Lent... a love story

In my memory, he stands tall and straight like the Georgia pines around his house. Wearing overalls with a can of Prince Albert tobacco and a packet of paper in his pocket, he sits on his heels to roll his cigarette, surveying the world around him. Yesterday, stooped, slight of frame and trembling, he stood by the casket of his wife of seventy four years to say his last good by to the woman he has loved since he was seventeen. As she descended into the pits of the hell of Alzheimer’s, he stood by her side and with the help of children, kept her home with him until the end. His was the last face she knew even when she couldn’t remember his name. Their marriage was not a happily ever after. Times were hard and Calhoun men are notoriously difficult to live with. But the love remained, refined by conflict and struggle, until the pure flame that sprung into being when he was sneaking kisses at school became a selfless devotion to her well being.
I sat with him for a few minutes talking about his new reality. He told me about coming home, a home without her presence, sleeping in his bed, waking up in the night to go sit in his chair and weeping for an hour. He has suffered an amputation of the spirit and it hurts like hell. Telling him I had no idea how he must be feeling (he informed me I got that right), I told him I hoped he would continue to cry, to grieve, to mourn the loss of his beloved Burma Lou. He spoke of his fear of being suffocated by tender loving care, of not being allowed to stand on his own as much as he could. And he spoke of feeling he had nothing to live for now. I reminded him he was a Calhoun man, tough as a corn cob, who never flinched from hard work. This will be the hardest work he has ever done. And I also told him I had asked Jesse to whop him up side the head when he talked about nothing to live for. I reminded him there were others of us who still need him, the last of the Calhoun brothers living, to be our stack pole, our connection to our parents and their family.
Love does not come cheap. Sometimes it comes with grace and ease but always it is given life by struggle and suffering. New mothers and fathers survey their little babies with a love the depth of which never fails to surprise. But, they live out that love through the years paying the price for that love in loss of sleep, feeding, clothing, teaching, weeping, frustration and pride. We find our mates, the persons who delight us and take delight in us. We marry. We live together. Our points of pleasure and attraction often become blisters raised on our soul as we struggle with the fit of our relationship. Our parents who brought us into this world and shaped it for us, are flawed even as we are. The love we felt for them as a child often turns to a benign mild contempt as we grow away from them into our adulthood. Most of us leave that form of loving behind as we mature and learn to see our parents as individuals, people like us who have their own gifts and struggles.
Love and loving is never a one size fits all process. Each relationship is unique unto itself and yet the same. “And now I beg you, lady, not as though I were writing you a new commandment, but the one we have had from the beginning, that we love one another. And this is love, that we follow his commandment, as you have heard from the beginning, that you follow love.” This passage from the Second Letter of John, a short loving note written to the “elect lady and her children”, calls us to follow love.
Lent is in the final analysis a love story. God so loved the world that he sent someone to love us here on earth. The power of that unadulterated pure loving has transformed lives through the centuries that have followed. My calling during Lent is to learn how to love more completely God, myself and others... to live that love, to speak love in truth, to become a purer, brighter flame of loving until one day my love returns to its Creator, refined and strong. Dear One in Three, give me strength to endure the furnace and laughter for living as I stumble along loving as best I can all those who share my life. Help me not take myself too seriously and remind me that we all deserve a heaping helping of love without strings attached. Let me be a loving respite for those who need a place to lay their weary heads and be my refuge in times of trouble, Lord. I love you best, Lord. Let my life show it, please.

