Tribute to a Lost Child

This week marks five years since I lost a child. I was about four months pregnant when an ultrasound revealed his little heart has stopped. My first and only pregnancy is a story I have buried deep inside of me, but every September, I crumble just a bit and my eyes fill with tears when I see a child about the age mine would be. Miscarriage, perhaps for many reasons, is rarely acknowledged in our society and there is no appropriate place for the grief of a child never carried to term, a child who never saw the world.

It is a peculiar grief, a grief that has no face, no memories of cuddling, no dreams of soft skin touching yours. It is a grief of lost hopes and lost dreams. For me, it is the grief of knowing that is biologically difficult for me to carry a child and the awareness that I will likely never conceive again. But it is also more. It is the grief of knowing that your womb, the giver and nourisher of life, became a tomb. What was meant, what was expected to give life carried death. The sensation of new life growing within my body, the awareness of another life sharing mine, was severed. The labor that normally accompanies new life was only the harbinger of death.

As a pastor, I wonder why we do not acknowledge miscarriage more, why we don’t commemorate children lost before their life begins and mothers who carry their memories in silence. Perhaps it is because we are uncomfortable with loss and even less comfortable with ambiguity. In our society, we do not have the words to speak of a miscarriage as a death. No ritual, no funeral, no memorial marks the end of a tiny life. When people ask me if I have children, the appropriate answer is no, even though I want so desperately to say yes. Yes, I am a mother, though I was only a mother for four short months.

 A woman who miscarries is often told to move on, to forget. I remember a male pastor telling me to stop grieving because it made the other women in the church uncomfortable (though I would guess he was only expressing his own discomfort).

We need a pastoral theology around miscarriage. We need a way to speak of expected life turning to death, we need a way to honor a life much shorter than expected and the woman who carried it.

I never buried my baby. “Fetal tissue” was sent to the lab for testing to determine why it was so difficult for me to get pregnant and even more difficult for me to maintain pregnancy. Last night, in my dreams, I enacted a funeral. I prepared a tiny shroud and, in my mind’s eye, I found a spot I loved among the trees on the land I love, and I dug a tiny hole. I imagined my baby dancing in the wildflowers and sunshine, watching me, its tiny spirit secure and loved by a God who gathers little children in his arms.

I Hold All of My Histories

I am the staunch Scot standing against the English crown and the English bishop

                Worshiping the stern Calvinist God of the Highlands

And I carry the songs of Irish druids who cherished the windswept land

                Whose heart beat with the sea and moors of the motherland.

I am the child of the cobbler who worshiped in secret, the English Baptist

                Who cherished soul freedom over hierarchy and power;

And I am the daughter of Catholic refugees from France

                Receiving absolution from the priest on Sunday, drinking hard on Monday.

I breathe the faith of renegade, frontier churches in the Americas

                Serving a working class God that orders all things right

And I bow too at the altar of ritual and grace in ornate chapels

                Who speak of a gentler God wreathed in mystery.

I am a child of the Americas embracing the mestizo faith of my southern sisters

                Bowing my head to La Madre de las Americas

And I am the wild preacher of the Western U.S. traveling on horseback

                Spreading a faith of holiness, healing, and Spirit led power.

I am the farmer who finds the heartbeat of the land in the soil

                Shaping the landscape to bring forth the bounty of earth

And I am the child of the forest who hears the whisper of ancestors not my own

                Biding their time until the old ways of this land are found again.

I am the redneck who worships a hillbilly God in a pickup and with song

                Who is proud of ancestors who fought and died for family and country

And I am the pacifist in plain clothes working hard in closed Amish communities

                Treasuring an old world way of life and a God of love and peace.

I hold all of my histories close to my heart—tangled in the depth of my being

                Please do not ask me to choose

I am a child of wandering ancestors who have been searching and longing for home.

 

I embrace all of my histories, needing them all to be whole

                I hold the history of the ages, of all of my people deep in my bones.

A Sheep-y Sermon

I just want to say what a privilege it is to be here with you and serve as your deacon. I know you have not had a deacon before. 

I have to admit I am still learning the role of a deacon. Its one of those orders that was only resurrected about 70 years ago in the Episcopal Church. It used to be simply a step into priesthood, which is what it might be for me. 

So we might have to learn together what a deacon is. What I do know is that all of us, lay and ordained, priest or deacon, regardless of our calling in life are called to follow Jesus.

I love this story in our gospel today—the story of Jesus as a shepherd searching for lost sheep. It reminds me of a picture I used to love as a child of Jesus holding a lost lamb.

But the story as it is told to us in the gospel is not quite like that picture. You see, Jesus at this point in his ministry, is constantly getting into arguments with the religious leaders of his day. The Pharisees were the leading religious party of the day and they get more and more angry with Jesus. In our story, Jesus is hanging out with the wrong crowd, at least according to the Pharisees. These religious leaders had very strict ideas about who was a good and a righteous person. A lot of people didn’t make the cut. Tax collectors certainly did not. Neither did prostitutes. Or people who didn’t follow all the rules. And Jesus—Jesus didn’t just talk to them, Jesus didn’t just teach them, Jesus had dinner with them. Jesus sat down at the table with them.  

