Lament and Hope ~ Sermon (Psalm 42) ~ A Church Comes to a Close ~ 12

Almost every Sunday after the sermon, we say a creed or confession or statement of faith together.  We do that as part of our Liturgy of the Word, which is usually expressed in three ways: we hear the words of scripture, we hear those words interpreted ~ usually in the form of a sermon, and we respond to those words with our own communal statement of belief, affirming that have heard, and wondered, and believe ~ that what we have heard and wondered about has spoken to our hearts and minds.  And when we say The Apostles’ Creed, which we often do, one of the things we affirm is that we believe in the communion of saints.

The communion of saints – what does that mean?  Many of you grew up in the Catholic tradition, and learned that there are specific individuals whose personal holiness and connection with God is recognized by the church with the label of saint.  Even many of those of us who have always been Protestant have our favorite Catholic saints ~ mine include St. Ignatius, upon whose life of prayer I model my own, and St. Brigid of Kildare (Ireland), who was a great healer and teacher and administrator in the Celtic tradition, someone whom I admire tremendously.  But we in the Protestant church also honor as saints all of those who have gone before us in the faith ~ parents, grandparents, teachers, healers, helpers ~ all of those whom we have loved and lost.   

Today, All Saints Day, is our annual opportunity to remember those saints of our lives, and to remember them well ~ with their names read aloud, with flowers dedicated to their memories, with music to remind us of the important place they have in our lives, with sadness and longing, and with hope and a sense of promise.  It’s also an opportunity to be reminded that the communion of saints, those long gone from our lives on this earth, and those still together here, join at the table at which we will celebrate in just a few minutes.

That’s a bittersweet reminder, isn’t it?  Because, when we tell the truth, we know that we would prefer for our departed loved ones to be here, right here, with us.  We want them to be healthy, and living their lives ~ and here.  I’m sure that as we read the names of the saints of our church and our lives, and as we thought of names of those perhaps not listed, we all felt the heartbreak of having lost them, and wished they were still alive.  The idea of the communion of saints, living and dead, is a powerful one, but it’s nowhere near the same thing as the actual physical and living presence among us of the people we love.

And so . . .  we lament.

“What does that mean?” a few of you have asked me. “That word lament ~ what does it refer to?”

A lament is a song ~ a song of grief, a song of sadness, a song of longing.  It’s the sort of song that makes many of us uncomfortable.  We have been taught, especially in our society, not to feel sorry for ourselves, not to indulge ourselves, not to dwell on the painful aspects of life, and, most especially, not to express ourselves where loss, and death, and grief, are concerned.   Not even where the loss of a mother, or father, or husband, or wife, or child, is concerned.  Not even where the loss of a church is concerned. We are taught to put on a bright face, to put loss behind us, to get on with life.  We are so death-averse in our culture that many of us do not even know the word lament.  We do not know that there is a form of writing, a form of music, designed to express our sorrow. 

And yet the Bible, the book at the center of our spiritual lives, is filled with songs of lament.  There is an entire book in the Bible entitled Lamentations.  Fully one-third of the psalms are psalms, or songs, of lament.  We tend to flip the pages right past these words ~ we want to hear the stories of triumph, of power, of healing; we want to sing the songs of praise, of honor, of glory.  We want so much to avoid death, to pretend that loss is not a constant in our lives, to believe that heartache is not a frequent visitor to our homes, that we also avoid their expression in the Bible.

But the reality, as my friend Patricia Raube preached to her congregation last summer, is that we need songs of lament every bit as much as we need songs of praise: “Because we need all our emotions. . . .  Without them, we are not completely human. We are shut down, and we are cut off. And sometimes that seems like the safest place to be… until we realize that, in the immortal words of John Green, “That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.”  . . .  We need to feel our sadness. We need lament. Not all the time, not 24-7-365, but as part of the menu of full human expression, full human living.”

And so . . .the Bible offers us models for lament.  Models such as today’s Psalm 42, in which the psalmist cries out:

 

When shall I come and behold the face of God?

My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, 

 ‘Where is your God?’ 

 . . .  I pour out my soul:

 . . . .

I say to God, my rock,  ‘Why have you forgotten me?

Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?’

