Apparently this conjunction of the holidays happened in 2018 (I vaguely remember that) and will again in 2029 and then won’t again until we and possibly even our children are all long gone. Now, I’m not a big proponent of Valentine’s Day. It’s overblown. There is too much pressure. Too much emphasis on “what I am doing for you; what I am saying to you; what I am expecting to receive from you…”
Ironically, I’m also not a big proponent of Ash Wednesday…or at least I wasn’t until a few years ago. I didn’t grow up celebrating Ash Wednesday. The community church we attended never talked about it – at least, not that I recall. I didn’t know what Lent was, either. But I have enjoyed this added element to my faith as an adult.
And so along comes this year, a rare conjoining of two holidays, when the seven-week preparation of the ultimate gift of love meets the 24-hour celebration of the feeble (by comparison) love of humans.
Quite the mashup.
On the one hand: perfect love. On the other: fallible love.
On the one hand: Jesus. Fully God. Fully man.
On the other: Us. Made in the image of God, sure…but not able to live up to that ideal any more than we are able to sing the Hallelujah Chorus on the day we are born. We are “fully human”. Period.
On the one hand: Looking to Easter as the ultimate fulfillment of our needs…
On the other hand: Looking to a person as the ultimate fulfillment of our desires.
Wow. When I put it that way, it really brings the picture into focus for me. If I come from the premise (and I do) that Jesus is God and his payment for our sins on the cross was the ultimate fulfillment of my needs (forgiveness of my sins), then to compare that to anything a human can offer by way of fulfilling another human’s desires…there is a lot left to be, well, desired.
And that’s the problem with Valentine’s Day. We’re imperfect. We don’t match up. We fail. We forget. We don’t live up to expectations. We disappoint. Valentine’s Day only seems to prove that we aren’t everything we should be. We simply can’t be everything that the object of our affections wishes we were.
We are, in short, human.
Ash Wednesday, however, is all about pointing us to the cross. Pointing us to the ultimate love. Pointing us to the One who Never Fails. The One who was the perfect sacrifice for our sins.
Perfection vrs. frailty.
All mashed into this one day. “Ashintine’s Day”. “Valinash Day”. This day, when we celebrate the ones we love as fully as we possibly can despite our human weakness.
This day: when we look to the ideal love of Christ.
This day: when Jesus, the ultimate Valentine, reminds us that “when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.” (Titus 3:4,5)
God knows about our imperfections. He knows and he still loves us.
If I anticipate the possibility, I’m usually ok. But if I don’t think about it, if I don’t prepare myself ahead of time…that’s when it leaps out at me and clonks me over the head.
And so, last Sunday morning, there I was in church. I got through almost the whole service and then we stood to sing one final song.
O Come, All Ye Faithful. One of my very favorite Christmas carols.
I sang the first few words just fine: O Come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant…
and then it struck.
O come ye, O come ye, to Bethlehem.
Memories of Mom flooded my mind. Images of her in choir. Images of her in her favorite chair. Images of her baking Christmas cookies, wrapping gifts, decorating the tree. Memories of her, down on hands and knees, playing with my dollhouse.
Within me, roiling emotions. Around me, the beloved tune.
Come and behold him, born the King of angels; O come, let us adore him, O come, let us adore him, O come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord.
For a moment I wondered: can I hold it in?
No, I could not.
Tears began and they began hard.
I had another wonder:
Should I walk out? Or would that cause more distraction?
I chose to sit. I bowed my head. Made myself as small as possible. And I sobbed.
Shoulders shaking. Mouth open. Silent. Heart all out there:
Mom is gone. I’ll never talk to her again. I’ll never hear her voice again. I’ll never sit beside her in church, hear her singing this or any other hymn. I’ll never hug her or be hugged in return. I’ll never see her little grin when something tickled her fancy and she couldn’t help but laugh.
I’ll never touch her hand.
I’ll never wrap another gift for her, smiling at the knowledge that she’ll be delighted with the present.
But then, in the midst of it all, an awareness.
Mom is with Jesus. Maybe right now she’s talking with him. Laughing with him. Asking theological questions of the author of Theology.
The song continued in the air around me:
Sing, choirs of angels…
Mom’s singing with those angels. Her sweet, soprano voice, once again soaring. As it hasn’t in more than a decade, ever since her stroke.
Sing in exultation.
I was alone in the pew. My husband was up front on guitar; daughter nearby at the mic. Singing. In exultation.
Sing all ye citizens of heaven above.
The song continued and so did I, tears like a river down my cheeks. I never knew so many tears could live within my head.
Afterwards, my husband’s strong arms.
My friends.
They came. The faithful. The compassionate. The criers and the dry-eyed.
