As the Deer
TEASER: A song on the radio during Mac's first drive home from Bethesda leaves her craving something more than human comfort or alcohol.
DISCLAIMER: In another universe, they all belong to me. In this one, however, they belong to DPB, et al., and I am just taking them out for a night on the town. I'll have them back by curfew, I promise.
ARCHIVE: Absolutely, but please ask first via e-mail in my profile.
FEEDBACK: ...is awesome, but I've already had my blistering sunburn this year, so please spare the heat.
RATING: PG-13
AUTHOR'S NOTE and SPOILERS: I didn't know about the official Psalm challenge and I'm too late to get into it, but I was inspired to write this after reading Raindrops on Roses' "One of the Princes." I'm a minister – do you really think I could pass this up? Psalm 42, quoted from the song "As the Deer" by Martin Nystrom and the New American Version of the Holy Bible. Spoilers for anything through the end of Season 9.
=====
Lieutenant Colonel Sarah Mackenzie had gone to her doctor at Bethesda Naval Hospital for a back ache, expecting to hear at the end of her appointment that she had pulled a muscle, or maybe at the worst that she needed some therapy for a misaligned vertebra or something. Nothing prepared her for the words, "it's not your back," and "exploratory surgery."
She had uttered the word "cancer" almost as a talisman against such an awful eventuality, but the doctor's response had not reassured her. And now, thirty two minutes after the doctor dropped the disconcerting news on her, she wondered if perhaps she had summoned the very thing she had tried to thwart.
As she crossed the parking lot toward her Corvette, she felt as though her whole body, mind, and spirit moved through wet cement. Weighed down with burdens, she could barely keep herself going well enough to survive each day, and tomorrow after her surgery she was expected at Admiral Chegwidden's Retirement Dining-Out! All she wanted to do was curl up in the arms of the man she loved and cry herself to sleep for a week.
Everything between her waist and her knees cramped as she climbed into the low-slung car, revolting against the bending and twisting so soon after the unpleasant but necessary internal exam. The pain in her body echoed the pain in her heart when she reflected that the issue of curling up in the arms of the man she loved was more complex than it should be: the man she loved or the man she was in love with? It was also moot – one was away in Germany and one might as well have been for all the access she had to him.
She didn't pay much attention to the music on the radio until she was off the grounds of the medical center, and only then because the jarring sputter and spit of rap boomed from the speakers behind her. She glanced away from the road long enough to see that her handbag had fallen against the tuner button, sending the station selector away from her usual Top 40 station.
With an exasperated sigh, she reached out without looking down and punched a button at random, hoping for the preset button that would restore her favorite music. Instead, she popped the tuner and a right-wing talk radio station thumped into the car.
"Damn it," she grumbled. She stabbed at the radio again.
The music that filled the car still wasn't her Top 40, but something in the soothing strings and gentle percussion made her drop her hand away from the radio. She braked the car to a stop at a red light just as the flowing vocal track began. What she heard brought the tears that her stubbornness had kept at bay since before she left the doctor's office.
As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after Thee. You alone are my heart's desire and I long to worship Thee. You alone are my strength, my shield. To you alone may my spirit yield. You alone are my heart's desire, and I long to worship Thee.
The song touched something deep within her, brushing across long dormant strings of her tenuous childhood faith in something or someone bigger than the troubles of her alcohol-saturated home. She turned the radio off after the song ended, not sure that she could handle any more emotion before she could get home to the safety of her bedroom where the tears would not interfere with her driving.
Thirteen minutes later, she stepped out of her uniform skirt, stripped off her shirt, and fell onto her bed, moving only enough to crawl under the covers before a series of cramps raged through her, bringing new tears. Maybe a nap will help, she mused, knowing that she might well sleep through the night given the way she felt.
Sleep eluded her, however. The words of the song came back to her again and again. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after Thee. She recognized the image as the beginning of a Psalm, and somewhere deep within she knew that the rest of the song didn't belong with that phrase in the Bible. The Psalms had intrigued her as a child, although her once astonishing memory for them had long since dissipated into fuzzy remnants of lines conflated into random strings of words.
