Michael and I celebrated our forty second anniversary Monday with our good friends Cannan and James by taking a time out at the Sourwood Inn on Elk Mountain Scenic Highway. Every year when July 12 rolls around, we spend time remembering our weddings. Cannan remembers us as young seminary students at Crescent Hill Baptist Church, remembers our wedding. I was her wedding director, a superfluous assignment, trying to herd cats at the rehearsal as all the strong minded participants felt free to tell us all how it should be done. This year our laughter was seasoned with tears as we listened to James share his journey into forgetting. Communication was an essential piece of his being as a pastoral counselor and professor. Words mattered and memory informed his life. Now, he tells us, he is learning to communicate from the heart since he can no longer speak and remember freely.
Our innkeeper, Nat Burkhart, was a longtime neighbor when we lived in town. In his retirement, he and his wife, his daughter and her husband built and staff the Sourwood Inn. It sits high on Elk Mountain near the parkway and is perched among blooming sourwood trees and clouds. At breakfast, Nat engages us in theological conversation as he serves oatmeal pancakes and juice. We learn he gives all his guests “propaganda” telling them they don’t have to read it, just don’t put it in the trash because when he empties the trash cans, it will hurt his feelings to find it there. He hands us some of his “propaganda” from various books and articles that have caught his soul’s eye and I bring it home to read. One of the passages is from “The Luminous Web” by Barbara Brown Taylor,
“It is not sufficient any longer to listen at the end of a wire to the rustlings of the galaxies; it is not enough to even examine the great coil of DNA in which is coded the very alphabet of life. These are our extended perceptions. But beyond lies the great darkness of the ultimate dreamer, who dreamed the light and the galaxies. Before act was, or substance existed, imagination grew in the dark. Loren Eiseley
The physicist Neils Rohr, who was so conscious of the limits of language, liked to tell the story about a young rabbinical student who went to hear three lectures by a famous rabbi. Afterward he told his friends, ‘The first talk was brilliant, clear and simple. I understood every word. The second was even better, deep and subtle. I didn’t understand much but the rabbi understood all of it. The third was by far the finest, a great and unforgettable experience. I understood nothing and the rabbi didn’t understand much either.’
Since I have studied under Rabbi Jesus, this story makes perfect sense to me. There are things no one can talk about. If we insist on trying, as we are inclined to do, then something unforgettable may happen in the air around our words, but it will not be because we understand them in any rational sort of way.”
We all live within the limits of our minds with or without Altzheimer’s. Our imagination is sparse and bound by our experiences. Do we imagine a God who hears our prayer or is prayer a means to action for us? Do we remember our faith stories and cling to the past or are we traveling into new unexplored realities of Imaginative Being informed but not bound by our history? Have we forgotten who we are and to whom we belong? Can we forgive ourselves for not remembering?
Forgiveness and forgetfulness… part of the Great Mystery… We are finite creatures who will never be able to see through the dark glass clearly no matter how hard we try or how learned we are. Like James, I am trying to learn how to live from the heart because no words, no memory can contain the Mystery. And, I must forgive myself for my forgetfulness, my inability to keep my eye on the prize. Tina Turner’s signature song asks the question, “What’s love got to do with it?” The answer is Love has to do with everything and even when words fail to come, when my memory begins to fade, Love will sustain me as it has these many years. And it will flow from James’ heart to mine unrestrained by the limits of language. Thanks be to God for the mysteries that I cannot begin to imagine.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
dragging bottom...
Getting into the inner tubes proved to be more of a challenge than we anticipated. Claudie held them for us as we plopped our bottoms down in the cold water of the Oconaluftee River that runs through the downtown park in Cherokee, N.C. As each one of us settled in, we held the rope on the other tube for the next person until our little four tube train was ready to go. Out into the current we floated and for a few minutes, it was bliss.
Watching the children scampering in the water and floating by us, it looked so easy from the banks of the river. Being IN the river was a different proposition however. First, Mary Lynn wailed she was losing air in her tube and sinking down. We began to try to head towards shore but the current speeded up and we were held captive to the flow. Mary Lynn’s bottom made a personal acquaintance with most of the rocks in the river as we struggled towards shore. As Mary Lynn and Claudie beached on the rocks, Janis and I were floating on down unable to extricate ourselves from the tubes or the current. The river was no longer friendly but scary and there were no easy places to land. Finally, we were able to make our way to the banks underneath the main downtown bridge after much anxiety and screaming.