O come, all ye faithful. Come comfort the brokenhearted. Come weep together. Come sit in silence while your loved one mourns.
O come.
Come and behold the knowledge that the lover of our souls calls his people home.
Called my mother home.
O come, Kathy. It’s time. You have been faithful, good servant.Come sing with the choirs of angels. Come sing, ye citizen of Heaven above! Come sit with the Word of the Father, who appeared in the flesh. Tiny, vulnerable, yet Lord of Lords; Son of the Father; begotten, not created.
Come and adore him.
Yes, there will be moments of unendurable grief. But it is grief for me. For the emptiness of the world without my mother.
It is not grief for her, joyful and triumphant citizen of heaven! Exalting with the angels up there, no cane, no breathing difficulties, no nebulizer treatments, no food forgotten in the oven: just adoring the true God of true God.
I am not a journal-writer. My mom, on the other hand, wrote in a journal every day of her adult life. Or as close to every day as she could possibly get. We have journals that go back to the early days of their marriage. We can look back to see what was written when my sisters and I were born, when emotional events took place in our family, when world-events occurred.
It was my grandmother, Mom’s mom, who encouraged her three girls to keep journals. We have her journals as well, though I understand that she didn’t want them kept. In fact, she specifically asked that they be burned when she died. Mom did not obey that wish. Whether she ever read them, I don’t know. I do know that as I was packing them up to send home with my Aunt Nancy after Mom’s memorial service, I found the one from the year I was born. I opened to the correct page and sure enough, there I was mentioned for the first time. My brain was in too deep of a fog at that time to remember exactly what she said, but it was full of thanks and hope and joy.
How lovely to have her words about me, from day one.
I have not read any of Mom’s journals. Not yet. I probably will someday, when I’m ready. Of course, that’s if I can read her handwriting. She words were pretty wobbly for the last few years of her life.
I did, however, with Dad’s permission, read what she wrote on the day she passed away:
12/25/22 Sun. John 7:1-9 No time to write – later or tomorrow
Sadly for us, there was no later, nor was there a tomorrow. But that’s ok. Because here’s what she read that day, in her well-worn Bible:
“After this, Jesus went around in Galilee. He did not want to go about in Judea because the Jewish leaders there were looking for a way to kill him. But when the Jewish Festival of Tabernacles was near, Jesus’ brothers said to him, ‘Leave Galilee and go to Judea, so that your disciples there may see the works you do. No one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret. Since you are doing these things, show yourself to the world.’ For even his own brothers did not believe in him. Therefore Jesus told them, ‘My time is not yet here; for you any time will do. The world cannot hate you, but it hates me because I testify that its works are evil. You go to the festival. I am not going up to this festival, because my time has not yet fully come.’ After he had said this, he stayed in Galilee.” John 7:1-9
My time is not yet here…my time has not yet fully come…
Wow.
Jesus knows about timing. He’s God, after all! God, who created time itself. God, who sees all of time at once. God, who knows what’s coming and knows how things will work out and therefore never gets stressed out about current affairs the way we do because, quite frankly, “now” is just a drop in the bucket of time.
Jesus knew the time had not yet come for him to reveal himself to the world with multiple miracles and the like. He was biding his time. He waited patiently. He did not allow his human brothers to dictate his behavior. His time on earth had come…but his ministry on earth had not yet fully come.
Not yet. Not fully.
The last sentence Mom wrote in her two-page journal entry on December 24th, the day before she died, was this: “I will come Lord. I will listen.”
She was so ready to be with Jesus!
And God, being God, knew. He knew Mom’s time had come. Fully. Completely. She was ready to see him and he was ready for her, too.
I cannot begin to say how comforting that is.
And comforting, too, that the last Scripture passage she read was about God’s perfect timing. She, a huge bookworm, had read her last book.
I don’t know the exact Scripture passage they read in church later that morning, but given that it was Christmas day, I can give a pretty good guess: Jesus. Born in God’s perfect timing.
“But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son…” Galatians 4:4
Perfect timing.
Or what about this?
“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.” Romans 5:6
A few years ago I came across a quote by American theologian and writer, Frederick Buechner. Here it is, in context. (This is from his book, Wishful Thinking.)
“The grace of God means something like: ‘Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are, because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It’s for you I created the universe. I love you.'”
Apart from Scripture, this is pretty much my favorite quote in the world. The part I italicized above, especially. I have an art print of it, hanging near my front door, with an arrow pointing out the window.
Here is the world. It’s right there: out the window. But it’s also right here, all around me. In the dirty laundry, waiting to be taken downstairs. In the groceries I just loaded into the fridge. In the mail, lying unopened on the kitchen counter. In the awkward and possibly misconstrued text conversation I’ve been avoiding all morning. In my car, in my work, in my friendships, in my church. In the news. In the books I read. In back-to-school sales and scheduled meetings and random meetings, too, on the sidewalk, in airplanes, in doctors offices and parks.
