Living word by word

Better than your own funeral

 
"It's too bad we can't attend our own funerals."  I hear this wish voiced from time to time, usually when a particularly well-attended and well-organized memorial service has taken place. I think what they mean is that they wish the living could hear the affirmation of their lives that a memorial service often devises. They wish all the loved ones from near and far could gather while the person is still living and well enough to appreciate the love that is witnessed there.

Of course, people who make these wishes are often not the people who, like pastors, see the underside of end-of-life planning. They haven't witnessed the ways that long-buried family dynamics can suddenly rear their heads when people are grieving and have no energy for best behavior. They may have forgotten about the relative who must be in control of matters at all times, and who was only held in check by  -- guess who -- the one who is now deceased.

And, I suspect, what they might really want is all the "celebration of life" that can happen as a life ends, without the reality that death ends that life. Better observers than I -- Thomas Lynch and Thomas Long in particular -- have voiced the concern that we seem too eager to have funerals without death, without bodies, without sorrow.

But every year, on Ash Wednesday, an astonishing number of people -- and not only the ones I would expect -- turn up to have a cross of ashes placed on their foreheads, and to hear the words, "remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

It's a moving ritual in and of itself, this reminder of mortality, but it is especially moving to me each year, because I know a lot of stories behind every forehead. Since I am a pastor,  I know who buried a sibling or a spouse this past year and who had a medical scare last week. I know who buried  a parent in the columbarium behind us, and who has come to terms with an addiction this year.  I know which marriages are particularly troubled, and who might actually be glad to hear that the troubles of this world won't go on forever.

It is, in an odd way, sort of like attending your own funeral, except that elevating the individual is completely antithetical to the day's message. In fact, Matthew's Gospel explicitly enjoins us to avoid visible signs of our piety, to hide the things that others might call holy in us. Instead, we all receive exactly the same visible signs-- a cross of ashes, mixed with oil, and a bit of bread and wine.  Whatever our triumphs or failings in life, they are marked with the same sign of temporality, and the same signs of God's redemption.

Like a funeral, Ash Wednesday produces in us a kind of compassion for one another that we don't always muster every Sunday, without the individualistic  "pressure" of the "only funeral you will ever get." We walk away reminded that this community, as it is gathered on this day, is captive to time and aging and death. No matter what our differences with one another, they stand underneath these signs of the ultimate truths: we will (all of us!) die; and Christ is risen.

I'm glad I don't have to attend my own funeral, and really grateful I get to attend this collective reminder of mortality  and redemption every year.

 

Lent = lengthen

When days are longer but still rather wintry, we live in the in-between time. Spring is coming, yes it is, but we cannot see it yet.

How often do lenten disciples feel like this? You can imagine praying more, or being more generous, or giving up that thing you know isn't adding life to your days, and yet somehow the living-into-it proves pretty hard.

So don't be thinking about your lenten disciplines as a sort of renewed January resolutions. This is about coming to terms with your limits, finding where they are, and handing the rest over to God.

December 15: What Child is This? verse 2

Why lies he in such mean estate

where ox and ass are feeding?

Good Christian, fear; for sinners here

The silent Word is pleading.

Nails, spear shall pierce him through,

The cross be borne for me, for you

Hail, hail the Word made flesh,

the babe, the son of Mary.

      In this month's Christian Century, Rodney Clapp   reminds us that the primary feast of the Christian year is Easter, not Christmas. If we're feeling stressed out about all there is to do with nine days to go, it is good to remember that

"The pressure to keep up a relentless facade of merriment is not a Christian pressure. We may not be able to completely escape this, but perhaps we can lessen it by not confusing it with discipleship."

Tonight at ECLC we'll do our part for relief from that pressure toward merriment by hosting  a Blue Christmas service -- one designed to give space for those who are grieving or finding the season difficult. I know there are many such people. Indeed, today I received a caringbridge update from the sister of a friend who died in December two years ago, just a couple days after her own 43rd birthday.

    The fact that Easter is our primary feast is hinted at in a number of Christmas carols, though sometimes the "facade of merriment" makes us uneasy with verses such as this second verse from What Child is This?. Who wants to hear about nails and spears on December 24? But the fact is that the Incarnation and our redemption through Jesus' death and resurrection are bound up together. If Jesus had not been born a mortal, he would not have been fully human. If this baby had not eventually died at the hands of the Romans (and, say, had become a successful violent rebel instead), his witness to a God who wishes "peace on earth" would have been null and void.

