Listening carefully to the angel of death...

Last night I found out that my colleague and friend, the Reverend Dr. Holly Reed, died. It was unexpected.  She had led worship earlier in the day and... by Sunday evening she was gone.  She was part of my small clergy support group that gathers on the last Thursday of every month for supper, prayer, conversation, study, encouragement and accountability. She had just received her Ph. D.  She was just completing her first year at our small church in Richmond.  We were just growing in friendship and appreciation.

With careful consideration of boundries - and professional ethics - knowing that our friendship was not intimate nor anything more that collegeal, my mind still ran to this poem by Adrienne Rich:

One autumn evening in a train
catching the diamond-flash of sunset

its puddles along the Hudson
I thought:  I understand

life and death now, the choices.
I didn't know your choice

or how by then you had no choice
how the body tells the truth in its rush of cells

Most of our love took the form
of mute loyalty

we never spoke at your deathbed of your death

but from here on
I want more crazy mourning, more howl,
     more keening

We stayed mute and disloyal
because we were afraid

I would have touched my fingers
to where your breasts had been
but we never did such things

Fr. Ed Hays always says that the news of another's passing is a visit from the angel of death.  He urges us to pay attention to our reaction so that the gift of this death isn't wasted because we're too busy - or afraid - or distracted to notice.  Again, I found myself weeping and weeping: weeping for colleagues and friends gone too soon, weeping for pastors who remain faithful albeit solitary and often all too alone, weeping for congregations knocked over by grief, weeping for adult children wrestling with the loss of their momma, weeping for myself, weeping for Holly, weeping for our small circle of friends who will meet tonight without her...

Over the past 20+ years, when the angel of death has visited me I have heard her whisper to me about opening my heart and soul to beauty:  pay attention, man, because you don't have this forever. A poem by Alicia Ostriker gets it right:

The sycamores are leafing out
On West Fourth Street and I am weirdly old
Yet their pale iridescence pleases me

As I emerge from the subway into traffic
And trash and patchouli gusts—now that I can read
Between the lines of my tangled life

Pleasure frequently visits me—I have less
Interfering with my gaze now
What I see I see clearly

And with less grievance and anger than before
And less desire: not that I have conquered these passions
They have worn themselves out

And if I smile admiring four Brazilian men
Playing handball on a sunny concrete court
Shouting in Portuguese

Goatskin protecting their hands from the sting of the flying ball
Their backs like sinewy roots, gold flashing on their necks
If I watch them samba with their shadows

Torqued like my father fifty years ago
When sons of immigrant Jews
Played fierce handball in Manhattan playgrounds

—If I think these men are the essence of the city
It is because of their beauty
Since I have learned to be a fool for beauty.

I think the ancient words of Scripture get it right, too:

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;  A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.