 

Have you ever felt like that?  Have you ever felt disoriented[1] in your relationship with God?  Disoriented due to your feelings of anger, of frustration, of sadness in the wake of loss?  Some of you may be feeling that right now, due to personal losses of loved ones, of health, of other things upon which you have counted.  Many of you may be feeling that way due to the impending loss of this church. 

And if you are feeling such disorientation, such sadness, then your feelings are not denied, or avoided, or ignored, in scripture.  They are affirmed in scripture ~ they are given voice.  Because God does not ask us not to be who we are.  God does not ask us to hide our true selves, our very real feelings of loss and pain.

But ~ God does ask one thing of us in our sorrow.  God does ask one thing of us as we mourn our dead on this All Saints Day, as we grieve the loss of our church this month, as we contend with the other losses that each of us face.  God does ask one thing of us, and that one thing is: not to lose hope.

The hope that God offers us ~ it’s reflected in Psalm 42, and it’s reflected in our communion meal.

Psalm 42, like almost every other psalm of lament, gives voice to pain ~ and then it turns toward hope: “Hope in God; for I shall again praise God, my help and my God.”  One of the remarkable things about most of the psalms of lament is that they do not stop at anguish.  They do not end with despair.  They honor those feelings of anguish and despair ~ they honor and respect them as genuine expressions of the human experience.  But they don’t stop there.  They keep moving.  They move to hope. 

And so do we, because we are called through these words of scripture, and through the rituals of our worship ~ we are called deep into hope.  We are called to know that we will again praise the God who is our hope.  We are called to share a table first set two thousand years ago, on the night before it seemed that all was lost, and two nights before all was gained.

Lament is what we do when we face sorrow ~ when we lose our loved ones, when we lose our church.  We cannot move forward without singing our songs of lament.

But lament is not the end.  Lament is not where we conclude our journey of faith.  Lament is but a waystation on the road toward resurrection, the road toward that day when the entire communion of saints will again gather, not on either side of the barrier between life and death, but together, in God’s new creation.

And, this morning: Know both.  Know both, in the mystery of God.  Know that your longings are honored, that your sorrows are held safe, that communion is a promise, and that resurrection is assured.       Amen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

[1] See Walter Bruggemann, The Message of the Psalms (1984).

Disorientation

I spent last night at my seminary, from which I graduated five years ago, in one of the guest rooms on the first floor of my old dorm.  I was there for a continuing education event which took place last night and this morning.

In some ways, it was like old times.  I went with a friend, saw some friends from seminary days, and met some new people.   The dining room is the same, the food is the same, and at lunchwe talked and talked just as we had not so long ago. 

But seminary for me was unlike seminary for most people.  Josh died right at the beginning of my second year, and so my last two years were a dream-like experience.  A walking dead kind of experience  I'm pretty sure that I was insane ~ quite literally ~ with grief.  I remarked at the time that I felt as if I were wandering around on the surface of the moon.  "How would you know what that would be like?" someone asked me.  "I guess I wouldn't," I said. "But I'm pretty sure this is it."  It probably had something to do with complete isolation and lack of oxygen, appearances notwithstanding. 

Last night I looked out the window and recalled all those sleepless hours, night after night, when I would go out after midnight and walk in circles around the campus, trying to . . .  I don't know what I was trying to do.  

It was a strange experience, my seminary career.  I'm so sorry that it wasn't what I had anticipated, not after the first year.

But tonight I think: What if I hadn't returned?  (A lot of people thought that going back was itself the truest indication of insanity.)

I would have missed the conversations and emails I've had with friends over the past few weeks. I wouldn't even have those friends. I would have missed this whole life as a pastor that I've had, despite everything crashing and burning and going to hell, including me.  I would have missed so much. 

I would have missed my version of surviving.

I will never be that person who went off to school in the fall of 2007.  She is long gone, never to return.

But I find that this new one is not so bad.

Yes, It Gets Easier.

I am just back from a few days in Algonquin Park, in Ontario, a place which my son Josh loved.  I went with my dad, who in the past took my boys and me, and once our entire family, and eventually just the two boys, canoeing in the backcountry up there, several days at a time.  We weren't so ambitious this year ~ we stayed in a lodge where the food was prepared for us and the beds were comfortable, and took day trips across the lake and down the rivers in the canoe ~ the canoe supplied with our cabin and its plumbing and hot water.

