Fantasy or Autobiography

If our days were predictable and easily managed, we'd be authoring fantasy rather than autobiography. 

Soul Music

If I owned sufficient talent to stand before an expectant crowd just once and 'deliver the goods,' I know what I would sing. No deliberation required.  Of all the options available of harmony and verse from countless ages, I could not help but choose what preaches the sweetest message to me. This is soul music in the deepest key. If ever we could seize its truth, we would move beyond theologizing about grace to hungrily devouring grace as God intended us to know it-- in hopelessness and crisis, in despair and disillusionment, in the sacred simplicity of our humanity.  Read or sing these words alone or aloud and see if they do not touch some hidden hope within. Hallelujah, what a Savior!

God loves a lullaby

In a mother's tears in the dead of night,

Better than a Hallelujah sometimes.

God loves the drunkard's cry

The soldier's plea not to let him die,

Better than a Hallelujah sometimes.

The woman holding on for life

The dying man giving up the fight,

Are better than a Hallelujah sometimes.

The tears of shame for what's been done

The silence when the words won't come,

Are better than a Hallelujah sometimes.

Better than a church bell ringing

Better than a choir singing, singing out.

We pour out our miseries

God just hears a melody.

Beautiful, the mess we are

The honest cries of breaking hearts

Are better than a Hallelujah.

(Lyrics by Amy Grant)

Watermarks of Joy

There is a mourning superimposed on watermarks of joy. Such is the normal human response to a loved one's release from Alzheimer's diseased effects.  I do not hesitate to admit that I already miss Poppi and anticipate the pang of family gatherings without him. My bocce compadre/adversary has been taken from me, but I cannot succumb to the hurt of absence without remembering the last time we played and how I had to remind him every turn of the rules of the game he knew so well. Looking down this week upon his shrinking frame I did not want him to go, yet silently prayed he would.  And now he has, and I appeal to Heaven that the peace that is his will soften the ragged corners of our grief.

Released from Clay

Transition came silently and, as of 4:30 pm this afternoon, Poppi is released from the confused confines of the clay he lived in. I'm not intelligent enough to explain in metaphysical detail what took place when breath and heartbeat ceased, but I am wise enough to admit that I do not know how to explain it. Some say death is the start of a grand journey toward the ultimate reunion. My thoughts run counter to such linear speculation for I see heaven as a matter of dimension, not distance. Heaven is not a far off place--some biblical Land of Oz--and the Father is not, as Bette Midler sang, in the distance. Scripture throbs with passionate cadence that God is near, making heaven not a trip, but a mere step.  It is what Marcus Borg calls, "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time."  For all I'm worth I believe that Poppi has now met Jesus again for the first time, and the only waiting for him is for the opportunity to introduce us.

Nearness of Love

The world becomes so small in a dying person's room.  All concerns shrink to the immediate context.  The waiting turns to remembering out loud in mostly whispered tones, as if sitting in a childhood library.  I must confess that I have become secretly selfish in the interlude. As I witness the tangible compassion of family and the nearness of love in this room, I gain inexplicable comfort in anticipating the same at my own curtain call. There may be nothing nearer to the heart of God than this, to love and be loved in return.

A Room Called Peace

Buechner wrote about A Room Called Remember, but I'm sitting this morning in a room called peace.  There is a giftedness about watching life draw to a gradual close without strain or struggle, silently, peacefully. Poppi's breathing has slowed and will soon stop altogether, and according to every indication it could go momentarily unnoticed when it happens. In a whitewashed room such as this, life scales back to the essentials--a breath, a heartbeat, a swallowing. And suddenly, what matters most in all the world is this sacred sharing of each slowing breath.  Perhaps in the stillness I hear a voice say to me, "Cherish better each moment with the ones you love. Savor more sweetly your own daily gifts."  Bonhoeffer wrote of this in Life Together: 

"We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts... Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things."

Connected Loss

I'm not sure it's possible to endure loss without connecting it to previous, seemingly unrelated losses. When my mother died I instantly began to grieve my father's passing fifteen years earlier. As we face my father-in-law's pending departure, I grieve the loss of my mother three years ago.  There's nothing logical about such a practice of association, but it happens nonetheless.  Perhaps this eases back the corner slightly on the mystery of life--we were created for relationship and cannot understand life in isolation. Each is a part of another, even without an associated genealogy.  I think I'm only beginning to gain an elementary understanding of the inherent value of humanity to humanity.

Reason with Grief

You can't reason with grief. Every evidence indicates my father- in- law will soon lose his struggle with Alzheimer's.  He's been declining for more than two years, so logic declares that this is for the better. Reason chimes in that Poppi really left us some time ago.  And theology whispers he'll soon be in a better place.  I cannot and would not argue against logic, reason, or theology. The fact of the matter is, I agree. Alzheimer's is an insidious mystery and release from its ghastly grip can be nothing but positive.  Having admitted all associated truth, the intense sense of loss weighs heavy.  It hurts to lose a family member we love. It wounds to know we'll never see him again in this life.  Try as I might, I can't reason with grief.

Daydreaming Heaven

I enjoy waking early, but rarely do much more with the stillness than accompany morning coffee with prayerful meditation.  These are not moments for doing so much as being. Reflection fuels the later doing. This winter morning I shove aside the sermon that insists on intruding and allow myself to settle on daydreaming about heaven. It feels somehow natural to think about death while peering through glazed windows at weighted skies and naked trees.  A grey and barren horizon makes it suddenly a strain to remember warmth and light and green and hope, as recent as yesterday. What complicates such mornings for me is that considering the endlessness of days causes honest turmoil initiated by a barbed question-- will life end with death? Although in my early days as a youthful pastor I meticulously recorded funerals officiated in a massive blank-lined volume printed for such a purpose (perhaps thinking that by writing names in a book I might grant them immortality ), I've long since lost count of how many times I've stood behind podiums and near coffins pronouncing hope that we are presiding not over an ending but endless beginning.  Reciting dog-eared scriptures for the comfort of those lagging behind in the run to see Jesus, I deliver discourses on the eternal sincerely but always with a twinge of wonder. Can such platinum hope prove true? Will I one day blink my eyes in darkest death only to find myself transfigured? Is it possible that my own grey horizon might yield to light grander than anything I've read about or imagined? Don't consider me a skeptic.  Instead, number me in the company of those who cannot honestly declare we have no questions but journey with confidence that we are embraced by the Answer.

Derring-Do and Dreams

Something about dreams both define us and deny us. They define in that they uncover ourselves at the most honest level--what we want most, the raw and uncut version. But they deny us in that a dream never acted upon calls into question a large measure of that which I think makes me "me." Left long enough in the Land of Oz with no mooring to Kansas, I regress to a wispy shadow of intention. Great courage is always required to move from here to there. The greater distance betwixt the two, the higher is the demand for an intrepid spirit. God grant each of us the lion's courage, the tin man's heart, the scarecrow's brain, but most of all, the derring-do of Jesus of Nazareth that catapults beyond the plains of dreams and onto the summit of fearless abandon.