Category Archives: grief

in a name

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At the hospital where son Jameson stayed, there was a white board.

On the white board there was a spot for writing the names of contact people for the patient.

In said spot for said son, there were three names written, each with a different last name.

What’s in a name?

While going through the shatter that is divorce, it feels like the word “family” will be forever grief soaked. The days of assumed roles and relationships are forevermore gone. There is a deep sense of loss in that. The “who are we now?” is question near desperate for answer.

And, resurrection is real.

Those three last names? They represent a dad and a mom and a step-father committed to the body-soul-mind health of our beloved. Those three last names represent a tribe of people who are committed to companioning each other through love and life.

Three last names represent family in all of its complex stunning foibled power.

What’s in a name (s)?

Family. Our family.

Our answer.

fragile

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While fully in the trenches of healing crises, there isn’t a whole lot of psychic space for terror to lodge. The tasks of diagnosing and triage take center stage.

But now, now that Jameson is home and convalescing the awareness of vulnerability is immense.

Who knows where he picked up the virus that is taking his body hostage? Who knows what sort of calumny lingers for us each? Who knows?

A gifted healer friend offered to come over last night to offer healing for Jameson. He agreed that it would be good. Unable to be there, I asked her afterward how she experienced Jameson.

She said this: “He is a boy/man going through his first health crisis. (He is) learning to take it seriously and appreciating the support of family, faith and friends.”

What a prayer, those words.

We are, each one of us, experiencing the incredible vulnerability of living in bodies that sometimes falter. We sometimes take that seriously. If we are wise, we live gratitude for the support of family, faith and friends.

This gift of life is so very fragile.

God grant us wisdom, grace, and reverence for the living of these days.

vigil keeping

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“Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans”. John Lennon

In the thread-the-needle that is daily life scheduling, this summer was planned oh so carefully.

And then life happened.

Having just come out of the Boundary Waters with a group of youth I received a text: Son Jameson was in the emergency room with unspecified misery.

The drive home was endless. He was discharged. He was brought back the next day with more howling pain and admitted to the hospital and is yet at home recovering.

This on top of the death of my nephew has stuttered my life-cramming ways.

I was supposed to attend a conference in southern Wisconsin. I had looked forward to it all summer.

I didn’t go. I stayed home and kept vigil and thanked God for the opportunity to be present to my son and to the needs of my heart.

Really. Conferences and calendar cramming will all pass away.

People do too.

Having witnessed the searing pain of son loss, I got to son tend.

Life happens.

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This past week Minnesota United Methodists gathered for our Annual Conference. It is a reunion and a marathon of meetings and always Annual Conference stokes my desire for fruitful ministry to a fever pitch. I serve a church pregnant with possibility and sometimes being patient is teeth gnash.

This year’s conference, like those preceding it, was marked by a speaking of how it is the larger church is so very wounded.

There are some eighty clergy in the conference (myself included), and over 1,000 across the United States who have signed a document stating that we will joyfully offer services of marriage to same sex couples. In Minnesota, it is now legal! And, this offering of grace routine to heterosexual couples is against the polity of our church. Persons violating said polity can be disciplined for facilitating the speaking of love and covenant.

I feel such grief. I feel grief for the judicatories in our system who are tasked with upholding policies they may not agree with. We are compatriots in the preaching of the good news of the nothing-can-seperate-us-from-the love of God in Christ Jesus. And, there may soon come a day when polity trumps grace and preachers are exiled by their kin in Christ. Surely God weeps.

I feel such grief because the expanse of grace opened to us by Jesus seems so jealously guarded by fear and surely, God weeps.

I feel such grief because this mother is watching her children and their compatriots turn from the Body of Christ known as the United Methodist movement. They cannot understand a denomination that barricades from some the very grace said to be offered to all.

I feel such grief because there is so much work calling to the people of Jesus: poverty and racism and ecological devastation and the people of Jesus are called to respond and heal and bless and while we natter on about who it is who ought be united in marriage by our pastors, the world continues to be wounded and about this I know God weeps.

I’m a United Methodist pastor. While my church is pregnant with possibility it so very challenged by its being as a United Methodist Church. We are a people meant to welcome Spirit breath and life transformation. We want to live in the way of Jesus.

