A Chilly Morning, an Evergreen Tree, and Twenty-Six Years of Grace

I remember well the day we wed

 I can see that picture in my head

I still believe the words we said

Forever will ring true

Love is certain, love is kind

Love is yours and love is mine

But it isn't something that we find

It's something that we do

It's holding tight, lettin' go

It's flying high and laying low

Let your strongest feelings show

And your weakness, too

It's a little and a lot to ask

An endless and a welcome task

Love isn't something that we have

It's something that we do

We help to make each other all that we can be

Though we can find our strength and inspiration independently

The way we work together is what sets our love apart
So closely that you can't tell where I end and where you start
~Clint Black/Donald Ewing

 

It was chilly that September morning as we gathered in our friends’ perfectly manicured backyard garden.  The appointed hour was 10:45 a.m. but of course we and the close circle of family and friends had been drifting in for an hour or more.  Nieces and nephews explored the bushes and trees and flower beds; friends huddled in conversational circles.  We had planned a simple ceremony; there had been no rehearsal.  Eventually the guests were shooed into chairs and Lori and I and Daddy convened before a large evergreen tree for the words, in the promises, the admonitions, the prayers, the readings, and finally the kiss.  Suddenly, it wasn’t only the cool morning air that caused the shivers.  And then the pictures, the greetings, the hugs and more kisses. 

And there we were:  husband and wife. 

Twenty-six years later as of today, I’m smiling.  Some years the smiling has been easier than others; some years fatter and others leaner; some years puzzling and others crystal clear.  But every evening we get to offer a cleansing, grateful kiss; every morning we wake to each other’s smile freckled by the prospect of a fresh day with new possibilities.

We don’t take such graces for granted.  And so we celebrate a lot and often this time of year.  On July 4 we celebrate the night we got engaged.  On August 31 we celebrate the anniversary of our first date which had occurred not quite a year prior to that engagement.  On September 11 we celebrate my birthday, and on the 12th my parents' anniversary of a marriage that extended 70 years - a pretty good example.  On September 20 we celebrate not only the anniversary of our wedding, but also the anniversary of our 2nd date during which both of us felt a subtle shift in the axis of the universe.  We hold them all as sacred days.  

We have been assaulted in recent months by enough evidence of mortality to know that these moments have a shelf life.  Days are intrinsically ephemeral.  There will come a day when one of us reaches across the table to take a hand no longer there.  Which is why in the meantime, these days are set apart...

...reverenced...

savored.   

As holy as they are euphoric.   

As filled with imagination as they are with memory. 

Interwoven so interdependently that, as the song observed, we can’t tell where I end and where you start.  It is a happy sanctum.

And for 26 years now, I have been the luckiest guy in the world.  

Smiling, then, at the memory of that evergreen tree, and shivering all over again, I can’t imagine what the next 26 years might hold.  We recall Daddy observing to us, just before we exchanged our vows and having heard those familiar words from 1 Corinthians 13, "We won't always be patient; we won't always be kind.  But when we are, God is working through us."

We are still, after all, figuring out how to help that happen, but let’s go, into how ever many of the next decades we can squeeze forward.  “I still believe the words we said forever will ring true.”

 

 

 

My Grief Observed

I really don’t sit around grieving all the time.  Only some of the time.  I rather feel permission to spend some of my waking - and no doubt some of my sleeping - hours indulging this grim quietude, given the fact that I have suffered the loss of both parents in the last 12 months - my mother, at 90 years of age, and ten months later my dad at almost 97.  One can hardly feel short-changed by those lifespans.  But it isn’t injustice I feel in the wake of their deaths; it is grief.  It is the ache of loss; it is the deafening silence of the absence that has replaced a lifetime of presence.  It is a truism, I recognize, that I have never known life without these two in it.  They have variously been everything, the anchoring center, and like the stars in my orbit, in turn proximate and peripheral.  But always there, in the room or on the other side of the house, across town or on the other end of a telephone call.  