   So we can sing with some gratitude that, like we will, Jesus died. And since he rose again, we too can join in Easter songs as well. Hail the Word made flesh!

dirty fingernails

     Every year after Ash Wednesday, it takes a while for me to clean out the ashes completely from under my fingernails. I don't know if other ministers have this problem, but like most ministerial burdens, this one is also a blessing.

  In a middle-class church like mine, it can seem as if most of us have things together. People don't particularly dress up at our church, but we put on our game faces and generally appear happy when we show up. Sure, there are some public struggles -- deaths, battles with cancer and the occasional divorce, but mostly the wounds are hidden. Only those of us who receive pastoral confidences can look out at a congregation and see a multitude of sins and struggles. Those stories, and the grief and loss they represent, cling to us like this mix of oil and ashes, easy to spread and hard to remove. Once a year we have the grace to say it out loud and make it visible for all to see.

  It can be easy to turn Lent into a sort of New Year's Resolution time, and make ourselves as pastors into personal trainers. But I believe we begin the season with these ashes to remind ourselves that our disciplines, no matter how "successful," do not change our essence. We are all made out of the same mortal stuff. Done well, our feeble efforts to pray, fast and serve the poor only remind us again of our weakness. We are dust, but that dust is mixed with the oil of royalty because God has chosen to enter it. Our mortality is formed in the shape of a cross, blessed and broken open for the sake of others.

I will scrub out the ashes from under my nails, but it's good to be reminded of their persistence.

Ashes coming. . .

 Every year my birthday (2/24) falls somewhere near the beginning of Lent. I call it a good year when it falls before Ash Wednesday, and this year is a particularly good year, since it coincides with Mardi Gras!!

Then again, I'll have only one day to celebrate a journey around the sun before we're called to contemplate mortality, and this year the vulnerability of aging is striking especially hard. . .too many of my peers are dealing with chronic or life-threatening illness.

I love the fact that Ash Wednesday deals in a physical sign of this vulnerability though, because ashes are a prime reason many of us do not contemplate our bodies' temporality much these days. As cremation becomes more and more the standard, our society seems to "slough off" the bodies of our beloved dead all too quickly.  We will gather to 'celebrate life,' but not so much to be reminded that those eyes we knew so well are closed forever.

Thomas Lynch has written powerfully on this subject in several places, most recently in an essay in Best American Spiritual Writing 2008. He gives the vivid picture of a woman who comes to pick up her sister's ashes, because no one else will, and as he watches she goes out with the urn  to the trunk of her car, thinks better of it, then places it in the back seat, then reconsiders again, and finally places the ashes in the passenger seat, and buckles the seat belt around them.

"Just a shell," people say of the body of the deceased, but our actions sometimes speak otherwise. We know that this dust formed of the ground has not only been breathed into by God, but molded, shaped, and blessed by divine hands. They will return to dust, but in the mean time they are marked with a holy sign of God's ultimate love.

Blessed Ash Wednesday

That thing you thought would save you, is killing you.

The margarine you ate for all of the 1980’s was worse for you than real butter and still clogs your arteries. The marathon training that made you feel so healthy turns out to have ruined your joints and reduced your immunity. The diet that they said would turn around your health messed up your metabolism for good. The drug  therapy that you thought would make your life better now turns out to raise your risk of heart attack.

The time-saving devices that our forefathers developed to save their backs now mean that we don’t get any exercise.

Remember the prediction that personal computers would give us  a paperless society?

The international alliances of a generation ago come back to bite us, and the children of those allies are now dreaming of jihad against us.

We live in a time with so much information and so little reason to trust anything we read. We can get practically anything we want from anywhere in the world, but half the time we don’t know anything about how it was made or whether it is safe.

And even our best intentions can come back to bite us.

A few months ago my husband and son were in a car accident one block from his nursery school. They slammed into the side of a moving truck at an uncontrolled intersection. They were fine. The car was not. Not having faced any decisions about cars in nearly ten years, we immediately began the research on what to get next for our one and only family vehicle. Hybrid or not? Compact or wagon? Side airbags too? What about diesel?

One thing we were certain of – it would not be a new car. Both for financial and environmental reasons, we did all our research in the used car market. We even contemplated buying a compact diesel station wagon from a few states away for its stunning gas mileage.  In the end, we found an acceptable conventional vehicle from a local small dealer, still second guessing ourselves about forgoing the diesel.

And then, a few days later a new report was released. It turned out that diesel fumes, because of the soot they emit, are so bad for their effect on climate change that any savings in gas mileage is canceled out. That thing you thought was so righteous? It’s not.

That thing that you thought would save you, in fact is killing you.

Forgive us Lord, for all our efforts to save ourselves. We make terrible messiahs.