Mourning by Bumps and Band-Aids

I was in a hurry. Bending forward to pick up a shoe, I banged my head on the corner of a shelf. A huge and bleeding bump -- my friend called it a “hematoma” -- immediately rose from my skull, bringing pain to me and horror to my children. No serious injury occurred, but the wound remained for days. I covered it with a band-aid, more to spare others its unsightliness than to protect my head. I soon discovered that the band-aid and the bump served a purpose I had not anticipated. They signaled the world that I was hurting, vulnerable and tender.

My mother died a week earlier, after a painful and progressive disability. Her death left me with a deep psychic wound. There was a rawness and immediacy about my pain. Sometimes I needed to talk about it, and at other times I couldn’t. The business of my life continued relentlessly, whether I was prepared or not prepared, whether I felt strong or weak. Healing had to be squeezed in between the carpool and the church meeting.

However, this band-aid stopped people. “What happened to you?” they asked. Sometimes I responded, “I bumped my head.” At other times I said, “My mother died.” I wanted the world to know of my loss but I didn’t always want to talk about it.

Every member of my family experienced injury or illness after my mother died. While most people would attribute this to “stress”, I suggest a different explanation. It may have been the psyche’s way of declaring its need for special consideration.

Grieving is neither well understood or accepted in our culture. Many thanatologists (death specialists) seek to tame its wildness by describing a predictable “process” with inevitable “stages”. We are told to “work through” our grief as we “let go” of our loved one. There is, it seems, a “right way” to grieve.

I long for the days when grieving was more mysterious, and when we who grieve were given time and (psychic) space to allow the inevitable transformations to grow within us. To burn a candle, to regather after a month (or forty days or a year), to ritually observe the loosening of the bonds -- these make more sense to me. They are public ways of honoring private grief, without dictating the form or content one’s healing should take. The black arm-bands or head coverings, the crepe hung over doors -- these were the bumps and band-aids of past generations. They discreetly informed the public that here were individuals in a special condition of vulnerability, who were adjusting to a world that had been made unacceptable by their loss. Here were individuals who carried within them a need for special care.

In our fast-paced modern world, crowded with commitments and obligations, crepe no longer hangs over our doors; neither do arm bands nor head coverings protect us. We are left to heal as best we can in the spaces we create. Bumps and band-aids will have to do. I thank God for friends who understand.

The Invitation

I still remember the smells of sweat and sawdust. In my West Virginia hometown the whole community came out when traveling evangelists brought their road shows to town. We worshiped in churches, at the park, or in tents outside of town. We worshiped with singing and shouting, with laughter and tears. No one watched the clock when we got together. No one could imagine a better place to be. What our religion lacked in sophistication we made up for with joyful exuberance.

But as I grew older this was not enough. I had too many questions, and my persistence in asking them made my elders uneasy. These 'revivals' were designed not to open my mind or expand my heart but to save my soul from the eternal fires of hell. I believe that my childhood religion was deeply rooted in a genuine faith, but it was too narrowly conceived to sustain the journey of a lifetime.

While I was quite young, and for reasons I still do not understand fully, I walked to a drugstore across town and purchased a recorded symphony. I could not even pronounce the composer’s name: Tchaikovsky. The symphony was his Pathetique. Closeted in my bedroom, I played it over and over on my sister's Decca phonograph. At first it made little sense to me, but soon I began to hear tunes, themes and particular instruments. The more intently I listened, the more the music revealed itself to me. It had come from another world, and it beckoned me beyond the boundaries of my life as I had known it until then.

This invitation to cross some unspecified boundary has become a frequent and welcomed visitor in the intervening years.  I heard it again in a loon’s call in northern Minnesota, in the plaintive horn of Louis Armstrong, and in the violent rush of spring waters down a New Hampshire mountainside. While walking alone amidst the ruins of Olympia, or preaching in an old Welsh chapel in Swansea, or walking with my children in the Badlands of South Dakota, I felt, like Jacob at Bethel, that “surely God is in this place.”

When dancers moved across the stage in a darkened Princeton theater, when an unknown woman played Brahms in a dimly lighted room in St. Galen, or when a single soprano heralded the Easter dawn in a crowed Siberian cathedral, I knew that I was part of a larger reality. Even in the dirty confines of a migrant laborers’ camp, or an NAACP-sponsored summer job corps office in Trenton, N. J., or by the bedside of a dying friend, I did not escape God’s presence. “Deep calls unto deep. At night, God’s song is with me.”

