Seeing the blessing through our tears...

In a short time I will be attending the funeral Mass of the mother of a friend - our drummer in the Sister City Music Ambassadors - who is a profoundly talented and soulful man. His smile can light up a room - or a heart - for he knows what it means to share compassion like bread on a journey. What's more, I have been moved by the way he expresses his grief.

Look, I (mostly) grasp that every person wrestles and deals with grieving in different ways - in nearly 30 years of ordained ministry I have seen enough grief to know that it comes in a variety of sizes and shapes - and yet I still find that some expressions of grief resonate within me in ways that evoke faith, hope and joy. Watching this youngest son drum through his tears spoke volumes to me. After worship was over, he said to me that while his mother's death was sudden and unexpected, he knew that she was at total peace and that brought him rest. I mentioned my experience of own mother's death five years ago at Easter, noting that with the passing of our mothers life is changed forever no matter what level of faith we embrace, and he smiled - gave me a hug -and said quietly, "Yes, yes that is true - but it is still ok."

And he is right: it is ok. We trust by faith that not only have our loved ones been restored to perfection by grace in life everlasting, but that they are now at rest in a unique and transformative way. I don't go in much for the sentimentality that infects most funerals - or death-talk - so as we played "Blue Skies" in worship yesterday, and other grieving hearts wept with the memories of other losses, I found all the sermon I will ever need when I noticed our drummer man keeping the groove while he smiled and gently wept at the same time.

And that is the holy paradox, yes? It is both/and - sorrow and joy - darkness and light - always together. One side of the equation - light - is completely true, but at the same time without the darkness, grieving without the darkness strikes me as incomplete. Likewise, when only the darkness is affirmed - the lonely agony without the blessings - it often feels to me like yet one more exercise in narcissism. To be sure, we are unique - precious in God's eyes and everyone grieves differently - but we are also always ordinary in the midst of real life, too.

St. Frederick Buechner put it like this:

"Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit," the collect goes, "that we may perfectly love..." if not thee, because we are such a feckless and faithless crowd most of us, then at least ourselves, at least each other.... (Sometimes) when (our secrets) are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father's death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love. To love our neighbors as we love ourselves means also to love ourselves as we love our neighbors. It means to treat ourselves with as much kindness and understanding as we would the person next door who is in trouble.

I would add that it also means that once we have honored our wounds, that we let them go in time and get on with being alive in the real and all too ordinary ways of life, too. Not just going through the motions, but fully entering each day with both the light and darkness - and returning thanks for it all.

Is it ironic that the "O antiphon" for today is: O Key of David, Sceptre of the house of Israel, that openeth and no man shutteth, and shutteth and no man openeth, come to liberate the prisoner from the prison, and them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death? Probably not...