So the religious leaders were angry with Jesus. What is he doing eating with the wrong kind of people? These people defile our town, they thought. These people don’t deserve your attention.

And, so, in response to the religious leaders, Jesus tells a story.

God, Jesus says, is like a farmhand watching over a flock of sheep. God is like a housewife who has lost a valuable coin. In this story, God is not like a king or like a ruler. Just a farmhand or a housewife. God is with us, just like in Jesus, God comes to us in a carpenter born in a barn.

God is always turning things upside down. You ever notice that? A carpenter born in a barn and executed as a criminal is the savior of the world. Amazing!

And this shepherd, this farmhand is not in a peaceful field surrounded by flowers like that picture I liked as a kid. Some of you know that barnyards are pretty darn dirty and muddy and that a lot can happen to an animal who wanders off. I grew up on a farm and we were always trying to keep raccoons out of the henhouse and cougars away from our horses.

And one of the sheep is lost. And this shepherd, this farmhand leaves the 99 sheep safely in their field and goes off to search for the one who is lost. Before I went to seminary, on the fourth of July, I came home early and my dog was gone. He had jumped a six foot fence, apparently. I knew he was afraid of fireworks, which is why I had come home early, but apparently some of the neighbor kids had lit some off early. And he was gone. I spent most of the night looking for that dog. There was a creek running not far from where I was living at the time and I searched and searched. Finally, he appeared, tired and scared. When I picked him up, he was trembling and wouldn’t leave my arms for a long time.

Do you ever feel anything like that? Lost, afraid, alone? I know I do, sometime.

Only as humans, feeling lost comes in many different forms. Like you are not quite good enough, not righteous enough, not holy enough, or just plain not successful enough? Like you can’t quite make the cut? Like the people around you are looking down on you?

The religious leaders of Jesus day only wanted people who had made a certain cut, who kept all the right rules, to be part of the in group. And Jesus said no. Jesus said; No, I don’t care where they’ve come from. I don’t care what they have done or not done in their lives. I don’t care if they are good people.

I am here for the lost. For the afraid. For the alone. For those who feel like their life is falling apart. For those who can’t make friends easily. For those who feel like outsiders.

You can be a tax collector, one of those people who in Jesus day everyone hated because they worked for the Romans and often cheated people. Jesus will come to find you.

You can be a "sinner." You could have made all kinds of mistakes in your life. Jesus will come to find you.

You can regret the decisions you have made in your life. Perhaps you have lost dreams or lost hopes or lost opportunities. Jesus will still come and find you. 

You can feel unloved and unwanted. You can feel like a failure. Jesus will still come and find you.

The amazing thing is—Jesus doesn’t say the shepherd, the farmhand, begrudgingly goes out to look for the lost sheep. He didn’t drag his feet. He didn’t roll his eyes. He went out with a heart full of concern and love. And he came back rejoicing.  Rejoicing so much that he was pounding on his neighbor’s doors to tell them the good news.

Jesus says heaven itself rejoices. God, who comes to us as a shepherd, as a housewife, as a carpenter, has abundant love to give to those who feel unloved and unwanted.  Jesus comes to find us with joy.

A Tale of Resurrection

Sometimes, when I look at the world, even when I look at my own community, it is easy to despair. Potential war looming with Syria. Growing poverty. Rising numbers of people homeless. The proverbial arc of the universe does not always seem to bend toward justice. Perhaps history is just one long story of justice lost and death prevailing. And, personally, a grandfather I love dearly was just diagnosed with stage 3 cancer.

And so I walk in the forest. Today, I took a long drive up the Wynoochee, to the head of the valley I grew up in, and hiked by the lake. It is a second growth forest; perhaps sixty or seventy years ago, the entire area was clearcut. Slashed and burned. I hate the sight of a clearcut-- simply because the area looks so dead and lifeless.

Now, the douglas fir and cedar trees tower upwards, feeding off the rich soil. Sunlight dances off the moss and the silent whispers of ancient wisdom and long dead ancestors not my own are heard if you listen closely enough. Life is back with a vengeance. The forest is a place of resurrection.

Perhaps that is why I need to be close to the land. Because the woods and the rivers and the soil teach me that life is stronger than death. That resurrection is possible. That wholeness is possible. In the forest, the flicker still flies and the little red squirrels build their home and the huckleberries still grow out of cedar stumps. And I am part of a great circle of life, unafraid of death. Knowing, deep in my bones, that goodness and life are woven into the fabric of the universe.

So, why are we poor?

