Funeral Mass

Here's one of the things I really like about Catholic churches: you can almost always find a portrayal of a heartbroken mother.  This one is a section of a spectacular crucifixion window.

 

Here's what I remember about this day in my own life:  after the service, and the food, and all the people, the thought:

 

OK, we did that, and it was truly awful, but it's over.  He'll come back now, right? 


 

Serenity

 

After having chosen Serenity as my word for the year, I asked my friend Wayne to make a piece of stained glass for me.  He finished it yesterday, as anyone who's been to my FB page knows (!).  I'm so looking forward to hanging it in a window ~ and waiting for the sun to shine in Cleveland, sometime in 2015 or so.

 

Wayne's timing was excellent.  Last evening turned into a perfect storm of grief, but I awoke this morning reminded that serenity hardly matters if we cannot apply it to the difficult times. 

 

Living to an old age is not a goal of mine.  But should it happen in spite of me, I would like it if people could say, "She was serene in the face of it all." 

 

I suppose that makes this a word for the next couple of decades. Hardly something that one can accomplish in a year.

Small Things - 3

Sunshine is really not so small at all.

 

At my church these days, the stained-glass windows on one side are out for cleaning and restoration (the work on the other side has been completed), so for this brief period in time, one can look through clear windows to colored ones.

Angels

This is one of those not-for-the-faint-of-heart posts.  Don't read it if brutal details haunt you in difficult ways.

I am also somewhat extremely hesitant to post this for other reasons, as I know there are people reading this blog who will conclude that my mind and I have finally parted company.  But, you know, fools rush in  . . .

And where is it that angels tread, exactly?

The first time I was with someone who died was in 1960, when I was in the automobile collision in which my mother was killed instantly.  Although I am told that I was conscious when we were discovered, I have no memory of that event.

The next time was in 2005, when I sat with my stepmother as she died after a several-months journey with lung cancer.  My father left the hospital immediately, but I stayed with her for about an hour.  I was so sure that we were being accompanied by Others that I occasionally looked out the window into the 5:00 a.m. darkness, expecting to see someone.

The next many dozens of time occurred during the summer of 2008, when I was doing my clinical chaplaincy education at The Cleveland Clinic.  Sixty actual workdays and nights over a ten-week period.  One of my units was a medical intensive care unit, and at a hospital like that, the people in the MICU are desperately ill.  When we were on call in the hospital at night (about once a week), we were each the only chaplain for 1000 beds -- all units.  I had two days that summer in which no one died.  Many days and nights the numbers were two, three, four.  I did not have any sense of the physical presence of Others that summer.

A few weeks after that, my son jumped to his death. Some months, maybe a year afterward, the shock beginning to wear off a bit, I began to wonder whether it was possible that the small patch of ground outside his apartment building had been crowded with angels that night.  I didn't particularly believe in angels, or not, but I began to wonder. I found that I kind of like to imagine that there is, quite literally, a host of beings of light who rush to lift the broken to God.  That they appear on isolated country roads, in high-tech hospital units, in suburban neighborhoods.

Yesterday, sitting by a hospital bed and waiting through the final moments of an elderly woman's life, I closed my eyes and bowed my head and -- yes.  Despite the occasional beeping of machinery and the voices of nurses in the hallway, I heard it -- or rather I sensed it.  The light brush of Others in the room.

I wondered, later last night, what angels look like.  Probably not like us, and probably not wearing white robes and bearing feathery wings.  Probably more like columns of light.  Think Tanner's Annunication.

I don't suppose it matters what they look like.  It matters that they are there.

Image: Lakeview Cemetery, Cleveland OH

Holy Week - Teilhard de Chardin

Five years ago, Josh and I spent much of Holy Week taking a little trip to celebrate his graduation from the University of Chicago a couple of weeks earlier.  We spent Monday at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.  Here's one of my blog posts describing that day:

 Space Window, Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul (Washington National Cathedral)

"Is the Christ of the Gospels, imagined and loved within the dimensions of a Mediterranean world, capable of still embracing and still forming the centre of our prodigiously expanded universe?"

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

Daily Photo 35

 

Good Samaritan Window

Presbyterian Church of Coshocton, Ohio

Daily Photo 33 - Cemetery Stained Glass

 

There are small mausoleums scattered throughout the cemetery where I walk.  Many of them harbor stained glass windows, windows which almost no one sees.  And why is that the case, that almost no one sees them?

