Stopping For Death

My father died on the first of December. It wasn’t expected, nor was it a surprise either. He was six weeks shy of his 90th birthday, and his days were filled with little else than putting together jigsaw puzzles. I share this with you because it is one of those crossroads I believe each of us comes to in life when a parent dies, and it begs the question how does one address this crossroad: does the death of a parent prompt you to change your course in life; does it draw you up short, wondering how you will go forward without that presence in your life, or do you cross over and deal with whatever grief and /or remembrances this death brings forth? I have known people whose lives went adrift when an elderly parent died, and they were like a ship which had lost its mooring. For me this has been a time of re-examining my feelings and attitudes towards death and dying.

Ever since my college days I have been periodically haunted by the Emily Dickinson poem “Death” where she writes:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves,
And Immortality.

Dickinson addresses the condition that afflicts most of us – avoidance of the matter of death, with a succinct countering that death is neither offended nor dissuaded by our busi-ness. So, I would like to cross this intersection where mortality and immortality meet, and share some thoughts which may help you to address this crossing in your own life.

My parents had done the pre-arrangements with a local funeral home and with their church to be interred in the church’s columbarium. So those issues were on record for my sister and I not to have to deal with. But what about the obituary? What about the funeral service – the scriptures, the hymns, the touchstones in life which made my father the man that he was or the man he became? Those were knee-jerk responses, mainly from my sister, but how much better for family and friends if both of these benchmarks of one’s life could have informed by the one whose life is being memorialized in each.

What is it about death which causes us to balk in our conversation about it? It is not option, like what kind of car we will buy. It seems as Christians many of us cannot embrace that final frontier of life; like Dickinson there are so many other things with which to concern ourselves.

Many of you have sent cards and emails expressing your sorrow for me and my family, and for those thoughts I am truly blessed and grateful; they have each helped me to cross over this crossroad with greater resolve and faithfulness. And that support is enabling me to “stop for death” and do some things I have been putting off. Pam and I have talked about some of these issues, but then the conversation becomes awkward, and we shift to other things. But today I make the following commitments:

• I will put into writing the blessings I have felt in this life, and anticipate the blessing still to come.
  
• I will detail the scriptures and the songs that have informed my life and my ministry, and why each was chosen.
  
• I will lay out the mistakes I believe I have made over a lifetime of choices, with the realization that I may never have asked for forgiveness due to my own human frailties, and with the understanding that I certainly won’t remember all of them!


• I will contact the person I wish to conduct the service and seek his counsel and consent to this request.

As a pastor for well over 30 years, I believe that there have been only two or three funerals or memorial services that I have conducted in which any or all of the above bullet points were available to me or to the family. But what a blessing when they were!

So as your friend and as a fellow, finite pilgrim on this journey through the life God in his grace has given each of us, let me encourage you to “stop for death” and give some thought to the issues brought forth today, and then take whatever action the Spirit leads you to take.
There is a prayer that comes out of the Ionian Community of Scotland which goes:
We have laid our burdens down / In the presence of the living God / We have been nourished for our journey / In the presence of the living God / We have taken on the armor of Christ / In the presence of the living God. / Now lead us, guide us, defend us, / As we go into yet another world / In the name and for your sake, / O loving, living God.

Transitions

As a child of about 5 years of age, I remember sitting with my parents and my sister on folding wooden chairs in this big – at least in my eyes – hall of a Methodist church. In point of fact, this is my first remembrance of church at all in my pre-school years. Being preoccupied with something – my nose, my shoelaces, a fly on the dress of the woman in front of me – I was suddenly aware that my dad was not sitting with us anymore. I looked around; a little panicked until I saw him up in the front with a lot of other people standing behind the guy who had been talking for some time. Come to find out that this “talking guy” – soon to be identified as a preacher – had put a call out for people to join the choir. This was a new church outside of Memphis, Tennessee, and my parents were excited about being involved with something new, and different … and stabilized. Dad’s work with the telephone company and laying cable from town to town kept us unstable until such time as I was ready to start school. And what could give a family more stability than by joining a neighborhood church? In essence, Dad never came back to sit with the family; he was a choir groupie, and he was good at it. He had the voice for it, and he used it diligently for over 50 years.

