An Eternity Together

This Sunday’s Gospel invites us to continue circling the tree in the morning mist, trying to find the bird that is making the music that slows our pulse, softens our step, and pushes back on our preoccupations and worries and fears, as long as we keep listening.  Jesus is talking with his disciples again about being gone, and remaining.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he begins, knowing that this is not a head trip, but a journey of consideration by the softer part of his male companions, the more vulnerable.  He will leave them.  All of us leave each other, don’t we?   We know this is true because we have been left by others, others who have been parents or friends, or God help us, children. 

Jesus is leaving, but he will remain, he says.  And in this is our greatest hope, of never being abandoned, never being alone.  The film “Cherry Blossoms” finds Rudi, losing his wife as we who watch know something that he does not, that he himself is dying.  That we know allows us to see his days of living after his Trudi’s death as his most precious.  And in these days, he circles the tree in the mist of death and listens to the silence, and tells his children “I want to know where Trudi is!”

In life, she attempted to dance him, to bring him to the miracle of the moment, to the intimacy of touch and movement, of being one.  It was not until she was gone that he allowed himself to be surrounded by her, to be drawn in to her, to understand that he and she were indeed one.

Perhaps it is the same with us Christians, we who struggle with the “gone-ness” of Jesus and circle the tree in the silence and mist, trying to recall the song that we have heard sung from time to time, wondering if there ever really was a bird, or if it was just our imagination.  We want to know where God is!

And here He is all along, so inextricably wound in us, in the love that is beyond imagining, but is hinted at by duets in dance and song.  Perhaps that is why it is these duets that can move us to tears?  Perhaps it is the insinuation of voices and arms that are the notes of that birdsong finding our ears through the mist of our hoping.  Yes, it is real.  It is not just my imagination.

Grieving Mothers

Mathilde Roussel Giraudy "lifes of grass"

The pastor’s Mothers’ Day homily was masterful…but in the end, he was just a guy, well-honed logic too dull to cut through the binding cord of loss.

The Opera Turandot was written by Giacomo Puccini – up to the first few lines of the final duet, when the composer died of a heart attack while being treated for throat cancer.  The pastor, a lover of Italian Opera, waxed romantic, inspired by the idea that Puccini’s students completed the work he had begun, allowing it to become one of the world’s greatest and most often-performed operatic works.  In the same way, he said, that God’s saving work is to be completed by the Church, a mother takes God’s miracle of conception and completes it by nurturing it with her own life.

Wow.  I imagined myself shouting “Bravo!” at the end of his homily, as one might do at la Scala in Milan, where Turandot was debuted.  How elegantly he had touched each mother’s heart, ennobling them with the holiness of their charge, to bring God’s work to fruition.  I did not shout.  This was, after all, not an opera hall, but a typically conservative church.  But I did hold on to that glow of appreciation for the composition and delivery of his homily.  Mother completes the unfinished work of God.  Wow.

Then I saw Sarah at the other end of our pew, and tears came to my eyes.  She had lost her son a year ago.  God’s miracle of conception entrusted to her for completion….  I thought of the burden of maternity, of carrying out the work that God has begun in creating a life, and tears flowed

As If Death Does Not Matter

Three years ago today the unthinkable happened.  As Kathy and I were packed up for our trip to the airport after a perfect visit with my family in Phoenix, my cell phone rang, and we learned that our niece had been killed in a horrible traffic accident. 

In three weeks or so the unthinkable will be remembered in Christian churches across the globe.  The only Son of God, sent to save mankind from our self-destructive path, will be humiliated, tortured, and hung on a cross as a spectacle.  And he will die.

This Sunday’s Gospel, a foreshadowing and harbinger, is John’s story of Jesus raising Lazarus.  Martha and Mary were upset with Jesus, the great healer, for not coming to save Lazarus from death, failing to show up to heal him.  We know the story.  Jesus raises him from the dead.

Yesterday morning I met with the group of men, husbands and fathers who look at the Gospels for help in playing those roles as we should.  One of them, Rick, a young father with two toddlers, found it interesting that before raising Lazarus from the dead, he asked Martha whether she believed that he was the Son of God.  She said she did, and in the moments between her expression of belief and her brother returning to life, this young father said that Martha had come, in her faith, to realize that it really didn’t matter whether Jesus could do anything about her brother’s death.   Rick considered the possibility that if Martha really believed that in that faith would be acceptance of everything, freedom from distress, even in the face of the death of her brother.

I came home from the meeting thinking how clever these gospels leading up to Easter are, how they give us three weeks to get used to the idea that death is not all it is cracked up to be, so that when Jesus dies, we will look beyond his death, and ultimately beyond our own.  My head could get around that, and I smiled.  

But just now, as I left a message on Mollie’s parents’ phone trying to express inexpressible feelings of condolence, I felt the reality of this in my heart, that the journey to accept death and not blame God is a tough one, perhaps because it is so unthinkable.  Maybe that’s why sitting in the story and becoming Lazarus, or Jesus, or Mary, or Martha might help us get beyond our heads, that grace might find some fragile foothold, someplace in the broken soil of our hearts in which to dig roots of hope and healing, where death doesn't matter.