The world is in the neighbor boys looking for the golf ball they say they lost in our yard but which would have taken a miracle of science to reach the area where they’re looking. But I don’t mind and I tell them to search all they want. They run and yell and jump around the point, but no golf ball is discovered. Not in this corner of the world, anyhow.
Beautiful and terrible things will happen. And they do. Beauty isn’t only in a sunset. It’s in the lacy, decaying leaf that floats to your feet as you sit on the deck on a chilly autumn evening. It’s in an unlooked-for invitation, in 64 years of marriage, in patience from a harassed clerk, in a wave from a stranger on a gravel road. It’s in kindness and gentleness at the vet’s office when the news isn’t good. It’s in a donut, left on your desk at work. Or a note, slid under the door. It’s in the stray cat that blinks at you through the window, the nest of eggs unexpectedly in your hanging flower basket. The smile from a child you feared may never smile again.
But yes, terrible things are around us, too. Fires. Storms. Earthquakes. Tornadoes. Broken hearts and accidents. Stolen things and stolen lives. Politics, wars, illness. Missed sleep upon sleep upon sleep. Unintentional hurts. Festering sores, real or imagined. Loss. Sorrow. Death. It’s thing after thing after thing when you just can’t get a break.
Don’t be afraid. Really? After that terrible list? How can I not? How? Because of the next line.
I am with you. This line isn’t included in the quote on my wall. But that’s ok because I know it’s there and I add its intent in my head whenever I read it. The world is out there, it says to me, the good and the bad of it. But that’s ok. All that means is that in the midst of the beautiful, terrible world, fear doesn’t need to be your first response because you are not alone in the beauty and the terror. You are loved. You are wanted. You are together with the God of the universe at your side, in your very heart.
And that, my friends, is grace.
Beautiful and terrible grace. Beautiful because you can’t earn it. Terrible because you can’t earn it.
No matter how hard you strive, no matter how often you go to church, no matter. God loves you, plain and simple. The grace – the gift, the beauty – of his salvation comes to us because Jesus died to cover over our iniquities. Our sins. Our terribleness. It is a gift and by definition, we don’t earn gifts. We are handed gifts simply because we’re loved. Simply because: beauty.
And so: we must respond. Take the gift we haven’t earned. Or not.
Here is the grace. Beautiful and terrible grace. Don’t be afraid.—
C. S. Lewis wrote a book titled, Surprised by Joy. I must admit, I’ve never read it. Only excerpts. I’m sure it’s great. I mean, it’s Lewis, right? I know I should read it…but the thing is, I’m an optimist. Joy never really surprises me; I expect it.
What surprises me is this grief.
I mean, okay, my mom died. I’m supposed to grieve. It’s okay. It’s normal. It would be bad to not grieve. On several levels. But what I wasn’t ready for is this “hit-me-out-of-the-blue” grief. The concept is not new to me, that of grief hitting at unexpected moments. But the reality is rough.
I’ll be going along, doing my own thing, and suddenly there it is: tears, welling up in my eyes. Maybe I saw a reference to Mother’s Day. Or a recipe she would have clipped. Or heard a song she loved.
Or, as the last time this happened, simply being in church.
Thank goodness it was the Maundy Thursday service — always a favorite of mine — and the lighting was dim. Thank goodness I was in the back row. Thank goodness it was acceptable to have our eyes closed.
My grief built up as the service progressed. I mean, it was Easter week – so that’s emotional right there. It’s Jesus forgiving, dying, rising. How can I not get emotional about that?
Says the girl who cries at the drop of a hat.
But usually when I cry in church it’s subtle. It’s silent. It’s perhaps even expected. Of me, anyway.
But this was different. As the service progressed, the emotions were building but still within acceptable levels and then there we were, singing My Jesus, I Love Thee and the dam that kept the waters at bay burst.
“My Jesus, I love thee, I know thou art mine / for three all the follies of sin I resign; / My gracious Redeemer, my Savior art thou: / I ever I loved three, my Jesus ’tis now. / I love thee because thou hast first loved me…”
CUE THE FIRST TEARS.
“and purchased my pardon on Calvary’s tree; / I love thee for wearing the thorns on thy brow;”
CUE MORE TEARS
“If ever I loved three, my Jesus ’tis now.”
CUE THROAT CLOSING UP AND TEARS STREAMING DOWN CHEEKS. I WON’T BE SINGING THIS SONG OUTLOUD ANY LONGER. I KEPT SINGING IT IN MY HEAD, THOUGH.
