The Cloud That Led Them Out and the Cloud That Blocked Their Prayers

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The Road That Sang

The sea still stood in two walls of water when the singing began. On the far shore, with Egypt's chariots broken in the surf behind them, a whole nation found its voice at the same instant, as though one throat had opened inside six hundred thousand chests. Moses lifted his hand and the words came out already shaped into music, and the people answered him line for line. "I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously." The sound did not stay on the beach. It climbed into the hills, and the hills threw it back. The mountains skipped like rams. The low hills leapt like lambs. A child who had never known a morning without bricks and straw rode laughing on someone's shoulder.

For forty years the singing had a floor beneath it. When they thirsted, water came. When they hungered, the ground lay white with bread before dawn. A cloud walked in front of them by day and stood over the tents like a roof built out of God's own attention. Near the end of it all Moses would remind them how they had crossed those years, held close against heaven the way a man carries his son over every dry riverbed and through every waste. Not one of them lacked a thing. Those who held fast were, every one, alive.

That was one departure.

The Same People on a Different Road

Long generations later the same nation left a city, and no one sang. They came out through the shattered wall of Jerusalem in iron collars, roped neck to neck, and the road bent north under them toward Babylon. A woman wept in the night with her palm pressed to her cheek, and the tears kept wetting it, and there was no line of song for anyone to catch and answer.

The mountains were the same mountains. When Israel had left Egypt they had skipped like rams. Now the prophet Jeremiah lifted his eyes to them and the whole ridge was shaking, trembling as if the ground had lost its nerve. The bread was gone with the song. Where a people had once walked forty years and lacked nothing, small children now dragged at their mothers on the exile road and begged for bread, and no hand had any to give. At the breast, the tongue of the infant stuck dry to the roof of its mouth.

The Cloud Turned Its Face Away

The cloud was the cruelest mirror of all. Once it had gone before them by day, a canopy, a sign that the eye above them never closed. On the road out of Jerusalem the exiles raised their prayers the way people had always raised them, and the prayers went up and struck something and fell back. Jeremiah gave it words. God had wrapped Himself in a cloud so that no prayer could pass through. The same white presence that had been a roof was now a wall. It shut. Their words piled against it and slid down unheard.

And the glory that had ridden with them, the majesty a man carries against his chest like a son, lay thrown down. Jeremiah watched it drop from heaven to the earth, the splendor of Israel cast out of the height it had lived in, down into the mud of a foreign road.

Two Roads Laid Beside Each Other

Laid side by side, the two mornings answered each other image for image. On the first road, song; on the second, a woman weeping in the dark. On the first, mountains leaping like young rams; on the second, the same mountains shuddering. On the first, bread from the sky and a people that lacked nothing; on the second, children crying for bread that was not there. On the first, a nation carried like a son against the chest of heaven; on the second, that same nation flung to the ground. On the first, the living who had held fast and were all of them alive; on the second, the cracked tongue of a nursing child. On the first, a cloud that led; on the second, a cloud that shut the sky.

Point for point the ruin answered the redemption. Nothing in the long catalog of grief stood alone. Each horror on the road to Babylon had once been a mercy on the road from Egypt, the same object turned over to show its dark side.

The Turning He Promised to Do Again

But a thing turned over can be turned back. The mountains that leapt and then shook were still standing, and a mountain that has done both once can do the first again. The cloud that opened and then closed was still only a cloud, and a shut door is still a door. Whoever had matched the two roads so exactly had not built the mirror to gloat. Every grief on the northern road had a mercy behind it in the desert, and a mercy remembered is a mercy that can arrive twice. The God who had reached into a house of slaves and drawn a song out of a people who had forgotten they had throats could reach into Babylon and draw it out again.

On the road north the exiles carried that buried hope like a coal wrapped in ash. The song at the sea had risen once out of a morning that looked like the end of everything. It could rise a second time. And when it did, the mountains would remember the older thing they knew how to do. They would skip like rams. The little hills would leap like lambs. And somewhere on the long way home a child who had known nothing but exile would ride laughing on a shoulder, and no one would take the song away.