This is a sign I found while driving on Highway 101. It says "Hunger on the Harbor: What's for dinner? Wilderness?" It is a testament to how disenfranchised people have felt by urban environmentalists who have little understanding or concern for their well being and a government who also has little regard for their welfare.

In a recent sermon, I asked people to start asking why people are poor. It is a great American myth that people are poor because they don’t work hard or have some character deficiency. A conference I attended recently on poverty, while fantastic in many ways, simply assumed that some people were rich and some poor. Rarely do we ask why. 

So, I intend to ask the question, and ask it specifically. Why are people poor in Grays Harbor County? Why is the official poverty rate in our largest town about 25%? Why do some parts of the harbor literally look like we are living in the so called “third world”? Why are there a huge number of people living in their cars or camping out on the river?  

Many would have us believe that it because we live in a “culture of dependency” and that people “don’t want to work.” I have lived in Grays Harbor for a good part of my life and I don’t buy it.  

So, why do we struggle so deeply with poverty? Here are few of the reasons that I have thought of....

An Industrial Economy: People are poor because the industrial economy built here, by the timber industry especially, created a system of haves and have nots, a culture of timber barons living on the hill and loggers living on the flats and in camps, a culture in which workers were dependent on capitalists for survival. This kept us from being able to take control of our own lives and futures and paralyzed us when the timber industry crashed. We never had control of our communities or of the land that had first been stolen from Native Americans and then kept in the hands of a few people with influence and power.

Industrial Crash: People are poor because the logging industry crashed. This is the simplest answer, though the causes of the crash are many. Timber was a boom and bust industry—two World Wars and the shipyards in Seattle kept peninsula loggers busy, but after the war the industry struggled and by the 80s and 90s was experiencing significant difficulty. However, two things contributed to the final demise of the industry, in 1994. And so…

Environmental Policy: People are poor because, in 1994, environmentalists successfully closed national forests to logging, citing their concern for the spotted owl. Their love of the forests most of them did not live in was commendable; however, they were far less concerned about loggers and their families or the people who made their lives here and loved the forest just as much. This is not to say that the forests were not exploited by the timber industry; only that environmental organizing failed to take into account the people living here and failed to give us any say in our future or the land itself.

Free Trade: People are poor because, also in 1994, NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) was put into place. This (and other free trade agreements) brought poverty to the area in two ways. First, many mills (especially paper mills) moved their businesses oversees, where cheap labor and low tariffs made manufacture more “cost effective.” Second, NAFTA brought a steady stream of migrants from the global south as Mexican and Guatemalan farmers were unable to compete with U.S. agribusiness and forced to migrate north to work, in this case, in secondary forestry. Suddenly, many people were in competition for low wage tree planting and brush picking jobs.  

State Control and Regulation: People are poor because those who did farm in this area have been increasingly put out of business by federal regulations that favor large agribusiness over small family farms. Farm after farm has closed operations, discouraged by a pricing system that favors big growers or shut down by the FDA because they could not afford the equipment necessary to meet regulations.

The Prison System: People are poor because the prison system keeps them poor. In the United States, with the highest rate of incarceration in the world, the vast majority of people in prison are poor. On the harbor, the war on drugs has filled our jails and prisons. When drug addiction went up along with the poverty rate and the meth industry (among others) became a black market for people to survive, the state answer was to fill up the jails. Once people are in the prison system, it is almost impossible to extricate themselves. The reality of a criminal record, probation rules, mandatory court dates and treatment programs, and so many other auxiliary functions of the prison industrial complex insure that people who end up in jail are likely to return many times over and are unable to enter the workforce even if there was a job for them to take.

Unjust Wages: People are poor because most of the jobs left are service jobs—jobs that pay poorly and offer few benefits. One of the largest employers in the region is Wal Mart. The big box store moved into the area, closing small businesses unable to compete and forcing most of us to shop with them. They employ large numbers of people at minimum wage and insure, through control of the hours people work, that they have little access to benefits. As fewer businesses can afford good wages or benefits, more and more people work multiple jobs in order to pay bills.  

A Culture in Motion: People are poor because unstable economics force them to move constantly. People who have had their roots here for generations move to the North Dakota oilfields to find work or to lay pipeline in the Midwest; they move to Alaska to fish for the season; they move from Western to Eastern Washington by season to harvest brush on the side and apples on the other; they wander the country homeless looking for work or a hand up. This constant movement contributes to an unstable economic reality as people are more and more desperate for work.

Collective Trauma: People are poor because they have lost a way of life. People who can no longer farm or log or do skilled work have lost a sense of dignity and hope and self-reliance. The harshness of poverty, the intensity of loss—these lead to collective, community trauma. And it looks like rising drug addiction and mental health struggles. It looks like hopelessness and uncertainty and anger. People have lost more than jobs—they have lost dignity.

So why are we poor? Because of misguided state power; because of the crash of an industry because of the greed of those in power; because we have lost control of our destiny and our dignity; because we have no control over our own land. How can we again find hope?