Much contemporary religion fails to do justice to the grandeur of God and the ambiguity of the human situation. Too often theology is reduced to clichés and mindless confessions. Religious communities are manipulated as mere political constituencies. A reverence for deeper things - what Aeschylus called “the monarchy of awe” - has disappeared nearly altogether. Yet awe veils a mystery, and from this mystery comes a summons. Humbling ourselves, we hear it.  Opening ourselves, we find answers to  questions we didn't know resided in our hearts.

(Badlands view from Norbeck Pass. NPS Photo by Shaina Niehans)

Singing

In my mind, I am a convinced rationalist. I honor God with words. Although precise verbal formulations never “capture” reality, words and phrases can evoke and reveal what might otherwise remain obscure. Words are our hypotheses, thrown before us into the abyss of the unknown. They are our bridges, linking soul to soul. They reassure us with their compelling logic. They comfort us with their illusory ability to name the unnameable.
 

But in my heart, something more is going on. Why is the worship of many African American congregations so moving? Why do I come away from the liturgy of a Russian Orthodox Church physically exhausted but spiritually soaring? From whence comes the thrill in my breast as bright Brandenburg cadences dance through the hall? From what well flow the tears in my eyes as the plaintive wail of Louis Armstrong’s trumpet engulfs me?

Words may be our bridges, but music is the rising dew, the meandering stream, the roaring cataract beneath -- now gentle, now ominous, now elfish, now raging, now sorrowful, now luminous, now full of dread, now full of mystery. Where words circle or suggest our reality, music draws us deeply into it. Where words are our hypotheses, music is our affirmation.

Singing, especially. Singing is to humans as roaring is to lions, as neighing is to horses, as chirping is to birds. The breath of creation flows through us as it blows through tree branches and tumbleweed. When we stop singing, the breath of life is blocked in us, and life itself begins to wane.

From times immemorial, we have sung -- at the hearth, in public arenas, around campfires, in the market place. We have sung old songs and new. We have sung at birth and at war, in joy and in fear. Our songs have linked generations. What will become of our world when that last real songs pass from our memory, if no new songs take their place, and if we are left only with I-Pods to fill the void?

Singing knows neither tomorrow nor yesterday, yet it links us to those who have gone before and those who will follow us. It gives energy, yields meaning, and invites commitment. It originates in the mysterious depths of life itself, and calls us into the Community of Life. It may be that my breath and your breath together produce the sound. But is that sound not waiting already on the lips of God, waiting for our breath to bring it to life in this world? When we truly sing together, do we not open ourselves to the breath of all life, the breath of all being, and let it sing its song through us?

Singing together -- in concert, as it were -- is one of the great pleasures in life. Whether the music divides us into parts or pulls us along from the beginning in some irenic unison, it fashions a community from the separate selves that we bring. As we give ourselves to song, does not the song give back to us? Although it depends upon our individual gifts, does not our singing transcend our individuality? It brings -- at least for the moment -- minds, hearts and bodies together with a common passion. My singing involves my commitment to life. Our singing together involves our commitment to share our lives in community.

We welcome the lilt and loveliness of our music. As its chords and cadences come to life among us,  we honor the songs we sing. 

Praising God with dandelions

She has a knack for creating lovely arrangements with flowers and greens from her yard and the woods near her home. When she brings her work to grace our Sunday worship, we are reminded that all of nature joins with us in our joyful praise of God.

On one such Sunday, as she approached our meeting place, her daughter ran from behind and thrust a handful of dandelions into the middle of her carefully crafted arrangement. At first she was perturbed because she hardly had time to repair the damage. Then she decided to leave the arrangement exactly as it was, dandelions and all. Dandelions are everywhere, she thought, yet they are never included in anybody’s arrangement. “Sometimes I feel like a dandelion,” she explained during the coffee hour.

The dandelion, of course, is well known to all who would perfect their lawns. It is sturdy, tenacious, aggressive, prolific and capable of growing under the most adverse of circumstances. It is a survivor. It intrudes where it is not appreciated. It brashly disturbs the otherwise quiet elegance of a cultivated lawn. Powerful poisons have been designed to destroy it, but it returns.