May the God who weeps hold us in this time.

space

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I’m learning this new life; a life without Zoe.

The smallest things lurch my heart.

When arising, we had a ritual of greeting.  We’d have a conversation about whether the night on the couch was to her liking (I know, dogs on furniture are anathema to some but she was old and creaky and I could deny her nothing in the comfort department).  She would gaze into my eyes as I appreciated the silk of her ears.  Her fine dog smell graced me before I moved to the second grace smell of morning:  coffee!

Scraps of food in this house are no more cause for canine celebration.  We throw them away without being able to hail the dog with great good news of treats.

There is no click of nails on the floor or jingle of collar or nudge of nose when a petting is due.

There is no welcome when we come home and no barking salvo when anyone nears the fiercely and loudly protected domain of her house.

The space left behind is immense.

I’m left pondering the mystery of dog companionship.  For fourteen years she raised children, comforted the lonely and found her pleasures in bread and fishing.  She asked for little.  In return for food and loving she gave and gave and gave.

I’m missing that giving.  I breathe my thanks for her being.  I apprehend the vast space she has left behind.

I’m humbled by the power of grief and gratitude, both.

 

 

steadfast

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Today we celebrated the life of a woman who lived 101 years.

Gathered for worship were her children and grandchildren and friends and folk who knew themselves to have spent time and life with a graceful powerhouse.

We do that at church.  We hold the space for celebrations and life markings.  We welcome  people we may never see again and for a time we share voices in song and stories through hearts.

There are times when the beleaguer of “doing church” can make the heart heavy.  The tending of relationships and buildings and protocols and brusings can near obscure the reason for our being.

And then there are services that remind us that community in Christ matters.  It matters deeply.

For 101 years the woman we celebrated today held space in her being for the power of God in her life.  The fruit of her faith was palpable in her people and in the air and prayer we shared.

I’m grateful.  I’m grateful for the steadfast devotion that has prompted people to support a church that has held funerals for nearly 160 years.  I’m grateful for the privilege of weaving worship that names resurrection and wonder.  I’m grateful for the hands that bake bars and pour coffee.

I’m grateful for the reminder that “doing church” matters.  It matters a lot.

Advent 16

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A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse.  The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.     Isaiah 11: 1a, 6

 

Children were our ministers.

We arrived at church yesterday morning heavy of heart, raw, and peeled back.  After hearing the news of bullets unleashed in an elementary school and after seeing the faces of snuffed lives, there was an almost physical need to gather together.  We needed the Word.  We needed to see each other and remember the larger story that this recent violence could not dim.

We needed to be church.

On the docket for the morning was precisely what our hearts longed for:  our children up front, in a place where we could sing their beauty with our eyes.  They were sharing the annual pageant; the telling of the time when a holy – as all children are – child was born into astounding vulnerability.

There were singing angels and wrestling shepherds and sheep with pink tights and a Mary and baby Jesus with matching red hair and a proudly sentinel Joseph and there were in the sanctuary people with their hearts bruised, open, and hungry for hope.

The children were our ministers.

There is unfathomable pain in this world, this we know.  The quiet desperation lived by too many erupts in innocence-crushing ways.  We wonder at such times if there is any Balm in Gilead powerful enough to be antidote.  Because we are willing to summon the courage to be open to all that life has to offer us, we are bound, one to the other, in the ache provoked by unspeakable violence.

As a people who seek to follow the teachings of a babe born in a manger who dared to call us to love, we were reminded by the children that there is more to the story than executions.

There is resurrection; resurrection practiced in hugs and tears and gathering and remembering and choosing to live in such a way that maybe, just maybe, we will practice love in the living of our days.

On Sunday we were reminded that angels sing yet.  In the swirl of pain, angels sing yet.

Led by our children, we could remember.

 

 

 

Keening

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This morning in Newtown, CT, moms and dads poured cereal and tied shoes and kissed their kids goodbye as they left for school.  Teachers and principals got their children bundled off for school and turned to the vocation that compelled them to work for a better world.