And now they aren’t. And I haven’t found the blueprints for constructing a new world absent those raw materials.

In the forward to C.S. Lewis’ book, A Grief Observed, Lewis’ step-son notes:

“In referring to this book in conversation, one often tends to leave out, either inadvertently or from laziness, the indefinite article at the beginning of the title. This we must not do, for the title completely and thoroughly describes what this book is, and thus expresses very accurately its real value. Anything entitled “Grief Observed” would have to be so general and nonspecific as to be academic in its approach and thus of little use to anyone approaching or experiencing bereavement.

This book, on the other hand, is a stark recounting of one man’s studied attempts to come to grips with and in the end defeat the emotional paralysis of the most shattering grief of his life.”

I assert here that same particularity.  I can’t speak for anybody else.  I don’t know what their grief is like, clumsily amateurish as I am just now feeling out the contours of my own.  It is, after all, new to me.  It is, come to think of it, new to most of us in this culture so averse to discomfort and fixated on prosperous pleasure that we cloister the ugliness of death in the mortuary, under the capable hands of the funeral director, and after the requisite “celebration of life”, “move on” as quickly as possible.  If once we bathed the corpse of our loved ones and laid them out in our living room for a time of relational support and introspective comprehension, we moderns happily leave all that to the trained professionals behind their closed doors.  And so it is that we are much more practiced at moving on than we are at grieving.  As uncomfortable with our own morosity as are our family and friends, we quickly return to the more socially acceptable business of getting happy.

The rush to bliss is especially conspicuous in the faith community - the very environment which has nourished and shaped me from infancy, and ultimately employed me in adulthood. Christians have been talking about eternity since the time of Jesus, and death and dying have inevitably been topics in the conversation.  

In the abstract.  Precisely as “topics.”  Rarely as experiences.  We don’t talk much about grieving.  We don’t linger over Jesus weeping at the death of his friend, skipping past to quickly arrive at Lazarus’ subsequent resuscitation.  Similarly the disciples’ traumatization following the execution of Jesus.  Portrayed nowhere in the gospels as spiritual luminaries, their grief has the odor of one more disappointing ineptitude.  Let’s get on with Easter.  Grieving in the church has come to seem implicitly untoward - a spiritual immaturity if not an outright deficiency.  

I say, then, somewhat confessionally how empty all the theological affirmations I have espoused in funerals throughout my ministry land with me just now.  I don’t eschew them; I am not experiencing any loss of faith.  I still hold fast to the assurance of eternal life in the complete fulfillment of the Creator’s intention.  I am simply, quietly acknowledging that, in this season of loss, I don’t find it comforting.  More than one devout soul in recent months has assumed celebration with the rhetorical question, “Isn’t it a joy that your mother, your father are with Jesus face to face?”  And of course I smile and reply with a slight nod of my head, but the real answer is, “No, ‘joy’ is not at all what I am feeling right now.  I am hurting.  I am grieving.  Trusting in their eternal well-being does not take away the pain of their loss.”

Lewis, in observing his own grief over the death of his wife, noted something of the same realization.

“Kind people have said to me, ‘She is with God.’ In one sense that is most certain. She is, like God, incomprehensible and unimaginable.  But I find that this question, however important it may be in itself, is not after all very important in relation to grief...

Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

Yes, I believe.  I also hurt, and just now that pain occupies the foremost ground.  If that is selfishness, so be it.  It is, after all, MY grief.  If others process their peculiar losses differently I bless them.  I can only own my particular experience.  I am not suggesting that the death of my parents is an evil or an affront.  They lived beautiful and beautifully long lives. Their deaths were perfectly natural.  I give thanks that, unlike so many who endure a slow and painful decline accompanied by all the mechanical accessories that extend our breathing but not our living, my parents’ respective deaths were quiet and mercifully swift.  They died as they had lived, with dignity and grace.  And they have now, I trust, received the life for which they had prepared.

And I, while affirming the goodness of that consummation, hold my sadness where I once held them.  Let me just say that it’s not an even trade.

