Thin Days

Feast of All Saints, November 1, 2015, 

the Rev'd Dr Richard Smith

These are thin days --  the Feast of All Saints, El Dia de los Muertos, the Feast of All Souls -- thin days when the membrane between heaven and earth becomes very thin, when we who are still walking the planet are brought closer to those who have gone before us.

Over here we have icons of some of better-known spiritual ancestors: Oscar Romero, Harvey Milk, Our Lady, St. Joseph, many others.

And a few moments ago in the garden we called out the names of some of those who have gone before us. On the altar in the back, many of us have photos of beloved friends and family members who have died, including Nico, Dennis Gould, and others from this community.

It’s a time of remembering, of giving thanks, and of grieving, which can be a wild ride.

If psychotherapists and philosophers can chart the path of grief and measure its duration and predict its stages, it’s only because they’re not up to their necks in it; they have the luxury of sitting back and observing. But when you’re in the midst of it, it’s a different story. It's as though you yourself are an occupied land. Grief has a life of its own, and there’s really nothing you can do about it. You can’t go around it; you can only find your way through it.

My first experience with grief came when my friend Tony died during my sophomore of high school. Our high school was along the shore of Lake Washington in Seattle. Some huge trees had been cut down and the logs were floating near the shoreline. Tony went out on the logs, jumping playfully from one to another, when he slipped and fell between them. The logs closed over him, and they were too huge for him to push them apart and climb back up, and so he tragically drowned, leaving all of us, his friends, in trauma and shock.

Weeks later the grief would creep up on me unawares. I’d be getting dressed for school, or walking to class, or waiting in line at the grocery store and something would make me think of Tony and suddenly I’d burst into tears. This was my first experience with grief, and it left me frightened and confused. Grief can be a wild ride.

One day, a priest at my school saw me in tears, and knew right away what was going on. He came over and put his arm around my shoulder and said simply, “Richard, you're going to have days like this. We all will.” And he was right.

This is our human story: the deeper the love, the deeper the grief. We will have days like this. We don’t think about this when we give our heart away, but this is our human story: that our first kiss and our first tear are linked.

A few months after Tony's death, my dad died, and this time I didn't know what to feel. My dad had left my family when I was a year old, leaving us in poverty and my mom to raise two kids on her own. I knew I loved my dad, and I cried when I got the news, but this moment was also filled with much anger and regret at what was not to be. Unresolved feelings toward my dad that I carry to this day.

If what an old priest once told me is true, that some of our relationships will be resolved only in heaven, then it certainly describes my dad and me. Coming to terms with our fractured relationship remains part of my own spiritual journey. Someday, in addition to all of my other conflicted feelings toward him, I hope I'll also be grateful for him.

I remember a reflection by Henri Nouwen about gratitude. He wrote,

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives--the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections--that requires hard spiritual work.
Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.

Part of my own spiritual work is in coming to be truly grateful for my dad.

Grief can be a wild ride. Eventually our loves as we know them come to an end, perhaps through death, perhaps through human frailty or sin or a combination. A young widow once asked, “Why didn’t someone tell me that all marriages end either in death or divorce?”

And in the face of this simple fact -- that love as we have known it must end -- we have a choice. We can become cold and cynical, thinking of love as a waste of our precious time and energy. “Don't go there. It's all going to end in tears. It's not worth it. Just live for yourself. Don’t give yourself away.”

Or we can take another path, harbor a crazy suspicion that there is more going on with love than meets the eye, more than conventional wisdom or scientific analysis will admit. That love is stronger than death, that life may be changed but it is not ended, and what may seem like an end is not the end at all. This is the suspicion we harbor in these thin days.

I love the moment in today’s gospel, in which an emotionally troubled, weeping Jesus is swept toward the tomb of the one he loves. He does not stand aloof, unmoved, like a philosophical observer with his act all together. No, this is one of those moments when the story of the Incarnation becomes vivid, when God is at our side, vulnerable as we are.

If he had not loved Lazarus and his sisters, he would not have stood there crying his heart out. Like us, Jesus cannot go around the experience of death and grief; he can only move forward by going through it.

So he goes into that dark night, where God is thought to be most absent, into the place of death and human tears, into our grieving with all it’s wild turns, and by his simple presence with us there he redeems even those dark moments.

Because when do we know that we have a friend? Is it when someone gives us good advice, or solves a problem we’re having? Perhaps. But even more I think it's when someone comes to us in a moment when we are vulnerable and in crisis and says, “I don’t know what to say or do, I don't have any solution for you, but I do want you to know that I'm with you, and I won't leave you alone.” Then we know we have a real friend.

It’ in this way, by fully entering into our own struggles with death and grief’s wild ride, by proving himself to be a friend, that Jesus redeems even those dark moments.

Some theologians say that ultimately everything is brought into God’s heart.

Some things happen that are in line with what God desires. God takes those things and presses them to his heart.
Other things happen that are not what God desires -- like human betrayal, violence, broken relationships. These things, God redeems, and then takes them to his heart.

In the end, the theologians say, everything is brought into God’s heart.

In these thin days, all our ancestors and all our relationships, including those with unfinished business, come once more into the heart. And I find myself asking: What if these theologians are right -- that no love is ever wasted, that even our most broken relationships are redeemed, and in the end nothing and no one is ever lost? What if that suspicion really were true? What if we really believed that?