“I’ll love thee in life, I will love three in death,”
CUE VISIONS OF MY MOM. IN DEATH.
“and praise thee as long as thou lendest me breath;”
CUE AGONIZED, DESPERATE WIPING OF EYES. COULDN’T YOU HAVE LENT HER BREATH A LITTLE WHILE LONGER, GOD?
“And say when the deathdew lies cold on my brow:”
CUE WONDERING WHAT DEATHDEW LOOKS LIKE. CUE WONDERING IF I WILL BE ABLE TO STOP THESE TEARS OR IF I’LL BURST INTO AUDIBLE SOBS AND VISIBLE SHAKING. CUE SPECTACULAR SELF CONTROL. CUE WONDERING IF I SHOULD GET UP AND WALK OUT. OR IF I SHOULD TAKE MY DAUGHTER’S HAND OR IF THAT WILL ONLY MAKE IT WORSE. CUE WISHING I COULD JUST LET GO AND WAIL. CUE THINKING THAT I NEVER THOUGHT I’D WANT TO WAIL IN PUBLIC BUT THIS MAY BE THE TIME. NOT SURE I CAN STOP IT. CUE WONDERING WHAT PEOPLE WOULD THINK IF I DID.
CUE NOT CARING.
CUE CARING.
CUE GASPING.
“If ever I loved thee, my Jesus ’tis now.”
CUE WIPING MY EYES A FEW MORE TIMES. CUE HAVING NO IDEA WHAT THE PASTOR SAID NEXT. OR NEXT. OR NEXT.
CUE DEEP BREATHS. CUE REALIZING THAT I’VE SURVIVED.
CUE WONDERING, BRIEFLY, IF I WOULD HAVE BEEN HEALTHIER IF I’D JUST LET GO AND WAILED?
I was surprised by the extent, the moment, the depth of my grief. Cue wondering, now, in this moment, how long this will continue? If I haven’t yet wept as I ought. If I will be like my mom herself, who, in the stress of Christmas Eve preparations 11 months and three weeks after her father died and approximately nine months after her mother died, when she fled the house in tears and wept to the heavens on the absent neighbor’s deck because she’d kept the emotions in check for all those months. Being strong. Being brave. Behaving as a Christian ought, she thought, who knows that her parents are in heaven, who believes that worldly grief is wrong, who must set a good example for her girls, who does what’s right. Always.
Always.
Oh, my dear mother.
Cue realizing that I’m more like my mother than I ever realized.
I think Micah 7:7 came as a gift to me today. I’d forgotten about this verse, but suddenly there it was, as I was looking for a photo. “But as for me, I watch in hope for the Lord, I wait for God my Savior; my God will hear me.”
Yes.
Yes!
God hears me. When I sob in public places. When I cry in the reaches of the night. When I contemplate the thought of Mother’s Day. As I watch in hope for the Lord.
Now don’t get me wrong: I love Christmas. It has gifts and cherished decorations and wonderful promises of good things to come. Not to mention the birth of the Savior of the World.
But as much as I love Christmas, I love Easter even more. Mostly because there’s less stress, which is huge. All I have to do for Easter is cook one big meal and fill Easter baskets…as opposed to planning food for a week, filling giant stockings, wrapping (and mailing), decorating and baking, baking, baking.
Yes, Easter is less stressful and the promise of spring makes everything seem a little more light-hearted. Not to mention the death of the Savior of the World.
Ummm, excuse me? Death of the Savior is a good thing? That’s not very Hollywood.
No, it’s not.
Resurrection, now that’s Hollywood!
But Good Friday is not a misnomer. Good Friday truly is good.
When I was a kid I didn’t really understand that. How can you call it “good” when Jesus died, for goodness sake? Well…just that. He died, for GOODness sake. For the sake of goodness everywhere. For the sake of goodness for all time.
For the sake of us.
Even though we are far from good.
The thing is, if he hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have been saved from our sins.
And that’s, unequivocally, good.
Yes, the birth of Jesus is fun. But it’s the death of Jesus that was the point of the whole birth thing. He was born to die. Not many of us come into the world with a known purpose. A few do. Heirs to the throne. Perhaps siblings, born with the hope that their blood or bone marrow or other such thing can help a brother or sister. But most of us are born for the simple reason that, hopefully at least, our parents loved each other and we came as the result of that love.
John 1, however, points Jesus in another direction. He came “not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (vrs. 10). God had a plan for Jesus from the start. A good plan. A plan for good. A plan, as Jeremiah 29:11 puts it, to bring hope for the future.
Without that good and hopeful plan, our world would be stuck. Stuck under the law. Stuck with the consequences of our sin.
