We’ve been getting a lot of disturbing news at our house over the past week: illnesses and deaths of Sisters, friends and colleagues, as well as difficult national and international event reports. We wonder when it will all end and “normalcy” will return but we are reminded often that “this is the new normal” and that we must step up into acceptance and courage.
I was struck this morning as I read the lectionary text from Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews (2: 14-18) that reminds readers of the mission of Jesus as one who understood the primacy of love and how to practice love to its full measure. As one of the fundamental truths of the Christian faith, it was not a new thought but, as sometimes happens, the power of one line – the last one in the text today – stopped me with the depth of its meaning. It said that “because he himself was tested through what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.”
Sometimes my comprehension stops short of remembering that in addition to Jesus as “fully divine,” my faith also asserts that he was fully human. I always know it, of course, somewhere in the recesses of my brain, but the reality of what it means in the everyday sufferings and sadness and loss – as much as the joy and affection and deeply loving encounters – is really something that Jesus lived as a fully human being even before he ascended to the role of the Christ in its fullness. In other words, he really, really felt the same kind of losses to the same degree or deeper that we are experiencing now and he went even further by losing his own life for love.
I don’t know how to explain the moment of recognition that was mine with that reading this morning. It can only be experienced and that is not something we can give to one another – we can only wish it for each other. All I know is gratitude for the fact that a divine being understands my struggles in a palpable way and shares them as his own.
And that is enough for now.
Later this morning I will attend a memorial service for the son of a woman for whom I have great admiration. His death preceded his 54th birthday by just a few weeks and was quite sudden. The shock was compounded by the death of my friend’s husband just three weeks previous to that of her son. No words of sympathy or attempts to assuage such grief are adequate for one who bears the loss of those she calls the two great loves of her life. All we can offer is presence. And so I go. I suspect that this event will be a lesson in diversity of belief about God and life while also manifesting a depth of unity brought about by relationship and community.
It seems as if we, like Noah, will soon have to begin building an ark to survive the rain that seems destined to go on forever taking lives, swallowing up cars and filling homes with muddy destruction. Would that we could gather it up and send it West to smother some of the wildfires that are devastating so many homes and lives on the other side of our country. Such environmental distress and human loss is difficult to take in as pictures on the news bring it all to the fore each evening.
This morning, a cautionary tale. The lesson: stay always in the present moment. It is all that we ever can depend on.
Sitting here this morning taking inventory of my thoughts and feelings I found only loss. First, I was faced with a message from a friend about her mother’s passing. It was not an unexpected message but monumental, of course, especially for someone who has been a loving caretaker for a long time. Then I read less serious news of dashed Olympic hopes in skiing and skating. Americans who seemed destined to win by the agreement of the entire world failed miserably and one wonders what role the expectations of everyone had in the results.
When I read the text of the first reading from the Book of Job this morning (JB 1:6-22) I thought – as usual – that it sounds like the synopsis of a bad movie. Satan, vying with God, bets that Job won’t be as faithful as he has been if bad things happen to disturb his idyllic life of favor as God’s friend. God disagrees. After he hears all the terrible destruction that his servants come one after another to tell him about, we hear the familiar line that “I came into the world naked and will leave it naked. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Of course Job doesn’t say these words as declarative, emotionless sentences. He does wail and rend his garments…and this is only the first chapter of his test.