Alison Christian Land

What Was Spoken Through the Prophets
Reflection on Mt. 2:13-15, 19-23
Jan 3, 2010

In our beautiful Gospel passage, so full of dreams and ancient Old Testament prophesies, the author of Matthew makes his case again and again that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, the inheritor of the cloak of Moses. He uses Joseph as a way of showing this.

The author of Matthew combed through the Old Testament to find ways to root the story of Jesus in these trusted texts.

We first hear of camels, gold and frankincense being brought by foreigners in tribute in the Book of Isaiah (60:6)

The young camels of Midian and Ephah;
All those from Sheba will come.
They shall bring gold and frankincense
And shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.

The presence of a star for the magi to follow to find the new king is inspired by this quote from Numbers 24:17:

I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near
A star shall rise out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel.

Joseph’s second dream is the one in our passage today. The angel tells Joseph to flee to Egypt with his child. Just as the mother of Moses hid her child from the murderous pharaoh, who pledged to kill all the Hebrew babies, Joseph flees with his son to save him from Herod’s very similar slaughter of the innocents. Once again, we are told that this was to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, in this case Hosea (11:1). In this lovely Old Testament passage, Israel is pictured as God’s wayward child.

Out of Egypt I called my son.

Hosea could be referring to Moses, or to the Child Israel called out of slavery by the Lord God. The idea is that Jesus will lead a new and greater Exodus, as he is a new and greater Moses.

In the third dream of Joseph, the angel appears in Egypt and tells Joseph to go back to Israel, as his enemies are now dead. This is an almost identical phrase from Exodus (4:18) When Moses wished to return to his home, although he was wanted for murder. God said,

Go back to Egypt, for all those seeking your life are dead.

But in a fourth dream Joseph was warned to go to the district of Galilee. So he went to Nazareth, that the word of the Lord spoken through the prophets might again be fulfilled.

He will be called a Nazorean

This sacred story, like all sacred stories, reaches for a truth more profound, deeper than history. Seeks assurance and corroboration from the ancient sacred texts so familiar to it’s readers.

This past week, I have been experiencing a sacred story of my own, trying to make sense of it by matching it up with Old Testament stories of my own life, and casting around for sacred scripture that might help it make sense. The remarkable, beautiful force of nature that was Alison Christian Land, my best friend since I was 13 years old died this past Wednesday at 8:00AM.

We met way back in Old Testament times, at Eastern Jr. High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was in our geography class that Alison first noticed me and decided that I was worthy to be her friend. She later told me that she had admired me from afar, thinking that I was very pretty. This was kind of funny, because she always pointed out to everyone how very much we resembled each other. I was an extremely introverted, shy geek of a girl, without a friend in the world, so I will always be grateful for her unexpected friendship.

We soon found that we had everything in common. We had the same weird taste in music and we both liked to draw, and to over-eat junk food. My brothers had indoctrinated me into the rarefied world of old time Appalachian country music- the sort of music that very few people like then or now.

So I brought an album by Dock Boggs, the seminal banjo player and singer from West Virginia, to our English class and Alison gratefully took it home and digested every note. We both had ancestry from Ashville North Carolina, so this music was in our blood. But what I didn’t know until she told me many years later, is that the Appalachian grandmother who she said taught her the wonderful and esoteric old time tunes she brought to me was an invention of her imagination- or should I say it was her own sacred story. The mythical grandmother was a calculation to insure her superiority over me in terms of Old Time music authenticity. She would covertly go to the Library of Congress, ( the Old Testament of Old Time music) searching for songs she thought I never would have heard and she would transcribe them and then teach them to me, as something her grandmother taught her.

Alison played dulcimer, an unimpeachably authentic Appalachian instrument, I played guitar, and we could harmonize. So we got an act together and played in coffee houses for brownies and applause. I never, ever had the nerve to suggest any songs for us to play- they all had to be from the sacred source of her imaginary grandmother.

We had the same taste in fine art too, and we would walk the ten miles or so from Silver Spring Maryland to the National Gallery in Washington DC. Then we would go to Georgetown to gawk at the stores and eat candy or cookies together in the sweet shops.

