Was It Worth It? A Mary Meditation (Part 2)

When she was young, after the angel had come and after she visited with her cousin Elizabeth, Mary was said to have sung her own song of praise to God:

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.  Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.  His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.  He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.  He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.  He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.

It is not the song of a young women, though.  Rather, it is the song of a woman who has lived long upon this earth . . . the song of a woman who knows things . . . sees things . . . remembers things. . . knows things.  It is Wisdom’s song.  Or is it?

This song of Mary is extraordinary as the song of a woman young or old, experienced and wise in the ways of the world or untried and unknowing in her vision of the future . . . for how could a young woman speak such keen prophetic words about the powerful and the lowly . . . the rich and the hungry?  And how could an old woman bereft of her child sing of her blessedness?  Proclaim through the generations to all who would ask that it was worth it?

Through the pain and the heartache . . . in anticipation of the joys and tears yet to come . . . in fulfillment of a divine invitation . . . in retrospection about how that promise played out in real time . . . and all evidence to the contrary, does Mary proclaim through the ages, Oh yes.  Yes.  It was worth it.  From the very beginning . . . from the moment Father Abraham set out on his journey along God’s path . . . to now, when my son is no more and like Rachel before me do I mourn all mother’s sons, none more than my own . . . to future generations who will see the promises play out in their own lives, their own time . . . and all evidence to the contrary, I give my own magnifying yes, my own witness . . . all evidence to the contrary, it was always worth it. . . He was always worth it.

Sacrifice

It’s not a popular word in its full panoply of meaning where I live.

Ones doing sacrificial things tend not to speak of them in such ways.

Others, ascribing the impetus, the motive, speak all too freely.

We are hardly edified by either approach.

Here’s the thing we perhaps miss about sacrifice.

To sacrifice, to give up something for someone else, presumably for their benefit, has a cost.  

Sacrifice is the cost.

The learning curve is just that – what is learned in the aftermath probably cannot be known in the doing.

Hence to sacrifice is an on-going thing.

At the time of the sacrificial act, one may know one is making a sacrifice.  What one cannot know is that the thing surrendered, given up, lost, is surrendered, given up, lost, forever.

It does not come back.

It does not replenish.

It does not magically reappear.

It is simply gone.

There is a humbling enormity to it.

When something is lost forever, that loss is carried – always.  

It shapes and redefines.

It changes the person.

There is a lessening.

Maybe it was worth it.

Maybe not.

But there is always a cost.

There, perhaps, should our honor guards, our parades, our memorials and speeches be gathered – there, where people in ways visible and invisible, where acts small as well as large upon the pages of history, where the ways things could have been and the way things are eternally co-exist.  

For whether the cost be counted or not, it is always lived and lived with.

There is sorrow in that.

And whether it should be honored or not, it should be noted.  And noticed. 

The Silent Witness of a Filled Sanctuary

I am tempted to conclude that . . . to believe that . . . always and ever . . .

Love begets love . . . but not always
Kindness given is kindness returned . . . but not always

And yet, and still, every now and then, we humans get it, like the proverbial Three Bears, just right.  And when we do, it is whelming and overwhelming.

One of those every now and then deeds is the act of showing up.  That’s it – showing up. . . being there . . . what we preacherly people like to refer to as the ministry of presence . . . and sometimes, that’s all about being a face in the crowd, for sometimes, it is the crowd that is the whelming thing . . . the silent witnesses to one’s grief and pain and joy and remembering . . . as in a funeral . . .

Last night was one of those times when love begot love and kindness kindness . . . and the husband who was saying his faith farewells to his dear companion beheld the crowd and pronounced himself overwhelmed . . .

The next day, I am struck by so many I know who eschew things like funerals because . . . why?  Because they are so hard?  Perhaps.  So final?  Surely.  So sad?  Definitely.

But sometimes, we’re called to do the hard, the final, the sad thing . . . sometimes it isn’t about us at all.  Sometimes it’s just about being another face in the crowd of surrounding love.

