As many of you know, we managed to get through an important passage in the life of Judson last month - what is, for some of us, the liturgical speed bump known as Easter. We struggle with it less for its magical mystery tour aspects, I think, as for the way its message gets manipulated and abused in Christendom (or Christen-dumb). So we bumble through, finding it easier to dance and sing in the face of mystery than to try to make it the alpha and omega of all that Jesus was.
In more recent years, I've been less preoccupied with Easter than the story that follows - those accounts of Jesus' visitation after resurrection. Because of a series of losses in my own life, I now hear those stories differently; I sense we don't have the full narrative, and the fact that the gospels were recorded well over a half century after Jesus' death suggests to me that time and distance glossed the true feelings of those who saw Jesus after his return.
Someday these texts will be found, the ones that reveal, upon seeing Jesus again, what was really said; things like: "Don't you ever do that again! You scared the hell out of us! And when was the last time you had anything to eat - you look terrible."
When I was little, my only knowledge of loss resided in a book on the top shelf of my parents' bookcase - a slim, pink-jacketed volume called Angel Unaware about the death of the two-year-old daughter of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. How could this tragedy happen to such good and happy people? How could they go on living in the face of such loss?
In fifth grade, I lost a dear cousin my same age to cancer - Charlotte, an utterly charming, radiant girl whose father, my uncle, was a doctor who couldn't save his own child. Because I was in Texas and she lived in Mississippi, it was convenient for me to think she hadn't died but was still at home riding her pony and lighting up everyone's life.
Other relatives died, but of old age - mid-90s, my grandmother at 100 - in ways that seemed as it should be. So my first real, hit-hard feeling of loss was when my husband died (to me). It scraped me out and laid me bare. I was sure there was a visible hole in my torso, a big round hole so obvious you could see blue sky and clouds through it - which I know sounds crazy, given how short I am. The only way to get that effect is if I were standing on a cliff with nothing but vast openness behind me. And that too was how I felt - on the edge of a cliff, and what did it really matter if I took one more step.
Time and distance and understanding closed that wound, but I saw that hole again when my brother lost his son at the age of 16 in a car accident - immediate, unexpected, raw, tragic loss. There was the hole in him. He collapsed and wanted to join his son in death.
Grief is like that. It seizes you and changes your whole body chemistry; it lets your body know it has taken a hit. For a while, you want to join the dead and your body reflects that - you go unnaturally cold and lose survival skills, not wanting to eat, move, or think. I wrote about seeing my brother like that in a poem called "Mostly We Bring Him Hot Tea."
Joan Didion describes this journey well in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking. The criticism of the current stage version of it is interesting - that Vanessa Redgrave has too much inner strength to project this kind of loss. I can understand how that might be - grief wipes you out, even the strongest among us; during the initial period of shock, you feel vaporous, out of body, that a strong wind will blow you away, and perhaps that wouldn't be such a bad thing.
There is a story of a kiko dolphin who lost his mate and swam for days in circles with his eyes closed, unable to even look upon the emptiness of her leaving. Though we now know that elephants do not go to particular graveyards to die, they do have elaborate rituals around death and dying - remaining in a circle, yes, but despairing, and often with their backs turned away from the body, yet still touching it with a back foot. They are obsessed with bones, picking them up and turning them over with their trunks, trying to make sense of them.
And that is our animal instinct too - to try to make sense of it all. I haven't figured out much, but I do know two things: you haven't lived very long if you haven't lost someone or something dear to you; and that the fulcrum of death rests on the balance of when and how.
My father's death this past December at the age of 90 felt like "the way things should be." It is true that it was a loss, mostly a loss of family memory - questions now will arise with no one to recall the answer - and of a loss of a sense of family homestead. But not the loss of a person at that point; he had already left us in so many ways.
Not so with my mother's death five years ago after an operation that seemed to go so well. During the two days she lingered unconscious, my youngest brother was like the elephants, unable to look at her - he sat outside the door of her hospital room, in time he moved just inside, until he finally made it to the foot of her bed and put a hand on her where it stayed until she slipped away from us.
We were devastated. I wondered at that, given that she was a cancer survivor from 1970 and we could have lost her so long ago. But I came to understand the "when" of her death was wrong - we had imagined she would outlive my father and that we would have many good years where we could take care of her and spoil her as she so richly deserved.
I knew my mother was special to me, but I was not prepared for the outpouring of love and grief, in the days after her death, from the community where she had only lived for a few years. The Mexican family next door brought food and told us stories; the Korean family across the street brought flowers and told us stories; and when the Vietnamese neighbors with whom she had shared gardening and recipes learned she was near death, they came immediately to the hospital, stood silently in her room, and wept with us.
I came to see my mother's death as not only a hole in me, but more: a hole in the world, fitted to the outline of her shape. That measure of goodness was now absent, and I felt whatever goodness I could do in life might be done in some way to repair this newly formed hole in the world. And for the first time, I could most fully understand doing something in Jesus' name, as I wanted to call forth goodness - I felt compelled to do goodness - in my mother's name and in her all too palpable absence.
This likely was the point of Jesus' last admonition to his followers: if I have meant anything to you at all, go and do and teach and heal and bring good news to those who need it most. But I doubt that was their first instinct - the scripture speaks of Mary's weeping, of the sadness of his followers as they walked the road to Emmaus. They were all so wrecked with loss, they never seem to recognize him when he first appeared.
Accounts vary about his body - in one he says "touch me not," while on another occasion he says, essentially, go ahead and check out my wounds. "Cling not to me" is another translation, a warning that he would not be staying, and could not be kept back.
There is in all this an interplay with the physicality of the body, for in the moment of loss, that is what is hardest to accept. Words intended for comfort - like "their spirit will be with you always" - fall flat; you don't give a flying flip about their spirit, you want the real, living, breathing body back with you.
