In the Faith that Looks through Death

In the faith that looks through death.

This is one of final lines in William Wordsworth’s poems:  “Ode to Intimations of Immorality.”   It’s a line that I have meditated on and repeated in my head over and over again as I have walked into a crisis, held a hand, received disturbing news, heard of another tragedy, prayed in a time of uncertainty:

“In the faith that looks through death,  In the faith that looks through death,  In the faith that looks through death.”

Wordsworth writes, “Though nothing can bring back the hour of the splendor in the grass/of glory in the flower/ we will grieve not, rather find /Strength in what remains behind/In the  primal sympathy which having been must ever be;/ In the soothing which spring out of human suffering/  In the faith that looks through death.

Today marks the 16th year of my ordination as a minister in the Presbyterian Church.  Of all the words I have read, all of the books I have my shelves, all of quotes that I have clipped and saved,  these 7 stanzas were the first on my tongue 16 years ago, and they remain my favorite today.

This middle of career place where 16 years ago,  29 seems like a lifetime ago, – I was 29 once, right?  and imagining ministry 16 years from now, at the age of 61, seems hard to imagine. –Just how many more Christmas Eve sermons can I write?  How many more deaths can I face?  How many more tragic stories?  How many more night meetings, visioning projects, stewardship campaigns – What will the future be?   I see how quickly the past 16 years have come and gone, and know how quickly the next 16 years will pass by.  I am also ashamed to to find that I have the same fears and uncertainty today as I had then.  – Maybe it’s time to learn something and stop being uncertain of what will come. Maybe it’s time to let go of what I do not know and hold on to what I do know.  Maybe its time to shed a fear and replace it with conviction.  What time will I have wasted worrying when I look back 16 years from now?

And yet if I have learned anything these past 16 years, it is that one cannot expect another sixteen years. Today is all there is.  It’s cliche, I know, to talk about the gift of every day, of recognizing the frailty of life. We can’t live every day like it’s our last all of the time.  We can’t constantly be in that Thin Place.  We have to live as if there will be college campuses to visit and retirements to plan and vacations to take.  But every now and then, we need to go to the Thin Place where we sense that we are just on this side of heaven, and heaven is not so far away.

Wendell Berry expresses that feeling in this poem – another of my favorites, when he says, “sometimes here, we are there… and there is no death.”

“Some Sunday afternoon, it may be, you are sitting under your porch roof, looking down through the trees to the river, watching the rain. The circles made by the raindrops’ striking expand, intersect, dissolve, and suddenly (for you are getting on now, and much of your life is memory) the hands of the dead, who have been here with you, rest upon you tenderly as the rain rests shining upon the leaves. And you think then (for thought will come) of the strangeness of the thought of Heaven, for now you have imagined yourself there, remembering with longing this happiness, this rain. Sometimes here we are there, and there is no death.”

“1996, V”  [“Some Sunday afternoon, it may be”] by Wendell Berry, from This Day: New & Collected Sabbath Poems 1979-2012. © Counterpoint, 2013.

What I am trying to say is this is what I know:  sometimes here we are there, and there is no death and when we can see through death, we know that healing happens. Healing, in the truest sense of the word, is holy.  Healing, in the truest sense of the word, is human. It is the threading relationship of God and Human together in the wrestling  of Jacob, in the dark night of the soul of Jonah, in the blood sweat night prayer of Jesus, in the heart breaking cry of Mary, in the courage of Ruth, in the humanity of David, even in the shame of Judas. One cannot be healed if one does not have something that needs healing.  It’s only through the dark valley that we can recognize the light.   This is what it means to have the faith that looks through death.

This I know.  It’s really the only thing I know for absolute certainty.

Healing always happens.

Healing comes and people live and sometimes healing comes and people die, but healing always happens.

Healing happens through time and endurance and blood and bone. It happens deep in the soul and in the breaking of the heart.  It happens when the unseen are seen and the unheard are heard.  It happens in rest. It happens in laughter. It happens in time. It happens in pain.

It is healing that allows us to have the faith that looks through death.  That healing occurs only  through suffering. Only through loss and rainy days and times of loneliness. It is in moments like these that soothing thoughts come through suffering and help us to see a way through.

We must never give up on the human heart for it is where the Holy resides.  We must never give up on the belief that healing of mind, body, spirit, relationship, community, world, does, can and will happen.

Though nothing can bring back the splendor in the grass/the glory in the flower, we will grieve not, but rather find strength in what remains behind

…..

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,/ Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears/ To me the meanest flower that blows can give/ Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.  (William Wordsworth, 1770-1850).

 

 

November.

The Artist is changing pallets.

Naked branches provide a new landscape.

Deep shades of blues, purple, periwinkle
cover the sky like blobs of tempera.

Bright colors fade.
The earth slumbers under a blanket of browns.