Easter falls, always, on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of Spring. Passover – bear with me, this does connect with God’s good plan – falls on the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Nisan. This is always a full moon, but about 15 percent of the time, that full moon and the Easter full moon are not the same full moon.
Clear as mud?
Back in the year that Jesus died – 2023 years ago – Jesus was celebrating Passover on the weekend that he was arrested, crucified, buried and rose again. And so that first Holy Week was also Passover week.
What does this have to do with God’s good plan for us? It’s inextricably linked. Passover celebrates the exodus of the ancient Hebrews from their enslavement under Pharaoh in Egypt. Talk about a good – albeit convoluted – plan! The Salvation that enabled their exit from Egypt was brought about by the death of a pure sacrificial lamb. It’s blood protected them when the Angel of Death “passed over” their homes, ultimately leading to their escape, straight through the parted Red Sea.
It was entirely right that Jesus and his friends were celebrating this salvation, this most Holy of Holy holidays, at the time that he fulfilled our ultimate salvation. As they celebrated this ancient story of Exodus, Jesus wrote the next chapter of our salvific story. He became, for us, the sacrificial lamb. The perfect sacrifice. For all time and all people (Hebrews 10:10).
And that, my friends, is really why I like Easter better than Christmas. Yes, it took the death of Christ – which, at first blush, seems “bad” – but that death is the ultimate good in the world. Without that death we’d be dead, too. In our sins. Eternally. But because of that death – and the resurrection that followed – we live.
I don’t like the word “eulogy”. But like it or not, this is what this is. And if this is too long or feels too personal, please feel free to close this window right now. But if you’re interested, here it is. The things I said about my mom at her memorial service. Plus a few pictures…
How does one wake up and say, “thanks for this day” on the morning when one faces saying goodbye to one’s mother?
I try to wake up each morning and have the first words out of my mouth be, “Thanks for this day and I give it to you” but I got stuck this morning on the “thanks for this day” part. But then I realized that I can say thanks for a life lived in light of eternity. Thanks for the example that one need not be perfect to be loved. By us. By God.
When Mom was three years old, she learned to read. Before she turned four, she came down with Rheumatic Fever and the doctor confined her to bed. She spent so long in bed that she had to learn to walk again. She survived the time by reading. Thus began a lifetime of devouring books.
Several years after this event, Mom moved to a new town – one of many, many moves in her life. Starting out in a new school part-way through the year is neverfun, but it was made worse by the fact that a school program was scheduled to take place and all the girl roles were filled. So young Kathy was given a boy part to play. She was the only girl on a stage full of Junior High boys. She prayed desperately that Jesus would return so that she wouldn’t have to do this horrible thing.
But God didn’t answer that prayer, for which I am thankful.
Despite the fact that Dad was is taking photographs, there are some pictures of Mom that are only in my mind.
Mom: walking into the living room and calling, “The Mountain’s Out!” We’d come galumphing down the hall and sure enough, there was Mt. Baker, peeking through the overcast haze. Mom taught me that views matter.
Mom: reading out loud with me up until I was 16 years old. We never did finish Ivanhoe. Mom taught me that words matter.
Mom: at checkpoint Charlie, the border guards scrutinizing her passport, looking at it, looking at her; looking at it, looking at her. Apparently she looked itimidatable. All it did was make her cross. Mom taught me that there is a time and a place to stand up for yourself. Facing Communist guards is not one of those times.
When I was small, there were a lot of things I didn’t understand about my mother. I didn’t understand her dislike of noise. I didn’t understand how her love of classical music could include Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition but so rabidly exclude Ravel’s Bolero. I didn’t understand her obsession with tea. Winter cold or summer heat, emotional turmoil, or mid-afternoon pick-me-up; tea was a necessity. She was Scottish, after all. 100%. First generation. Tea and shortbread and tartan and scones. Not scOnes…scawnes.
I also didn’t understand Mom’s enjoyment of “Ducks” having something to do with the “U of O”. But by the way she talked about it, I knew that I wanted to be a Duck because Mom was a Duck.
Mom was a saver. She saved every single card and letter that Dad ever sent to her. Birthday, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Easter. For six and a half decades. She kept ideas: for stories, for Bible studies, for crafts. And she kept recipes because she loved to cook. She especially enjoyed trying new recipes. They say that if company is coming over you shouldn’t make a new recipe. Mom didn’t ascribe to that philosophy. She taught me what it is to be fearless in the kitchen.
She also taught me to eat my vegetables. I’m fairly certain that every dinner she ever made – excluding Sunday night Popcorn, of course –
included vegetables. Every. Single. Dinner. The next day, she could take a fridge full of those leftover vegetables and turn them into delicious soup.
