To Be Together

I recently officiated at a funeral for a gentleman I didn't know. It happens from time to time: a person dies devoid of church connections and the family, in need of ceremonial leadership, falls upon the kindness of a stranger. One of these days people will realize, in the looming presence of institutional absence, that anyone with a willingness to stand before a crowd and traffic-cop an order of service can emcee a funeral. In the meantime, the funeral home calls someone like me. I choose to believe that I bring a few cards to the table beyond glibness, but that's for others to judge.  The point is that the occasion doesn’t really need me - except when it does.  

In this case, the mourners gathered, I led us through the memories, rehearsed the attributes and commendations, remembered the affirmations, and reasserted the comforting commendations to the extent possible for the spiritually disconnected, and pronounced the benediction.

Afterwards there were compliments amidst the sandwiches and chips, and gratitudes. I was more than adequately appreciated. I said my goodbyes, reiterated my sympathies, and went on my way. Some days later, I received in the mail a handwritten thank-you expressing the family's appreciation for the service, but more effusively for the opportunity I had afforded them, in the days preceding the service, to sit down together and remember and talk about their loved one. It was, the note elaborated, the first time they had been able to do so since the death.

I was certainly grateful for the note. I had valued the interactions with the family and, as usually happens on such occasions, left lamenting that I had never been privileged to know the deceased.

And yet there was a poignant, melancholic element to the note.

Some years ago, we hosted a clergy renewal program here at our farmstead through which ministers would spend a day each month in work, private retreat, and guided reflection around assigned readings and the experiences with the land. Every month, during the personal retreat time, one or more of the participants returned to their car and took a nap. I had no complaint. Participants were encouraged to use that time however it might be useful and renewing. Some walked the trails, some walked the labyrinth, some sat and watched the chickens while others relaxed in the shade of a tree and journaled or read.

While others took a nap in their car.

As I say, I didn't disapprove. But I did feel sad that someone needed to pay someone a registration fee for the privilege of closing one's eyes and catching up on neglected zzz's.

Or in the more present case, needing an officiant's convening to create the time to sit down together to remember, through laughter and tears, the loved one who has just died. Why is it that we can't take a nap on our own time? How did life become too busy to grieve?

I'm happy to be the impetus - for a nap or a family moment to remember and give thanks and lament. It just makes me sad that we need that much external permission or help or insistence. Sad, I suppose, but grateful that at least it can happen then.

Is it the Protestant work ethic or the “keep a stiff upper lip” ethos, or are we simply that out of touch with ourselves?  Yes, I know there are those who push the limits of self-care - who spend so much time and invest so much energy taking care of themselves that they cease to be any use to themselves or others. But surely they are the exception.

One of these days perhaps we can grow self-aware enough to take care of ourselves - to sleep when we need to sleep; grieve when we need to grieve; share stories when we need to reminisce, and both laugh and cry without apology.

With or without some stranger’s initiative or permission.

One of these days.

In the meantime, give me a call. I'm happy to tell you to take a nap or to tearfully slobber your way through a story you will regret not sharing, or to simply hold your family member's hand.

We are, after all, in this life together.  And you can thank me later.

What We Know

It startles me to hear Iowans speak with such faux common sense.  It is so different from the pervasive groundedness that characterized these people from my first introduction to the state in the fall of 1992.  Forthright and unveneered with the sugary sweetness frosting so much of the southern concourse among which I had been raised, Iowans had a penchant for observation, rumination, and reserved but considered opinions.  Education was a collective priority, as was “retail” politics.  This, after all, is a caucus state where neighbors met in living rooms and churches and school classrooms to discuss and consider the candidates on offer.  In its DNA were barn raisings, trend bucking, magnanimity, and forward thought.  Historians and sociologists likely have explanations for how these traits evolved.  I only know it was a refreshing contrast to the “charm” ethos of my childhood where one learned the hard way not to read too much into the interpersonal and transactional facades.  This, after all, was the land of those who saw no conflict between the hymns they sang in church on Sunday mornings and the lynchings they perpetrated that night; no rub between the cordial and genteel greetings they extended by day, and the bodies they dragged behind their pickups through town after dark. 

 

Iowans, in my experience, didn’t waste a lot of time on “charm offensives” and conversational saccharine.  There was, instead, an operational assumption that you were as likely as me to have something important to say, that life was too short not to tell the truth, and that the better part of wisdom was the recognition that our particular “truth” was always and ever partial and in need of growth and correction.  Not calcification.

 

There still is some of that laying around like farm implements rusting in tall grass.  But it’s harder to find; those well-considered conversations increasingly rare among the brassier pronouncements more common now among us.  Donald Trump’s border wall has migrated northward and now divides not only countries but communities, churches, families and co-workers.  The conversations that once were common in the interactions that populate our hours have largely been replaced by arguments or suspicious silence.  We believe what we believe and encircle ourselves with a curated chorus of like minds.

 

And so it was that my larger reaction to the Governor’s newest campaign ad was sadness moreso than anger.  Far from the moral vibrancy it sought to assert, it represented, instead, a kind of death among us to be grieved.

 

"Here in Iowa, we still know right from wrong, boys from girls and liberty from tyranny."

 

There was no need for this not-so-subtle affront.  The Governor is hardly at risk of failing in her bid for reelection.  By her words she lamentably adds her voice to the cacophony of intellectually sloppy sycophants clamoring for leadership in this parade of descent.  She owes Iowans in general, and the transgender community in particular an apology.  She either does not view them as human beings and thusly deserving of common respect, or she simply does not consider them at all.  For either she should be ashamed.  Failure to understand or failure to “approve” does not warrant legal, verbal or political abuse.  People are more than a “topic”.  Personhood is more than an abstract concept to debate or dismiss.  And anyone who even pretends to be a leader should know that and act accordingly.

 

This is not the way we talk to and about each other.  This is not the way we look into the soul of one another - as Iowans have for generations - and know what we see there to be precious, holy and worthy of a priori respect.  This is not the growing edge of truth and the intellectual frontier of understanding.  This is not the bias toward community, but the prejudice that foments demonization.  This is the vile element of human nature given head.  Hardly the fertile soil of vibrant culture, it is the denuded and eroded dirt that only grows the stubbornest weeds.

 

Perhaps the John Deere company could develop a different kind of plow - a kind of social cultivator - that could pass among us and loosen the civilizational ground that has become so sedimented among us.  

 

I would like to think that lush life could green here among us once again - along with curiosity, humble inquiry, and relational generosity.  But it feels quite barren at the moment, with the Governor’s shameful characterizations the tumbleweeds blowing among us.