I had a lot of time to think about my Josh, about his 24 years, and about the last seven.  And I realized, as I have over the past few months, that the terrible weight of his death has indeed lessened. No more an enormous slab of iron crushing the breath out of my chest, it has become something more like a sheer, gossamer web that envelops me, tangling me up sometimes, but mostly surrounding me in a memory of grace and horror: delicate, shimmering, hopeful and anguished.

In the first couple of years after Josh died, I used to fall asleep crying and wake up crying.  I'm not sure that I ever stopped crying, except when I had to go out in public.  Two, three, fours years later, I would still sometimes look at a full day's schedule lying before me, say "Nope," and curl up in a blanket to wait out the wave of sorrow that threatened to engulf everything in its path.

 

I once read that it takes somewhere between four to seven years for the grief that follows the death of a child to abate.  It seems that I am right on schedule -- from a detached, clinical point-of-view, I would guess that the suicidal death of a child would push a mother right up against and right on past that seven year edge.  Of course, nothing about grief can be genuinely measured or assessed in clinical terms.

 

What helps?  Love and work, I guess Freud would say.  Prayer and work, St. Benedict would have offered, centuries earlier.

 

I'm grateful, so grateful, for the work I plowed through ~ the seminary years  I barely remember, the suicide prevention advocacy which brought out my latent lawyer, the ministry I have been, oddly, able to share with others. I'm grateful for the people who really hung in there with me ~ those amazing Jesuit priests and the spiritual director colleagues who kept on listening and then did it some more, the readers of all these blogs of mine, a couple of fearless professors and a couple of even more fearless friends, and all the people who allowed me to enter their lives as pastor and confidant, preacher and teacher, liturgist and floor scrubber, even as I was crumbling inside.  I'm grateful that I learned how to pray, and not pray, into the cavernous darkness of unfathomable loss.

 

Yes, I look at the world differently now.  I have seen and read and heard and pondered things so distressing and heartbreaking that I cannot help but see the most ordinary facets of life in a slanted light.  I used to think that that light had transformed me into a much worse person than I could ever have imagined being: angry, self-absorbed, brittle ~ suicidal, myself.  And maybe it did, at least for awhile.  Now I think: it provides an angle into a depth of darkness seldom acknowledged, but always there, here, as a persistent backdrop to our lives.  It's a penetrating source of illumination, a kind of darkroom light, the light from a sort of space in which Josh and I used to work intently together.

 

Maybe we still do.

 

 

Image: Lake Between Two Rivers, Algonquin Park

Seven

If you had told me seven years ago that I would survive the events of the following week, I would have told you that I would not.

Which is true, in some ways.  That girl is gone.  She disappeared late one night in Chicago, hours before she even knew it.

Because our minds no longer work as they did before, it took me seven years ~ seven! ~ to register the proximity of the coming and going days of the children of the four women, me included, who met online soon after our children died, and shared much of those first tender years together.  Two birthdays in the past couple of weeks.  Another loss anniversary in the next few days.  And then, the day Josh was born, followed by the day he died.  I am inundated ~ not unhappily ~ by words and pictures from heroic women, women still moving forward.  Seven and eight years later.

I could not tell you how we do that.

It seems to me that at seven years, I might have words of wisdom to share. 

I am grateful, so grateful, to be his mother. 

I am not grateful that he is unable to live out his life, that the world does not enjoy his many gifts, and that I no longer share his company.   I am, by turn and all at once, horrified, bereft, angered, heartbroken, baffled, lost.

 

I can hardly stand it, actually.  Perhaps that is the wisdom I have to offer: You wouldn't believe how far you can continue to walk when you can't stand it.  How brave you can be.

 

One of my FB friends, who lost her son to suicide only two years ago, posted this song last year.  A vampire wedding song?  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio . . .   .  A thousand years, and a thousand more.

The Pretty Pictures

Over the past several months, I've been re-posting a lot of nature and scenic photos on Facebook.  A lot of them come from the Department of the Interior; others, from various photographers focused on Ohio (my home state), the Blue Ridge Mountains (North Carolina being my pretend home state), northern Florida (the other one), the National Park Service . . .  you get the idea. 

 

Sometimes friends thank me for re-posting those beautiful images.  I suppose that's what it looks like I'm doing: posting pretty pictures.  Or humorous or moving or unusual ones.

 

But what I am really doing is FIGHTING BACK.

