A Congregation Comes to a Close ~ 4: Columbarium

I have been writing letters.  To the exercise classes and AA and NA groups that meet in our building, to tell them the dates by when they must move on, and to the folks who have left the cremains of their loved ones with us.  For some years, the urns were stored in the bell tower (in which no bell resides) but, more recently, a beautiful little columbarium was built off the chancel.  Oak cupboards and a backlit stained glass window; a lovely space to visit.

 

A neighboring Presbyterian church has offered to remove our columbarium and install it somewhere in its building, so probably most of our cremains will go there.  But we still have to send a letter to everyone to explain the situation and ask what they would like to do.  Some are current members, who will receive a personal note from me on the form letter. Many are themselves long gone from the congregation, and perhaps from this world.  Some will no doubt come looking a few years hence, and frantic calls to the Presbytery will ensue.

 

I have presided over many funerals since becoming a pastor four years ago, and many interments of caskets and urns.  I have also continued my own little worldwide journey with ashes of my son in hand, most recently to Canada.  Most people look inside caskets; few, as far as I can tell, look inside urns. Although mothers do.  I'm not sure that the sense of the world flung out of orbit ever leaves us after that first look.  "Bone of my bone," as a dear friend said to me about our children.  As with most things related to the deaths of children, scripture offers cold comfort.

 

Despite the stress involved in learning to scatter ashes so as to render them, and the activity itself, invisible in spots where others might raise objections (and sometimes the humor as well, as we  finally experienced it, in the form of an early morning campus paintball game on a day when we were sure we would encounter no one), I prefer the winds and the wilds to urns locked in a an interior space.   And this latest experience has turned out to transmit its own stressors.  My own reaction where cremains are concerned is a relaxed one, but you never knows how others will respond.  One person's calm is another's horror, and vice versa.

 

I need to remind myself that the conversations that lie ahead will be holy ones.

 

Ashes III - Sermon

Turn to the Living God

There is but one way to turn to God on Ash Wednesday, and that way is to allow your heart to be broken open. 

Stand still, and silent, and watch as your heart breaks open into a thousand glistening pieces, the pieces marking a person who has turned entirely in the direction of God.

There are other ways, on other days, to encounter God.  There are paths of calm and repose, there are mountaintops of joy, there are rivers of energy.

But on Ash Wednesday, on this day on which we recognize and reverence the fragmentation of human life, there is but one way to approach God, and that is with a broken heart. 

For what is your heart broken tonight? 

For the world, God’s world?
in which warfare does not cease?
in which water and air fill with the oil and smoke of polluted waste?
in which animals go extinct every day as a consequence of human greed and destruction?

For what is your heart broken tonight?
For human society?
in which poverty and disease claim thousands of lives every day?
in which hunger and illness limit human potential
in which bright-eyed children are denied their basic educational and health needs?

For what is your heart broken tonight? 
For the human family?
n which divorce and conflict run rampant
in which strife and envy are more prevalent than love and compassion?
in which people repeatedly choose themselves over those they love? 

For what is your heart broken tonight? 
For yourself?
for relationships ground to dust?
for deep desires abandoned by the wayside?
for losses and heartaches for which it seems no remedies exist

We don’t want to recognize, let alone reverence, these broken, fragmented slivers of heart. 

We don’t even want to look at them, strewn in the paths we hope we have left behind.

And yet, in order to receive the blessing of Ash Wednesday, as the pastor-poet Jan Richardson tells us,

all you have to do
is let your heart break.
Let it crack open.
Let it fall apart
so that you can see
its secret chambers,
the hidden spaces
where you have hesitated
to go. 

all you have to do
is let your heart break.

“All” you have to do? 

I have had times in my life – long, long times – when I have wondered how one would ever, could possibly, return to God with all of one’s heart.  Times when the broken pieces are so many, they would fill an entire desert.  Times when those pieces are so scattered that no one could gather them into a basket and they could not possibly be pieced together, not even by God.

So what could it mean, to return with your whole heart to God? 

To repent, to change your entire orientation,
 to spin in a complete circle and then to keep going,
until you were face to face with the living God? 