It isn’t anger I feel, or violation; just sadness.  Neither disability nor deficiency, merely a powerfully new -to me - natural and inevitable experience.  

This, I trust, is a passage not a pit.  I don’t know what time will do with my grief, but though I have every expectation that it will do something, it won’t involve eliminating it.  Life - at least the life I have experienced - is bent toward living.  And I do continue to live, even as I continue to grieve.  I want to attend to this latter precisely because I believe it to be a nourishment to the former.  If the garden has taught me anything it is that flourishing and dying are not opposites, but inseparably intertwined - something like the relationship between notes and rests in music.  Hardly enemies, the silence and the sounds are partners.

“How long will it take,” I am newly realizing, is the wrong and misguided question.  Grieving and flourishing move hand in hand.  And so grieving, I also lean toward the fruiting, unable to imagine what it will look like; toward the music, even if I can’t imagine the sound.  

Waiting for the Words

I haven’t had words of late. The page, ready and available, has remained blank despite time and opportunity. And just cause. 

Words, it turns out, are close akin to heartbeats, breaths, and those, too, have been hard to come by.  My eyes have been, alone, on my feet putting one step in front of the other. Simply moving forward has been full-time effort. One step at a time. And then the next one.  Grief, I have feared, has stolen my vocabulary.  Since the death of my dad July 11 I have been unable to will the words.  Absent my own, then, but reaching for something, I have snatched evocative images from around the farmstead and borrowed the words of others.  

But even limp, monosyllabic words, I am observing, eventually leak out; finally uncontainable, like the tears that dissolved them these recent weeks.  And so these tentative, mostly guttural sounds; closer to the scriptures’ “sighs too deep for words,” but for the first time in recent weeks, more than nothing.  And almost audible.  After all this silence, all this barely outlined silhouette, I am beginning to hear the notes and see, again the colors.  I am beginning to breathe, and finally to form some tentative words.

Be patient with me, then, as I am having to be with myself.  There are things I need to say - recollections, affirmations, gratitudes and insights.  There are emotional contours I need to trace, and new beginnings I need to sketch of life on different terms.  But it is slow.  As I recently confessed to a trusted friend, I look forward to the hope, thus far unrealized, of discerning Daddy’s presence in new and more gossamer ways, than simply the broken and jagged ramparts of his absence.

I can just make out the edges of the village of voice just around the bend, but I have not yet gotten near enough to locate its gates.  They will open, I trust, soon enough, and I will part my lips and risk a word.  And perhaps, then, another.  And then we will just have to see what the hot sadness has been emulsifying that only now, with cooler perspective, can settle out. 

These Are The Days

“These are the days,” Van Morrison sang, 

“by the sparkling river
And His timely grace and our treasured find
This is the love of the one great magician
Turned the water into wine”

 

Timely grace.  Treasured find.  Magic love.  These are the days of all that…in a face.  These are the days of that episodically quiet and undulating grief.  Yesterday, as even my short memory recalls, was Mothers Day – the first of those to come around since mine died last September.  And now today, one wave following fast upon the last, is her birthday – what would have been her 91^st.  I remember well her 90^th celebration.  We didn’t know it would be her last, but the real possibility that it could be joined us as a guest.  Lori baked pies, Merryl brought decorations and a crown.  We lit candles and Mother blew them out.  We took pictures, which always was her favorite joy.  We sat around while we ate and told stories, laughed and reminisced.

 

“These are the days now that we must savor
And we must enjoy as we can
These are the days that will last forever
You've got to hold them in your heart.”