This memory came to me one day when I was worshipping at a church here in Sacramento – sitting in a pew, not standing in a pulpit. At a time of introducing visitors, an older couple in the back of the church introduced their six year old grandson. As they wrapped up their brief introduction, the lad’s grandfather said with a note of pride in his voice, “Yep, sitting right where his father sat when he was this age.”

When our children came along, I was already out of the pew and into the pulpit; When Pam and I married, there was already the separation between pew and pulpit; neither my wife nor my kids nor myself have ever really had the experience of sitting in church together. On the rare occasion that it does happen, it really feels right and purpose–filled. As a preacher, I had the opportunity to observe those families who sat together, and prayed, and sang, and listened together. For a time, my wife gave up her spot in the choir, in order to keep a tight tether on our four in their younger years. Now, in my role as a non-parish pastor, I sit in pews and wonder why we have we lost the kids sitting with their parents. Have we become so acquiescent to children’s demands that we shrug our shoulders and say “whatever …!”

There was a woman in my first church in Arkansas who showed me a gold pocket watch which had belonged to her late husband. She showed me the tiny dents in the case, and then told me that those were teeth marks from her children. From the time they were small, she and her husband had them in church, and when they got fussy, she gave them the pocket watch to occupy their attention, to bite on, to look at their reflection on the bright metal, etc; later they were allowed to open the case and move the hands as they practiced their math, all the while seated in church with mom and dad. Later, the watch went back into the vest pocket as they stopped looking down and started looking up and participating in the worship experience. Long after her husband had died, and the children had married and moved away, she still carried that dented pocket watch in her purse; a sacred relic which brought to remembrance being in church worshiping God with her family around her.

One day I will be back in that church here in Sacramento, and I will find that grandfather and thank him for what he said that day and for what he and his wife had done so many years before.

Gifts of Grace

The other day I watched a DVD of the movie “Cast Away,” and like so many things that you see once and then see again, you are made aware of things you missed before.

This is a Christmas movie in so many ways, which is probably why it was released during the Christmas season of 2000. The doomed FedEx aircraft crashes on Christmas Eve and the Tom Hanks character washes up on a south Pacific atoll on Christmas Day. With a touch of irony, we note that one of the first “casualties” of the crash is the pocket watch his girl friend/fiancé gave him as a Christmas gift no longer works; from the point of impact into the ocean, time became irrelevant. But now there were other things to take the place of time, for along with the soggy salvation of the efficiency expert, Chuck Noland, there is the salvation of all these “gifts” – the FedEx packages – that come in with the tide.

Each of these gifts impractical though they may appear – ice skates, volleyball, party dress, videotapes, etc. – plays a vital role in Noland’s survival. But none more so than the one that is never opened, the one with the wings as of an angel that provides a balance to all the material things that this castaway makes use of until he is rescued some four years later. Why does he hang on to it? Why does it stay intact the whole time of his ordeal? It is the only link to the spiritual aspect of his life; God is never mentioned, to the best of my recollection, but the spiritual component of God is there from the very beginning of the film. There is a continuity of a sense of the eternal while everything else in Chuck Noland’s life is bound by the temporal, by the tick-tock of on-time deliveries. In the end, we witness how one man’s ingenuity and determinism contribute to his salvation, but in the end also, we observe how the gift of hope is held up in a simple unopened package with a west Texas address adorned with wings as of an angel.

I have told you already that I am fascinated about those places, events, opportunities where the spiritual and the material sort of brush up against each other. So, it happens here in this screenplay.

I believe that God gives each of us gifts to get us through the days of our lives. For me the film is a metaphor for the frustration and despair that hover around us like a shroud. But underneath the despair there are gifts that God sends us if we but look around. They may be practical gifts just to get us moving, and dressed and getting ourselves fed, but there is always a spiritual gift that helps us to look beyond our present circumstances into the world that is to come; that has yet to be revealed to us.