Isaiah tells us.  The prophet Isaiah tells us that it is when we are most broken, when we are a people in exile, when God seems far, far away: 

We are to share our bread with the hungry. 
We are not the only people starving for hope, for comfort, for peace. 
We are not the only people longing for shelter from the cold, from loneliness, from grief, from oppression. 
We are not the only people who feel that life is unfair, that we are unappreciated, that our gifts go to waste and our desires remain unnoticed.

We are to look toward others who share our brokenness, and to share our bread with them, 
 and then, as Isaiah says,

“God will satisfy [our] needs in parched places, and make [our] bones strong; and [we] shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.

When we, each of us, return with all of our heart toward God, we do so by turning not solely to God, but to all in need of God’s justice, for God’s justice means food for the hungry, freedom for the enslaved, comfort for the hurting. 

We cannot sweep up our millions of broken pieces, we cannot paste and glue them back together, we cannot save the world from sin, or creation from destruction.

But God can.  And Ash Wednesday serves to remind us that,
into the ashes of human death,
Jesus Christ comes to restore a universe and a humanity
to the beauty of shining, beloved wholeness
which our God has always intended and toward which God continues to labor.

There is a beautiful song, the words of which go like this:
Turn, turn to the living God,
The God of healing and comfort,
And in delight, God will turn to you,
In delight God will turn to you.

Tonight, with the imposition of ashes and the reception into our bodies of the bread of life and the cup of salvation, we turn to the living God. 
 
We allow the pieces of our broken hearts to be gathered by the one who will mold and meld and solder them into new life. 

We allow ourselves to be reminded that the bread offered to us is given us for sharing. 

We affirm, gently but without reservation,
that in delight God turns to us
and that, with healing and comfort
Jesus brings resurrection life. 

Ashes - II

From 2009, written six months after Josh died.

*****

Return to me with your whole heart. That was the line from Joel 2:12 that I heard early Wednesday morning.

Your whole heart, I thought? What can that mean, when your heart is not whole?

My heart is shattered.

It lies in tiny shards all over the ground.

Its jagged pieces spin into space, floating past Jupiter like lost little pilgrims.

Its dusty bits float on the oceans, bits of ash, sparkling grimly in the sunlight and filtering slowly downward, into the darkness where oddly luminescent sea creatures chart paths we can barely imagine.

One might want to turn to God again. The word metanoia slides off the tongue. It sounds graceful, and hopeful. But if God's desire is for a whole heart, if one can turn toward God only with an intact heart, then one is surely lost.

Late last night I turned to the passage in another version. Return to me with all your heart. Of course, I had known, in some small and isolated portion of my mind, that "whole" meant "all." I had known that in my own broken heart the response to what seemed a play on words but was really a conundrum of translation reflected my own longing for wholeness.

Your heart. In Biblical Judaism, the seat of your being. The essence of who you are.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. So end the readings for the day, with the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:21.

Barbara Brown Taylor has a wonderful sermon about the treasure in the field. (The Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew has a lot to say.) The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Why does he purchase the entire field; why doesn't he just dig up the one section? The treasure, she concludes, is scattered in plain sight, glittering all over the field.

Your heart accompanies your treasure and so there it is,

strewn across the field, scattered across the universe, mixed with the salt of the sea.

Return to me with your whole heart.

Return to me with the gift of a heart so cracked open that that in its wholeness it encounters brokenness everywhere.

Return to me with all of your heart.

You will find its pieces in places to which you would never have sought to journey on your own.

It is, indeed, an appalling thing, the strange mercy of God.

Ashes - I

I think I'll post three reflections today. 

 

This year's perspective.

 

One from four years ago.

 

Tonight's sermon.

 

**********

 

Ash Wednesday presents a particular dilemma of dissociation for me. 

 

There is the public me, who will preside over an Ash Wednesday service tonight.  I have burned last year's palm branches in my fireplace and crushed what was left into fine ash, which now sits in a plastic bag on a kitchen shelf.  This doesn't sound very holy, does it?  But the ordinary and the sacred always blend in a life of faith.

 

I think of Forrest Church, preaching at Chautauqua many, many years ago, and proclaiming that "We have religion because we live, and then we die, and we need to make sense of that."  I didn't ponder that while I was burning the ashes last week, but today I do.