 

I have no idea how one heals from the suicide of a child.  But it occurred to me, last winter or so, that one possibility might be to recover some small portion of my enthusiasm for the beauty of this universe.  When a child dies, so does pretty much everything else.  But small glimmers of life eventually reappear here and there, and for me, they take the form and shape of nature.

 

Every time you see one of those posts, you are seeing me say: There is life beyond death.

 

Some time after I started collecting these photographs, I came across an article about Amherst College psychology professor Catherine Sanderson, who apparently does a lot of public speaking (including a famous TED Talk) on the topic of happiness.   More explicitly, on what people think makes them happy and what, in contrast, actually does.  Nature is high on her list of what makes us happy.

 

I don't know what I think about happiness, other than that it can be hard to come by.  But I'm not surprised by Catherine Sanderson's conclusion about nature.

 

********

 

 

Image: from the Department of the Interior FB page ~ a RWB hitches a ride on a RTH

 

Sixth Anniversary Meanderings

"They'd crossed over to that continent where grieving parents lived. It looked the same as the rest of the world, but wasn't."

 

~ A Trick of the Light: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel by Louise Penny

 

A few years ago I read an essay by a young mother who stated that she didn't see any reason to mark her little son's death anniversary.  "It's not as if he's more dead on those days, or less on others," was the gist of what she had to share.

Good point, I thought.  I'll try that.

But you can't help it. The weather changes, as does the quality of the light and the length of the days.  There's no mistaking the end of summer; I don't think there's any mistaking, really, any time of year and, therefore, no way of mistaking the inevitable memories accompanying the seasonal changes.

If you watched today, what would you see?  Some errands, some gardening. A lot of reading.  I have been gulping down Inspector Gamache novels.  Because he contemplates the thoughts and feelings of those who murder and those who are murdered, and one who dies of suicide is both?  Or have I turned into my grandmother, who read her way through Agatha Christie's mystery canon as a distraction from intolerable loss? You might think I look like an ordinary person on a day off. I suppose that is exactly what I am. Gardening and reading. Except that I am preoccupied and exhausted.  I forget, sometimes, how draining grief is.  Still. 

My son died between 10:00 and 11:00 p.m. on September 2, or so they told us.  Chicago time.  His death certificate says September 3, because he was found the next morning.  I asked the funeral director about the discrepancy.  "You're not dead until someone says you're dead," he responded.  I think about that sometimes.  It's not true, of course.  When you're dead, you're dead, whether anyone knows it or not.  What's true is that no one knows what that it means.

For whatever reason, a series of Compassionate Friends posts have been appearing on my FB feed this summer.  Perhaps I needed to know that I am not insane? Or at least not insane all by myself? I read the reflections, so familiar to me now, but still unknown to many of my closest friends.  The intense grief, years and decades later. The lost marriages, relationships, friendships, jobs.  The guilt from wanting to die when so many others fight for their lives. 

Did you think about foregoing treatment and just dying? asked a friend last winter, also diagnosed with breast cancer after her son died of suicide.  No, I said, for me it was a uterine cancer scare a couple of years earlier.  In seminary.  How can you stand it? my best friend asked during the week I awaited the results. I shrugged.  What difference did it make?

Should I hit the post button?  I think I will.  I want to say: This is what it's like. 

 

I don't think I feel particularly sorry for myself.  I watch the news.  I get it. 

And I try hard not to miss the beauty.  I at least try to practice resurrection.  I have so loved this life.  That's what John Ames says in Marilynn Robinson's novel Gilead, as he knows he is dying.  I have so loved this life. I try to recover that experience, that knowledge, that feeling. 

 

But it's very hard. 

 

 

More Asia, More Memory

Some seeds flower into the most astonishing color.

 

This morning I received an email from Josh's girlfriend's father, to whom I had written apologizing for having to leave his wife's memorial service early (previous post).  He filled me in on what we had missed, which included this video as his final farewell to his wife in  honor of their cross-cultural romance.

 

It is worth attending to for the entire five minutes.  And, of course, it speaks to all of us in our losses.

 

Our relationship with this family is tenuous and unusual.  But I think that many families who have lost children find themselves briefly and intensely connected to those who have in some way shared in those losses.

 

I am extremely grateful that six years later this video has come my way because of one of those connections.