It is in this tender moment of physical, stripped-bare, and unbridled longing that we create museums to our loved ones - fearful that if we throw away their physical possessions, we've thrown away them. We build shrines centered on death, not life; in grief, we repeat the story of death to take away its sting. We erect crosses for worship and emboss gold on Bibles to give physicality to our loss, without the harder work of letting the spirit of a life continue to breathe through us. More than that, we want to stay in that grief - a new and comfortable home - because moving from it suggests moving from the harsh reality of no longer living with that physical being in our lives.
So Jesus comes back. His followers implore him to stay with them, if only for a little while. They do so over a meal - a broiled fish meal, like Jesus comes back and can no longer eat fried foods. He takes on the doubting Thomases and he "opens their minds to understand the scriptures." And then he tells them to get up and go and do.
It is this last bit that interests me. After the death of my dear nephew, so young, I kept a book by my bed - it's still there - called A Broken Heart Still Beats. It contains stories of people - many famous, some not - who have lost children. How did they manage that? How did they manage to keep on going and not take that one last step off the cliff?
I get this part: the rules of engagement for this life are that people die, people we care about will die. And it seems to me, from what I can observe, the rule of engagement for a meaningful life is that somehow, even in the face of that cruel and heart crushing reality, the rule of engagement for a meaningful life is to stay engaged. It is in spite of living. I have not mastered it, I just know that's what is required. I mostly resent it, but I know I have to figure it out, and that to be engaged in a meaningful life is part of the legacy I want to pass on.
The last time I flew out of my Texas home was during a terrible thunderstorm - we climbed up and into the blackest clouds I'd ever seen, and I kept thinking, dear God I don't want my last supper to be a crappy bag of peanuts. We bumped our way through a storm that had started the night before and swept away a couple, ripped them right out of their car and in an instant pulled the man downriver to his death. This same storm system was pushing ferociously against us, and yet, as we rose through it, the sky lightened until we were on the other side of the cloud and in divinity - as in the candy - canyons of deep, vast shining whiteness, a brilliance I cannot even now describe.
Do not think we have crossed into the self-help, things-are-darkest-before-the-dawn section here - I am staying in the natural science aisle on this because I was struck with how in nature, and this is just one example, the tension between life-giving and life-taking coexists as the natural order of things, and sometimes, as in this case, within the space of a few feet, perhaps the length of the human body. As with the dual nature of these clouds, we too are expected to hold darkness and light, life and death, in tension and embrace.
Charlotte Mew ends a poem with the following lines:
"Surely the Spring, when God shall please,
Will come again like a divine surprise
To those who sit today with their great Dead, hands in
their hands, eyes in their eyes,
At one with love, at one with Grief: blind to the scattered
things and changing skies."
"At one with love, at one with Grief." Or as the Book of Common Prayer at burial observes: "In the midst of life we are in death." So, as Jesus taught us, we pray and make rituals, and like Jody with his private communion, we comfort ourselves; and in time, we move into communion with others, we pray and make rituals, and like Jody, we take "chameleon" and try to live in this tension where we are asked to at once look like we rejoice in life, while we are yet inwardly trying to make an accommodation for the pain of death.
And together, in communion, we think about ways to stay engaged in this world; to know that we all are struggling with being one with love, and one with grief - to be a happy thing on sad bones - and that through it all, we can say to one another in the darkest passages, we'll walk through this together, and other holy words, like "I've got your back."
Jesus returned to his followers - one last meal, one last reminder that grieving lasts for a season, and then it is time to engage, to find a way to go and do. They went to the mountain, he ascended into the clouds - "go ye" he says - adding, "And remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age."
Come back to the lost and found - you haven't lived very long if you haven't lost something; but try to live a little longer, and let's see if something can't also be found.
For Your Meditation
"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"
- from A Man Without a Country, by Kurt Vonnegut
"I'm a happy thing on sad bones." - Etta James
New Testimony: "The Story of Jody's Communion"
Kaki Roberts writes of her son Jody's ritual communion, after attending Lord's Supper services at "Circle of Mercy", which is the name of their Asheville, NC, church.
In October 2006, my 16-year-old son, Jody, who has Down syndrome, spontaneously chose to receive his first communion in this merciful Circle. He had long ago developed a spiritual practice he calls "playing bread and wine."
Always occurring in the very early morning while his breakfast cooks, it involves a slice of whole wheat bread, a cup of orange juice, a lighted candle, and a hefty Jerusalem Bible, all carefully arranged on the living room rug. First, Jody croons a hymn-like tune in which the garbled word "alleluia" features prominently. Its rousing conclusion is my signal to bless the bread and cup and offer them to the very attentive one-man congregation.
I often explained that he could receive communion in just this way at Circle of Mercy, but Jody always responded, "Maybe later." However, on that October Sunday, Jody grabbed my hand, approached the table, and accepted the body and blood of Jesus with the words "Thank you!" Making a lopsided sign of the cross as he walked back toward his seat, he broke into a glowing smile and rushed to his Dad, exclaiming, "I did it! I had chameleon!" Two weeks later, he held the cup for everyone in the Circle, offering to each recipient a robust "You're welcome!"
"May 1915"
by Charlotte Mew
Let us remember Spring will come again
To the scorched, blackened woods, where the
wounded trees
Wait, with their old wise patience for the
heavenly rain,
Sure of the sky: sure of the sea to send its healing breeze,
Sure of the sun. And even as to these
Surely the Spring, when God shall please,
Will come again like a divine surprise
To those who sit today with their great Dead, hands in
their hands, eyes in their eyes,
At one with love, at one with Grief: blind to the scattered
things and changing skies.
