frailty

When our little one was about a week old we were on what would become a multiple times a day walk around our neighborhood. About 100 yards away from our house I stopped and looked closely at the boy. Then I informed him of what I hope and pray will be the truth...someday he will be very sad because Mama and Mommy will die. And, I'm very sorry about that but it is his job to be sad about us. He is NOT allowed to die first and he will have to plan our funerals. So there, that is just the way it is.

I'm not sure if many parents feel compelled to inform their week old baby of this hope/prayer/rule. But, we did. We have both spent enough time with the sick and dying that we know all too well how close it can be. And, no matter how old he becomes, it will be our hope and prayer.

When my own father died at the age of 53 his grandmother (my gramama) was still living. She had had a stroke several years before his death and was in a locked in state (cognitively she was in there but could not move or express herself). However, when told of his sudden death, she cried.

La Pieta again. Is there a greater pain?

Meanwhile, our healthy, beautiful boy is sleeping. He grows and thrives...babbling up a storm and holding court with his "guys" (the beetle mobile that hangs above him in the crib). Yet, the melancholy persists for the Mama...and I resist the urge to scoop up the sleeping baby so that I can squeeze his chubby thighs and kiss his round cheeks and cupid's bow lips.

Advent Paradox

God we cry out to you
For love
For redemption
And that is the promise you have given

We didn’t take into account
Reality.
Love and redemption
Do not eliminate suffering.

Rather, they accompany it.
And in the midst of suffering,
We find that you are there
The weeping, suffering Christ/Spirit/God

Whose love can only witness
To the true hope
That awaits us only
In death.

Episcopal Cafe Essay

After a steady diet of General Convention on all things Episcopal/Anglican sites I have an essay published that has NOTHING to do with convention...but everything to do with the household of God. Feel free to peruse, and comment, as I share the details of my first baptism. I wrote this essay in light of my first baptism in a church setting--all my other baptisms as a priest had taken place in the hospital. So, I reflected on what was my first--and will continue to reflect on what it means for the crucifixion and baptism to be so intertwined in my theological understanding.

The Child

I remember her now. Her body was stiff in my arms and I held her while I prayed with her family, her father and mother distraught and terrified at what they saw. Her father explained to me again and again: I found her dead, I tried to do CPR, she was blue. Meanwhile, I held her and prayed. Her hair, if I recall correctly, was in little pony tails. Her mouth was crusted with dried sputum around the tube that they had inserted to try and force air into her small, dead body. The women cried, falling to the floor. My eyes were dry and I prayed. My hands were heavy with her weight and I comforted her heartbroken parents just as I had comforted parents before and since.

Until today I had forgotten her. There were two deaths simultaneously that day and dozens since. But today, I opened the paper and saw her name. The autopsy and coroner had completed their work and deemed her death murder. She had not died during the night, she had died the day before, after ingesting nicotine and cocaine. The police are in search of her father and mother and I pray. I pray for her senseless death and for all who die at the hands of violence and beneath the feet of injustice. I wondered for a brief moment if there was something I should have known, if knowing would have changed my prayers. But no, I prayed the prayers that I knew and left the rest to God to know. It was not my role, and is not my role to judge--and as I read the words I am reminded that again and again we are called to "forgive them for they know not what they do."

Before I left seminary and took a call as a pediatric chaplain a colleague of my wife's, another physician, told her that he thought that the moment I saw my first child die I would lose my faith. It had happened to him, and he no longer believed in God--because no God would allow such a thing to happen. No God, would forsake an innocent such as these.

But, God did not abandon them. God accompanied them, feeling every convulsion every blow, every laceration. God was forsaken at the same moment that they were and died with their death--whatever you do to the least of these, my children, you do to me. This is why Jesus died on the cross for me...so that when I face the nightmare of senseless violence I know that I serve a God who does not leave when we grow fearful, I serve a God who understands and has experienced the depth of human depravity, I serve a God who fills the nothingness with love. I serve a God who knows what it is to feel forsaken and knows what it is to die. This is my comfort, and this is my faith.

In The Crucified God, Jurgens Moltmann writes: “Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.”

So today, on this Good day, on this day where Golgotha blots out the sun. Today, what kind of God do you serve? Where do you find faith and comfort in the midst of nothingness?

Saying Goodbye

“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. “ Jn 12:24

I have never been in any call/job for more than three years. This is largely due to my age and the interspersion of large chunks of schooling in the midst of my professional life--4 years of college, during which I worked at a daycare center; 3 years as an inner city youth outreach worker for a group of churches; 3 years in seminary with field education in a program sized parish where I worked with the young people; 2 ½ years as a pediatric chaplain.