 

There is the pubic/private me, who will preach a short sermon tonight, a sermon which emerged from searing experience.  As time passes, you are indeed able to take that experience and give words to it that are more universal in scope. 

 

I don't consider that to be a particularly good thing.  I would prefer to have foregone the experience.

 

There's the private me.  The one who has an urn half-filled with ashes in her bedroom closet.  Jan Edmiston says today that most of us hide our ashes in the closet.  She is speaking metaphorically.  Those of us with tangible ones keep them in all sorts of places.  I keep some in the Pacific Ocean, some in the Atlantic, some in Lake Chautauqua, and some in the mountains of North Carolina.  Some in a locket. And some in the closet, because it takes a long time to scatter ashes across the globe.  Or at least across our small parts of it.

 

I don't much care for Ash Wednesday.  I used to love it, but now it's not exactly as if I need a reminder.

 

Fire After Death

I went to a funeral this morning.

And tonight I read this, which I think might be the very best piece of writing I've ever read on the subject matter in question~ and I've read a lot of them, and written some, too: carrying out our immediate responsibilities and trying to honor our most beloved people in body and spirit  after they've died.

Preparing to Prepare

Christine Valters Painter has written a thought-provoking essay on Ash Wednesday and lament, which I highly recommend to you.  I've been thinking about it since she posted it a few days ago, trying to discern where it does and does not resonate with me.  I've been thinking about it as I try to make a decision about whether to go to the Ash Wednesday service at our church.

The essay begins with these words:

"Ash Wednesday marks a threshold when we leave ordinary time to enter into the journey of Lent through the desert. The desert is that uncharted terrain beyond the edges of our seemingly secure and structured world, where things begin to crack."

I hadn't noticed the reference to ordinary time until just now.  It's only been a couple of days since I mentioned that the term "ordinary time" has lost its meaning for me. And as someone learning to make her home in the desert, I don't need Lent as a portal.  My secure and structured world is long gone and I'm here, building my house right on top of the cracks, because there is nowhere else to go.

Nevertheless, I sent the essay to a friend who has just lost her brother, and she responded with gratitude and said that she has forwarded it to family and friends.  And I'll be sending it to two other friends this week.  One's husband died of cancer a year ago today; we had breakfast Saturday. One's husband died three years ago Thursday, and we are planning a long walk in the cemetery that afternoon.  One told me that she has been focused on distractions; the other, that people clearly want her "to get over it."  I think that the essay will speak to them both, each in her own place of grief and longing.

And I think I'll stay away from the service Wednesday night.  As I did last year.  As I should have done two years ago.  I have spent so much time this past year caring so gently for ashes ~ ashes that have become one with the forests and streams of the North Carolina mountains and with the waves of the Atlantic ~ that they have lost the distance that a symbol requires to persist as an invitation and gift. 

I do plan to observe Lent.  But I am looking for signs of life around my little house in the desert. Perhaps I will find a truth beyond the song of lament I now know so well.  What do you think of this illustration ~ both the house and the name of its locale ?!

  

Plexiglass House in Wonder Valley CA, here.

A Different Kind of Christmas - Part 4

Early on Christmas morning, while it was still dark, I set out for the beach, about a ten-minute drive away.  The other members of my family have exhausted their resources when it comes to dealing with the ashes, and it probably seems odd that I would have decided that a Christmas sunrise on the beach at St. Augustine was a right time and place, but when I flipped open my phone and saw the reading that came up, I felt vindicated.

As I drove through the dawning light and walked along the beach where we all ran and played and sunned and built sandcastles for so many years, I thought about those words:

Behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all the people; for to you is born this day in the city of David, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.  ~Luke 2:10-11. 

God's son, my son, incarnation, cross, life, death, light overcoming the dark.  It seemed to me exactly the right thing to do, to wade into the gentle ocean and scatter ashes as the sun rose.  

The next day, I found this poem stashed away in my email, and it seemed appropriate and compelling, given how I had celebrated Christmas:

But the silence in the mind
is when we live best, within
listening distance of the silence
we call God. This is the deep
calling to deep of the psalm-
writer, the bottomless ocean
we launch the armada of
our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,
whose margins are our margins;
that calls us out over our
own fathoms. What to do
but draw a little nearer to
such ubiquity by remaining still?

from "AD" by R.S. Thomas

Looking Glass Falls (and Daily Photos 22-23)

When they were little, our three children played in the stream beyond the falls, sailing boats made of rhododendron leaves, and when they got a little older, they swam in the pool under the falls.