Yes, Mom served us, and served God, with food. Up on Orcas Island, if a child broke a bone or was ill, she would call the kid’s mother to find out their favorite dessert and then she brought it to them, freshly baked. It was part of her firmly-held belief system, one which she called “Banana Bread Evangelism”.
If a new person moved to their neighborhood, that person received a loaf of banana bread and a sincere welcome. Likewise, when Mom and Dad moved to a new town, she’d bake some bread – once the loaf pans were unpacked – wrap it in foil, and set out to introduce herself, to begin a relationship which, prayerfully, would later provide opportunities to live out First Peter 3:15. Mom was prepared to give an answer to everyone who asked her to give the reason for the hope that she had. And she did so with gentleness and respect. Because it wasn’t reallyaboutthe bread, it was about the message that went with the bread.
The very day they moved from Silverdale, Washington, to Arlington, Washington, she and my son walked across the street to ask their neighbor, one last time, if she knew Jesus, because this might be the last chance she’d ever have to hear about God’s love. Mom taught me that if you claim to love Jesus, you talk about Jesus.
Mom loved a good theological discussion. To find a question in Scripture and debate the ins and outs, the why’s and wherefores. She had a lifetime of knowledge, but more importantly, a lifetime of love for the Lord.
Of course, that didn’t mean she agreed with youif you tried to convince her that Christian Rock music was a legitimate thing, or that drum sets belonged in churches. Choirs belong in churches. And if there was a choir, Mom would be in it.
Another love Mom had was gardening. We had a large garden on Orcas. Every winter Mom and Dad eagerly anticipated the Burpee Seed Catalog; planning and refining their order for weeks. Then, once the seeds arrived and the conditions were right, all of our daily saving-of-the-coffee grounds-and-egg-shells-and-rotten-tomatoes suddenly made sense as Dad tilled in the compost and the dirt became rich and dark and perfect for those fortunate seeds. They planted, they watered, they waited and they weeded.
Our mother, weirdly, loved weeding. Up until the end of her life. Weeding was a joy to her.
Finally, after all that preparation, came the first signs of buds, the growth, the harvest. And then came the canning, the freezing, the storing-up-for-winter. I had no idea what a sticky, sweaty mess that was until I tried it myself, years later. Once was enough for me. But every year her shelves glittered with golden peaches, purple plums, cream-colored pears, cinnamonny applesauce, verdant beans.
I could have done without the beans.
And let me tell you, if Mom could have preserved zucchini, she would have.
If Mom wasn’t weeding or cooking or singing or dreaming of new ways to feed us zucchini, she was sewing. Dresses for us girls, shirts or ties for Dad, dolls or stuffed animals or Raggedy Andy’s or Ann’s. She sewed quilts from the leftover scraps and tied them with yarn in the church basement. She lived out Proverbs 31: we were clothed in scarlet and had no fear for the winter because she took care to make sure we were prepared.
She and Dad were a team. Sharing dreams and kisses and our best interests. Dad was gone a lot with the Air Force or with Pan Am or flying helicopters into snowstorms to rescue lost hikers, but Mom carried on; knowingDad would back her up in her decisions. She knew he’d step right back in when he returned, she knew he wanted to be with us but also wanted to provide for us, and flying was how God called him to do that. And in the lean years, when flying didn’t always cover the bills, she stepped in; to substitute teach, to work at Darvills bookstore, to tutor or to help watch kids at the daycare down the road.
Yes, they were a team. For 65 years. They barely knew each other when they got married, living as they did on opposite sides of the nation. But they knew enough to know that this union was right. So when Dad proposed over the phone, Mom said yes. “Yes” to whatever may come. “Yes” to living their lives in the presence of Emmanuel, God With Us.
Mom is now with Emmanuel. Absent from the body, no longer present in their cozy home, reading her books and her Bible – I should say Bibles, plural. Underlined, worn, creased, cherished. Memorized. Sung.
She’s no longer up at 4a.m., praying. Praying for me, for Kris and Jenny, for our husbands, our children, and our grandkids – even the ones not yet born. Praying for all of you. Praying for missionaries, whom she felt she knew. Praying for – and with – Dad.
One morephotograph that is only in my mind: Mom praying before bed, years ago, when they lived in Wisconsin. I was staying with them for a few months. It was late in the evening, and I walked past their openbedroom door and there she was, kneeling at the side of the bed, like a little child, hands clasped together in prayer. I’d blundered into a sacred moment, but she didn’t mind. She opened her eyes, stood up quickly, and hugged me good night.
She could stand up quickly then, 13 years before the cancer, before the stroke.
After the stroke, not too long before they moved to Arlington, we were visiting them in Silverdale. Momwas having a hard day. I don’t know what triggered it, but tears began to flow as we sat at the table. She was frustrated with her inability to sew and sing and serve as she had for so many years.
