’s history. And somewhere in the midst of them all one particular voice speaks out that is unlike any other voice because it speaks so directly to the deepest privacy and longing and weariness of each of us that there are times when the centuries are blown away like the mist and it is as if we stand with no shelter of time at all between ourselves and the one who speaks our secret name. Come, the voice says. Unto me. All ye. Every last one.”

- Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark, p. 98

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