Oh, to be human

I’ve been in the kitchen for most of the morning making cinnamon rolls for Don.  As I’ve been sifting, kneading, measuring, greasing, melting and chopping CBC has been playing Bach’s St. Matthew’s passion.  I have been only peripherally been engaged in Lent this year, but the music quickly seeped into my pores and before long I was along the road with the others watching as Jesus went by on his donkey, palm leaves waving as he sat listless from dehydration and physical assaults.

The chorus, which is the voice of the people, of you and me, is mournful and tender as they describe the scene before them.  Bach has them sing softly, almost dirge like, but then it shifts to a tender melancholy like they are looking at the scene from a distance.  I hear a self-reflective compassion for themselves that echoes Jesus’ words “Forgive them Father, they do not know what they do”.  They, I, we, see it all then: the betrayal, the witnessing (and not stopping it), the weakness, the persecution, the cruelty, the killing.  The Passion story is a vivid and raw depiction of the capacity for inhumanity – that each of us has within us.

As Richard Rohr writes: “Jesus became the cosmic Scapegoat who reveals our very worst and our very best to those who will gaze on the Crucified long enough.  Jesus became what humanity hates—to tell us to stop hating, to love that which we fear, and how wrong we can be about who is good and who is bad”.

I feel a revulsive kinship with the crowd: I myself am capable of great love but also selfish, self-centred, impatient bitterness.  I have capacity for nobility and graciousness but I am also full of a cold fury at the bitter loses I have endured.

I contemplated not believing in God last night (it is a choice after all isn’t it?).  Wouldn’t it be easier to think that there is nothing more than this?  That Heiko’s death was just a random event, not an event that is connected to my destiny. That I am not held up to a higher ideal of myself.  That I don’t need to keeping choosing forgiveness, goodness and self-love because Heiko’s spirit urges me to do so.  How much easier to sit on the couch and feel sorry for myself with no responsibility… But, why then, this inner urging to become whole, to transform my hurt into something good and meaningful?  I can only surmise yet again that this is the voice of God in me, the great unifier that calls us to truth.  Some bereaved create foundations and charities in their child’s name – for me, it seems that my memorial is this imperative that I cannot shake: it is to rise above my “sins”, as so piercingly depicted by the jeering crowd in the Passion story.

My sins are many when I am feeling afraid.  And betrayed.

Two thousand and eleven years have gone by since that scene on the donkey. Are we any different? Not on a geopolitical level (that is obvious) but inside each of us?  Are we more peaceful people now – again, not on the world stage, but in our own homes? When times get tough, especially then, do we act with graciousness and kindness? Or selfishly and with judgement, rash words and emotionally charged actions?

My step-father Bruce died last week, on Friday, April 8th at 3 p.m. to be exact.  My sisters and mother were with him as we had been for nine long, intense and sacred days.  As Bruce lay dying and fear gripped us (death was visiting yet again) was there not a temptation by some in my family to act on bitterness, to remember past betrayals and withhold love, to act out of fear for the self rather than the other? To be at times the bystander, at times Judas? I, myself, fought back unwelcome feelings of impatience, judgement and rocky emotions that threatened to lash out.

But there was love and grace and kindness too and Bruce died with his head covered in kisses, his palm imprinted by the shape of many hands, and veils of tears dropped on his chest like rain.  For moments, we “sinful” humans were nothing but love and Bruce, my burly, gruff, absentee, alchoholic father was stripped to his essence – sweetness, generousity and love.  “I love you girls”, he whispered with his eyes closed and his face pulled taunt by the stroke and the tumour, words never spoken before, hung like jewels in the room as we gripped his hands even harder.

In the Christian story, Christ is risen. His death is redeemed with the resurrection. This part of the Passion story gives us hope, but, what of us left here to struggle on?  Me? I experience the co-existence of good and evil inside me, each beseeching me from one minute to the next.  During Bruce’s dying, I worked hard to be a peacemaker.  While I wasn’t perfect, I was conscious of the need to be gracious, to be kind and to be patient and for the most part this is how I conducted myself. The cinnamon buns in the oven though? A little sweet gift for Don to make up for my actions that sunk me shortly after returning from Bruce’s dying.

Full of Grace one week and full of self-involved fury the next – oh to be human.

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River of Love

It is Friday morning, 8:30 a.m.  Normally, I’d either have been at work for an hour, or if it was a late start day I’d be scrambling to get there.  This morning though, I find myself sitting in the kitchen staring at Heiko’s orchid.  You remember the one – I posted a photograph of it here a couple of months ago.  Before I took the photograph, I had watched it grow and bloom, petal by petal, blossom by blossom into exquisite beauty.  For months we were gifted with its delicate yet provocative presense. In March our house was overtaken by  a virile  amarylis – a scarlet beauty with eight trumpeting blooms – petals as luxurious as silk, white stamens hooded by crimson.  Heiko’s orchid waited patiently in the background as the cursing energy in the bulb released itself into glory.

Today, the amarylis is but a pair of stumpy stocks with rather plain leaves growing between.  I have moved it from the limelight as it prepares itself for a spring time transplant to the garden.

And the orchid reveals itself again – now an old woman, its graceful stem holding its fragile blossoms as if by gossamer threads.  The once thick and brilliantly white petals have withered, closing protectively, bashfully around the pink centre.  Their nodding heads as delicate as a butterfly wing or a sun-bleached sea shell.  The orchid is passing away.

As I write this my step-father Bruce is lying in a hospital bed with a brain tumour.  His once larger than life self is thinning, he legs like weathered logs on the forest floor.  When we visit he holds our hands and says “I love you girls”.  Another day he whispers “I am scared”.  Death is in the room.  In quiet moments I strain to hear what it wants to say to us, to Bruce.

On another visit Don and I were staying at my sister’s cabin in between hospital visits.  Don was out for a walk and I was washing up from breakfast.  Out the window I saw a woman emerging from the path through the forest.  Rosie, the neighbour – a woman in her sixties with fine blond hair and a round face blushed from the morning wind, large, black rainboots squishing through the early March mud.  I open the door and her beautiful face breaks into a smile.  “Hi Rosie!,” I say and we begin to talk.  “How is your step-father?” she asks.  “He’s dying.” I say.  “My 18 year old cat is dying” she replies.  We both exchange condolences. “It is a process,” she continues.  “First he stopped eating, now he is not getting up.”

I think a lot about the wisdom of understanding death as a process.  A movement from one state of being to another.  A threshold crossing.  How much we want it to be different – this ultimate vulnerablity – to lose or to be lost.

“I am scared,” Bruce says and his sons and daughters gathered around his bed look at each other in panic.  What can we say that will calm his fear?  Words are muttered but hands instinctively touch him.  “We are too,” we seem to say as flesh touches flesh.

Now though, in the quiet of the morning, I know there is nothing to be afraid of.  There is a river that runs through all our lives, we are the river, we sail on the river.  It is a river of Love and it holds you and it holds me.  It holds Bruce and Rosie’s beloved cat.  It holds my friend who recovers from a mascetomy and my friend who courageously ran from an abusive husband.  It holds Emily who has a terminal illness and has been bed-ridden for most more than half of her eighteen years.  It holds each and every one of us.  It holds Heiko who is just further up the river, a spirit of joy and freedom calling us to the same.

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