With a groan of disgust and discomfort, she rolled over to her nightstand and jerked the recalcitrant bottom drawer open. Inside was her leather- bound confirmation Bible, the last gift her mother had given her before the older woman ran away from the horrors of Joe Mackenzie. The Bible had been opened infrequently enough in the 20 years since to have no crease in the binding, no wrinkled pages, no thumbed edges to give away favorite passages. She guessed at where the Psalms would be, erring only a few pages into Proverbs as the book fell open on her bed.
"As the deer . . ." she murmured, flipping back page by page toward Psalm 1. She stopped at Psalm 121 long enough to be reminded of her Uncle Matt and Red Rock Mesa in the words of hope and trust before she resumed her search for the Psalm of the deer. When she found it, the words washed over her like the stream of water she didn't know she needed so desperately.
As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God. My being thirsts for God, the living God.
With no one around to hear her, she lost herself in spoken meditation, reading the Psalm and hearing herself speak the words that came to her as she did. "I didn't know how parched my soul is until the doctor told me that she needs to do surgery. Can you quench this fear?"
When can I go and see the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, as they ask daily, "Where is your God?"
"Who are you, God? Are you Allah, as Sadik would have me believe? Are you the gentle God of the stable at Christmas? How can I find you if I don't even know who you are?"
Those times I recall as I pour out my soul, When I went in procession with the crowd, I went with them to the house of God, Amid loud cries of thanksgiving, with the multitude keeping festival.
"Even at Jimmy's christening, I couldn't rejoice. Where were you when I was in your house?"
Why are you downcast, my soul; why do you groan within me? Wait for God, whom I shall praise again, my savior and my God. My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you From the land of the Jordan and Hermon, from the land of Mount Mizar.
She closed her eyes, tried to envision a time when she could feel God close to her. All she could think of was her sojourn to Red Rock Mesa with her uncle, when she faced the hardest test of her life – to get sober. But was that God with her then, or the spirits of the ancients? Did it matter? "Someone was there. I will remember it with hope."
Here deep calls to deep in the roar of your torrents. All your waves and breakers sweep over me. At dawn may the LORD bestow faithful love that I may sing praise through the night, praise to the God of my life.
"If you want my life, God, you can have it. I could die, anyway, so why let me suffer?" She punched her pillow before she resumed her reading.
I say to God, "My rock, why do you forget me? Why must I go about mourning with the enemy oppressing me?" It shatters my bones, when my adversaries reproach me. They say to me daily: "Where is your God?"
All she could hear was Sadik's taunts, his supreme confidence that if only she would become an obedient, subservient Muslim woman she could be fulfilled in a way that no other action could. Happiness in the anonymity of a burqa. Perhaps that was the way out – a way to avoid more hurt from lost, haunted Clay, whose indifferent withdrawal into the bottle tested her will to stay sober; a way to avoid more hurt from arrogant, insecure Harm, who suffocated her with his superior ambivalence even as he was the air she needed to stay alive. "Are you Allah?" she asked again. "Is that what you want from me?"
Why are you downcast, my soul, why do you groan within me? Wait for God, whom I shall praise again, my savior and my God.
Praising God. She searched her memory, thinking of her grandmother, of all the women she had encountered in her many travels to the Middle East. She could not think of a single time she had seen a Muslim woman in a burqa expressing true joy in public. Nor in private, actually, although she remembered her grandmother telling stories about women's prayer services where they could be exuberant in their faith. She envied the women she knew here in the States whose Islamic faith was not rooted in the oppression of fundamentalism and Wahhabism but in the true equality of personhood preached in the Koran. Their faith gave them strength and hope, while her encounters with the faith of her grandmother left her cold and shaken.
Islam, though a part of her heritage, could not be her faith. Her God and Allah might be one and the same, but she could not call upon "Allah" in her prayers and be faithful to her independence.
A revelation came to her, not one that could change her in the instant but one that would grow in the days and weeks to come, despite everything she would learn in the next day. "I want to sing again. I've forgotten what joy feels like. As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O Lord."