So the next time you dither, not wanting to go, you might think about that and you might go . . . go because you need to . . . go because you want to . . . and even when you don’t want to, go, because your presence matters to those most heart-struck in their loss . . . your presence will whelm them . . . and that is a good thing.

Prodigals Don't Always Leave By Choice

In the early summer of 2005, I traveled to Colombia with CPT.  Among so many others, we meet an older couple whose son was murdered 18 years previous because he went fishing on the wrong day in the wrong place – or so another man with a gun thought at the time.  I wonder if that man still lives and what he thinks of that life he took now.  I wonder if there were other lives taken.  I wonder the cost to him in the taking.  I wonder about wildernesses of our own making, we human-war-making beings.  These are the things I wonder now.

What I wrote, what I prayed at the time, was all about these parents growing old without their boy . . .

Dona Marcelena and Don Juan sit and speak quietly.  Don Juan tells us, “we do not manage the fear; the fear manages us,” describing nights of belly-gripping terror, spent listening to every sound of the forest, every rustling leaf a potential FARC, ELN or para.

O God, forgive us that in their old age, we visit on such folk fear and not peace, sorrow and not joy at a race well run.

They have had 16 children, but even 15 will not make up for the one who is missing from their table.

Prodigals do not always leave by choice.

What Would I Say?

If faced with someone I love who is about to kill themselves, what would I say?

Unfortunately, I know what I would say, because I’ve said it.  Maybe you have too.  Maybe it made a difference.  Maybe it didn’t.

What would I say to God?  Maybe where were you?  What were you doing?  Why didn’t you stop it?  Where were you?

If I were God, what would I say?  All will be well?  I am with you?  Fear not?  Were you there?

If I were talking to a father brought to the death of his son, what would I say?  If I were God, I could say I know how you feel.  But I’m not and I don’t.  I’m not God and I don’t know how it feels.  So what would I say?  I am so sorry.  

Not . . . he’s in a better place.  He may be – and so I believe – but what comfort is that in the keening pain of that excruciating loss?

Not . . . it was meant to be – for I do not believe that.

Not . . . I’m sorry he’s in hell, do you know Jesus?  It makes Jesus trite . . . and mean . . . and stupid . . . and if I know nothing else, I know Jesus is not trite or mean or stupid.

Yet the question remains, why is it so very easy to know what I would not, should not, say, yet is it so very hard to know what to say?  Maybe because saying isn’t the point, isn’t the needed thing, for words are not truth.  And sometimes, they’re camoflauge for what is just too hard to name – this happened – it is real – and there just aren’t words. . .

If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves . . . and keeps us present before God.  –Rom 8.26-28

Digging Out the Bullet

Pain – the deep pain
the walking with
every day so much
you almost forget
it’s there – almost –
pain – the hard-shell
part of a past that
can’t bear telling let
alone retelling pain

that pain – bastard
betrayer that it is –
bubbles up out of the
formless void that is
future past
(to borrow from the Moody Blues)
into the now that isn’t hurting
present and stabs its knife
right into the muscle of you
and does not stop

so that you are reduced
(why do tears reduce
rather than enlarge
can someone please tell me?)

because John F. Kennedy died . . .
50 years ago

brings you sobbing bent over

because a son killed
himself after trying to stab
a father along for the ride
50 miles away . . .

brings you screaming your agony
into the loneliness of the space
that surrounds you

because someone looks you in the face
and declares that you are the kind
who tricks and deceives and cheats
your way into advantage
50 gulps of air hence

and you drown
in the shock and awe of it all
as war is declared far too
quickly for you to pull
out your white truce flag
always carried in your back pocket
for just such occasions as this
when one son blends into another
into a president into a child into
a black man into a baptism you
never wanted . . . never – wanted
never but there you are and the
never is now always for this
hurt, these memories, that pain
shall never leave

oh, you’ll carry it better some days
than others, for that is the way of
things – and the calm bit in your
head tells you this is just not a
better day and it too shall pass
and you know it is truth yet it
is no comfort, this knowing
and so you scream – for if you
do not you will go mad
may have already done

and gritting your teeth,
you rip the knife out of your
flesh and slowly stand aright
for that too is the way of things

and even as the scabbing crusty
overlay of time healing crap
lie shit does its work and tries
to call it good, you - wound
gaping for the unseeing world
to see – walk on – what else?