Lent... Sad brains

Mom, how can I stop crying when my brain is still sad? Mason Thomas Maguire

I went to my daughter Megan’s house this week to help with her boys while her husband was out of town for a convention. Megan had a class in at her work and her days began at six thirty teaching, often lasting through the evening meal. So Nana rode in on a white horse(or a white donkey?) to the rescue arriving to loud shouts of praise and acclamation from three of our grandsons. My days began early with snuggles and laughter followed by the multi-tasking required to feed, clothe and transport small children to and from school. Matthew takes a bus to his neighborhood school but Mason’s special class is in a school in town so he must be driven in.
Every morning we walk in with the other children and parents at Ward Elementary, many colors, ethnic backgrounds, typically and atypically developing, all converging in a swarm on the school doors. I smile at the African American mother who walks her son in on crutches. Maximiliano, Mason’s friend, and “my girl Donna” are already in the classroom at the computers and look up smiling as we enter. The principal speaks to Mead and calls him by name, teasing him a little as we leave.
Then it is on to Mead’s school where I join in the parade of parents and grandparents bringing their little ones to the pre-school at Lewisville Methodist Church. I watch the Pap Paw in overalls, driving a pick up truck and wearing his cell phone blue tooth in his ear, walk his granddaughter into the building. I smile at the mothers and fathers and grandparents who have the privilege of being a part of the daily routine for these children. So much joyful energy concentrated in this one place lifts my spirits.
In the evening of the first day, we go to eat at the boys favorite restaurant, The Statue of Liberty. Its real name is the Liberty Restaurant but the statue of Lady Liberty in the front translated by the literal minds of children has resulted in a name change. She stands washed in gold paint over a sea foam green background, holding her torch aloft, a sign of fine dining for the boys. It is a down home place with leatherette covered booth seats, home made potato salad, salmon patty specials and waitresses who have worked there for years. Like the bar in “Cheers”, everybody knows your name.
We order and sit with the boys, talking about their day. Megan and I catch up on the schedule for the next day. Matthew asks how long I will be staying and I tell him I will be leaving Wednesday. A few minutes later we look at Mason and see his lower lip trembling, eyes brimming and running over with tears that streak down his dusty little cheeks. One of the ways Mason’s autism is manifested is in a slower processing of information. He had just realized I would be leaving and was already grieving my departure. “Mom, could you hold me?”, Mason asked as his tears continued to flow. Megan held him and tried to comfort him with the prospects of coming to the farm next week for Easter with Nana and Pop. Looking up at her with tear streaked cheeks, he asked, “How can I stop crying when my brain is still sad?”
And there it is... the question for Holy Week reflection in preparation for the Resurrection Easter. Sad brains for Lent leave us with tear streaked souls, trembling chins and the dawning realization that our lives too will come to an end. Even as Jesus died and descended into hell, so do we during Lent die to ourselves and descend into the pit of despair and loss. We will never measure up, do enough, be completely true to our professions of faith, or obtain a certificate of perfection. Facing our shortcomings, our sins of omission and commission, is a depressing business and we weep not only for ourselves but for the world and its grimly familiar cycle of wars and rumors of wars, hunger and starvation, earthquakes and tsunamis, haves and have nots. Depressing... How can we stop crying when our brains are still sad?
An article in the New York Times Magazine, Depression’s Upside, written by Jonah Leher, quotes Andy Thompson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, and Paul Andrews, an evolutionary psychologist, who have proposed a new meaning for some of our sad brains. They view some depression as a necessary part of our development that carries with it the possibility of benefits... the silver lining in every cloud school of thought. Andrews and Thompson say “Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.”
Our souls need the wisdom that comes with the pain of Lent, the recognition of our limits and the awareness of our endings. Like Mason facing the departure of his Nana, our knowledge of suffering and death can lead us to grateful appreciation for life and all its gifts, a celebration of life’s triumph over death in the resurrection of Jesus, a model for living all the little lents that come our way during the days of this next year.
So I will learn from Mason... find someone to hold me, weep without shame, feel the sadness and loss, anticipate the bridge between grief and joy, and walk into the light of a life lived wisely without whining, grateful for all that has been and all that is yet to come. Hosanna, indeed! Anybody up for a donkey ride?

Lent... the Aunt Thelma of the liturgical year

My great-aunt Thelma was a force to be reckoned with. Stout of heart and body, her corset pulled tight by long laces, she moved through the days of her life busy with the work of God and man. Her round face, usually smiling, was wreathed with long braids wrapped round her head. When she took her daily nap, we were awed to see her unlace her corset before she lay down and even more dumbfounded to watch her lace it back up again. Hugging Aunt Thelma was like hugging a tree. Above you there was warmth and softness, but where you reached to hug there was only a generous sized unyielding whalebone encased midsection.
She was always on her way somewhere or doing something and talking non-stop with her Virginia Tidewater brogue a treat to my ears. Her pickled peaches were a gourmet treat and a meal at her house was a pleasure. She and Uncle Bill, my granddaddy’s younger brother, lived in my great-grandparents house on the family farm. The front door had a doorbell that you “rang” by turning the handle which we children did ,often to the chagrin of the adults who would eventually tire of our fun and tell us to stop. Trees as old as time shaded the front yard and the side porch. In the library along with Aunt Thelma’s extensive collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed books, stood an antique square piano that I loved to play even though it was in sore need of repair and tuning.
Aunt Thelma and Uncle Bill never had any children so Bruington Baptist Church, our family church in Virginia, became her family and she was an ever present force in that community. Preachers came and went but Aunt Thelma remained. Sunday School teacher of the same children’s class for years, Women’s Missionary Union president, deacon without the name, she provided pastoral care for generations of church members whether they knew they needed it or not. Sitting on Grandma’s porch, we saw her car pass by on the road at the end of the lane at least three times a week on her way to church. When we saw her pass by, we knew we should leave soon or we would be late. During the years when my grandparents did not have a car, she would pull in and pick them up for church.
Her life surveyed and judged by today’s standards might seem limited and poor. They did not travel much past Richmond nor did they have much of what we deem important today. They had enough to be comfortable... enough food, much of it grown in their garden, shelter in the old family home, friends, a place in their community, church and work to do. Uncle Bill’s job as a mailman guaranteed them a salary in times when money was scarce. And yet her life was rich in many ways... rich in connection and community, full of family and friends, faithful to her church and her beliefs. She lies buried now in the old churchyard at Bruington Baptist, the last resting place for many of my mother’s family.
Lent, like Aunt Thelma laced up in her corset, is stiff and unyielding in its insistence upon our taking a long hard look at our hidden selves, the petty, mean and unattractive parts of ourselves that need a spring cleaning. Hugging Lent, like hugging Aunt Thelma, feels stiff and unnatural to souls that are emerging from winter’s darkness in need of warmth and light. But in the embrace of Lent, we find forgiveness as well as judgement, light as well as darkness and love as well as loathing. Paradox Mystery... lose your life to save it, he said. Look at all that you need to let go, lose it, and move on to the new life waiting for you around the corner. If you are faithful to the process, like Aunt Thelma at Bruington Baptist Church, a life rich in all that really matters is yours. Today I will search for and name the places and people to whom I wish to be faithful. I will list the ways I have failed and ask forgiveness for my mistakes and sins. And I will rest in the old, old promise that though my sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Please, Lord?

