Will There Ever Be A Year……
Last evening, as I finished reading my Year Three, Chapter 6, EfM lesson, this week known as, On the Eve of the Councils (a most heavy and tedious chapter on the subject of Christology and the Trinitarian question as it was addressed at the end of the first century; and one that reminded me of why I never took many classes in philosophy during my college years) I glanced around me and took in the faces of the happy, carefree diners that made up the crowd in the bar area of McCormick and Schimcks. I like to go there each Thursday evening, have the $2.95 cheeseburger and occasionally a glass of wine from their Happy Hour menu, relax, unwind and go over my lesson one last time before class which begins right next door at 7:00PM. But last night, my mind (as it is often prone to do when I observe others having fun), wandered down that old familiar “I- miss-Ashley-so-badly-I-could-cry-right-here-in-this-restaurant” road and suddenly the following words filled my head…
“Will the year ever come, where there is a week, that has a day in it that I don’t ache for at least a moment just like I did the instant I heard you were gone?”
I did go ahead and cry. And as I did, I grabbed a pen and wrote the words down because they seemed to express so powerfully, the fact that years can go by but that pain, that sadness still has a way of flaring up or resurfacing with the same intensity that it had originally. Anywhere, anytime…I never know. Again, I am reminded of how different I am, or rather feel that I am, from the rest of the world around me. As I gather up my things, pay my check and walk through the still, dark, maze that is the pathway from the restaurant to my classroom inside the beautiful, old, gothic, All Saints church in Pasadena, I find comfort in the soft glow emanating from the classroom and acceptance from the friends inside. I breath easier now and settle down into the rhythm the class naturally takes week after week, year after year.
During our break someone mentions what a wonderful service we had last Sunday which was All Saints Sunday. It was said that Ed Bacon, our rector, preached a wonderful sermon and a chamber ensemble orchestra preformed the Requiem Mass, “Lux Aeterna”. My spirits fell as I began to realize what I had missed by being out of town last weekend, but I made a mental note to go on-line and listen to the sermon in the morning.
This morning I found and listened to Ed Bacon’s All Saints Sunday sermon entitled, “Life is Changed, Not Ended”. It didn’t take me long to know that God had given me this message as a gift. Once again, He led me to the place I needed to be. After I listened, I printed the sermon and read it again and again. He quotes excerpts from several sermons by another pastor named Rev. Dr. William Sloane Coffin who lost a son at the age of 24 in a tragic car accident. I immediately found comfort in the first of those quotes when he preached, “When the waves closed over my son’s car sinking in the Boston Harbor, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.” And suddenly I realized that would apply in our case too, that surely then God’s heart must have already been aching by the time I received the news that Ashley had died.
Dr. Coffin went on to say that, “The trick is not to pray to God to rid you of your pain, but to ask for grace to improve the quality of your suffering.” Coffin stated that for him the improvement in the quality of his suffering helped him to see that Albert Camus had it right when he wrote, “In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in my heart an invincible summer.” And that he learned to say with Nietzsche, “If it doesn’t kill me, it will make me stronger.” Those are all gifts from God. Gifts given and meant to sustain us, to support us, not to protect us. “Scripture is not around for anyone’s protection,” Coffin says, “just for everyone’s unending support.” What a perfect response or answer to the age old question of, how could God let something like this happen to me or to him or to her?
So Rev. Bacon goes on to suggest that we might pray in our own words something like this, “God, please take the chaos of my life, the jumbled feelings, the grief, the loss, the confusion, the disappointments, and failures and transform it all into love. Let me see and feel the love in my life, not the fear.” And for me Lord, please “fill the hollow in my heart with joy that can absorb the sorrow; with hope that transcends the despair and love that joins all mortal and immortal life, so that I may do as all the saints would have me to do; fight the good fight, endure unto the end” and by Your side Lord, live to stand victorious in the midst of any week or year, ache or tear that falls. In God’s name….Amen