It’s greatest offense may be that it is so common. It takes no skill to grow a dandelion; having a crack in one’s concrete step may be sufficient. I have never heard anyone brag, even in the most indirect manner, about the dandelions in their gardens.

To an impartial observer this may seem curious. The dandelion has all the requisites of a lovely and useful flower. It had an exotic name derived from the French - dent de lion, or “lion’s tooth”, because of the tooth-like outline of its leaves. Its soft yellow blossoms, when massed, create carpets of brilliant color over sunlit meadows and fields. Its puff-balls possess a fragile beauty whose design has been copied by sculptors. Generations of earth’s children have enjoyed blowing into these buff-balls, watching them disintegrate and vanish in the breeze.

In ancient times the dandelion was considered a useful herb. Even today people add tender dandelion greens to their spring salads. The delicacy of the color, bouquet and taste of a well-made dandelion wine defies verbal description. This “lowly” flower may simply be the victim of a very bad press.

Someone once said that a weed is merely a flower misplaced. I quite agree. I am grateful to my young friend who saw the beauty and dignity of this common plant and gave it the place of honor on a Sunday morning. She has not yet learned to see it as a weed. I suspect that she sees beauty in a great many other places that I overlook. Is it any wonder that so many of our spiritual leaders have insisted that children have the clearest vision of us all? 

Photos from "Wildman" Steve Brill's Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places.

Pomp and Circumstance

Jim and I were fellow seminarians. Neither of us is very tall, and I always admired the way he conducted himself. He was something of a prince -- urbane, articulate, even a bit haughty. His  beard was precisely trimmed; his clothing was exquisitely appropriate to every occasion. I never saw Jim in a situation in which he was not in complete control.

Once he was asked to conduct worship for one of the more stately Presbyterian churches in Princeton. Jim was a master at ceremonies. What would seem hopelessly pompous in anyone else was merely dignified when performed by Jim; he was a good choice to direct the staid and proper rites of these eminent folks.

On this occasion, while he was leading a responsive litany, Jim felt a peculiarly insistent call of nature -- one he could not ignore. Alone in the pulpit, he also could not depart to relieve himself. He glanced hurriedly through the order of service and devised a strategy. While the offering was being collected, he would sneak out behind the choir and return unnoticed before the doxology and prayer. Much depended on timing.

The first part of his plan went well. Enthralled by a typically magnificent anthem, the attentive congregation did not know that they were temporarily without a leader. But as the anthem neared its conclusion and Jim started back to his place, he found that the door separating him from the sanctuary had locked when he passed through. He was alone and trapped in an upper hallway. With the choir singing gustily away, no one heard him scratching behind the door.

But Jim is smart, as I say, and he never loses control. He found an open window and, with nary a pause to consider the consequences, he leaped through it - black robes, academic hood and all. Landing on his feet, he ran around the church as the organist hit the chords for the doxology.

The congregation performed its conditioned response of standing, and joined in the song, "Praise God from Whom all blessings flow...” The ushers began their ritual walk down the center aisle with offerings great and bountiful. And marching right behind them, with head held high and singing as loudly as anyone present, was the Reverend Mr. Jim. He waltzed around the ushers in time to collect the plates, and gave a most deeply-felt prayer of thanksgiving. Then he continued with his sermon.

To this day he swears that ninety-nine percent of the congregation never noticed anything unusual about that service.

Playing With Fire

My parents were right about fire. They cautioned me not to play with it. Not to play with matches, or kerosene, or the gas burners in the kitchen. My mother was a nurse. She had seen what fire can do. My father was a fireman. He had watched lives and properties destroyed by fire.

On the other hand, we cooked our food and heated our home with fire. We shoveled coal into the roaring giant of a stove in our cellar. We learned how to start campfires with flint, steel and tinder. We made them blaze for story-telling, body-warmth and entertainment, and we turned them into glowing coals to cook the most amazing meals. My father said that sometimes he set controlled fires to fight wild fires – a concept that is still tinged (if not singed) with mystery for me.

Later I learned that our sun is a seething ball of fire, and beneath the crust of our planet lie fiery volcanoes, simmering. Wires in our house carry a kind of controlled and pulsating fire; too many plugs in a socket once made that unforgettable. Under the hood of our car an engine harnesses a sequence of fiery explosions to bring us to the park. Even my body burns calories in a continuous metabolic fire.

