Genesis 21:16 Meaning She Went and Sat Down Opposite Him

Despair sets a distance between the mind and the hope it cannot bear to watch die, and in that distance it sits down and weeps as though the outcome were already sealed. To move a bowshot away is the mind refusing to look, certain that hope is beyond saving and choosing grief over sight. Yet the very act of not looking is what keeps the rescue hidden, for what is turned from cannot be seen to live.

The weeping is real, but it mourns a death that has not happened. Sorrow this deep is still a choice of teacher, and the mind that sits apart in tears has only forgotten that it could turn back and look again.

Hagar: the despairing part of the mind that withdraws from its own hope, unable to face what it believes is dying. Child: the hope left at a distance, still alive though the mind has turned away certain it is lost.

Pema: Affection Pema is warm attachment to one particular person. Grief grows straight out of it: she walks away from this boy under the shrub, the one she carried out of Abraham's house, and the bow shot she paces off is measured by how much she loves him. Wherever something has become dear, sorrow and fear already have their opening, and a mother in an empty country feels that opening more sharply than anyone.

Piyehi vippayogo: Separation from what is dear Parting from loved ones stands among the plain forms of suffering. A bow shot is a distance she measures out with her own feet, a small separation taken on early so the final one will not have to be watched. The wilderness gives her nothing for it; the loss she dreads arrives on its own terms whether she sits close enough to touch him or far enough to see only a shape.

Maraṇa: Death Maraṇa is the ending every birth carries with it. "Don't let me see the death of the child" holds the whole difficulty in one line: the young die too, and the water in a skin runs out on a boy as easily as on the old. Turning the face away moves the eyes and leaves the fact standing exactly where it stood.

Parideva: Lamentation Parideva is grief that breaks into sound. Lifting up the voice this way is not weakness of faith, it is what a heart does when it has run out of anything else to do. Sound carries in that open country, so the distance she set keeps her eyes off him and nothing more, and it is the boy's own cry from under the shrub that draws the answer.

Karuṇā: Compassion Karuṇā is the heart's movement toward another's pain. Its near enemy is this very collapse into sorrow, which wears the face of love and yet turns around and sits down a hundred paces off. Compassion is what walks back and stays beside the boy, the thing she is finally able to do when her eyes open on the well and she fills the skin and holds it to his lips.