 

And so today I do.  I savor the sound of her voice singing solos in church, and the scent of supper on the stove.  I savor the sweetness of after school cookies, the “earthquake cake” that was simply a strawberry cake that fell apart just out of the oven, which she simply repurposed and renamed and served in a brown paper bag; the occasional “7-Up Cake” and the frozen fruit salad cup at Thanksgiving.  I savor the warmth of staying up late on a December night to watch “White Christmas” – her in her chair, me by the fire.  There might have been popcorn involved.  I savor the giddy joy of picking out, along with my brother and Dad, the Mothers Day birthstone ring – a sapphire for me, an opal for Daddy, topaz for Craig, and emerald for Mother – all lined up on the setting like the family we were.  I savor her fierce uprightness, and the vocabulary of her face that routinely spoke more plainly and bluntly than her voice.  I savor the sheet music she routinely indulged me to encourage and bait my practice time at the piano.  I savor the humor of her sweet tooth – an indulgence she rarely permitted herself earlier in life, but which in later years galloped unbridled.  Chocolate and flowers.  Flowers and chocolate.  And the smile that accompanied them both.

 

But of course I savor most the blanketing, anchoring, elevating, ennobling tenacity of her love.  A lioness to the end, we never ceased to be her cubs – us, and ours.  I am elevated by it, still.  

 

Mothers Day.  Birthday.  Grieving days.  Grateful days.  Savoring days.

 

These are the days.

The Saint vs the Sow

 

Norcia is a rural village, nestled in the elevated plain amidst mountains in Umbria, an hour or so southeast of Spello, similarly from Assisi.  Assisi is larger than either Spello or Norcia, more famous and, if the grand and ornate architecture is at all reflective, richer.  Assisi, of course, has its Saint Francis and the cascading stream of Franciscan influence on Christian perspective and spirituality.  Spello has its classic and endearing hill-town charm.  Norcia, by contrast, has its pigs.  It is, by all accounts, the pork capital of Italy - especially cured pork and sausages.  Vegetarians are pitiably second class here - tolerated, as Italians are constitutionally bent to do, but not publicly indulged.  But if all those delectable and diaphanously sliced meats like prosciutto and salami and capocolla, lonzino and pancetta are your appetite, Norcia is your foretaste of heaven.

But though the restaurants and shops convey little evidence of it, and the streets hum only the faintest echo of its melody, Norcia is more than pigs and prosciutto.  It is also the birthplace of Benedict - St. Benedict.  You know, the Patron Saint of all Europe. Benedictine practice:  all those monks and nuns, all those monasteries and prayers, all that sense of the shape of each day and every night, all that sensibility about order and stability and community and humility and responsibility to each other, the world, ourselves and God.  There is a statue of him in the center of town.  There is a church across the piazza, though the earthquakes of 2016 largely destroyed it along with much of the rest of the town.

But there isn’t the collective, communal - civic, even - preoccupation with Norcia’s venerated child as there is around Francis in Assisi.  I had the feeling that if you wanted to talk about Benedict, you might go loiter around the statue, but the rest of the town has other matters on its mind.

We talked about that over dinner the following evening.  Why the vast difference?  I don’t recall anyone at the table voicing it, but it occurs to me in retrospect that, however ancient and even quaint his life now might seem, Francis is in the present tense a sexier, more viscerally appealing character.  He has become something of a patron saint of environmental awareness and care.  He invoked “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon”, preached to birds and fish and mollified wolves.  I don’t want to caricature him, confining him to bird baths and petrifying him in garden statues. Taken seriously and conscientiously, Francis’ way is as demanding and challenging - perhaps moreso - than others.  It is just that his way sounds at least appealingly and comfortably warm.  Assisi is an easy place - an inspiring place - to visit.

Less so, Norcia.  For one thing there were those earthquakes I mentioned, and the devastation they wrought.  It’s hard to enumerate the scaffolding erected around and throughout this town.  It’s sobering, even after these succeeding seven years, to note the cracks in the walls and the crumbled plaster and the uninhabitable buildings.  

We sought out a monastery noted in a guide book.  Approaching the slightly ajar door, one of us called inside to seek permission to enter.  Answering silence drew us further inside, where we found an eerily empty courtyard and building.  There were tended potted flowers, and an empty wheelchair against the building as if vacated only for a moment with intention to return.  But there was no one there to return.  The compound was utterly deserted, as if in a vanishing moment. Comprehending eventually that if the space was unsafe for the nuns who called it home, it was probably unsafe for us as well, we retreated and pulled closed the heavy wooden doors behind us.  The nuns, we later discovered, had reconstituted their community in temporary quarters nearby and across the street, in a constellation of prefab portable buildings.  

