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

Friday Firsts (Friday Five)

"I'm on a vacation week and in between trips, so it's a good time for a Friday Five from Julie:

This is my very first Friday Five!

Well, actually, that’s not entirely true, I did a guest spot a couple years ago. But, I’m going to be the new third Friday Gal for the next wee while.

 So, I thought we could talk about some firsts this Friday. I have just returned from my annual holiday, and this year’s was very much family oriented. My beloved’s older son lives in Boston, my middle son lives in North Vancouver (between us we have 7 grown up children) so we travelled all the way from Scotland to visit with them, and each was a first time visit. While in Boston we spent some quality time with our granddaughter… Our first!

Play here in the comments, or on your blog, five of your firsts, here are some ideas to get you started. Don’t forget to post a link when you play!"

1. Can you remember the first time you travelled a long way to meet someone special?

I can't!  My extended family and their friends all lived in the same general area when I was growing up, so when we traveled, it was to visit other places, not other people, and to go far away to school.

 2. Share a memory of a first visit to a new country, state or place that was unexpected or unusual.

My grandmother took me on a number of marvelous trips, the first one being to Williamsburg for a week when I was ten and in fifth grade.  It was a great surprise to stop by her house on the way home from school, as I did every afternoon, and discover a large white invitation awaiting me, inviting me to accompany her on an overnight train trip and then for a week visiting the sites of the history that so fascinated me!

 3. What is the first thing you do on waking each day? Is it always the same?

Other than the necessities of life . . . I try to get out and walk first thing every day.  If it's a relaxed kind of day, I indulge myself in reading before I'm even out of bed.

 4. Have you met up with other RevGals? Maybe at an event?

The first RevGal I met was a seminary classmate ~ back when we were all anonymous, she heard me talking over lunch about a blog post, and said "You're on RevGals!" Yikes!  Since then, I have met many others, most recently a group at Fthe estival of Homiletics in Denver  in May and then a group of UCC RGs at their annual meeting here in Cleveland this past summer.

 5. Is this your first Friday Five? If not, can you remember the first time you played?

No IDEA when the first one was.  I'm a pretty erratic player . . .

Wisdom Calls (Sermon)

The first thing I want you to do this morning is to look at the first banner up here to your right – the banner that proclaims “Light.” I don’t know whether or not you know – I didn’t until a couple of weeks ago – that these banners were created by a very young man, the young man who was to become SA’s son-in-law.  I often pray with these banners, using them to imagine God’s calling and our response, but I did not know how they had come to hang here.  And I think it’s quite remarkable that such a young person should have so beautifully captured the words, and most especially the word “light.”  If you walk up to the banner, you’ll see that the light is varying shades of white and pink against a background of different hues of blue – just wonderful.

The word “light” today comes to us first in how we are invited to understand Wisdom.  Wisdom in the Bible is characterized as a woman, as Lady Wisdom, who is a mysterious extension or part of God.[1] In the Book of Proverbs, we hear her claim to have been present with God at the creation of the world.  The Book of Proverbs is where we usually learn about her, and where the words of the cover of our bulletin come from.  Those words are from one of today’s official readings, and they tell us that Wisdom calls out in the streets.  She is, in other words, a public figure, out among the people, reaching to us in community.

 

But there’s another place in which we learn about Wisdom – in a book called Wisdom of Solomon, which is found in the Catholic Bible, but not in the Protestant version.  And it’s in this wisdom book that we hear about Wisdom as more dazzling even than light.  Listen again:

For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of God’s goodness. . . .  She is more beautiful than the sun, and excels every  constellation of the stars. Compared with the light she is found to be superior, for it issucceeded by the night, but against wisdom evil does not prevail.

So Wisdom reflects and mirrors and images light and the goodness of God, and is superior to light itself.  As beautiful as our banner is, as powerful and bright as light is, they are only reflections of Wisdom herself, that all-encompassing, deeply-pervading source of knowledge and of discernment, and that grace-filled companion to God.   

We see Wisdom in another form today as well – in the form of Jesus himself.  We know that Jesus identifies himself as light – “I am the light of the world” he says in the Gospel of John – and is also identified with wisdom. In Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians, we are told that “he is the source of [our lives] in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God . . .”.  So Jesus is light, and more than light – Jesus is wisdom.

 

In today’s gospel passage, Jesus asks his disciples who they think he is.  And it is Peter who answers clearly and without equivocation, “You are the Messiah.”  You are the anointed one. You are the one who has come to restore us to life.  You are the one.