For one thing, not that many people spend time at the cemetery.  And those who do tend to be walking or running, or visiting the graves of those they love, or perhaps stopping in to see the Garfield Monument.   They aren't pausing to do more than glance at the smaller buildings.

And the windows are usually on the back side, often covered with protective grating.  Even if someone were inclined to walk around to the back, she wouldn't see much.  You have to walk up to the front door (all of them locked) and peer in, hoping that the sun will illuminate the window from the back. If you and the sun both co-operate, you may be rewarded with a view of a small, hidden treasure.

Mosaic of Friendship

Kathryn and I have known one another for a long time.  We "met" in an online moms' forum; we've all been talking and sharing our lives online for 15 years.  Kathryn and I have also gotten together several times, most recently just a couple of months ago.

Wayne and I met more recently.  Somehow our mutual Wernersville connection brought us together, along with our interests in birds and stained glass.  I have a couple of lovely Wayne-designed gifts.

Wayne is married to Margaret; she's a mosaic artist.  She and I share the same birthday, but we have yet to meet.  Wayne and Margaret and Kathryn have met, though.

(I should insert here that Margaret and Wayne gave me a beautiful mosaic cross as a seminary graduation gift last year. They don't know this yet, but the photograph will appear eventually: As promised, that cross was the very first thing I hung on the wall of my study in the church I pastor.)

This afternoon, a small package arrived, Kathryn-commissioned and Margaret-created.  The colors, Kathryn wrote, are those of my birthstone and Josh's:

Pushing, Pulling, Resisting, Accepting, Whatevering . . .

I don't think it's news that the last couple of months have been tough ones.  I've graduated from seminary and I'm home to stay and . . .  Josh is still gone.

But some days, God's grace has a way of piling up in a heap.  Today, for instance.  

First, my lovely friend Karen posted about "pushing forward."  I've written before about my awe in the face of Karen's and her husband's move from Hawaii to Virginia after their son's death, a move that has enabled them to live close to daughters and grandchildren, but must have nevertheless taken the strength of Hercules to accomplish.  Then I remember that the other Karen (in this blog, they have to take turns being "the other Karen") has become engaged in the battle against childhood cancer, and that I went back to school, and that other mothers have picked up and gone on, and I wonder, How ???????  There are still plenty of days when I open my eyes in the morning and say, "No.  I can't."  But "push forward" we do.  And I am so grateful for Karen's honest articulation of both the pain and the determination, the sadness and the hope.

Then, Saturday having been St. Ignatius' Feast Day, another blogger wrote about the world in which Ignatius lived, which I also said a little about on Saturday. (Protestants and Catholics alike might enjoy his glimpse into that era.)  And what, he says, did Ignatius sense God telling him, in the face of a religious and secular context fraught with conflict?  "Do something new."  It was a good message for me to read this morning, as I look back at a birthday and ahead to (another) ordination exam, back to my life with three children and ahead to a life in ministry into which I have to incorporate the horrific loss of one of them.  "Try something new."  I don't think my new something will be anything huge or dramatic, but I am hopeful that the honest gaze into the reality of God laboring in all things, including the loss of children and the grief of their mothers, will be put to use in some way.

And then, today's mail came, and with it a birthday card from Michelle, who has just been to the Art Institute in Philadelphia where she had the opportunity to spend some time with my very favorite painting.  When I finish here, I am going to start looking for a frame.

And then, for some reason, I stepped out onto the front porch an hour or two later and discovered two packages, one of them containing a piece of glass restored by another blogging friend, who probably wants to remain nameless.  This small hanging was the last material Christmas gift my son Josh gave me, in 2006.  (In 2007, he gave us a contribution to Heifer Project for a water buffalo, an animal he said is of great importance in Vietnam, where his girlfriend's mother is from.  We got a tiny carved water buffalo as a symbol of the real thing.)  The glass was accidentally broken some time ago, and it has now been most beautifully restored and is hanging in the living room.

Blogging has produced quite an astonishing web of connections.  I believe that what has coalesced in my life in just these last few hours is a melding of Hawaii, Virginia, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and Evangelical Christian, Catholic, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian.  I generally feel that I am being pushed in all directions and pulled apart pretty much simultaneously, but today I am experiencing a warm and generous melding of friendships.

Thank you, all of you.

Stained Glass (Daily Photo 10)

Window Detail, Villa Maria Retreat Center Chapel (PA)

I'm over at Quantum Theology today.