“All I can do is pray,” she finally managed to say.
“Mom!” I said, in the middle of the busy years where a quiet day when all “I could do was pray” was nothing but a dream. “Mom, that’s not an ‘all’! That’s your job now.”
But it wasn’t enough. She wanted to be doing. She did not go gently into her waning years.
Why are all those phrases easier to say than the actual word? All those poetic euphemisms to avoid the stark reality. I guess because even thinking the actual word makes me cry.
She moved on. She gained her heavenly reward. She went to be with Jesus.
It happened early in the afternoon of Christmas day. (“It happened”…still avoiding the word.) We’re two hours ahead of my family on the West Coast, so we were done unwrapping gifts, done snacking (temporarily), and the kids had even moved their loot into their respective rooms. My husband, Colin, was on his ipad, doing whatever it is that he does on his ipad, and I was sitting in the middle of the mess, reading a beautiful book that a friend had given me, a book full of kindness and wisdom and love. I was feeling sentimental. Cozy. Thankful.
Colin’s phone rang. I could tell by his voice that it was family. I expected a, “Yes, she’s right here,” but instead there came, “Ah. Uh huh. Okay.”
Colin hung up and turned to me.
“They’re giving your mom CPR.” He said it gently. But really, there’s no way to gentle those words. No euphemism for breathing air into your mother’s congested lungs.
I looked back down at my book, automatically, as if to make sure that the world still looked the same as it had before this monumental shift. But the words before me blurred. The whole room, really, faded away to be replaced with a distorted mind’s view of my sister’s living room, gifts unopened, children’s excitement turned to confusion, my medically-trained sister and brother-in-law doing all they could, my dad…oh, dear, Lord, my dad.
Colin told the kids, who wandered, empty-handed, full-hearted, to sit, awkwardly, in the living room again, wrapping paper still strewn about, stockings unhung by the chimney with care. Somehow I stood, moved to the mudroom for something, I have no idea why, talking of I know not what. Colin joined me, let me finish my words, stepped to me and took me into his arms.
“Your mom’s gone,” he whispered. “Patrick texted.”
Gone. Another euphemism. Another way to gentle the concept that the world as I knew it had ended.
I don’t blame Patrick for texting. Words are easier to write than to say. I’m thankful he’d called to give the first news.
It all happened so quickly. Ten minutes? I don’t even know. Fast. Gone. Such short words that say so much.
Our son read some Scripture. I made tea, because that’s what Mom would have done. We hugged and cried and made more tea. Mom’s parents were Scottish, and tea cures all.
Only it couldn’t cure this.
This.
This = death.
There. I said it.
I’ll say more, later, but for now I leave you with this…
This = hope:
“’Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” 1 Corinthians 15:55-57
I love Christmas. I love the surprises. I love the scents. I love the giving (and, I must admit, the getting). I love the decorations and the music and the events that are unique to the rest of the year. I love Advent calendars and I love the general feeling that this is a special time. Something is different. This is a time set apart to celebrate.
Spiritually speaking, to be “set apart” is to be sanctified. To be holy. And indeed, the very best thing about Christmas is that it’s a holy season, a season to step back from the usual and focus on Jesus.
And I don’t just mean the baby Jesus. That cute little infant in the paintings; the Jesus of the nativity scenes and Sunday School programs and youthful memories. No, the Jesus I mean is the grown-up Jesus. The Jesus who has hard teachings. The Jesus who threw out the baby with the bathwater when it came to following rules and obeying the traditional law. The Jesus who gave up his right to be right, humanly speaking, because he knew he was right, spiritually speaking.
That Jesus is harder to embrace. That Jesus is rejected. That Jesus is spat upon by Romans, Ancient Hebrews, and modern day philosophers, be they suit-clad in higher institutions or blanket-clad in gutters…or flannel-clad in cozy homes and offices and check-out counters and yoga class.
That’s the Jesus the little baby turned into.
I know that Easter is the “hard Jesus” season. The season with the brutal images and the repentant sinners, hanging upon their various crosses. But the truth is, I want to live my Christmas in the far-reaching shadow of Golgatha, because that’s what this sanctified season is truly all about. The baby came because the man was going to die. He knew that from day one. From minute, from second one. He didn’t come into this knowledge as an adult, he told his parents as a 12 year old, “didn’t you know I needed to be about my Father’s business?” (Luke 2:49). They didn’t fully understand, yet we know that Mary, “treasured up all these things in her heart” (vrs. 51). All the little things. The annunciation: “you’re going to have a miraculous baby”; the telling of her news to Joseph: “Surprise!”; the birth in a stable, the shepherds and angels and eventual Magi; the growing-up years; the ultimate revelation of who he was at the wedding at Cana; the final days and hours and minutes, standing at the foot of the cross, watching her son die for the wicked world which did not understand.
