Lent Day Seven


imprisonment

Genesis 39 and 40

Zornberg (274) writes, using midrash: "In the early days of his captivity in Potiphar's house, Joseph goes about repeating (whispering) the Torah he learned in his father's house. This is his strenuous attempt to 're-member' his identity and culture, to keep 'God with him.'"
But Joseph forgets. And again he falls into a pit. "He is lost to memory, his own as well as his family's conscious memory." (274)

"The story of Joseph in Egypt is a history of his continued, desperate attempts to re-member himself, to reintegrated the broken pieces of his identity." (273)

As we move into Lent, this story reveals for me some of the depth of despair that Australians can hear from within the detention centres.

Perhaps it would be a lenten discipline to put the pieces of our history together. To weave together the stories of dispossesion and settlement. To put the pieces of our family histories together. The pieces from this land and from elsewhere. To become whole again, holy....

Pray for those who despair.