Experience the Progression of the Experience

The following passage is the conclusion from Wendell Berry’s book “Life Is A Miracle”. I have been reading and re-reading this book for Lent and it has been a rich read. His education and writing skills have caused me to commit the sin of envy, fodder for my Lenten reflections. His words applied to my religious experience remind me how difficult it is to pass on what it is I know, what I have felt, what I have lived in my life with God. It is both judgement and hope for our future as children of God.

In speaking of the reductionism of modern science, we should not forget that the primary reductionism is in the assumption that human experience or human meaning can be adequately represented in any human language. This assumption is false.
To show what I mean, I will give the example that is most immediate to my mind:
My grandson, who is four years old, is now following his father and me over some of the same countryside that I followed my grandfather and father over. When his time comes, my grandson will choose as he must, but so far, all of us have been farmers. I know from my grandfather that when he was a child he too followed his father in this way, hearing and seeing, not knowing yet that the most essential part of his education had begun.
And so in this familiar spectacle of a small boy tagging along behind his father across the fields, we are a part of a long procession, five generations of which I have seen, issuing out of generations lost to memory, going back for all I know, across previous landscapes and the whole history of farming.
Modern humans tend to believe that whatever is known can be recorded in books or on tapes or computer discs and then learned again by those artificial means.
But it is increasingly plain to me that the meaning, the cultural significance, even the practical value, of this sort of family procession across a landscape can be known but not told. These things, though they have a public value, do not have a public meaning; they are too specific to a particular small place and its history. This is exactly the tragedy in the modern displacement of people and cultures.

My father, his father and his grandfathers before that were farmers in Georgia. My mother’s father and her grandfathers were farmers in Virginia. They each carry in their memories farming skills peculiar to their own geographical location at birth. Mother’s memories as she tagged along side her daddy, riding the plow horse as the fields were plowed, neighbors gathering to harvest the ice pond in the winter, the truck that came each week to the farm with fresh fish from the Chesapeake Bay, growing wheat to grind for your flour supply so bread could be baked... Her memories are so different from my daddy’s.
Daddy tended cows that were set free to roam the woods and fields each morning. It was his responsibility to gather them up in the evening. Growing tobacco, cotton and corn was hard work and all the children were field hands. Cornbread and biscuits, cane syrup, meat butchered in the backyard and smoked in the smokehouse, mules that provided the power needed to plow and harvest the crops... farming of a different sort from my mother’s experience.
I have heard these stories all my life and they are a treasure. And yet, hearing the stories does not teach me how to butcher a yearling, how to grow a healthy pasture, how to harvest ice, or how to plow with a horse or mule. Even growing up on my parent’s farm, I never lived what they lived, never felt the cycle of the seasons in quite the same way, felt the back breaking work necessary for survival, or had the same pleasures of swimming in the creek, watching the deer eat the windblows in the apple orchard in the early morning, eating the canned pork tenderloin that lives in my mother’s memory as one of the best tasting foods of her childhood.
And so it is with my faith experience. I can tell the stories of my mother growing up in the oldest Baptist church in Virginia, my growing up Baptist in a small country church in Georgia, being a part of a succession of Baptist churches all my adult life until my denomination self-destructed, leaving my faith home place and traveling to the strange land of a new denomination. These stories have a public meaning as Berry says but the private meaning, the particular meaning is impossible for me to capture in words alone.
Lent is a part of a faith experience that is public and particular at the same time. Its history is rooted in our beginnings with the meaning of many of its traditions lost in the telling of the stories. Knowledge captured in words written and spoken sheds a light on our path as we make this inward journey. Telling what we know, what we feel, what we have experienced is the only way we can hold on to the procession of the faithful through the centuries before us, all the grandfathers and grandmothers who walked before us on the Christian path to God.
Like the farmer in the parable of the barren fig tree, I have another year to dig and fertilize my soul during this particular season. So I practice Lent, walking in the fields of Christian experience, continuing my education, hearing and seeing and beginning to know some of what I need to know to be a competent Christian. And I write of this knowing words are a poor vehicle for the expression of my experience but it is the best I can do. And in the writing I become a part of “the living procession through time in a place that is the record by which such knowledge survives and is conveyed. When the procession ends, so does the knowledge.” May it never end.