Each of these calls/places/jobs was VERY relational in nature—the lines between the professional and personal often blurred, and I retain close friends from each of these places on my journey. Yet, as much as I loved the people I met in these places, I left. Some of my leave taking came from the natural progression of my education, no one expected me to stay at the student staffed daycare center beyond college, and some from choices I made about my personal and professional life.

Each time I left I went through a period of mourning as I experienced the loss of relationship, the loss of my role(s), and the loss of the structure I had established in each of my calls. My world changed dramatically with each transition and I often felt (and feel) bereft as I pondered what my new manner of life would be. Leaving, for me, is always the hardest part of ministry—but good leave taking can help the people left behind to become more the people they are called to be…

There is a book entitled, Running Through the Thistles: Terminating a Ministerial Relationship With a Parish: Roy M. Oswald, that I read while in seminary. In brief, the Reverend Oswald, describes how it is our responsibility and obligation (both for our own sake and that of our congregation) to prepare them for our leave taking. That we can duck and cover or we can allow the process to unfold in a fashion that allows for reconciliation and love to manifest themselves.

Preparation for leave taking from a call is very similar to preparation for leave taking from life. Quaker physician Ira Byock, in his book Dying Well, describes five tasks of the dying as: “Forgive me”; “I forgive you”; “Thank you”; “I love you”; and “Goodbye.” In saying each of these things (either in word or action) the dying and those who love them are able to achieve reconciliation at the last. And, it strikes me, that our “smaller” leave takings may be practice for our big leave taking.

And, on this Tuesday in Holy Week I am struck by how Jesus prepares his disciples for his own leave taking. Forgive me, I forgive you, thank you, I love you, goodbye…

Our dog, Lily, shortly before her death.

Monday of Holy Week

Even though it is only Monday of Holy Week, I’ve jumped ahead to Good Friday. Perhaps it is still my theological inclination to spend too much time at the cross and not enough in “ordinary” time or any other time for that matter. I lived a bit over two years of Good Fridays in my call as a pediatric chaplain and I am still searching for the joy of Easter that was stolen in those years.

But, Lent and Holy Week make me think of those who are trapped in Good Friday--those for whom the resurrection of Easter seems to never come. The children I’ve seen die, the desperately desired infants who never made it beyond the womb, the parents whose prayers seemed to go unheard, the gravesides adorned with pinwheels and teddy bears. These losses, these sacrifices without any seeming greater good--these have stolen little bits of the Easter joy for me through these last years. What good is Easter when such pain is all too common? It is an unending Lenten sacrifice without the remediation of the first fire of Easter.

But, what is Easter really? Does it have to be all alleluias and Easter lilies; is its meaning encapsulated by new dresses and eggy brunch? As the world crashes in I have begun to accept that in some ways, we’ve billed Easter wrong. Perhaps what we really need isn’t a joyful Easter but a defiant one. I am a priest and I am an obstinate woman who likes a God who can spit in the face of death, defy all the evils in the world and declare love victorious despite it all.

This Monday of Holy Week, under the umbrella of this long Good Friday, I ponder the sentence from John, “He loved them to the end.” This is a truth I can live with. There is an end, it hurts and hearts break—but in the midst of the suffering there is love. Ultimately, this encapsulates everything true of each death I’ve experienced--each child was loved until the end. And, perhaps the truth of the resurrection is that they are still loved and their story is unending.

So f’you death, you don’t get the last word.

all goats go to heaven

Hunting and football games were most likely my two earliest excursions (apart from my baptism) as an infant. Where I was raised, the island of Maui, there was a very large feral goat population. These goats, rangy creatures with dark fur and dark eyes round as marbles, lived on the slopes of Haleakala in vast herds. With no natural predators the goats thrived and local families, such as my own, would supplement the grocery budget with their meat. Goat was served at my house as often as chicken or beef and we thought nothing of a meal of teriyaki goat.

Hunting the goats was often a family activity and when I was quite little I would trail behind my dad and brothers as they hiked the slopes with their guns. Once a herd was spotted they would hike as close as they could to the animals and the shooting would commence. Hundreds of goats would leap from crag to crag and some would fall. Six, seven goats at a time--often dead quickly, but sometimes not. When a nanny goat was shot her kid would be caught and we would take it home to raise it ourselves.

I was too young to carry a gun and too young to wander about so my dad would sit me down next to one of the dead goats while he went to find the others. I would sit quietly or poke about in sight of the dead animal while I waited for my dad and brothers to return. On one occasion, as I sat staring at this dead animal, I observed what looked like mist rising from its body. It was often cooler on the mountainside and now I realize that what I saw was the warmth of the body dissipating into the cooler air--much as my breath does on a cold day. But then, then I thought, that what I was witnessing was the soul of the goat leaving the body and going to heaven. I remember a sense of peace at that moment as I stared in wonder. What I had been taught was true, death was not the end and I had proof as I watched the soul of that goat ascend.