Crisp winds brush past
dabbing cheeks pink.

It’s a time of turning inward.
To the dormant and the quiet.

Allow life to change color.
Pay attention.

You too are being recreated.

Shattered People, Sermon On Luke 7:11

Photo by Denise Andrad

This is a portion of my sermon from today, with some commentary at the end….thanks for reading.

The little town of Nain. Have you heard of it?  It’s between Nazareth and Bethlehem. If you blink you will miss it. It’s a remote, little town. Nobody lives there. It’s never mentioned again in the Bible. It’s obscure and insignificant, except for the fact that Luke tells us Jesus passed through it. And on the day he was passing through,  a funeral was taking place.   A young man had died and a funeral procession was occurring on the one road in the town.  There were women wailing and pounding their chests and  there was a woman, his mother, who was beyond despair.  She had recently lost her husband and now faced the death of her son.  These circumstances would be tragic today – imagine losing your spouse and then your child. But in antiquity, the truth is there were two funerals that day, because upon the death of her son she now has no identity.  She could not own property or care for herself.  Without a male relative to latch on to, she would have no social or economic standing.  She is automatically homeless and destitute. She reminds  us  of one of those stories  you hear, maybe it’s your story, about the person who just can’t catch a break. Who seems to have every ailment, every misfortune and you think, how can this person keep going?  She represents one of the stories that causes us to think, I can’t imagine going through that.

This is the woman Jesus meets on the road in the little, insignificant town in Nain. Jesus sees her and he has compassion for  her. He is moved and compelled to act. He goes to the boy, touches the briar and tells him to rise, and the boy comes to life.  Everyone who witnesses this is awestruck and they cannot help but glorify God.

This little story is found only in the Gospel of Luke. It’s obscure and easy to miss, like the town of Nain. It’s one more person who has all the bad luck, who is down and out and completely worn down by life. Yet Jesus comes to this small place and looks upon this bereft person and restores life.

You might take note that the woman never expresses her faith . In fact she never says anything. She never asks him for help. She never expresses her belief that he could heal.  None of this seems to matter to Jesus.  He does not go to her because of her faith, he goes to her to because he simply has compassion.

In “My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer,” the poet and essayist Christian Wiman writes about his religious faith, which intensified after he met his future wife and then intensified again when he was afflicted with a rare type of cancer at the age of 39. It’s a wonderful book that explores both the intellectual and the mystical sides of faith.” Wiman makes the comment that  “there must be a shattering experience” in order to “build a vocabulary of faith.”

“Everyone has shattering experiences. It may be falling in love or having a child. It may be the death of someone you love or thwarted ambition. It may be just some tiny crack in consciousness that deepens so slowly over the years that, by the time you notice it, it only takes a spilled drink or missed flight to tear it — and you — wide open. One way to look at this is: no one is spared. Another way: everyone is gifted.

We all have shattering experiences that redefine our existence that put the cracks in us, so the light can shine through.  We may not want to admit how cracked we are. We may not want to confess our suffering or our anxieties, or our anger, but we rest assured while we may hide these cracks under a tough exterior, Jesus sees them.”

“Be Kind,” The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, “for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

In her book, Still, Lauren Winner writes about faith after dealing with a divorce.  She tells a story about a going to church alone one Sunday.  She writes, “there was a time when I hated this, hated being alone in church but those feelings have left and what once felt sorry and painful has come to feel tranquil.   However, it’s unlikely you ever find yourself alone in the last pew; it is more likely that you will find yourself with the halt, the lame and the new mothers.    Just as I thought I would have the whole pew to myself, a woman sidles up to my left and says, something like, is there space here? I scrunch my legs in so that she can squeeze past me, but she doesn’t move, and I come to realize that she want to sit where I’m sitting. She wants the same spot at the end of the pew.  Perhaps she is claustrophobic. Perhaps this is where she sits every week. What choice do I have?  I move over. She looks like she has seen better days. She has a suitcase with her, and she keeps a hat and sunglasses on through the service and she smells like rotten apples and streets. She seems, oddly entirely comfortable. Then, in the middle of the sermon the rotten apple woman begins to tap her right index finger rapidly on her knee.  There is a rhythm to this tapping and makes the whole pew shake. I glare at the woman , hoping she will take a hint and top. Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. Then unaccountably my left hand shoots out and I close my fingers over her hand , squeezing her fingers to stop the tapping, as a mother would still a child. In an instant, I am horrified. I can’t believe I have actually done what I did.  And then, as I am blushing, thinking I want to vaporize, I realize the woman does not seem offended or confounded, or even  surprised, and she has not shrugged off or let go of my hand. In fact she seems to be holding my hand.  We hold hands for the rest of the service.

Winner concludes, “and that is part of what I mean when I say it is life inside this Christian story that has begun to tell me who I really am.”