Saigon, Chicago, Cleveland

There's a scene in an early episode of the most recent season of Downton Abbey that goes something like this:

 

One of the recently widowed Mary's suitors has come to dinner.  At the end of the evening, her mother-in-law Isobel, for whom the event has been excruciating, shakes the young man's hand and says, "I hope that we'll be seeing more of you."  Isobel's nemesis, the Countess Dowager, says in an aside to someone else, "One hates to admit it, but that was very well done."

 

I think it's something to which to aspire, that people say that we have done well when circumstances seem to dictate that we would not.

 

Yesterday, the Quiet Husband and I attended the memorial event for Josh's former fiancée's mother.  In a strange twist of fate, it was held here; several members of the far-flung family live nearby, and so they decided that all would gather here.  A's father and I have been in very occasional communication, which meant that he told us when his wife died, and welcomed us to the event.

 

We debated until the last minute  whether to attend and, if so, for how long. In the end, we decided to go for a bit of the gathering time and stay through the lengthy program (which, finally, we had to leave before its conclusion, since I had another obligation).

 

I am so glad that we went.

 

We have not seen A in nearly six years, not since the day she joined us to clean out the apartment she and Josh had once shared in Chicago.   We all learned a great deal about one another and about Josh's death on that day, one of those days that burns itself indelibly into your mind. She and I corresponded frequently for a year or so, but in the ensuing five years she has built a new life, become engaged, and moved to a new city. While I wish that her life were with my son, it was a tremendous relief to see her doing well and talking animatedly about her work and family. 

 

I don't know how A experienced it, but our conversation reminded me of one many years ago.  Our daughter had flown into Chicago from her semester abroad in Prague, and the two girls and I lingered all morning over breakfast. A told us about her decision to drop out of her academic graduate program and focus her life upon dance; I remember the excitement I felt for her as a young woman finding her authentic path in life.  I felt some of that pleasure for her again yesterday, knowing full well the life-changing terms of the interruption we had all experienced.

 

Insofar as the memorial event was concerned, it had been engineered by A's father to tell the story of his marriage, beginning with his life in the Air Force in the waning months of the Vietnam War, and the young Vietnamese woman who told the cousin working in the officers' club that she wanted to meet an American.  Slides, videos, photos, memorabilia: the story ~ of 20th century Vietnam, of a young woman whose girlhood had been marked by devastating loss and hardship, of a young officer, and of a family life spent criss-crossing the country in a peripatetic military career ~ was spell-binding.  And A spoke beautifully about her mother, their relationship, and her loss. 

 (Saigon, 1966)

 

 

I still don't really know why we went.  To see A.  To honor the mother with whom I had once thought I would share the role of mother-in law but in the end never met.  To honor the father who was a support to me in ways he probably knows nothing about.  To recognize the small and tenuous and yet striking connection between our families.  I don't know.  But I am grateful to have witnessed what I did.

 

Since Josh died, I have often thought of Eleanor Roosevelt's words: You must do that which you think you cannot do. At first, those words applied to getting out of bed.  Now, to other things, but still often.  I find, though, that I am usually grateful in some way to have done whatever it was that it seemed I could not.  I am grateful for this.

 

 

 

Rediscovering Wonder

When I was a little girl growing up in the country, wonder was an everyday experience. The caterpillars we watched morph into butterflies, the birds we spent days trying to catch, the creek we wandered for hours, the snakes we actually did catch and keep in jars on the stone wall out back until we tired of them and let them go.

Today they say that children experience grief in spurts, moving quickly back and forth between moments of intense sadness and periods of play and humor.  That rings true to me, and it also explains why otherwise intelligent and perceptive adults fifty years ago believed the professionals who told them that children do not grieve.  Those moments of intensity come on quickly for children, and disappear almost as fast, rendering them invisible to people who don't want to see them anyway.  And children are quick to sense the latter, and learn to keep their sorrows to themselves.

Thus I could roam the countryside, play sixteen-inning games of softball, and splash in summer camp brooks and waterfalls, finding wonder easily despite the airless density of childhood loss.

For adults, it's somewhat different.

A couple of summers ago, I heard myself saying to a spiritual director, "I was, quite simply . . . completely enchanted by my children.  And then . . . one of them was gone.  And thus enchantment evaporated from my life."

