Simple Journey

I want to know a song can rise from the ashes of a broken life... --Mike Donehey, 10th Ave. N.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Easter "Up Close and Personal"

I first heard the hymn when I joined others of the Chorale in helping our director mourn the loss of her mother at her funeral. I had not known her, so it was not difficult for me as some other departing services have been. But when the last hymn was sung, then something got to me. It was this: I did not know the hymn, and so looked around a bit at the congregation as I listened. Pall bearers came forth and lifted the coffin from its resting place at the front of the sanctuary, and reverently carried it, very slowly, down the aisle and out the door to the waiting hearse.

This is a difficult thing for someone who was raised Baptist. We never spent time discussing or thinking on funerals or memorials, as our belief that the soul had gone either to heaven or hell already was uppermost in our teachings. Add to that Paul's conjunction in a letter to one of the early churches to not "mourn like the heathens do", and we had a zealous tendency to stuff it at times of loss, when others honestly and simply cry. We hadn't learned how to mourn.

As I watched the coffin make its slow way down the aisle, my eyes fell on my director in the front pew with her Presbyterian minister husband. She was finally crying too. She had been strong for our last concert, while her mother lay dying in her hospital bed at home. I had caught only one tiny tear during "All Poor Men" in our Christmas line-up. But now it was time for her to say good-bye forever to a woman who had been such a beautiful Christian role model for her daughter and son-in-law, besides simply her own good mother. That's when I nearly lost it.

My faith had taken quite a beating during my education years and beyond, and now I was 3,000 miles away from my own faith-filled mother, from all my family and my life-long friends. I had a hard time with funerals at any time usually, because they seemed to shout out a final answer: "THERE IS NO HEALING!" This death-knell to faith in prayer was quickly followed by the question, "So is there no resurrection too?" This question surfaced again as I watched the coffin retreating.

But then on my ear fell the words of this hymn I had never heard before. "Jesus lives, and so shall I. Death! thy sting is gone forever." The words were so strong. Where I doubted, each word of this hymn answered with no wavering, the tune lines strong and undefeated. My attention became riveted on it as I watched that evidence of death's victory receding further and further, until it finally was loaded and out of view, driven away, and the doors to the church closed on death.

That was not the final answer. This is:

Jesus lives, and so shall I,
Death! thy sting is gone forever.
He who deigned for me to die,
Lives, the bands of death to sever.
He shall raise me with the just:
Jesus is my hope and trust.

Jesus lives and reigns supreme;
And, His kingdom still remaining,
I shall also be with Him,
Ever living, ever reigning.
God has promised: be it must;
Jesus is my hope and trust.

Jesus lives, I know full well,
Naught from Him my heart can sever,
Life nor death nor pow'rs of hell,
Joy nor grief, henceforth forever.
None of all His saints is lost;
Jesus is my hope and trust.

Jesus lives, and death is now
But my entrance into glory.
Courage, then, my soul,
For thou hast a crown of life before thee;
Thou shalt find thy hopes were just;
Jesus is the Christian's trust.

Lyrics ~ Christian F. Gellert, 1715 - 1769
Trans ~ By Philip Schaff, 1819 - 1893
Music ~ Johann Cruger, 1598 - 1662

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmMKD3PmLW0

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Holy Week

It would have been much clearer for us if God would have placed directional signs in our paths: This way-> education, this way-> start a family, this way-> take that job, this way-> retirement now, this way-> buy a house..... It would have been ever so plain as the noses on our faces. But He didn't. He buried all knowledge and wisdom about Himself in an old Book we scarcely understand most of the time, and in people's hearts and minds. But it's up to us to decipher the Book, and up to us to heed the words of wise people, and also to figure out just who is and isn't wise in this world. Why?

It sure leads to some dark doubts. Is God really there? How can I truly know He is guiding my life? Why, if He is there and guiding my life, didn't He guide the lives of those children who died in Haiti, crushed under their own houses right next to their parents who survived, or vice versa? Is He watching us and laughing or frowning at our puny efforts to see the way He so clearly knows?

What pitiful beings we can become when we give way to the darkness and wallow in our uncertainties! But it's easier sometimes, really. I mean, when you look at it as jobs we have because we're humans, then it gets simpler: Because we have brains, we have to make choices about what we're going to think. We use our senses to gather information to make these decisions. What we allow our senses to pay attention to is our choice, being humans. The animals don't have these choices. They are stuck in their instincts. What are our instincts? Pretty similar to the animals, except we've got blunted senses that don't convey instinctual directions to our motor memories the way theirs do, just a "fight or flight" quickened heartbeat and heightened adrenalin, which mainly makes us sweat.

So, to keep to the point, our choices are myriad daily. Not only that, but we're born or develop, whichever you choose, with this sense of guilt when we make the wrong choices, which triggers our one left-over instinct and makes us sweat, and so our decision-making is hampered from the get-go.

This morning I came upon one of those times when my lack of animal instincts and my human responsibility collided to created something I can only call a mini-episode of the dark night of the soul. Considering yet again what direction I should put my whole self into, as I've been putting only bits and pieces of myself into anything ever since the kids were born, I once again had to admit there is no clear path in this life. Others seem to find one, but down the road a ways they always find it wasn't such a clear path after all. So I shouted to God to put some road signs already!