Life as he had known it with FedEx, with his girl, with his urban environment is as empty for Noland as that south Pacific atoll. But there was still one thing left to do; deliver the package; take the gift of hope – the unopened package – to its intended destination. And so he does. As the film ends, we get a kind of God’s eye view of the “born again to a living hope” person we know as Chuck Noland. He is standing at a west Texas crossroads looking back down one of the roads at a new opportunity that has been placed before him. And the irony this time is that as one gift got delivered, another one was offered in its place. A gift of grace for someone who was lost, but now is found; was blind, but now he sees.

… and the credits roll.

Welcome to my Blog - Celtic Crossings

(Photo caption: Dr. Hurst atop Dun I, the highest point on the island of Iona)

I have spent over 30 years in the parish ministry, writing sermons every week. Even when we moved to another church, I kept up the discipline, feeling that delivering sermons written in another time and in another place would be like offering my congregation stale bread when they needed a fresh slice of the gospel to inform and to challenge their present existence. My years as a parish pastor came to an end last summer when I accepted an interim position as an associate presbytery executive in Sacramento, California. Suddenly, I found myself in an entirely different mode as a minister in the Presbyterian Church. At first, it was refreshing not to “fret” over next week’s texts. But then I remembered how much I enjoyed writing these 15 minute polemics for my congregations, and I found myself missing one of the more time consuming aspects of parish ministry. Enter my good friend Mary Duval who not only encouraged me to enter blog-dom, but who volunteered to do all the creative stuff to make this blog appealing to any who would find it interesting. You might want to check out her art and her insights at www.artbymj.blogspot.com.

CelticCrossings is a theme I came up with for this blog because it raises a particular world view that includes a socio-theological reference that intersects with a traveler’s musings or reflections. There are many of you out there who can be far more conversant on things Celtic than I – I know because I have read some of your postings. But there is a degree of self-awareness which leads me to posit that much of my latter theological beliefs have been shaped by my reading and by my traveling in Celtic lands. There is so much that is ancient in this word Celtic and there is so much that is post-modern or “new age” in this concept. There are elements of celtic thought and theology in the writings of such people as J.R.R. Tolkien, Frederick Buechner, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald. Among Protestant churches, the celtic cross has long been a recognizable symbol, particularly among Presbyterian churches. Throughout the life of this blog, you will see many that I have photographed in my travels, most of which were headstones in cemeteries to mark the life of a fellow traveler on this cobbled road of faith.

Thus we come to the word “crossings.” In each of our lives, we come to places where we just stop and go no further; or where we come to a place where we are distracted or diverted to go a different way than we had intended, or we come a place and decide to cross over to the other side. It is in the crossing that I believe the greatest learning takes place and it is in the crossing that our greatest fears most often surface and must be confronted. Fear of failing, or fear of embarrassment, or fear of doing the wrong thing, are often the greatest impediment to growth and learning. Perhaps that is why the Bible has the exhortation: “Fear not …” come from the heavenly messengers of God before a significant event is about to take place.

One of the things I would like to investigate in this blog is how such crossings open us to experience God in ways we may never have imagined. The Celts had an expression for where the spiritual and the physical came together in close proximity. They called it a “thin place.” George McLeod, a Presbyterian minister from Glasgow, Scotland, once used this expression in reference to Iona, a small island off the west coast of Scotland. McLeod believed that on this place where Columba ostensibly brought Christianity to Scotland, one could experience that “thin place” where the physical realities and the hardships of life rub up against the spiritual aspects of life. McLeod devoted his life to rebuilding the abbey on Iona and to making it a community for worship, meditation, and study for people of all faiths and backgrounds to come an experience this thin place for themselves. Indeed, when I “crossed” over to Iona in the early 90s, I sensed it to be a thin place for me, and I have been back several times to plumb the depths of that initial experience.

In future blogs, I will share with you some of the other places where I – or friends of mine – have experienced crossings in our lives where God’s grace endured and fears were relieved. I invite you to share with me your own crossings as God’s grace and support were manifest in the thin places of your own life.