I've been reflecting on that statement this summer.  Perhaps my capacity for wonder, if not actual enchantment, is making a comeback.  Or, at least, tapping on the door.  This summer has already ushered in its grueling moments, with more predicted ~ most of them having to do with pretending to enjoy myself so that others are not burdened.  But I find that I am longing for some genuine joy.

Interesting, isn't it, that this surge of hopeful anticipation should accompany my renewed ability to walk short distances?  Yesterday I walked a mile around my immediate neighborhood early in the morning, and another mile in the opposite direction in the evening.  It's such a pleasure to see the world on foot again, to notice faces and dogs and gardens in ways that one can't from a car.

 

In her poem When Death Comes, Mary Oliver, who has certainly experienced her own deep loss, says:

 

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 

Regretfully, I will not be able to say that of all my life.   Or, perhaps, I will.  Perhaps the black hole of the last six years, sucking all the gravity into a huge and heavy space of darkness, will someday reveal itself as its own venue of wonder.

 

But for now, I think I would like to return to the more conventional forms.

 

For Bereaved Parents: How Many Children Do You Have?

Such a simple question, here in middle-class America.  Kind of like asking, "Are you cool enough?" in the middle of a midwestern summer.

 

This post was occasioned by a parent asking on the Compassionate Friends' FB page how others respond.  She lost a son a year ago and has just begun a new job, so the question is a frequent one. I think she's outrageously gutsy in taking on a new job at this point in her life, but most people at her work would have no idea about that.

 

The answers vary, of course.  Mine was:

 

"I would say that it depends on the situation. If I can get away with it, I say three and immediately ask about their family. Most people are more interested in talking about themselves anyway! and warm to the change of subject. Sometimes I say that I have a son who lives here and a daughter in a nearby city and don't mention where the other son is. Sometimes I say the exact truth. But after six years, I have become so "comfortable" with the topic of suicide that I am wary of the latter approach, because I have lost my patience for dealing with others' shock and discomfort."

 

It was FB, so I didn't elaborate, but I might have added:

 

As a pastor, I am often in situations which are all about the other person.  Not my time to share my life story, and so I don't.  When I am asked, I try one of the first two alternatives above.  On Mother's Day my answer to a friendly parishoner was admittedly extremely awkward; I had almost made it through the morning and was feeling quite pleased with myself for having done so, and then there it was, that question, on one of the worst days possible.

 

If it's a professional, public situation in which I can offer suicide prevention education, I go for it.

 

If I think it might help someone in a similar situation, I tell the truth, but tread cautiously.  We all grieve so differently, on such different timetables, and find comfort in such different ways.  Personally, I find it a lot more palatable to wonder where exactly God wandered off to when my son needed God most of all than to hear that God needed another angel in heaven ~ a God who gets lost or busy is a lot better than a God who steals children ~ but I have found that many others do not share my viewpoint!  I was honest this past week with the mom who had just lost a son to suicide, but I told truths that I thought might make her path a tiny bit easier.  I did not grab her by the shoulders and scream "This is the F-----G worst thing ever and when the shock starts to wear off you are going to want to DIE!"

 

Yeah. No.

 

I don't know a single person who wants to say a number of children one (or more) less than he or she actually has.  But that question ~ it's a minefield.  How are you doing with it?  And what about when it is your only child who has died?

Sitting Shiva

I realized that the living room had grown silent as I told the newly bereaved mother what little I know about suicidal states of minds. 

 

Mostly I told her that, while scripture tells us to "Choose life," people who die of suicide are not un-choosing it.  They are choosing to end the pain, not to die, and they don't really understand, according to my son's therapist, that they will not be here tomorrow with the people they love so much.  The tunnel vision, the fog created by pain and despair, take over, and they forget how much they are loved and how many people would do anything at all to save their lives.

 

I gave this Orthodox Jewish mom, with whom I used to discuss the academic progress of her children, my card, and told her to call me, not as a pastor, but as another mom.

 

Dad of Best Friend followed me out of the sweltering house to ask more questions.  "These kids," he said, "they're all blaming themselves."

 

Yes. 

 

It's been a long time since I've been at an event at which the men go into the living room to daven (pray) while the women, dressed in long skirts and long sleeves despite the oppressive humidity, stand around in the kitchen and wait.

 

I liked it so much better before, when my expertise was world history and not suicide.

My Jewish Life

After I learned of the death of my former student on Friday, I went to the memorial FB page to post my condolences and to add a portion of a piece I'd blogged some years ago.