FIN
TEASER: A song on the radio during Mac's first drive home from Bethesda leaves her craving something more than human comfort or alcohol.
DISCLAIMER: In another universe, they all belong to me. In this one, however, they belong to DPB, et al., and I am just taking them out for a night on the town. I'll have them back by curfew, I promise.
ARCHIVE: Absolutely, but please ask first via e-mail in my profile.
FEEDBACK: ...is awesome, but I've already had my blistering sunburn this year, so please spare the heat.
RATING: PG-13
AUTHOR'S NOTE and SPOILERS: I didn't know about the official Psalm challenge and I'm too late to get into it, but I was inspired to write this after reading Raindrops on Roses' "One of the Princes." I'm a minister – do you really think I could pass this up? Psalm 42, quoted from the song "As the Deer" by Martin Nystrom and the New American Version of the Holy Bible. Spoilers for anything through the end of Season 9.
=====
Lieutenant Colonel Sarah Mackenzie had gone to her doctor at Bethesda Naval Hospital for a back ache, expecting to hear at the end of her appointment that she had pulled a muscle, or maybe at the worst that she needed some therapy for a misaligned vertebra or something. Nothing prepared her for the words, "it's not your back," and "exploratory surgery."
She had uttered the word "cancer" almost as a talisman against such an awful eventuality, but the doctor's response had not reassured her. And now, thirty two minutes after the doctor dropped the disconcerting news on her, she wondered if perhaps she had summoned the very thing she had tried to thwart.
As she crossed the parking lot toward her Corvette, she felt as though her whole body, mind, and spirit moved through wet cement. Weighed down with burdens, she could barely keep herself going well enough to survive each day, and tomorrow after her surgery she was expected at Admiral Chegwidden's Retirement Dining-Out! All she wanted to do was curl up in the arms of the man she loved and cry herself to sleep for a week.
Everything between her waist and her knees cramped as she climbed into the low-slung car, revolting against the bending and twisting so soon after the unpleasant but necessary internal exam. The pain in her body echoed the pain in her heart when she reflected that the issue of curling up in the arms of the man she loved was more complex than it should be: the man she loved or the man she was in love with? It was also moot – one was away in Germany and one might as well have been for all the access she had to him.
She didn't pay much attention to the music on the radio until she was off the grounds of the medical center, and only then because the jarring sputter and spit of rap boomed from the speakers behind her. She glanced away from the road long enough to see that her handbag had fallen against the tuner button, sending the station selector away from her usual Top 40 station.
With an exasperated sigh, she reached out without looking down and punched a button at random, hoping for the preset button that would restore her favorite music. Instead, she popped the tuner and a right-wing talk radio station thumped into the car.
"Damn it," she grumbled. She stabbed at the radio again.
The music that filled the car still wasn't her Top 40, but something in the soothing strings and gentle percussion made her drop her hand away from the radio. She braked the car to a stop at a red light just as the flowing vocal track began. What she heard brought the tears that her stubbornness had kept at bay since before she left the doctor's office.
As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after Thee. You alone are my heart's desire and I long to worship Thee. You alone are my strength, my shield. To you alone may my spirit yield. You alone are my heart's desire, and I long to worship Thee.
The song touched something deep within her, brushing across long dormant strings of her tenuous childhood faith in something or someone bigger than the troubles of her alcohol-saturated home. She turned the radio off after the song ended, not sure that she could handle any more emotion before she could get home to the safety of her bedroom where the tears would not interfere with her driving.
Thirteen minutes later, she stepped out of her uniform skirt, stripped off her shirt, and fell onto her bed, moving only enough to crawl under the covers before a series of cramps raged through her, bringing new tears. Maybe a nap will help, she mused, knowing that she might well sleep through the night given the way she felt.
Sleep eluded her, however. The words of the song came back to her again and again. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after Thee. She recognized the image as the beginning of a Psalm, and somewhere deep within she knew that the rest of the song didn't belong with that phrase in the Bible. The Psalms had intrigued her as a child, although her once astonishing memory for them had long since dissipated into fuzzy remnants of lines conflated into random strings of words.