Fire can be released from rocks (coal, uranium), water, wind, oil, wood, or even corn. Controlled fire propels bullets, planes and rockets through space at unimaginable speeds. With it we build canyoned cities, cruise ships, and congested highways. Without it, war as we know it would cease upon the earth. Without it, nights and all enclosed spaces would be invariably and impenetrably dark.

Fire has always been associated with the Sacred. There is little wonder that fire is one of the four (or five or seven) basic elements of antiquity. No fire, no life. We are a long way from the Beltane Fires of pagan practice, but we still light candles, use incense and announce a pope’s election with smoke. Why did the writer of Acts describe the arrival of the Holy Spirit as manifested by “tongues of fire”? Why have we retained fire as the very symbol of Pentecost – the third of our three greatest Feasts?

Does the Holy Spirit reveal a dangerous side of God? Krister Stendahl, former Bishop of the Church of Sweden and Harvard Dean, once compared religion itself to nuclear energy – an immensely powerful kind of fire. Like nuclear energy, he said, religion can do an enormous amount of good when respected and properly channeled. But if misused or treated casually, it can be awesome in its destructiveness. He said this before 9/11 and the radical simple-minded extremism of today.

When affirming belief in the Holy Spirit, our ancient creed heralds “the Lord and Giver of Life.” The Holy Spirit brings liberating transformation; She is the source of all hope. The Holy Spirit is “God-as-change-agent.” Pentecost reminds us that God, like fire, is above us and beneath us, around us and within us. She is the One who brings warmth and possibility. She is the Source of life itself, and accessible to everyone one equally. She is the Holy Comforter.

But Pentecost also reveals the awesome, fiery, unpredictable and passionate side of God. Our invocation “Come Holy Spirit, Come!” may never be said easily, indifferently or with over-familiarity. For me, this prayer will always be tinged with fear and trembling. I learned long ago never to play with fire.

(The first "Fire" photo is by Jackie Keepers, from her facebook site. The second "Fire" photo is by Ernest von Rosen, www.amgmedia.com)

The Holy Mobile

If you have ever visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you may have seen a great and colorful mobile by Alexander Calder, one of America’s foremost modem sculptors. Calder’s mobiles are huge, welded, metallic surfaces, delicately balanced and suspended so as to move constantly with the slightest currents of air. Calder himself was one of the great and colorful characters in American life. He was noted for his love of double entendres, his shocking bluntness, and his willingness to take great artistic and personal risks. He was not noted for spirituality, piety nor for having even an inkling of religious sensibility. So the art world was puzzled when he named this Philadelphia mobile The Holy Ghost. Essays were written and theologians speculated. What could this possibly mean?

Then someone noticed that the beautiful fountain at Logan Square lay on a direct axis between the art museum and the Philadelphia City Hall. A grandiose statue of William Penn and four huge carved eagles all had been mounted on that building. They were the work of Calder’s grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, an immigrant from Scotland. The fountain itself had been carved by Calder’s father, Alexander Stirling Calder, another prominent sculptor of the city. So naturally, when the modem “Sandy” Calder installed his work he thought of... Father, Son and... Holy Ghost!

For many people in today’s world, even in the church, talk about the Holy Spirit carries just about this level of importance. If it is thought of at all, it is considered little more than an inside joke, and as little understood. It has been called the “poor relation” of the Trinity, a bit of an embarrassment to modem minds.

In the long history of the church, on the other hand, Pentecost was and is considered the third great festival of our faith. It brings to fruition and makes real the work silently begun at Christmas and declared to the world at Easter. It celebrates the gift of the Holy Spirit, the birth of the church on earth, and the gifts of the Spirit given to us for the transformation of the world. The Holy Spirit is God’s way of being “present” now. It is “in” the Holy Spirit that we discover both our unique individuality and our deepest communion with others, our freedom and our most intimate love. The fruits of the Spirit, Paul writes to the Galatians, are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control. In the creeds the Holy Spirit is worshipped as “the Lord, the Giver of Life.” The symbols of the Spirit are many; fire, dove and wind are among the most well known.

Calder’s title for his Philadelphia mobile may have been more of a double entendre than he intended. For in 1951 he wrote, “The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or a part thereof. This is a rather large model.” And twenty years later he emphasized, “I work from a very large live model.” Sounds like the Spirit to me!