 

Those posts garnered me a lot of parent and student "likes" and some new friend requests, from people with names like Hannah and Issac and Noah and Ariel and Yael and Chava and Hadas and Avital and Liat.

 

The circumstances are heartbreaking, but it's a pleasure to see the names of those beautiful young people and recall another life. 

Too Much

Yesterday the Huffington Post published a piece they'd invited me to write in response to a TED talk about suicide.  I decided to write about things I thought might help survivors -- not a religious post, not a post filled with pastoral reflections or exhortations - just a post about some of what I've learned, written by a mom survivor who happens to be a pastor.

Positive responses poured in.

Among them was a repost by a former teaching colleague on a memorial FB page for a former student of ours.  Unbeknownst to me, he had died of suicide two days previous.  Twenty-four years old.  What I remember is his relentless sense of humor as he failed, time and again, to turn in his work.   Jewish funerals take place within 24 hours of a death, so I missed that, but she and I will go over to the house together on Monday.

Another response came from a high school classmate, about a series of suicide-attempt related losses all those years ago.  I did not know about those events, but I recognized the emotional landscape of which she wrote.

Then, today, the wedding of our next-door neighbors' middle daughter.  I tried; I really did.  I do not want to be like the father who wrote the column a year or two ago about not having attended a wedding in the eleven years since his son died.  I want to help my friends celebrate the great events of their lives.  This was our fourth try.  We haven't made it all the way through a single reception.  Tonight's final straw came when the bride's two sisters and brother sang "Here, There, and Everywhere" to her.  Before dinner, I might add. The seven children of our combined families played together for years; both families were filled with joy and laughter.  Theirs still is.

A new friend is doing the Overnight Out of the Darkness Walk in Seattle tonight, in honor of her son who died just a year ago, on the morning of his high school graduation day.  I had toyed with the idea of going to that walk (in one of my favorite cities) - until I broke my ankle.  I wish I were there anyway.

I am completely depleted.  Whatever I wrote about finding hope, whatever courage people saw in that   piece . . .   . Not tonight.  I just want my son back. That's the only thing I ever really want.

I can't imagine how I am going to lead worship tomorrow morning.  One of these days I'm going to have to preach so far ahead of myself that I'm going to fall flat on my face.

The Grace of an Ordinary Day

More than a decade ago, I took a graduate course entitled "Narrative and Spirituality" from the priest who would become the person I refer to as spiritual director emeritus.  (Although, having made a week-long retreat with him during Lent, perhaps I should dispense with the emeritus title.)

One of our assignments was a brief essay, "Grace Notes," by Brian Doyle, today a well known spiritual essayist, novelist and magazine editor, but at the time a voice new to me. 

Our family that fall was emerging from a dense, dark couple of years, from a sequence of events that, frankly, would have ripped most families to shreds.  Each day had required us to draw upon every resource of strength and creativity at our disposal, and then some more.  When Brian Doyle mentioned his wife's prayer for "the grace of an ordinary day," I glommed onto her words as I might have seized a literal lifebuoy out in the middle of the ocean. And I kept looking, for ordinary grace, and even sometimes for the grace of a whole, entire, sunrise-to-midnight ordinary day.

A few years later our Josh died of suicide, and eventually I began to come to terms with the reality that "the grace of an ordinary day" would forever elude me.

Or, at any rate, an ordinary day as I imagined such a thing.  I liked the ones filled with the heat and sunshine of summer, bare feet on a sticky kitchen floor, shorts and t-shirts for everyone, damp beach towels hanging over the deck railing, popsicles the chief ritualistic offering  of the afternoon, and small blond heads (mine) and dark (my next-door neighbor's) dancing through lawn sprinklers.  Those were my idea of grace-filled ordinary days.

After Josh died, I was stuck with mostly terrible, awful, tortured days.  Days, and then weeks, and then months, in which it seemed to me that crawling under the bed and staying there would have been infinitely preferable to going to one more seminary class or encountering one more person seemingly in possession of the grace of an ordinary day.

These days, though, it is occurring to me that, while I would trade it all in a second to get Josh back, while I would hand it all over in exchange for his life and never look back even once, I am now in possession of the grace of other kinds of ordinary days.  Days I would never experienced had I in fact slammed the door to my house never to emerge again, which I think others would have understood better than they understood my return to seminary.

