If I should fall behind...

Last night, after the fullness of the first Sunday of Advent had come to a quiet close, I received a phone call from the spouse of one of my staff. He and the doctors confirmed what I had sensed earlier last week: my colleague and friend's kidneys are shutting down and she has about a week to live. In a flash, this tune from the Dead came to me, one of my all time favorites...

Now I am unusually saddened by this news: not because she isn't ready for God's rest and not because it comes as a shock, but rather because it feels so horribly wrong. Sometimes death feels natural to me - at the end of a full life - and sometimes it seems brutal and cruel. Most of the deaths I have known personally - not professionally - have been of the brutal and cruel type: my nephew before his 5th birthday, my sister two years after her son died, my aunt Donna and my mother. To be sure, I've been blessed by a number of beautiful deaths in my professional ministry - and this one has been entered into with dignity and grace and faith - but still it has slammed into me hard in ways I did not see coming. I feel brittle and very vulnerable inside.

So as I walk through these final days with my buddy and her family, it is clear that I, too, am going to be touched and changed by this death. And if there's anything I've learned over the years it is that I usually can't fully understand everything God is trying to say to me in these experiences - I need the wisdom and insight and love of others - which takes me to this prayer...

T.S. Eliot wrote:

Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Hear and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my
beginning.