I was there Saturday morning, very early.  And when I turned to go, I saw that someone had made a small cairn across the tumbling water.  It guards Josh, I thought.  It waits there and watches.

It's a beautiful spot, and I could imagine Josh saying, "Thank you, Mom.  This was a very good place for all of us."  But . . . 

Don't say it's not really so bad.  Because it is.  Death is awful, demonic. ***  People sometimes think things are more awful than they really are.  Such people need to be corrected -- gently, eventually.  But no one thinks death is more awful than it is. 

~ Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

Graveyard Fields (and Daily Photos 17-21: Mountains)

I don't remember how we discovered Graveyard Fields (origin of name unknown, but possibly due to a scattering of stumps reminiscent of gravestones) in the Pisgah Forest of North Carolina.  I do know that our first hike there involved the entire family in a gigantic thunder-and-lightning storm during which we ignored all safety rules in  our determination to make it the entire way to Upper Falls.

En route we discovered a stretch of river that flattens wide over a bed of pebbles ~ and that's actually my favorite part of the hike.  On sunny days when I've been out there alone, I've enjoyed just wading around in the river, and sitting on that huge rock to journal.  The one day I had last week was, unfortunately, not sunny.  But at least there was no sign of Thor and his thunderbolts.

 

I'm told that Second Falls is a favorite hangout of camp counselors on their days off ~ a great place in which to sit in the water all day long when the sun is hot.  

Josh and I have been all the way up to Upper Falls together, (it's about two miles from the trailhead but, given the terrain, hikes more like four) and have wandered around in the shallow riverbed, and so I took some of his ashes to each place.  Upper Falls was a little scary -- very slick on the rocks, and I had to slide most of the way down once I got up there.

Do you see how my life has changed, that I consider this to be normal behavior?

Back Home: A Quiet 4th

The Lovely Daughter and I took off last Thursday afternoon, spent an hour with my dad in southern Ohio, and made it to southern Kentucky while it was still light outside.

On Friday we reached Brevard NC in time for a delightful cafe lunch, and then I dropped her off at her camp for an afternoon of planning and orientation activities.  Bursts of delightful laughter filled the Gatehouse as she and other previous years' counselors recognized one another, and she seemed really happy to be "home."

I spent the afternoon hiking Graveyard Fields so that I could scatter some of Josh's ashes in places to which he and I had hiked several years ago ~ and, on other occasions, all five of us together, and sometimes me alone.  I got lost a couple of times, so it was three hours and five miles of rigorous (for me, anyway) hiking before I made my way back up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and an eventual  dinner with my girl.  

Saturday I got up very early to scatter more ashes at Looking Glass Falls, where our children spent many happy summer afternoons playing in the pool and streams, and then the Counselor and I hit the trail for a hike and a climb and a scramble with ropes to a high overlook.  I think her brother would be happy with the places we found for him.  I myself am somewhat the worse for the wear, pretty bruised and scraped up from a slight tumble toward the top of the overlook, and stiff all over from two days spent hiking alone on mountain trails and through mountain streams, trying not to twist or sprain or break anything while in slippery and isolated locales.

I'll  post some pictures and some thoughts later.  Suffice it to say that, while I'm fine, I'm hiding out from 4th of July revelers today.

Image: Back for a 7th summer at camp!

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust (Warning: Explicit Entry)

Karen has been writing about scattering her daughter's ashes this past week, and we have plans to scatter more of Josh's later this week, since we will be in North Carolina in places deeply inhabited by his memory.

When I did a presentation on the grief of suicide survivors for a seminary class this past spring, cremation and ashes were the subjects that generated the most questions.  In our culture, cremation is becoming more common, but we have not yet developed much in the way of ritual to accompany the task, and many of its realities are, like so much related to the practicalities of death, seldom discussed.  We learned about cremation mostly from friends sitting around our kitchen table in the days immediately following Josh's death. The funeral director offered other help; I discussed it a bit more with a priest friend but, as Catholics do  not believe in scattering ashes in various locales, he wasn't able to offer much there.  We never discussed it with our own pastors. A few months ago, I was the one to provide the explanations and possibilities to a friend whose husband was dying.

