A Candle in the Window

They say that my Celtic ancestors, in time before memory, would light a candle in the window on Samhain’s eve, so that the dead could find their way home again. For me, this day—All Hallow’s Eve, the eve of All Saint’s Day, Samhain, the Day of the Dead—is a time to remember my own dead. The faces and memories of those loved and lost. And not completely lost, for they live on in our collective memories and some of them live on in the memory of this place.

This is the day of thin places, of thin borders between the living and the dead, ever sacred to the Celts and to many peoples for its crossing of boundaries.

It troubles me sometimes to wonder if my dead have a home to which they can return. My ancestors are of a people who have wandered ever westward, searching for but rarely finding “a secure life in a land of plenty.” We moved constantly, amid landscapes both grand and marred by an industrial ideology.

My people came west for the jobs promised by a rising industrial power—to cut giant trees, to harvest fruit, to build vast cities that empty the desert of water, to mine rocks, and to lay railroad tracks. Of my great grandparents, one worked on the railroads, another build automobiles. None were every fully settled into place and thus, my ancestors’ final resting places are scattered across the entire west, from the Ohio River to Texas, from the deserts of Arizona and southern California to the forest land of the coastal west.

So, while my ancestors apparently cherished some memories of their respective homelands, by the time my generation was born, we had no idea where we had come from, nor did we have a homeland to speak of.  The memories of the borderlands of Scotland and Ireland, of Spain, or of northern France were only a faint shadow; so too were the more recent home of the Alleghany mountains or of central Canada or the southwest tip of Arizona.

And so my generation anew attempts to create home out of the transient heritage we have been given. My dead, those I personally have lost, lay scattered across several states, and yet firmly rooted in my heart. Somehow, in our random search for home, we have learned to make home on pilgrimage.

So, on this night, I will burn a candle in my window, calling my loved and lost ones home from the four corners of the west, home into my heart.

Sacrament and Desecration

My niece in the apple tree I planted almost 20 years ago.

In this corner of the world, it is harvest time. That means that, all around me, people are canning madly and harvesting the last of their vegetables. Guys and gals are standing around, talking about the salmon catch this year and how many deer they were able to bag. Having returned too late to plant a garden and being out of practice enough not to attempt hunting this year, I am an observer, though happy to sample the fruits of others’ labor.

And I am reminded of a favorite quote from Wendell Berry. “To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.”

I am struck often by the reverence that those in this part of the world view the work they do. The care people take with the harvest, with the soil, with the preservation of food for the winter. The insistence that every part of a slaughtered animal be used and used well.

We cannot live without death—this is an incontrovertible fact of life. The forest would disappear if trees did not fall and die to nourish the soil and if animals did not do the same. Even if we choose to eat a vegetarian diet, we eat from plants whose life cycle we have interrupted, planted on soil that had to be cleared of forest and animals in order to grow. And, in the short growing season and long winters of this part of the world, if one were to try to live sustainably and relatively locally, the taking of animal life is a necessity.

Berry points out that, in this, we have no choice. However, we can treat this sacrifice of life for life as a sacrament. I know people who murmur thanks to the deer they have shot, honoring its sacrifice for their own sustenance. Most of us who have gardens large or small, know that such work is often deep spiritual practice, as we connect with the soil, with the nourisher of life. I remember, ages ago, long afternoons of slaughtering chickens for the winter. We would take the birds we had raised from little chicks, birds who had lived on the land, cared for and protected, and, gently and mercifully take their life. I remember an almost biblical sense of reverence on those days—a deep understanding that these birds gave their lives to sustain my own.

Or, we can take life destructively; in which case, such an act is a desecration. Factory farming is a case in point, of course. And there is also a tradition of hunting I encounter on occasion, often from people who live in cities and come out here only to hunt, that can be destructive, that goes beyond the thrill and skill of the hunt. That takes life cavalierly, without reverence. I have on occasion encountered a skinned and headless carcass left to rot.