and then you look down and see
the knife in your own hand
and the gaping wound of your
own flesh and the bloody
bullet lying on the ground
and a small grim smile appears
physician healing herself . . . again

maybe God makes you feel better
he’s never done so for me –
all he’s ever done for me
is pick up the pieces
it’s not nothing,
but shit God, I thought you
were a better surgeon than that –
look what you’ve done to my leg

Words No Words

A student is killed in an ‘altercation’ with a security official on Liberty University’s campus.  Not so far away, a local politician is stabbed and his son is dead.

Details, salacious details, are sure to follow.

Analyses, over-the-counter diagnoses, pieties and impieties will be spoken.

Tear Drop Window, Monument
Valley - photo at Luminous Landscape

Here, in this now, before the storm following the storm of personal tragedy writ large, I sit and wonder with a  friend about all the little things . . . the little problems we call to mind to remind ourselves that our lives aren’t so bad . . . the little things that for some become the big things . . . mounting and mounting until the explosion comes – the small explosions of angry words and harsh judgments or the bigger ones . . . none of them can be taken back, can they?

The writer of that book was wrong I think – that book that told us not to sweat the small stuff and that it’s all small stuff – yeah – I think he might be wrong – I think it might all actually be big stuff.

I have no answers, only questions – and tears.

What do we do to keep the pressures from mounting?

How do we help each other not let the little things pile up?

What does it take to change a course that in hindsight can seem inevitable?

I wish I knew.

Lord, oh Lord, how I wish I knew.

The Gift & Curse of Time

Yesterday Celia and I each ordered the same sandwich.

We were hopeful with anticipation.

Alas, disappointment is sometimes a sandwich.

And for me, at least, a wee bit of irritation – you can do better than this.

Today, amusement and pleasure anticipated that Celia and I share the memory of the same bad sandwich.  At some other meal, we will remember and we will laugh at how we both pushed the bad bread (how can bread be bad?  Trust me.  It can.) to the side and settled for mediocre innards, the one time in his waiting career the young man probably never asked how the meal was – fortuitous.

The gift of time is also its curse: so precious, we want more, as anticipated future so quickly moves to remembered past.  Knowing it will all end for each of us some day becomes its own disappointment, pain, anger, and loss.  And that’s the thing, isn’t it?  If time weren’t such a gift, we wouldn’t mind its loss so much.

May your times be filled with precious memories in the making, now and evermore.

Rachel Weeps: On the Loss of a Child

A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, 

Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, 

because they are no more.

                                                    –Matthew 2.18
                                                      (quoting Jeremiah31.15)

On the Roman Catholic calendar, today is the Feast Day remembering the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, the boy children who, in the Matthean narrative of the birth of Christ, are the collateral damage to Herod’s effort to find and kill the Messiah.

On such a day, it is common and appropriate to remember the thousands and hundreds of thousands of children who die each year from poverty, as casualties of war, living in refugee camps, as part of the exploitation and human trafficking that views children as commodity rather than human being to be treasured.

But this Feast Day, the trembling of Rachel’s shoulders seems much closer to home than what even horrifying statistics can convey.

My own father died of cancer in 1993.  He was in his early 60's and his own mother, my Grandma, in her 80's.

For all my sorrow at my own loss and my sadness for my mother’s loss of her husband, it is always the vision of my Grandma, Dad’s own mother, that draws my mind’s eye backward to that time.

I can still remember Grandma standing there at the casket, alone, allowing herself no comfort from any quarter.

