The Musician (A Poem for Good Friday)

A memory of Kreisler once:

At some recital in this same city,

The seats all taken, I found myself pushed

On to the stage with a few others,

So near that I could see the toil

Of his face muscles, a pulse like a moth

Fluttering under the fine skin,

And the indelible veins of his smooth brow.

I could see, too, the twitching of the fingers,

Caught temporarily in art’s neurosis,

As we sat there or warmly applauded

This player who so beautifully suffered

For each of us upon his instrument.

So it must have been on Calvary

In the fiercer light of the thorns’ halo:

The men standing by and that one figure,

The hands bleeding, the mind bruised but calm,

Making such music as lives still.

And no one daring to interrupt

Because it was himself that he played

And closer than all of them the God listened.

~ R.S. Thomas

Maundy Thursday 2007

Josh and I were away on a trip together, celebrating his college graduation.  In the early morning he slept in, something I almost never do when I'm at the beach:


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I started my Maundy Thursday by driving across the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge toward sunrise on the beach at Assateague, with Bach echoing in the car and birds beginning to awaken on the darkened marsh.

As the sun bubbled over the Atlantic, flocks of willet and sanderlings sparkled out along the edge of the foam, and the just-past-full moon hung above the inlet.

My drive back was marked by scores of shorebirds wheeling over the marsh, a posse of Sika deer stopping to stare, and a loon floating serenely in the early morning sunshine.

An awesome day on the calendar beginning with such fragile beauty on the coast.

Ignatian Prayer Adventure Reflection 13 ~ Skipping Ahead

I am looking forward to the Easter services this week-end.  If that statement sounds as if it should be non-newsworthy for a pastor, allow me to explain:

Holy Week has been hell for me for the past three years.  With Josh gone ~ my Josh, my beautiful son, the one member of my very nonreligious family who would make the effort to share things with me that no one else cared about, the one who walked under the dark sky and the full moon to the Sunrise Service with me each year~ the memories were too much to manage. 

The first year, I simply skipped all observances. Well, I attempted an Easter Vigil at a Catholic church, but when the lights came up and joy filled the sanctuary, I left.  Too much.  Seven months had not been long enough to absorb our loss, let alone three days.

The second year, as a  student pastor in a large church, I made my way through the whole series of services in a state of complete numbness.  I'm not sure which was the more tortuous ~  the suffering and death of Jesus, events which had become extremely personal in terms of lived experience ~ or the Resurrection, which was not my lived experience at all.  Last year, I went to some of the services at the Carmelite Monastery, but my heart wasn't in them.

This year:  this year I admit to glossing over much of Thursday and Friday of Holy Week in terms of my interior approach ~ I have spent so much of the past three-plus years there ~ although I am making every effort to create a meaningful Maundy Thursday service for my congregation.

This year: this year I am all about the Resurrection.  Finally.  Joyfully.

I'm "skipping ahead" in these Ignatian reflections to the final one in the Exercises, the one Ignatius called "The Contemplation to Attain Love." In that contemplation, Ignatius suggests four ways in which we might understand God, the third of which has to do with how God labors for us.  How God works on our behalf.

A deep appreciation of God as laborer, as one who toils for and in and with me, has taken hold of me these weeks of Lent.  There have been many, many days since Josh died on which I have questioned my basic sanity in continuing with my education and my ministry, with my life in any kind of way.  And yet, here I am, about to celebrate the Triduum with my first congregation, and with a life filled with other opportunities to serve, because God has worked with great diligence in my life.

And, much more important than anything I say or do this week, God's labors on my behalf, most of them through the care and persistence of other people, have filled me with the sense that God's love for my own son overflows, that my own son is safe and cared for and completely held in God's protective embrace.

The man whom I might call my spiritual director emeritus once sent me a little bookmark with a photograph of this Chartres Cathedral statue (yes, I've posted it before).  The statue depicts God creating Adam; I immediately understood it, as he had hoped, as God re-creating Josh.  

Easter: re-creation for all of us.

Ignatian Prayer Adventure Reflection 12 ~ Another Morning

A brief offering, and this one really is about Jesus and his mother:

Sunday's gospel reading ended with Jesus returning to an empty temple at the end of the day to look around.

I imagine the same thing for early this morning.

I've just been out for my own morning walk.  It's a beautifully sparkly sunshiny morning, and birds who should not be here for another month are out and about.  I thought about how my own son Josh and I used to go out early in the morning together.  We had a vacation tradition of a breakfast out, just the two of us.  And then my thoughts turned to Jesus, and his mother . . . 

I imagine them standing in the temple, early on this spring morning, the light just beginning to spread out from the east.  She talks about the day of his dedication; she doesn't have to relate yet again the words of Simeon, which have overshadowed her life as a mother as surely as the Holy Spirit did, and which they both know are about to come true.

He reminisces about favorite teachers, rabbis with whom he spent time in this temple when he was a young man.  They laugh over a couple of the more humorous stories,  and wonder who might show up later in the day.

She gazes at him, her heart full, brimming with the love of a mother for her son.  He looks toward the west, his own heart already full of Friday. 

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.

Breast Cancer Fallout

It was discovered as a consequence of a routine mammogram last fall.  I had scheduled a series of medical check-ups, making an attempt to put all routine health matters behind me prior to embarking upon my first call in ministry.  I got as far as having my teeth cleaned and going in for the mammogram.

Breast Cancer 101 now a month behind me, I need to pick up where I left off and take care of the rest of my body.

I find that I have been unable to make a single call.  Even the idea of the two fillings I need sets my heart pounding.  (Figuratively speaking.)   And the other things?  Terrifying.

Merely observations.  No advice needed.

Palm and Passion Sunday