Those are the moments she treasured up. It didn’t matter that she didn’t really “get it”. What mattered was that she treasured. She contemplated. She put two and two and one million little things together and came up with belief in a man who was the Savior of the World. Belief that this human being, whom she had birthed, was also God. Deity incarnate. The Devine human.
Sanctified. Set apart. Holy.
And so, I live in that holy shadow at Christmas. Yes, I love the season. Santa Claus, candy-cane-stripes, presents, songs about red-nosed reindeer. But the reason I love it all is because it has been made holy by the presence of the man upon the cross. The man who forgave — and continues to forgive — me of my many sins. And, equally true, who forgives you of yours.
Merry Christmas, dear friends. May the joy and the shadow co-exist in your celebrations this season, pointing you to the one who loves you more than you can possibly imagine.
My earliest Christmas memory — a memory I know is mine and isn’t just from family stories or photos that make me think I remember — is me, age 10, I believe, so impatient and anxious to get to the important business of unwrapping gifts but having to wait for my sister to get off of the ferry boat because she’d had to work the night before on the mainland and therefore couldn’t arrive home to Orcas Island, Washington, until Christmas morning. I must have been quite a pest because Mom sent me with Dad to drive the 35 minutes to the ferry dock to pick up Kris, knowing that the enforced hourish away from the beckoning Christmas tree would give her peace and me something else to think about.
I’m not sure that it did give me something else to think about because I remember pouting all the way there and all the way back, but then, finally, oldest sister returned to the fold, we were home, breakfast was ready, and we could get down to the agenda of the day.
I can’t tell you most of what I received that year. Books, for sure. Puppets, possibly. Probably some Lego. Clothes, handmade by Mom, and that could have been the year I received an Instamatic camera from my grandparents with film that was two years expired.
But I do know for sure, that was the year I received my dollhouse. I had been banned from the loft above the kitchen for weeks, knowing that something more than just secret sewing was going on as sewing machines didn’t make sand-paper noises, or require anyone other than Mom to shut themselves away for hours at a time. I imagined all sorts of things — a book shelf, a birdhouse (though why I’d have been receiving one of those I’m not sure) — anything to keep me from imagining a dollhouse because what if it wasn’t that and Christmas morning would come and I’d be heartbroken because my imagined house wouldn’t be there, waiting in all its glory beneath the Christmas tree.
But it was a dollhouse. Three stories high. A kitchen off to the side. Wallpapered with wrapping paper and inhabited by tiny people my mother made and furniture made from upholstered match boxes. It was all I had secretly dreamed of and more, even if it was incomplete. That just meant I was able to help put it together, which was also fun.
I kept that house for years, finishing some architectural details that the arrival of Christmas had thwarted, installing new furniture over time, adding dishes and doormats and plastic chickens. I borrowed baby Stevie from my Sunshine Family dolls and he lived happily in a second story bedroom. I finished painting the front railings just about the time we had to put it into storage, the year I turned 16. I knew I’d miss it in my new German bedroom.
Four years later, having left West Germany behind and returned Stateside, a truck arrived with Mom and Dad’s things that had been stored away for all that time. A huge box was placed upon the grass, DOLLHOUSE scrawled across the lid in bold Sharpie.
“Where do you want this?” the man asked, indifferently.
“Just leave it right here for now,” Mom replied, handing me a box cutter. I think she was as excited as I was.
We sliced the tape, folded back the lid, and there it was.
Smashed.
Busted.
Literal sawdust.
Literal holes.
I turned away, unable to face the shock on Mom’s face. I brushed past oblivious moving men, went into the upheaval of my room and shut the door, flinging myself upon my bed. I cried that day. For far longer than one might think a 20 year old should cry for a broken dollhouse.
It had been a cherished hope. A wonderful surprise. A time-consuming art piece. A creative outlet. A miniature world. The one thing I had missed the most, and looked forward to with the coming of that great big van.
Destroyed.
I wonder, sometimes, if that’s how God looks at His world. He anticipated it; He made it; He saw that it was good. He cherished it; He watched it; He set it up to succeed.
Yet still it fell. Still it failed. Still sin entered in.
Destroyed.
And so He sent the angel.
So He sent His Son.
So He came to save us.
And as we fling ourselves upon our beds in our misery, we fling ourselves upon His mercy, and that wee tiny baby takes hold of our hearts.
“What shall I give Him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would give a lamb. If I were a wiseman, I would do my part. But what I can, I give Him. Give my heart.” – Christina Rossetti
(All photos curtesy of my dad. The angel is me, by the way, circa 1976?)
The Disheveled Theologian 