More thoughts on Rome #3 (modified)

More from Doerr

In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

The same can be said of the routine of worship. In my first sermon after returning from Rome I spoke of how the difference between visiting Rome as a tourist and visiting as a pilgrim were the moments when, beyond the awe of the beauty of churches, beyond the incredible feeling of being in churches where Christians had prayed for almost 2000 years, I felt connected to the Christians praying beside me. We didn’t share language, culture, or rite but in that moment we shared a common faith, a common love and we abided together in that love. As I spoke these words and looked out at these people I gather with once a month, people I’m coming to know, I was struck by how what I found in Rome is something I experience regularly here. The familiarity of worship in Southern Alberta had obscured for me the joy and miracle of coming together in a common faith with a community of people which whom I might not otherwise have come together with.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

T.S.Eliot from The Four Quartets

Back home from saying goodbye to Dad

Yesterday we held the memorial service for my father. It was a good day filled with memories, some tears, and a lot of conversation. I feel like I met two hundred people yesterday all of whom had lovely things to say about Dad. It made me proud and exhausted at the same time. Having now been a family member twice now at a funeral let me say I have real sympathy for how hungry and thirsty family members can get trying to get to the refreshments and having to stop every two feet.

Four of my friends from Lethbridge came to the service and I can not express how much that meant to me. It gives you incredible strength to know that your 'peeps' are holding you up in their hearts when you knees are going weak and you are in danger of losing it. Yes, I know tears are okay. But I had spent two weeks writing my reflection and I wanted to be able to read the whole thing.

This is what I wrote for my father:

When it became obvious that something was really wrong Dad sat down and chose the poems and some of the music we are hearing today for his service. He has always loved Dylan Thomas – I remember being forced to listen to a Child’s Christmas in Wales when I was too young to appreciate it – but I wish now I had the opportunity to ask him why these two poems. The thing is that he didn’t seem to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’ when he was dying. From when he was diagnosed until the doctor told him that he had only a week or two to live he was what he described as fatalistic. He explained to me that he didn’t mean this in the sense of thinking that there was no hope, but in the sense that he thought things would progress the way that they were going to progress and he couldn’t wish it away. He appreciate that people were praying for him, he appreciated the care that it was reflected in such prayers, and he left open the possibility that there may be someone hearing those prayers, but he didn’t rage against God or the unfairness of this disease. Or if he did he did it quietly where we couldn’t hear it.

So my first reaction was that this poem was inappropriate for him. But then a friend pointed out to me that it did reflect much of how he lived his life. For my father did rage against social, political and economic forces that worked to diminish the light in people’s lives. Much of what motivated him was outrage when people were not treated decently or fairly. His work, his political involvement and much of his community involvement was driven by a commitment to social justice for all, especially those who were marginalized or silenced. More recently he raged against economic and political decisions which threaten the environment and the lives of future generations.

Even his social activities, his involvement with music, playing polo, sailing, building things, working in the garden were not trivial endeavors. Although they offered relief from the anger he often felt about economic and political matters they were still matters to be pursued with intensity. Even his leisure activities were opportunities to build community, create beauty, encourage the human spirit. He did not go gentle into any good night.

His passion was not always easy to live with. There were times when rage spilled out over us and times when it felt like Dad’s commitments to these bigger causes took priority over his family. And yet we were drawn into and shaped by his passions. In our owns ways Mom and Nicki and I share Dad’s passion for justice and beauty and community. While we may have found him at times infuriating he was not a trivial or a boring man and we are immeasurably changed by our life with him.

Many years ago I first read Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen there was one part that reminded me strongly of Dad’s way of living his life. The main character Reuven is worried about that his father is working too hard when he should be looking after his health. His father responds,

“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?”…I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”

Dad’s life was filled with meaning and he was worthy of his rest. But his dying was not just an end to that full and rich life. Even his dying itself was invested with meaning.

Dad has never been one to talk much about personal feelings and for most of my life he wouldn’t talk about death. He didn’t visit friends when they were dying and he hated going to funerals. Something significant shifted in him, however, when his sister Ruth died and I think it casts light on his choice of Thomas’ poem “And Death Shall Have no More Dominion”. When his only sister was diagnosed with cancer he phoned and visited her often and the week she died he flew out to be with her. When he phoned me to tell me Auntie Ruth had died he told me all about the week. He described how people had come to say goodbye and how it all felt. He told me how he felt being in the house and being with her. So out of character was this, I remember thinking, “who are you and what have you done with my father?” For most of his life I think he feared death but in that week spent with Ruth and her partner Joy and all their friends something changed in him and death had no more dominion.