 

Jesus goes on to provide something of a job description for the Messiah.  The Messiah will suffer, he says, and be killed.  And rise again – but it’s too late – Peter is already protesting.  And Jesus, who needs support, not dissent, at this point, become angry, and tells Peter that he has his mind set on human things rather than divine things.  “Get behind me, Satan!”  And then Jesus tells his disciples, and thus us, “For those who want to save their lives will lose them, and those who lose their lives for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save them.”

 

The Christian life – the life of light and wisdom -- is about recognizing and following Jesus – even into difficult places.  Into place where we lose that which we think of as our lives.

Light, and wisdom are not all about Easy Street.  The light shines, and the darkness does not overcome it, but the light shines on some pretty tough spots, on some rugged roads and in some dark places. 

Places not unlike the one in which we find ourselves today.

Today, we are called to vote to close our church, to bring our congregational life to an end.

Today, we are called to be a community of wisdom and discernment.  A community which listens to Wisdom call and which follows Jesus, Light of the World and Wisdom of God.

 

In the wisdom of our Presbyterian forbears, we look for wisdom in community.  We are not a church which places its reliance in bishops or in councils of elders far removed from us.  Although it is the Presbytery which officially plants and which closes congregations, it is we, the congregation, who bear the weight of the responsibility for this decision, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  Under the guidance of Wisdom herself.  Under the guidance of Jesus himself.

 

And that is as it should be.  We believe that each one of us can hear and trust in what God has to say to us.  We believe that God speaks through community – that what we understand of God, we can test in the community of faith, in the historical community which speaks through Scripture, and in the contemporary community – us, speaking though our prayer and our conversation and our love for God and for one another. 

It might be easier to let someone else carry the weight.  It might be easier to turn to some sort of hierarchy, and let the decision be made elsewhere, by others.  But that is not what Presbyterians do. 

And so I urge you today: Let your voice be heard.  Let your vote be counted.  Several of you have told me that you’re not sure that you can cast your vote today.  But it is a great privilege, a great gift from God, to be a member of a congregation which makes its decisions in community, by voting.  It is also a great call to faithfulness: to understand what it means to be stewards of all that God has given us. 

 

And so: what wisdom do we bring to our discernment?  What light can be shed upon our decision-making this afternoon?  I want to suggest three qualities needed for discernment[2] which we have tried to exercise for the past year and which we are called to bring to our vote today:

The first is openness.  “We must approach our decision with an open mind and open heart.”  I do believe that many hearts here have softened and opened in the months just behind us, as we have come to understand that the old ways no longer suffice and that God is asking us to be willing to trust in something new.  Remember that unfolding trust we talked about last week in the form of that wet origami that unfolds, that OPENS, into graceful and surprising curves?  That’s what we are called to emulate.  We cannot discern for the future if we insist on closing our doors around the past and on locking ourselves in to a season whose purpose has expired. We are called to open our hearts and minds to the reality that what God has in store for us is not what we have known, to the consistent truth of our faith that God is always preparing us for new life – for resurrection life.

The second quality of wisdom to which we are called at a time of discernment is generosity.  “To enter into a decision-making process with . . .  openness requires a generous spirit with which we, with a largeness of heart, put no conditions on what God might call us to. God is asking us to give ourselves away to God with . . . no strings.  God is asking us to consider both present and future in the most generous way possible.  We in this congregation have many gifts to share, gifts which have been honed and which have flourished right here at Boulevard.  And now we are called to be good and generous stewards, of both a building that we ourselves can no longer afford, and of the gifts which God is calling us to take and share elsewhere.  If we are open to God in discernment, then we can also be generous with God in discernment, as God is generous with us.

And the third, the third quality of wisdom for decision-making is courage.  The openness and generosity we are talking about demands courage, for God is asking something difficult, challenging, and risky of us. It takes courage to give up control and in trust in God’s plans.  It takes courage to open ourselves to the future, to be generous when we do not know the outcome, and to act when the cost is high.  It takes courage to follow Jesus, who tells us that his path involves a cross – that to journey with him is to know sadness and uncertainty, suffering and sorrow.   To give up even our lives.  Even our lives at Boulevard.

But you, my friends, are up to this task.  You are up to the call to respond with wisdom and to follow Jesus into unknown territory because you – we – are a resurrection people.  We are an Easter people.

The Christian faith does not end at the cross.  Our lives as Christians will not end with Boulevard’s closing.  The Christian faith, and our lives – as the people of Boulevard, as Presbyterians, as Christians – our faith and our lives are about resurrection.    Unlikely as it may seem to us, those events which look like endings to us are steps on the path toward God’s new creation.

