next Sunday, April 28th, turned out to be a nice, warm, early-spring day. As the sun came up, we looked forward to a day of rest and worship and a chance for a return to normal.
About one hour before the Sunday service, Br. Larry came in to the office to say, “We have another one.” It took me some moments to understand and internalize the fact of another death. She had died tragically in a fire, caught in an upper room. Her mother would be coming up from New York City on the bus later that evening. The police would have informed her of her daughter’s death. Our Dean of Students, Kenn Elmore, his associate, John Battaglino, and I planned to meet the bus. That evening, we awaited a delayed Greyhound, talking a bit about the week past. We pondered how best to greet the grieving mom. It was decided I would meet the bus and greet her as she came down the steps, offer our heartfelt condolences, and start the trek over to the hotel. The noise of the terminal, the lateness of the hour, the long weeks of terror and loss, and the approximate presence of death itself settled on us, giving us that quiet of the soul that sometimes overtakes us.
In the bus rolled. The mother came down the steps carrying a beautifully decorated box, holding it with both hands.
“I want to greet you for the University and express our deepest sympathy and heartfelt concern” I said.
“Where is my daughter?” she replied, “What hospital is she in? Please take me to her so I can see her and talk with her. I want to go and see her. Where is she? How is she doing? I brought a rice cake. See. In the box. It is her favorite. Rice cake. I know it will make her feel better.”
Honestly, at every phrase, I tried to say, with honesty and kindness, that her daughter had in fact died the night before, caught in an awful fire. Apparently, she did not understand the police, they did not speak clearly, or someone else in the family took the call. I tried everything. But she could not understand or could not hear, until, at last, she looked up and asked, “You mean . . . she . . . is dead?” Yes.
There is a phrase in the Christmas gospel about Rachel weeping for her children. That Bus Terminal echoed with the chilling, haunting, and painful cries of a mother who rightly could not and would not be consoled, as Rachel could not. The reverberation of her sobbing across that urban nighttime cacophony I can hear still. Nothing I said helped. Nothing I did helped. Nothing I could offer her could she receive. We sat on a bench, the wailing stronger still, the cake and box on the floor, the gathered friends lost in grief. Then, she stiffened, her arm becoming taut and cold in mine. Perhaps she was going into shock. Everything I tried—counsel, prayer, listening, scripture—all was of no avail.
Then, from her other side, Dean Elmore simply surrounded and enfolded her. He put all of his body and arms around her as she wailed and stiffened. He held her. He rocked her. He embraced her. And little by little, sob by sob, she began to relax. And little by little, breath by breath, she began to loosen up. And little by little, held tight, she came through it. Her lament lessened, her limbs loosened. Out up from the tomb she came. A physical, unspoken compassion brought her through, from death to life. It was a resurrection love, compassion, embrace, grace, freedom, care, acceptance, mercy, pardon, peace, inclusion. It was a resurrection love. And it is perhaps the most powerful, public, pastoral ministry I have witnessed.
Unamuno: warmth, warmth, warmth; we are dying of cold not of darkness; it is not the night that kills, it is the frost.14
Six years ago, at the time of our dad’s death, Elie Wiesel sent a note. It was love physical, compassionate, and personal, and, as with all resurrection love, it made a difference. It concluded: we have a saying in our tradition, “may you be spared another further hardship.”
Love gives us life.
Memory. Prayer. Love.
The marks of the new age are present hidden in the old age. At the juncture of the ages, the marks of the resurrection are hidden and revealed in the cross of the disciple’s daily death, and only there . . . this is what the turn of the ages means, that life is manifested in death.15
Hear the Gospel: memory, prayer, love, creation, redemption, sanctification, Father, Son, Spirit, and life in death. Life in death holds out a promise of something grander still, life after death.
Closing: Apostles Creed
8. Martyn, “Epistemology,” 273.
9. Gilmour, Gospel According to St. Luke, 416.
10. Santayana, “Life of Reason,” 629.
11. Wikipedia, “Requiem for a Nun.”
12. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 2:992–96.
13. Schulweis, “Two Prophets, One Soul.”
14. See Unamuno, “Tragic Sense of Life,” 631.
15. Martyn, “Epistemology,” 273.
Exit or Voice?
Philippians 1:21
Tuesday, August 8th, 2017
For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.
Frontispiece
Over pasta last summer, on a hot July night, six of us of long friendship ate and talked. For decades, our dear friend has been a committed participant in a community group. She has taken pride in her work, preparing and practicing for her role, recruiting others and helping in the community. With spaghetti, wine, and the warmth of long relationship, we nodded and supped. But something had happened. The old committee chair left. A new one came. He was, sadly, rude and belligerent with his helpers. Not just once or twice.
Said she: “What should I do? I love the group, and I love my team. But his behavior I cannot abide. I have talked to him. He rebuffs me. If I stay, I endure and even collude in his misbehavior, but I will still have my voice in the group and with the committee. If I leave, I exit from what I love and also leave behind any influence I might have to help, support, or protect others. I am loyal to my friends, but I am ready to go. What should I do?”
Hours, days, and months are actually shot through with this form of dilemma in choice. Exit or voice? A famous study, written at MIT forty-five years ago, laid out for economists the dimensions of the dilemma.16 But such a condition goes well beyond the marketplace.
Having introduced our gospel, let us re-introduce ourselves, one to another . . .
We are grateful for your witness here, at Chautauqua, your ubiquitous ministry—lay, musical, clerical, and all. Incidentally, Peter Gomes left us a clue or two about ministry:
You ask me the secret of my success in ministry at Harvard over forty years? I give it to you in a single word: ubiquity. I am everywhere. I go everywhere. I attend everything. I enter every building and dorm. I walk through every yard and hill and valley and molehill. I go where I am invited.