Grandma hovering over the body of her baby boy is the loneliest sight I have ever seen.

A mother then myself, I understood and my heart broke for her . . . no parent, no matter how old, should have to stand in such a place mourning such a loss.

This feast day, this day set aside to remember those murdered out of the fear and jealousy of a tyrant who would be threatened by a toddler, I am mindful of all the parents who have stood and watched as their own children have returned to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

However your own child was lost to you . . . whether in the vagaries of the madness of war . . . or the puzzling loss of the body turned against itself with disease . . . car accidents or random unexpected tragedy . . . suicide or homicide . . .

This day and always, my prayers are with you.  I can only try to imagine the depth of your loss.  I know not the source of your comfort.  I hate that you have suffered in such a way.  I ache for your loneliness.  And I cling to the belief that God stands ever at your side as you keep your own vigils, weeping your tears, crying your anguish.  I know not whether there be any comfort in that presence.  I only know that you and your pain are not forgotten and neither is the one you loved so much that you risked giving life where it might be taken away.

May Comfort and Peace find you and grant you rest.

Where I Live . . . Part 2

Where I live . . .
a neighbor brings by a couple of garbage bags full of black walnuts
just because he picked them up
and knows I love them
even though I was too lazy to join him in picking
them up from the ground the other day
Hulled, they lay on newspaper
in the garage
drying out a bit
waiting to be shelled

Where I live, if I get too frustrated or too lazy to shell them myself,
I can always call Lucy
down the street
busy shelling her own nuts
oxygen tank at her side
hammer and the skill of generations
in her hands

Where I live, Keri is busy making applebutter
and when I FB to ask if I can come over just to inhale
she laughs and messages me back
to go stand outside
the window’s open
so I should be able to smell all the
applebutter I want
all I have to do
is stand in the cool night air
and breathe in

Where I live
when tragedy strikes
as it did this week
with Levi's death in a car accident
Everyone pitches in to help
food comes unbidden
and even out here in the country
FB messages of love and comfort fly
across the cyber lines of connection
even as we all reel from the news
the loss
three young men in a year
Anyplace the loss is writ large on the hearts of those close
in a small place, the loss is writ on the hearts and faces
of everyone . . . because everyone is close

Where I live. . .
black walnut cracking time
and applebutter making time
and crying-for-the-ones-who-died-too-young-time
are all coming in at once this year . . .
Pray for us, won’t you . . .
as we pray for you . . .

How the Light Gets In

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack in everything 

That's how the light gets in. 

                                          Chorus from Anthem by Leonard Cohen

I sit in a workshop at CPT’s Peace Congress in Chicago.  I’m not sure what it’s about, but clay will be involved.  And I am more than ready for a bit of play in my spiritual life.

Photo by Tim Nafziger courtesy of CPT

The facilitator hands us each a ball of clay, inviting us to shape it however we like.  As we press and mold and shape, she speaks. . . gently . . . quietly . . . she speaks of loss, for there is much loss in the room . . .

And she speaks of allowing the cracks into our creations . . . quoting Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, she reminds us of letting the light in . . . of seeking and finding the spaces and gullies and gulches in our faith . . . of looking there . . . in the broken places . . . for God’s shining . . .

I glance around . . . all have created small pots of beauty and symmetry . . . all save me . . . my creation is a broken thing . . . finger gouges mark it within and without . . . cracks and holes where my hands have punched through, at first unaware, mark this misshapen thing that I begin to see as me . . . broken and bent, chock full of holes, uneven, barely standing . . . and yet somehow letting in the light . . .

I start to press the clay back into a ball and begin again, aiming for beauty this time, when something stays my hands . . . no . . . this is true . . . and so I keep it . . . and a couple of Sundays from now, I will stand at the communion table and pour the wine into the misshapen clay . . . and the wine will pour out . . . like Jesus, poured not in, but out, for us . . . and the light will come in.