“But where is Benedict?” I pressed my companions.

“Constantly competing with pigs,” one observed.

“And besides,” she continued, “they are focused on all that repair and construction, and how they are going to pay for it.”

And so it is that the Saint competes with the sow, and all that the scaffolding.  

But I wonder if maybe Benedict isn’t smiling from his grave all those centuries removed - approving of all but my characterization of competition?  I have much to learn about Benedict and his teachings, but my limited study convinces me that he had little time for “beliefs” and theological “abstractions”.   He was concerned about how we are to live together - the ordering of our lives, the conduct of our communities, the care with which we tend our hours - all in the light of God’s presence and intention.  Benedict, I sense, had a comprehension that everything is holy - every moment, every conversation, every piece of laundry hanging from the line strung outside the window, every trowel of plaster smoothed over a crack in the wall.  And he was determined that we not lose track of it.  Neither our moments nor our life in each other’s keeping is to be squandered, dissipated, or trivialized.  We aren’t simply to live and then die.  We are to parse our moments and practice our prayers, less in a closet than in the interactive commerce of our lives.  Granular, quotidian, enacted prayer. 

When I think of Benedict I think more of an orchestra than a pinball machine - the harmonious interaction of disparate voices, rather than the ricocheting ping off one surface, then the next. Far from esoteric abstraction, there was a reverent carnality to Benedict’s teaching.  

“Carnality”, as in “meatiness”, as in flesh and bone.  

And so perhaps my question, “Where’s Benedict?” was born out of blind ignorance.  The townspeople may not have called his name or invoked his civic progeny, but he was everywhere - in the scaffolding tending to the rehabilitation of where people actually worship and live and cook and launder; in the sausages and salamis that both nourish them and translate their labors into the economics of living.  Benedict might even call it prayer - sometimes uttered in words and adhered to the hours, but always ground and cased and cured from from the pieces and parts, the earthquakes and the pigs, of life as it comes to us this day.  

And the next.

Holiness, incarnate.  

In the fleshiness of these hours.

The Tree of Life and its Fruit

 In the small piazza near the Chiesa dei Cappuccini S. Severino, high and overlooking the panoramic valley, stands a bronze sculpture by Andrea Roggi titled, “Tree of Life”.  It is a subject by which artists are frequently intrigued; by which faithful are perennially haunted, and to which eternally drawn.  I know nothing of the artist, nor how the sculpture was prompted and finally settled into this location.  But whether simply purchased and installed, or inspired by this particular setting, it evocatively integrates the agricultural region stretching out around us, and the airy expanse of the hillside view.

 

In fact, the sculpture is more air than bronze – an open circle into which passersby love to poke their head, or through which to be photographed.  But if some might be offended by the playful interaction, I suspect the artist might smile at his successful execution as viewers are quite literally drawn into the art.

 

Held aloft on a pedestal perhaps 5-feet tall, the earth is an open globe with a tree rising from its upmost surface toward the heavens.  The tree’s roots dangle into the interior of the world.  But as evocative as are the descending roots, it is the tree, itself, that captivates – the trunk formed by two human bodies glorying in each other while stretching toward Divinity.  In his artist’s statement, Roggi writes:

 

In the Tree of Life, the embraced male and female figures create a bridge between the Earth, 

where the olive tree grows, and the other part of the world, the vault of heaven. 

Like tree branches aiming for the sky, striving to reach the greatest heights, 

we try to strike a balance between a part of ourselves that is rooted in the ground 

and a greater part yearning for the sky: 

part of us is in the ground, but most of us is above the sky.

 

I’ve been captivated by the art ever since passing by it on our first evening here in Spello – the openly beckoning globe, the dangling roots, the exuberant tree; the perfect harmony with the olive groves cascading throughout the hillsides. And that enchanting discernment of the bridge where earth and heaven conjoin.  It is both sensual and inspiring.

