A bishop's first education

30 March 2010

The Song that Ena Zizi Sang As usual one story will have to serve for one million stories. That is the way of stories. You might think that a lone story Cannot possibly do that, and you would be right and wrong. So here is Ena Zizi. She is seventy years old. The house fell Down on her when an earthquake hammered Port-au-Prince. She was there in the dark for a week, her leg and hip broken. In the beginning she talked to a man who was buried nearby. He was a priest, he said. After two days he fell silent so Ena Talked only to God, she said. After a week, she was rescued By a team called the Gophers. They slid her out on plywood. Ena sang all the way out of the rubble: she had begun to sing When she heard the scrabbling of the Mexicans’ search dogs. No one can remember if there were any words in the singing, But everyone remembers the lady singing. Ena says she does Not remember what song she was singing. I was very thirsty, She says. I sang and sang. Everyone there wept, and clapped, And they went back to work. But Ena is still singing the song. That’s what I wanted to tell you. You can’t not hear her song. I think perhaps that’s a song that once it gets born never ends. I think maybe there are more songs floating than we can hear. I think we all know that and we all get a little tired and forget, But look, there’s Ena rising from the dead again, and singing! Near Fig Tree Road, in Sydney, Australia Once upon a time I was at dinner with a lean priest named Michael. This was on a long muscle of soil called Hunters Hill by the harbour. There was a Catholic school nearby in a sprawling field and around The field were Mark and John and Paul and James and Mary streets. What, no Luke and Matthew? I asked. He grinned. Jupiter and Mars Streets are south a bit, he said. We like to cover all the bases, as you Say in your country. And aptly our broadest street here is Augustine. Wondrous lesson, that man, but he has been imprisoned by theology. Grant me chastity but not yet, everyone knows that hilarious remark, But we perhaps do not remember that he was African, and had a son, And a steady girlfriend for many years before his epiphanic moment, Which occurred under a fig tree not unlike, perhaps, one of our trees. You

ARTS AND CULTURE

A bishop's first education

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