All I ended up with was a prayer in a hymn, learned by many listenings to a cassette tape recording of a concert by our school choir about my freshman year of high school while I spent summers painting by number in my room by the open window filled with a box fan against the Southern California heat:

Spirit of God, descend upon my heart;
wean it from earth; through all its pulses move;
stoop to my weakness, mighty as thou art,
and make me love thee as I ought to love.

I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
no sudden rending of the veil of clay,
no angel visitant, no opening skies;
but take the darkness of my doubt away.

Hast thou not bid me love thee, God and King?
All, all thine own, soul, heart and strength and mind.
I see thy cross; there teach my heart to cling.
O let me seek thee, and O let me find.

Teach me to feel that thou art always nigh;
teach me the struggles of the soul to bear.
To check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh,
teach me the patience of unanswered prayer.

Teach me to love thee as thine angels love,
one holy passion filling all my frame;
the kindling of the heaven-descended Dove,
my heart an altar, and thy love the flame.

I never quite understood those words in high school days, except for the words of the second verse: I didn't want to see visions, no sir! I was petrified by my mother's constant discussions of Satan and his ways, of people's having seen him and others having seen spirits. I did not ever, ever want to see anything but the physical world, unless it were Jesus Himself. I didn't want to hear voices and I didn't want to speak in tongues. I never wanted anything but the things I could see with my normal, human eyes and things I could pick up and handle, and people I could hug or sing with. I wouldn't mind Jesus, because I knew no matter what form He took it would be filled with love and peace, not ghostly scariness.

I also didn't understand, then, the darkness people's souls got into sometimes. I had a simple, child-like faith I wish I'd never educated myself out of, and I knew with total certainty God was not only there, but holding me in His hand every minute of every day. That didn't keep me from falling into human, everyday fears, but I always had my faith to hold me up.

Then, as I said, I grew up and went out into the world, where things weren't answered anymore by the Book and my parents words, or the words of my pastor and church founding members. They were answered by men and women toiling through their days to the answer, with great difficulty. Sometimes the Book was consulted, but usually it wasn't. In fact, most often in the world outside my little ivory tower the answers in the Book were scoffed at and explained away, even when they provided a direction, a clear path, and thus a way to inner peace.

My search for knowledge and beauty led me so far astray from where I began, I didn't even remember who I was anymore. I continued attending services in churches, and truly believed the faith I had learned as a child, but more and more it became a choice of the will, not a fact of the heart.

I continue in this way daily. Each day I deliberately choose to follow the God whose ways I love. Each day I sift through facts and fictions of the faith I profess with all my heart. Each day I find myself praying along with John Donne:

BATTER my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason, your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

I was once privileged to sing these words with the Susquehanna Chorale. I have never forgotten them, because as my doubts multiplied through the years they have been the only words that do justice to my soul's prayer. They were where I began this morning in my journal. I don't want this responsibility, this job of choosing daily the right way, this labor of the mind I brought on by choosing to be a child of the enlightenment, someone who uses my own, God-given intellect to learn new, interesting things and make decisions about where I live and who I go through my days with. By sharpening my mind I opened a Pandora's box of unanswered questions that just won't meekly go back into the box and stay quiet when I tell them to.

This is my point, though long in my getting to it: I believe that this very difficulty proves the answer, that it is much easier both to blindly believe in God and to blindly not believe in God, but that to remain relevant and discern daily duty to Him is the most difficult task a human can attempt. And thereby He is proved. As Tolkien wrote in The Lord of the Rings (from the recent movie):

Merry: [to Frodo] How do we know this Strider is a friend of Gandalf?
Frodo: I think a servant of the Enemy would look fairer and feel fouler.

The prophet Isaiah says the same of The Suffering Servant, for-telling Jesus:

He had no form or comeliness that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that made us whole,
and with his stripes we are healed. (53:2-5)

The world wants an easy answer. It's human nature to want things to be simple. Life is hard as it is. If someone professes to bring peace he darned well better make it simple and easy, or no one's going to listen to him. But Jesus just plain and simply doesn't do that. He is not pretty. He is, in fact, ugly. We don't want to look at Him still hanging on the cross. We don't like it, it ain't a purty sight.

Jesus said, "Come unto me, all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon me and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Have you ever been in the hospital or bedroom of someone dying of prostate cancer? It ain't a purty sight, and even worse when it's your beloved father. How is that burden easy??

Thanks be to God that Jesus came as an ugly outcast and died a hideous death on a cross meant for you and me!!

That takes the darkness of my doubt away. That makes Easter Sunday possible amidst the ruins of our lives. That makes us able to sing the great Alleluia! with the huge congregation crammed into the pews, as the trumpets blast for all they're worth and the kettle drums sound the announcement - "He is risen!"

Thanks be to God, He didn't make the answers easy for Jesus either. And because of Him we live through this life with difficulty, but oh joy in the morning! At the end of it is the great Alleluia with the angels, but better yet, with our loved ones gone before who suffered through to their reward.

Amen! Alleluia!!