Nearly 20 of those children and educators won’t come home to tell stories about what was for lunch and what they learned in science.  Places at the dinner table will never be filled again.

They won’t come home.

Don’t talk to me about the right to bear arms.  It is obscene that reality in 1791 when the world was drastically different would eventuate in children and educators being slaughtered in their schools.

Do we need guns for self defense?  Ask the man who shot to death two teenagers in Little Falls this past month.  Ask the man who shot his own granddaughter, thinking she was an intruder this past week.

Ask the parents of the too-many children and youth slain by guns.  Ask movie theatre patrons sprayed with bullets.  Ask college students in a locked-down campus.

Ask your heart:  for what purpose do we need the ability to project metal into the hearts and bodies of others?

Ask why are we not rending our clothes with grief and terror because when people mow down children they are mowing down the future and at a deep spiritual level it is clarion call: We are broken.

We are in need of communal repentence and accountability because these are our children.  They are our children.  Our future.  Our hearts.

And some of them will not come home tonight.

 

 

 

Advent Day 12

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Rejoice in Christ always; again I will say, Rejoice.  Let your gentleness be known to everyone.  Jesus is near.  Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.     Philippians 4: 4 – 7

Here is what I see:  I see gentleness being lived in community.

Every Wednesday at 8:00 AM I meet with men from the church for bible study.  They have been at this for years.  They are seasoned souls who have lived a lot of life and they are beautiful.

And, they are getting on in years.  We check in with each other weekly and the list of bodily challenges is as varied as the men around the table.  There is a constancy in the sharing:  Growing older involves the deeply spiritual discipline of letting go.

Some of the men around the table have “had the talk” with their children.  In a poigniant and circular playing out of love, their children have asked to share with them a fact of life: they are worried about their parents driving.  They believe that getting behind the wheel of a car is not safe any longer.   They love their dads enough to share their concerns.

It is hard to go from being the co-maker of family law to the recepient of same.

The beauty that I see is their willingness to reflect upon the changes they are experiencing.  There is laughter thrown in and there is a lot of grace.

What moved me in the “let your gentleness be known to everyone” department happened as I was leaving for a meeting directly following bible study.  Out in the parking lot, the men who drive were loading up their cars with the bible study members who no longer drive.

They ushered each other into the waiting chariots with a sense of reverence and care.

The promise of “Jesus is near” was made flesh in the parking lot of our church.  Ninety-three year olds drive the snowy streets of South Minneapolis in order that their brothers might sit at table and unpack scripture.

Jesus lives.

wonder

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Desks and seemingly must-do tasks can run my life.

Maybe you know something about that.

When I look up from the emails and phone calls and clamorous things that need tending, I find that time and energy have zipped by yet again.

So it feels especially crucial to me to get out and spend time with people.  Flesh and blood heart beating people are what center me and my work.

I spent near two hours (where did the time go???) with a woman who has long called RUMC home.  She is one of those members who have given so much to their church and who struggle to get moving early enough to catch the church bus to attend worship and who has seen so much change and who feels increasingly invisible in her church.

Many of her friends have died.  The people she knew and so very importantly, the people who knew her by name are no longer in the pew beside her.  She sang in the choir.  Her husband was an accomplished soloist.  The pictures in her home feature eyes eagerly engaging the world and energy to embrace adventure.

She gracefully shared her sense of grief about her sense of growing invisibility.  That is no small trick.  The hurts of being unseen can fester and erupt in bitterness.  Not so for her.  She cares enough about her church and her pastor to name her heart.  It is honor to be in the company of such a one.

Through her I am blessed.

Often we talk in churches about how vital it is to greet visitors.  I was reminded on Friday how vital it is that we greet each person we encounter in church.  In the body of each beats a heart longing for recognition and acknowledgement.

I talk often of the wonder of parents of young children who go through the considerable challenge of readying all of their charges and themselves for worship.

What my sister in Christ reminded me of is the importance of experiencing wonder and appreciation for each person who goes through the considerable challenge of readying themselves for worship, particularly when bodies are reluctant to move because years have been encountered.

Tomorrow is Rally Sunday.  My prayer is that all feel welcomed and all feel wondrous about our shared call to transformation in Christ.