We have a difficult congregational meeting and a hard vote ahead of us.  We cannot deny that.  But let us also not deny – let us remember – that when we vote to close our church, we are voting for life and for resurrection.  We are voting with openness and generosity and courage for a new future, for an Easter future. 

Yes, this looks and feels like the end.    Our experience must be something like that of the the disciples after the crucifixion, when all seemed lost. 

But let us remember: Wisdom is calling.  We are followers of Jesus, Light of the World and Wisdom from God.  Let us respond in wisdom ourselves, and “let [Jesus] Easter in us.”[3]  Amen.

 

 

---

[1] See Wil Gafney, Working Preacher, 9/16/12. http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=13629/

[2] Warren Sazama, S.J., “Ignatian Principles for Decision Making.”  http://www.marquette.edu/faith/ignatian-principles-for-making-decisions.php

[3]

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” 1918.

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

Prayer with the Mothers

One outcome of loss: it does, eventually, create in one a sense of solidarity with others who have experienced something similar.

 

I'm not much for praying for specific outcomes ~ but I do pray for healing, whatever that might mean.

 

And so I pray with the mothers.

 

The mothers whose children are dying, or have died.

 

The mothers whose children are starving.

 

The mothers whose children are refugees.

 

The mothers whose children are immigrants.

 

The mothers whose children will soon be motherless.

 

The mothers whose children are soldiers.

 

The mothers whose children are victims of terrorists.

 

The mothers whose children are terrorists.

 

The mothers whose children walk out into a dangerous world every day.

 

The mothers whose children are being raised by other mothers.

 

The mothers who leave abusive relationships with their precious children and little else.

 

The mothers whose child-daughters are forced into early marriages.

 

I support, in a very small way, an organization called ASCEND, which is helping a small group of young Afghan women climb mountains.  I pray with their mothers, who are watching their daughters take steps that may be dangerous in many ways beyond the physical.

 

I live in a world in which most mothers worry about which pre-school or which soccer team, which wedding caterer or which dress.  Because of my son's death and thanks to the internet, I know many mothers who have lost children ~ but not among my daily life friends.  But also because of our loss, I have a much better understanding than I did of what motherhood is for perhaps the majority of mothers in this world.

 

I don't go into this kind of detail often.  But at least once every day, I simply pray:

 

The mothers.

Scout 'n Me

I haven't yet read Go Set a Watchman, although it's sitting on my ipad, and I don't know that I will.

All of the reasons pro and con have already been thoroughly digested and analyzed on every form of media outlet, and I don't have anything new to offer.

I just have Scout.  And me.

TKM was my first grown-up book.  I read it when I was ten and in fifth grade, mostly with the aid of a flashlight, in the event that one of the real grown-ups would get up in the night to go to the bathroom and see a sliver of light under my door.

I was mesmerized.  I did not know what the word "rape" meant and, when we discussed the book at dinner, my own father, who looks a great deal like Gregory Peck, did nothing to dissuade me from the notion that it meant a violent act by a man against a woman which was, for some reason unclear to me, more heinous that a man pummeling someone of his own gender.

I did not understand anything at all about racial tensions in the South, or anywhere else.  In my rural, all-white world, they were not discussed, at least not in my hearing.  Within the next few years that would change, and I would discover a depth of racism in the extended family of my own dead mother that left me as as stunned as a girl otherwise unexposed to much of the world could be, but at ten I did not understand.

What I did understand was Scout, and Jem, and Dill.

To the extent that TKM is a coming-of-age novel, it was ours.

I was Scout: motherless, feisty, disinterested in convention, absorbed in figuring out a world in which adults played significant but peripheral roles.

My step-brother, same age as me, was Jem: physically bolder and more adept, but still my partner in our age of discovery.

My younger biological brother was Dill: the face of daydreaming innocence in the wake of tragedy, easily overlooked by adults until suddenly and occasionally he wasn't.

The shack down the road was the Radley house, and the elderly owner's German shepherds, lolling in the sun as they stretched across the blacktop between us on our bikes and town with its dime store and ice cream, were our Boo.

The town, a couple of miles down that road, was our Maycomb.  Many of the adults who populate Scout's world were easily recognizable in ours.

I can't relate many of our stories, as they involve how country children with free reign and bicycles spent their time in the early 1960s , and we will probably carry them to our graves.

But I can say that the curiosity, and recklessness, and sometimes courage, and fierce loyalty evinced by the Finch children and their friend Dill were ours.

I'm not sure that, even all these decades later, Jean Louise will speak my story as Scout did.