 

Various cultures have scratched around on such linkages.  Indigenous peoples have routinely called attention to sacred places – holy places – where Creator and creation come into contact.  Celtic people have given us the notion of “thin places” where the membrane between heaven and earth becomes diaphanous enough to see into the other side.  All recalling us to the intimate proximity of eternity with the quotidian.

 

“The embraced male and female figures…rooted in the ground and a greater part yearning for the sky.”

 

All that said, it is easy to feel like the two have little contact these days, heaven and earth.  Whatever it is in which our roots are dangling, it doesn’t seem very nourishing – or grounding.  Whatever it is toward which our arms our reaching, it doesn’t appear to be very salvific.  And as for embracing one another, well, there isn’t enough of that on which to comment.  We have traded loving for condemnation, exchanged embracing for killing, muffled exuberant reaching with stultifying embitterment.  We have become as estranged from each other as have heaven and earth.  At least earth from heaven.  Easter’s recent “Alleluias” remind us that the gardener still and determinedly toils among us, with saving determination.

 

Perhaps part of the problem is supposing that one approach – one aspect – is adequate. Could it be, however, that the artist is on to something with the inclusion of all three:

 

Rootedness in the earth.

Exuberant embrace of each other.

Celebratory reaching toward heaven.

 

Love of creation, love of each other, an insatiable ache for God.  

 

It will not, after all, go well for us without any one of the three. 

 

All three.

All three.

All three.

The Lingering Quietude of Holy Saturday

 

It is daylight, now, yet the sounds are more muted than a typical Saturday morning; bird song being the primary echoes of last night’s singing.  

 

Throughout the preceding days in this small, ancient Italian hillside village, workers had hung the large paintings – perhaps 8-feet by 4-feet - throughout the narrow streets of the town in preparation for Good Friday’s “Way of the Cross” procession.  Each painting depicted one of the traditional stations of the cross – one, imaging the Roman guards rolling dice for Jesus’ tunic, hung immediately across from our doorway.  

 

We had no idea what to expect.  At the appointed hour – just before 9 pm and well-after dark – townsfolk, perhaps 200 strong, gathered in front of one of the ancient churches, and, following the large cross and accompanying signs of the faith held aloft on poles by strong and fervent assignees, sang our way from station to station.  At each painting, now dimly illuminated by two burning candles on the pavement below, we paused for a reading from scripture, and a prayer from the priest, before resuming our song and our inexorable procession through the cramped lanes forward to the next artfully rendered scene and eventually to the miserable end.  There, after closing priestly words, we were bade to depart in silence – an admonition even we could translate, and with which everyone complied.  

 

Back through the now emptied streets we made our way back toward our apartment, pausing briefly as we passed the now lonely candles still flickering beneath the art.  In silence, and in darkness of more kinds than one, with only those small, flickering flames licking away the void, walked a more utilitarian procession of our own.

 

We are not Catholics, nor do we speak Italian, but we are no strangers to the story.  The images themselves were raconteurs enough.  The readings of the volunteers, the prayers of the priest, the guitar strums by the teenager leading the songs eventually devolved into the accompanying drone over which our own prayers and meditations were hummed. 

 

For as I say, we know the story.

 

There was rain overnight, no doubt extinguishing whatever candles might have remained burning; washing away  – at least literally if not essentially – some of the soot and smudge of the world.  The deeper cleaning needed requires sturdier, more spiritual bristles and water of a different character.  We will be reminded of those tomorrow.

 

But today, amidst the fragrant morning and the industrious joy of the singing birds, the memory of the darkness lingers – the crowd, the murmured responses, the foot treads, the images, the flickering flames.  A day – a mood – perhaps not unlike that one endured by Mary and Martha and Peter and John and all those others who had heard what they could not unhear, seen what they could not unsee.

 

Remembering, seeing, hearing afresh, wandering these same narrow streets now haunted by the echo of grace.