When Jesus sees this woman and has compassion,  he gives her life. – Not just physical life to the boy, not just financial security to the mother, but life that is restorative in every sense of the word.  She is another person in the Christian story who is claimed for who she truly is – seen by Christ.

This week I was asked to do a funeral for someone who had no faith. They asked me to not mention God, or read scripture, or do anything too churchy. They didn’t want any religious talk. I felt my profession compromised. I imagine this the way it will be in the future. There will be more and more people wanting send off’s with God language in the mix. I decided that the only thing I could was look upon this family with compassion. The only thing I could do was tell them that while this person did not see Christ, Christ always, always, always looked upon him.

If you are struggling with your faith, or wondering what this whole being part of organized religion means, or wondering how your faith life fits into the rest of your life, remember this.  Jesus sees you.  He sees you for who you are in all your brokenness and places of pain. He sees the places where your soul is cracked and places where you are lonely and most vulnerable. He sees you when you feel unnoticed or unheard.  Rest assured it is in those places, where you feel the least noticed,  you are seen.  We all will have times when we are the person from nowhere with nothing and when people shake their heads at us and think, how will they ever survive that?  When we are pretty much a mess, someone will take our hand. Trust and believe that you are seen. Jesus looks upon us with compassion, suffers with us and restores our life.

Trust and believe, you are seen.
Amen

…..After I preached this sermon a woman going through hell came out of the sanctuary. I asked her how she was doing. “Well, I’m sick, my son’s a drunk, I’m a shattered person, but somebody will hold my hand and make it all better…..” Then I went to see a mother whose teenager daughter had ran away from home. Then I visited a woman with a tumor in her brain. Then learned of another parishioner with cancer, and a couple facing divorce….and my heart felt heavy.

Sometimes the words I say, and the faith I believe can feel so small in light of the pain and anguish of daily life.

Sometimes there are no words.

May the light shine through our cracks.

Still: Notes a Midfaith Crisis, by Lauren Winner. Harper Collins: 2012
My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer, by Christian Wineman. New York: 2013

The small country church

The small country church.

The small country church

My robe still has the old, musty smell of the church lingering in its fabric.

Yesterday I officiated at a memorial service for a parishioner’s father. He lived in a tiny town in rural Iowa. A place no one could ever find on a map. I drove out, out, out in the country and came upon this small town. A Casey’s Gas station signified that I was in town. The homes were old. Some houses showed signs of life, others looked as if there may had been life in them, long ago.

The small, white Presbyterian Church, that joined with the Methodists that shares their space with another denomination, currently has 16 members and worships 10 on any given Sunday. The carpet was a rusty orange. Brown paneling held up the walls. The pastor’s office looked like it hadn’t been touched since 1942. Old pictures hung cock-eyed on the walls. Curriculum from the 60’s sat on the shelves. An unused desk with empty files and lists of elders from the past were left as signs that life had been there, long ago.

The waa-waa-waa of the organ started up, indicating it was time to process the family in to the sanctuary. I don’t believe they had ever seen a preacher woman in the pulpit before. The pulpit, the baptismal font and the cross on the wall, were all made by the elder who had died. He was a saint of the church. Ushering, working, saving, serving. The pulpit, font and cross, all signs of life and death and Word, that had been expressed there, long ago.

I approached the pulpit. The “Legion guys” as the funeral director called them, sat on the left side all in row. Their flags and rifles for the military rights sat in their laps. Their uniforms were a navy blue. The men all had facial hair and long side burns. I swear I thought I been taken in a time warp and I was back in the Civil War! They sat stoically, facing forward, no one looking my way as I spoke. One man, the largest one, was ghostly white. He had a cough that could wake the dead. He coughed, and coughed, and coughed, and coughed. I thought he was going to die before the funeral was over. When the service had ended I discovered that he was the one in charge of the military rights as he hobbled around putting the men with their flags and rifles in a row. I saw this large man. This veteran. Once strong and powerful, now over come with an illness that I fear is life threatening. I could not help but wonder what his life was like, long ago.

As I sat and ate my lunch of potato salad, ham sandwich and water a man approached me and told me he was a poet. He asked if he could recite a poem for me. I told him, “yes.” He then stood in this room of dark wood paneling and said,

“Breathe….
….how beautiful can the morning be to exult a heart in joyous glee the morning is of brilliance with its wind fresh fragrance and the morning sounds that sing…from a morning of the seven does the sky touch the heaven, this is the sky the savior rides, our Father who art in Heaven.”

He made me cry. And thanked him for the poem.

As I left the little, white Presbyterian church, I noticed one of the rifles propped up against the front door.

I got in my car and drove through the Iowa farm land, still sleeping under strips of snow. In a short while the farmers will begin to til the dormant ground and life will resurrect from the earth once more.