A fairly typical day for me:

Listening to someone speak of grief and doubt and fear and isolation and longing,

Reading and researching and praying with Biblical texts and commentaries,

Praying with someone terrified of chemo or devastated by widowhood or caring for a friend or relative in distress,

Conducting tedious and tense calls and meetings at which major issues are at stake,

Enjoying discussions with colleagues about lectionary texts and theology and day-to-day life,

Exploring questions about career discernment and relationships and living arrangements (because I have young adults in my life),

Writing sermons and essays and presentations to which other people will actually listen.

*****

In fact, all of the above took place in one form or another just a few days ago.

And I still got to do laundry and run errands and watch Fargo.

Many of those things would have taken place had Josh lived and had I finished seminary and been called to ministry, all as planned. 

 

But they would not have taken place in the same way.  

 

I listen to people in anguish differently than I might have had I not known how completely fear and despair can take hold of your ice-cold bones and frozen veins.   

 

I read Scripture and theology differently than I did before urgent questions of life and resurrection became my most personal moment-by-moment concerns.  ("Where is my son?" wails one mother. "I know my son is in heaven," asserts another.  I myself have no idea about these matters, I conclude.  All in the space of twenty-four hours.) 

 

I have a much better sense of priorities.  And I feel (almost!) no need at all to provide answers, as there are so few that we can accept and even fewer that we can comprehend.

Like, maybe only one, which is Love, and which is itself difficult to accept and nearly impossible to comprehend.

So, while I am envying some of my friends their leisurely retirement days, and many their travels, and others their restored homes and well-maintained gardens, I find that I am, surprisingly, also grateful for the grace of ordinary days in ministry, days in which I see and hear things I so easily might have missed.

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? 


 

Funeral Home Calling Hours

In a little while a friend is picking me up so that we can go to the calling hours for our other friend's son.  Here is what I remember from 5.5 years ago:

 

My surviving son said that the place looked like, ummmm, I believe that what he said was  "a Vegas brothel."  I trust that that remark emerged out of imagination rather than experience.  I believe that it had to do with the overdone décor, particularly the drapes and upholstery.

 

The event seemed very stilted at first.  People began to sit quietly in the chairs ringing the rooms.  I went over to a group of Josh's college friends and urged them to move about freely and talk among themselves.  "One would think that you were in a funeral home.  Oh.  I guess you are."  Yes, I actually said that.

 

One consequence of the above was that, as the afternoon and evening wore on, the crowd became a large crush of people.  We abandoned all sense of a receiving line and wandered about greeting our guests.

 

I was surprised by who showed up.  A lot of it I could not remember afterward, and I had to look at the guestbooks to see who had been there.  But there are moments that remain clear to me.  A lawyer colleague whom I had not seen in a decade, but who had lost a college-age daughter years earlier.  Parents and children from the Jewish school in which I had taught ~ a brave move on their part on many levels.  My cousin who flew in from Chicago and had only an hour to spare before his flight back.  Two nuns who had made the four hour drive from southern Ohio and had to make their return trip that night.  That's why I'm going today, because I remember those moments.

 

And something I learned.  I had been most opposed to the urn being "displayed" at the funeral home and at the service the next day.  The funeral home director kept talking about "closure," which I consider a BS kind of word.  But there it was.  And at one point I glanced in that direction, and saw Josh's ex-girlfriend, fiancee' really, standing alone in front of the table.  She quietly blew a kiss in the direction of the urn and mouthed the word, "Good-bye."  So.  I thought.  Maybe it is of some use. 

 

 

 

Weirdness

This in-between locale is . .  weird.

 

I have a new church in which I barely know anyone. I will, but I don't yet.

 

It's not a situation fraught with the intensity of my first call two years ago, when I was being ordained and dealing with impending breast cancer surgery.  And also when I had no real understanding of small church communities.

 

Absent that combination of intensity and ignorance, I am beginning to understand how very much I am changed since Josh's death.  I feel removed from my life, in the sense that my capacity for wholehearted openness has vanished.  I don't think it's coming back.

 

You know how people with brain damage can experience a healthy portion of the brain beginning to take over for the area of loss?  Somehow the neurons fire themselves up in different ways than they have before.  They stretch to learn something new and, if luck is on their side, they get the job done, but it's not the same.

 

Yeah.  It's a weird sensation.