After that he visited his friends when they were dying. He told me of one visit, how they had talked about their friendship and what they meant to each other. He expressed regret when another friend died before he had a chance to say goodbye. He was a changed man, a better friend, and in his own dying he was able to be a better husband and father. For whatever fear he may have had about dying he was not paralyzed by it. His big worry was us and how hard this was for us looking after him. Yet he was able to accept our help. He was able to allow us to care for him. Death had no more dominion.

And I think I can say for all of us, for my Mom and my sister, for our family and friends, who gathered with him that week that something has shifted in us because we walked that final week with him. Afterwards I met with a friend who lost her father two years ago. We shared our stories of what it was like walking on that holy ground: she said, “your heart is breaking but it is also breaking open.” Dad allowed us to care for him in a way we had never done before and in the process our hearts were broken open to love for him and for each other. And Death has no more dominion.

The Feast of St. Andrew

Today is the feast of St. Andrew, patron saint of Scotland and Tim has a wonderful posting over at Tale Spin. Please check it out here.

T. S. Eliot

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
Choruses from the Rock, I

Quoted by Richard Burridge in his article "Wisdom, Spirituality and Community in the University,"
Theology 104(2001)169.

After Grief - a poem by Dorothy Livesay

After Grief - Dorothy Livesay

Death halves us:
Every loss
Divides
Our narrowness
And we are less.

But more:
each losing’s an encore
of clapping hands
dreaming us on;
the same scene played once more
willing us grander than
we were:
no dwarf menines
but kings and queens.

and still, some say
death raises up
gathers the soul strong-limbed
above the common tide
to catch a glimpse
(over world’s wailing wall)
of an exultant countryside.

Lent - Day 35

Suspended

I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummetted.

Denise Levertov

Lent - Day 16

Praise

god or the gods, the unknown, 

that which imagined us, which stays 

our hand, 

our murderous hand,

                   and gives us

still,

in the shadow of death,

            our daily life,

            and the dream still 

of goodwill, of peace on earth. 

Praise

flow and change, night and 

the pulse of day.

An excerpt from "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus"
by Denise Levertov

Lent - Day 15

"O Taste and See" by Denise Levertov

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination's tongue

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savior, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

Lent - Day 13

We are fallen like the trees,
our peace
Broken, and so we must
Love where we cannot trust,
Trust where we cannot know.

Wendell Berry

Lent - Day 5

Catch Me in My Scurrying

Catch me in my anxious scurrying, Lord,
and hold me in this Lenten season:
hold my feet to the fire of your grace
and make me attentive to my mortality
that I may begin to die now
to those things that keep me
from living with you
and with my neighbors on this earth;
to grudges and indifference,
to certainties that smother possibilities,
to my fascination with false securities,
to my addiction to sweatless dreams,
to my arrogant insistence on how it has to be;
to my corrosive fear of dying someday
which eats away the wonder of living this day,
and the adventure of losing my life
in order to find it in you.

Catche me in my aimless scurrying, Lord,
and hold me in this Lenten season:
hold my heart in the beat of your grace
and create in me a resting place,
a kneeling place,
a tip-toe place
where I can recover from the dis-ease of my grandiosities
which fill my mind and calendar with busy self-importance,
that I may become vulnerable enough
to dare intimacy with the familiar,
to listen cup-eared for your summons,
and to watch squint-eyes for your crooked finger
in the crying of a child,
in the hunger of the street people,
in the fear of nuclear holocaust in all people,
in the rage of those oppressed because of sex or race,
in the smoldering resentments of exploited third world nations,
in the sullen apapthy of the poor and ghetto-strangled people,
in my lonely doubt and limping ambivalence;

and somehow,
during this season of sacrifice,
enable me to sacrifice time
and posessessions
and securities,
to do something....
something about what I see,
something to turn the water of my words
into the wine of will and risk,
into the bread of blood and blisters,
into the blessedness of deed,
of a cross picked up,
a saviour followed.

Taken from Ted Loder's Guerrillas of Grace

Ash Wednesday

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit
of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

from T.S. Eliot's poem Ash Wednesday written after his conversion