One of the reasons I raised the whole topic in my presentation at school was that I believe that pastors should know to inform families that they can accompany the bodies of their loved ones to the crematorium, that they should be prepared to offer the possibility of prayer and other ritual at the time of cremation, and that that they should be aware that families are dealing with precious cremains on their own, finding their own ways to handle the shock and devising their own rituals.

A friend who lost a daughter in her twenties to a sudden accident asked me if I had looked inside the urn when we picked it up.  "Oh, yes, immediately," I said.  I had gone back to the funeral home with Josh's twin brother, and we opened the urn there. "I looked at those flecks of bone and thought, 'They grew in my body,' " I said.  "That's exactly what I thought," she said.  " 'Bone of my bone.' "

"How do you transport small amounts of ashes?" I asked a friend whose son had died by suicide, and who has scattered ashes in many parts of the world. "Film canisters," she said.  "I had to ask my other children to transfer them from the urn the first time.  I couldn't bear it." 

My husband doesn't do ashes.  He goes with me, usually (not this week).  But I don't think that he has ever looked closely at them.  

I find that the ashes, scattered in places that mean something to us, create new bonds among those of us who find ways to make something of this yet another unwanted experience.  Karen's photographs and words this week  present a powerful argument for fighting back against childhood cancer.  I feel much the same about ashes as a symbol in opposition to suicide.  Ours were once the body of a vibrant, creative, and joyful young man, who was stolen from us by illness as surely and completely as Katie was from those who loved her.

They float in the sea, they settle into the earth.

They represent dashed dreams, crushed hopes, bodily brokenness beyond repair.

They represent love too powerful to be dashed or crushed or broken.

We scatter what little we have left, honoring final requests and

Hoping.

Life and Death

The Lovely Daughter and I are off to Jamestown NY in a few minutes, to celebrate a baby shower for my nieces, sisters who are each expecting a first baby in August.  One boy and one girl on the way!

Meanwhile, my dear friend Karen is celebrating her birthday today, after having yesterday scattered her own Lovely Daughter Katie's ashes at a camp that brought joy and meaning into Katie's and her family's lives.  Please go and wish Karen a happy birthday, either on her blog or on FB.

So much love, mothers and children, on both sides of the country, and a reminder that that love comes at a terrible risk to hearts that are sometimes broken wide open and themselves scattered in pieces that sparkle across the wide, wide universe.

Still a Challenge

I went back to my home church today, for the first time in a very long time.

I realized how much I miss many, many things about it. 

But it's still so hard.

It's Trinity Sunday, and so we sang Holy, Holy, Holy.  

That was the opening hymn for Josh's funeral service, because it is the opening hymn every Sunday at Chautauqua.  When my kids got old enough to complain about accompanying us to the ampitheater service there ever summer, I told them that one day when they were old and still doing the same thing, they would look back with gratitude.

Guess I was wrong about that.

We've only been to Chautauqua once since Josh died, and that was to scatter some of his ashes into the lake on the first Thanksgiving.  I'd like to go back for at least a day of BBT's preaching this summer, but I'm not sure that I'm up to it.

I can't figure out where to sit in church.  No matter where I try, the memories of that service 21 months ago feel like a physical invasion.

When I skipped Pentecost last week, Gabriele wrote that by this time of year she is longing for the green of ordinary time.

Yes.  It seems to me that ordinary time is quite complicated enough.

Ashes

This (HT to Contemplative Photography) is for Karen, who is focused on a sad anniversary this week-end.  Oddly or, I suppose not, in the midst of final assignments and packing boxes and the graduation dilemma, I, too, have been thinking about ashes all day, every day.

Love to you, Karen.

Crying out loud and weeping
are great resources.
A nursing mother, all she does
is wait to hear her child.

Just a little beginning-whimper
and she's there.

Cry out.
Do not be stolid and silent with your pain.
Lament,
and let the milk of loving
flow into you.

The hard rain and the wind
are ways the cloud has
to take care of us.

-- Rumi, A Year with Rumi (May 5)