With a groan of disgust and discomfort, she rolled over to her nightstand and jerked the recalcitrant bottom drawer open. Inside was her leather- bound confirmation Bible, the last gift her mother had given her before the older woman ran away from the horrors of Joe Mackenzie. The Bible had been opened infrequently enough in the 20 years since to have no crease in the binding, no wrinkled pages, no thumbed edges to give away favorite passages. She guessed at where the Psalms would be, erring only a few pages into Proverbs as the book fell open on her bed.
"As the deer . . ." she murmured, flipping back page by page toward Psalm 1. She stopped at Psalm 121 long enough to be reminded of her Uncle Matt and Red Rock Mesa in the words of hope and trust before she resumed her search for the Psalm of the deer. When she found it, the words washed over her like the stream of water she didn't know she needed so desperately.
As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O God. My being thirsts for God, the living God.
With no one around to hear her, she lost herself in spoken meditation, reading the Psalm and hearing herself speak the words that came to her as she did. "I didn't know how parched my soul is until the doctor told me that she needs to do surgery. Can you quench this fear?"
When can I go and see the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, as they ask daily, "Where is your God?"
"Who are you, God? Are you Allah, as Sadik would have me believe? Are you the gentle God of the stable at Christmas? How can I find you if I don't even know who you are?"
Those times I recall as I pour out my soul, When I went in procession with the crowd, I went with them to the house of God, Amid loud cries of thanksgiving, with the multitude keeping festival.
"Even at Jimmy's christening, I couldn't rejoice. Where were you when I was in your house?"
Why are you downcast, my soul; why do you groan within me? Wait for God, whom I shall praise again, my savior and my God. My soul is downcast within me; therefore I will remember you From the land of the Jordan and Hermon, from the land of Mount Mizar.
She closed her eyes, tried to envision a time when she could feel God close to her. All she could think of was her sojourn to Red Rock Mesa with her uncle, when she faced the hardest test of her life – to get sober. But was that God with her then, or the spirits of the ancients? Did it matter? "Someone was there. I will remember it with hope."
Here deep calls to deep in the roar of your torrents. All your waves and breakers sweep over me. At dawn may the LORD bestow faithful love that I may sing praise through the night, praise to the God of my life.
"If you want my life, God, you can have it. I could die, anyway, so why let me suffer?" She punched her pillow before she resumed her reading.
I say to God, "My rock, why do you forget me? Why must I go about mourning with the enemy oppressing me?" It shatters my bones, when my adversaries reproach me. They say to me daily: "Where is your God?"
All she could hear was Sadik's taunts, his supreme confidence that if only she would become an obedient, subservient Muslim woman she could be fulfilled in a way that no other action could. Happiness in the anonymity of a burqa. Perhaps that was the way out – a way to avoid more hurt from lost, haunted Clay, whose indifferent withdrawal into the bottle tested her will to stay sober; a way to avoid more hurt from arrogant, insecure Harm, who suffocated her with his superior ambivalence even as he was the air she needed to stay alive. "Are you Allah?" she asked again. "Is that what you want from me?"
Why are you downcast, my soul, why do you groan within me? Wait for God, whom I shall praise again, my savior and my God.
Praising God. She searched her memory, thinking of her grandmother, of all the women she had encountered in her many travels to the Middle East. She could not think of a single time she had seen a Muslim woman in a burqa expressing true joy in public. Nor in private, actually, although she remembered her grandmother telling stories about women's prayer services where they could be exuberant in their faith. She envied the women she knew here in the States whose Islamic faith was not rooted in the oppression of fundamentalism and Wahhabism but in the true equality of personhood preached in the Koran. Their faith gave them strength and hope, while her encounters with the faith of her grandmother left her cold and shaken.
Islam, though a part of her heritage, could not be her faith. Her God and Allah might be one and the same, but she could not call upon "Allah" in her prayers and be faithful to her independence.
A revelation came to her, not one that could change her in the instant but one that would grow in the days and weeks to come, despite everything she would learn in the next day. "I want to sing again. I've forgotten what joy feels like. As the deer longs for streams of water, so my soul longs for you, O Lord."
FIN