Perhaps most of us live in between sacrament and desecration. The last hamburger I ate was likely from a factory farm. And the apples from the trees I planted in childhood taste amazing this year.

Sitting with Suffering

As I meet with people under the bridge in Aberdeen, as I minister on the street, I often think of how important it is to learn to sit with suffering. Sometimes the hardest thing we do is watch people we love suffer—be it friends, neighbors, family members, or simply another human being.

And we want to fix it. I want to get people off the street and into stable living situations—damn it, I would be ok if I could just find a few warm beds for the guys standing around in our circle with trembling hands in the cold. We are always looking for the right things to say and do, always looking for a fix. And, that is a good impulse. It is good that we are able to feel the pain of another and good that we want to fix a society where it is the new norm for a good 1% of our population to be on the street (that’s 3.5 million people in the U.S, folks!).

And, yet, sometimes our rush to find a solution, a fix, is a reflection of our own need to feel ok. Our own discomfort at suffering. An effort to make ourselves feel better. We tell our friend whose father just died nice platitudes because it makes us feel better that we have “done something.” We hand out supplies and coats and food to people on the street, perhaps even things they would not ask for or want, because we are the ones that can’t stand to watch someone else suffer. As I stood today in a little circle with a few guys, sometimes in silence, I realized again the value of just being with a person. 

I learned something of sitting with suffering early in life. I remember confronting death many times as a child, but it was when, in the course of a few shorts months, a dear 14 year old friend and my grandfather died that I learned most about grief. I was at my granddad’s bedside when he died and I sat with my dad afterwards, with his own great, silent grief between us. I got an early morning call that Ashley had died, a friend sobbing on the other line, two states now between us. Both times, I was overwhelming struck with my inability to do anything or say anything to assuage the grief of those around me—and I found myself deeply annoyed at the platitudes I was given about angels in heaven and drinking with St. Peter and God’ will.

This experience and others since have taught me that the best friends and mentors in my life have been those who have been willing to sit with me. Have been willing to feel my pain, knowing full well that they cannot fix it or fix me. Their example of selfless love has been my inspiration, because I would not be here without them.

And so I stand on the street in the cold, unable to fix anything. Unable to meet all the overwhelming needs that meet me. And the great paradox is this: in letting go of the need to assuage our own discomfort with suffering, we give our greatest gift. The gift of presence. The gift of standing with and alongside another in their greatest need. And sometimes it is the greatest gift that can be given.

The Gift of Time

My darling little niece

My years in college and seminary seemed to pass in a whirl. I never had enough time—time to do the readings or write the papers or prepare for exams or work side jobs. Sometimes I was not sure I had the time to breathe.

I was struck in an interview with Wendell Berry by his advice to young people to have patience, to be patient in emergency. Perhaps the older generations have always told the young these words. But they seem to take on special significance in our age of rushed schedules. And in our age of imperiled resources and increased fear and uncertainty in the face of change. My generation, perhaps more than any other, is a generation raised on technology and instant gratification, a generation always in a hurry but never sure where it is going, a generation facing a tremendous sense of crisis.

It was oddly comforting for me to hear Berry’s words. My crazy school schedule is over. I have come home to the harbor, home to the forest and the sea, home among friends and family, and away from the centers of power and influence. And my lesson to learn is patience. Patience in crisis, with people all around me struggling to survive, with a world in turmoil, with my own sense of call still struggling to manifest.

And in the silence of my meditations and my walks in the forest, in the in the new routine of my life and ministry, I am coming to realize that what I seek is not simply a career or a purpose, but a well lived life. A life lived in company with those I love, in relationship with a broken world, in relationship with my neighbors, in relationship with the land. Because one cannot change a world without changing oneself. One cannot find hope in crisis without being willing to change how one lives. 

I am only a beginner in living such a life. I am still impatient. I still want quick answers. But, ever so slowly, I am learning to listen and learning to be patient in an emergency.  

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.