Walking up the path back to the park, we were uncertain whether to try again or not. Janis needed some time off to regain her balance so she stayed with Andy, our work camp family historian and videographer, as the rest of us tried again to master the art of tubing. Mary Lynn’s tube was flat as a pancake so we were a three tube train this time. Getting in the tube was a little easier, the water was not quite as cold, and we watched our fellow tubers to ascertain an exit plan. This time out we found the flow, avoided most of the rocks submerged just below the surface, and made shore without too much trouble. Janis rejoined us and the bliss grew with each successful trip.
The children began to play with us, the only old tubers on the river. They watched us with interest and fascination as we careened past them laughing and screaming. One little boy became our friend and we dubbed him our lifeguard. When we floated past him, he would grab our tubes and take us to shore. One time he dove under the water and came up beside me roaring like a shark scaring the bejeezus out of us. We listened to his fish story… I almost caught a fish by hand and he was huge… and praised his minnow collection. We were river buddies.
The writer of Psalms 46 knew about dragging bottom. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.’ Each of us in my work camp family had spent some time dragging bottom in the past year since our last reunion. Health issues, retirement or not, aging problems, financial concerns, relationship changes… those rocks in the bottom of the river of time had left marks on us. But we have gathered ourselves up and launched out into the river again and again, gathering courage and strength from those who love us and from the God of the Glad River that flows through the habitation of the Most High.
I give thanks for the laughter on the river that came after the fear on the river, the love that surprises me again every year when we gather, and for the One who first called us together in Cherokee, N.C. forty five years ago. We are children of God in the River of Life floating back to the One who is our resting place, our still water in the midst of the rocky bottoms. Thanks be to God for more than enough!
Watching the children scampering in the water and floating by us, it looked so easy from the banks of the river. Being IN the river was a different proposition however. First, Mary Lynn wailed she was losing air in her tube and sinking down. We began to try to head towards shore but the current speeded up and we were held captive to the flow. Mary Lynn’s bottom made a personal acquaintance with most of the rocks in the river as we struggled towards shore. As Mary Lynn and Claudie beached on the rocks, Janis and I were floating on down unable to extricate ourselves from the tubes or the current. The river was no longer friendly but scary and there were no easy places to land. Finally, we were able to make our way to the banks underneath the main downtown bridge after much anxiety and screaming.
Walking up the path back to the park, we were uncertain whether to try again or not. Janis needed some time off to regain her balance so she stayed with Andy, our work camp family historian and videographer, as the rest of us tried again to master the art of tubing. Mary Lynn’s tube was flat as a pancake so we were a three tube train this time. Getting in the tube was a little easier, the water was not quite as cold, and we watched our fellow tubers to ascertain an exit plan. This time out we found the flow, avoided most of the rocks submerged just below the surface, and made shore without too much trouble. Janis rejoined us and the bliss grew with each successful trip.
The children began to play with us, the only old tubers on the river. They watched us with interest and fascination as we careened past them laughing and screaming. One little boy became our friend and we dubbed him our lifeguard. When we floated past him, he would grab our tubes and take us to shore. One time he dove under the water and came up beside me roaring like a shark scaring the bejeezus out of us. We listened to his fish story… I almost caught a fish by hand and he was huge… and praised his minnow collection. We were river buddies.
The writer of Psalms 46 knew about dragging bottom. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult.’ Each of us in my work camp family had spent some time dragging bottom in the past year since our last reunion. Health issues, retirement or not, aging problems, financial concerns, relationship changes… those rocks in the bottom of the river of time had left marks on us. But we have gathered ourselves up and launched out into the river again and again, gathering courage and strength from those who love us and from the God of the Glad River that flows through the habitation of the Most High.
I give thanks for the laughter on the river that came after the fear on the river, the love that surprises me again every year when we gather, and for the One who first called us together in Cherokee, N.C. forty five years ago. We are children of God in the River of Life floating back to the One who is our resting place, our still water in the midst of the rocky bottoms. Thanks be to God for more than enough!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