While other girls were listening to the Beatles, we were glorying to Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the “Minstrel of the Appalachians,” or the Carter Family or Doc Watson. But finally, as the sixties were at their late peak we became part of the throng of hippies that rebelled in one great multitude. We even started to listen to rock music.

Alison always went five steps farther than I was willing to go. She went to Woodstock and although I had planned to go, she called and told me it was just a big sea of mud. After a time her life style got too scary for me, and I was estranged from her for about 10 years. Finally, she cleaned her life up completely, got married, had her beautiful boy, got back in touch with me, and started coming out to California every summer. From the beginning she brought her son, Alexander, who is just one year older than my older daughter. My kids got so used to them coming out every summer and the attendant fun things we did that they began to refer to their visits as “Camp Alison and Alexander.”

When Alison first started coming out to California it was a delightful re-living of our adolescent friendship. It seemed that essentially, nothing had really changed since we were hanging out at her locker before we had to tear ourselves away from each other to go to class. When those wonderful summers first began, we would walk for hours, all over San Francisco, from Union Square up through Chinatown and through North Beach and up to Coit Tower. We would troll the record and book stores, the fabric shops and bead shops, and she, with her exquisite taste, would always find those gems that she felt I really had to possess.

We would take the kids camping to Big Sur or go to see the Tule Elk at Point Reyes. One summer, as we were walking up to Coit Tower, she remarked, with surprise in her voice, that she was getting winded. By the next year, I noticed that she always got short of breath before I did. This amazed me, as I had always had trouble keeping up with her- she was taller than I was and would walk in long, graceful, swift strides.

Then she told a mutual friend that she really didn’t want to go camping anymore- she preferred a cabin when we went to Big Sur. I happily switched over to cabin camping, but couldn’t help but notice that she had trouble climbing the hill to get to the cabin site.

On her next trip out she told me that she had been diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Lung Disorder- something like emphysema but worse, usually suffered by people much older than herself. What could be done, I wanted to know. It seemed that nothing could be done. I paid for her to go to my favorite acupuncture guru, and she did seem to make some progress. But she couldn’t find anyone like him where she lived in Decatur Georgia, and didn’t seem to want to be proactive about her disease, nor did her husband.

Her trips out to California started to be different- we didn’t try to go much of anywhere, we would watch DVD’s or go to movies or sit and make beaded necklaces, or cook. She was adamantly against any invasive treatment, and seemed so sensitive about talking about her illness that I eventually backed off. The last time she came out to visit was 3 years ago. She was beginning to have panic attacks when she would run short of breath, and I encouraged her to start using oxygen to help her breathe. Back home in Decatur she started doing just that, and when I visited her last February, she was on oxygen 100% of the time. She had a walker- she used a wheel chair whenever she could. It was a shock- my beautiful, glamorous, wild friend, still only in her fifties, in a wheel chair.

She continued on her downward slide, and the past 2 years it was I who traveled out to her home in Georgia, as she could no longer travel.

I don’t think any team of psychologists or matchmakers could have invented a more perfect best friend for me than Alison. She was funny, so smart, so down to earth, so talented, she had such great taste in art and music. She was so enthusiastic about life, so irreverent in the best sense of the word. She never complained about her disability, her sense of humor was untouched and she was, even in her debilitated state, a joy to be around as always.

This past week I have had dreams, not of angels, but of my angelic Alison coming back to life again. There is a way in which Alison was never of this world- was always larger than life- mythical, magical. Perhaps her passing had to happen, that she might truly be the untamed spirit she always aspired to be.

Thinking about the whole sweep of my relationship with her now, it all does seem to have an inevitability about it- a dream-like quality, as if her death had to be, to fulfill some kind of prophesy, perhaps her own.

There are plenty of sacred scriptures that I have looked to, but the one that rings true, the one that I cling to is from that Old Testament treasure, the Song of Songs. I know that Alison will be with me all my days, because, as the scripture tells us, “Love is stronger than death.”

Amen.