Jordan's Stormy Banks

(I am reposting this from Everly Broadway's CaringBridge site.)

When I was still a pre-teen (I'm not sure when, but I think in Portland, Texas, around 1969 or so), I remember not the time but the experience of hearing the hymn "On Jordan's Stormy Banks I Stand and Cast a Wishful Eye."  I think it was the boisterous melody and rhythm that caught my attention, along with the lyrics which I could easily understand.  I also remember some kind of visual of a storm over a body of water, dark and menacing.  There were no music videos in those days, so I must have been looking at some sort of children's hymnal with illustrations.  Maybe I was at a children's choir rehearsal or "Intermediate Training Union" (you Baptists may remember that terminology).  I remember deciding to learn that song, and I still have an echo of that memory each time I hear or sing it today.

Recently, reading from Henri Nouwen's In Memoriam, I was reminded of that hymn again.  The short book begins by telling of the warm reunion with his mother when she was terminally ill, and the blessing and joy of being together.  He was reminded of the many ways in which her faith and faithfulness had anchored him and held their family together.  But after their initial time of gathering, he describes a dramatic change that happened in his mother.  She became less able to communicate.  She had moments of obvious struggle.  She seemed no longer at peace, but often disturbed, fearful.  She seemed to him to be in a fight against whatever evil, temptations, and doubts that she had suffered during her life.  He interpreted these days as a final battle as she prepared for the end of her life, a storm through which she was having to pass.

Part of what Nouwen was realizing was that his mother, who had often been for him a tower of strength, was a human being, a woman, who had her own struggles.  She was not just the one who helped the other family members with their struggles.  And he saw this working itself out in her last days of life.  His reflections, of course, put my mind into searching through Everly's days of dealing with cancer and its deadly outcome.

I thought through her last days.  From March to July 2013, there were many ups and downs with treatment and constant pain.  She was committed to do all that she could to keep living with us, and for the most part she pressed through whatever came, asking for help that she needed from us.  There were times when she became discouraged by the pain, but we kept seeking answers and trying to find a way to getting better.  Our family trip in May was for her a great triumph and celebration.  There was only a short time remaining, but none of us knew that.  We kept looking at houses in Austin, hiring inspectors, thinking about how to fit all five of us in a house together, and even negotiating a contract.  At the same time, the cancer was doing its own work.  When our house-buying plan collided with the tumors' deadly growth, the time was nigh.  The doctors diagnosed the situation, and we learned there were no more medical solutions available.  We made the transition to hospice, and Everly lived less than one more week.

During that week, she did not have the same kind of struggle that Nouwen saw in his mother.  She was very vocal with her fear initially that she would be deserting us when we need her.  But her trusted friends shouldered their priestly role in granting her absolution, reassuring her that she had done all that she could do and all that God would expect of her.  They told her they would make sure her children never went hungry or had no place to lay their heads.  And she received this grace and began to rest.

If she had the kind of struggle about which Nouwen writes, it was during her first month after the diagnosis in 2012.  Already very sick, and considered potentially beyond help from medical intervention, she entered the hospital and received her first dose of chemotherapy.  Anyone who was following her story through this illness remembers that the first treatment almost killed her.  In that first crisis, she fell deeper and deeper into a stupor.  Her body became weak.  She could not eat and had to be fed through a tube.  She slept constantly, and emerged to waking dreams and hallucinations.  She sometimes awoke with fearful concern about some matter from work or from our family life, needing to give one of us instructions on what we needed to take care of, urgently.  Sometimes these troubled conversations dealt with some relationship or other matter about which she believed she had done wrong and things needed to be set right.  I know I was not the only bedside companion who served as her minister in that time of trouble.  Perhaps, during that time, it was the stormy Jordan she saw before her, and she felt her need to face the dangers head on and get herself ready for that crossing.

She came out of that initial sojourn in the wilderness with a new outlook on her life.  She took on the disciplines needed to regain her strength and to resist deterioration.  She talked of the peace she had made with her career and her previous years of hard work toward a powerful mission.  She considered what she wanted her remaining years to count for.  And through many ups and downs, she made them count as much as possible toward the goals of taking care of her family and reminding us of the beautiful life we had shared and would keep on sharing.

I don't mean that her 15 months, minus that first month-plus of hospitalization, were constant sunshine.  Everly certainly had fears and worries.  She was a worrier, but not to despair.  And she did not handle pain well.  Many of you have heard her say honestly, "I'm a wimp."  She did not like to get stuck for an intravenous tube.  She did not like any treatment that made her burn, or get chills, or get poked or prodded.  But that part of her life was not so different from before we had to face cancer.  Of course, every time we had to get a new CT Scan and reevaluate her progress, there was anxiety.  When the news was not as good as we hoped, there was disappointment and concern.  I'm not trying to sugar coat things, but I think it is accurate to say that Everly did not face that kind of struggle against her potential dying as a constant overwhelming problem after the beginning.  She was not resigned to die, but she was not terrified by it either.  When she looked back at her experience of making it through those terrible days in 2012, she would tell us stories and share insights as one who had been through a great ordeal.  She spoke as one who knew something beyond what most anyone had known, having approached the brink of death, looked into it, turned back from it, and rededicated herself to a life worth living.  I think you will forgive me if at times I sound like I'm writing hagiography, but what I want to say is that she had faced something, had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, and she did not need to repeat those experiences and lessons again.  She already had learned that even there, God is with her.

So as I look at her last days in July 2013, I don't see intense dread.  She became upset sometimes as she dealt with losing control over her body, growing too weak, too tired, too foggy-brained to act independently.  But these were flashes and passing moments.  It was difficult to speak, but she would suddenly enter a conversation with perception, instructions, and even jokes.  It was hard to swallow well, and she would cough as one who felt she would choke, then rest again.  Mostly, she was at peace with her children and all of us who cared for her around her.

I think we saw more of this struggle toward the end in the prolonged illness of Everly's father, Herbie.  His struggle was longer and painful in a different way.  He observed himself slipping into dementia and losing the strength from his athletic body.  He was exhausted but could not sleep peacefully.  The waking dreams were deep struggles for him.  I am not talking about his character or trying to say Everly did better.  I am merely describing a difference in the progression of mind and body.  Herbie's illness incited his brain in different ways than Everly's, stirring partial memories and robbing him of awareness of the loving people around him.  He feared being left alone and called out for Marie, his wife, at all hours.  He found himself running a race or fighting an enemy when he was simply in bed with family standing by.  He had fought so many battles, solved so many complex problems, trained his body and worked hard for so many years.  As that slipped away from him, he continued to fight and run.

What Nouwen learned, and what we learned from Everly and Herbie, is that our loved ones struggle.  Even when they have hidden it from us so well, they have had their struggles throughout their lives.  Some of those struggles come back to them as they take account of their lives and look ahead to what may remain.  Herbie was grateful for such a rich life, for the devotion and love of his marriage, for three talented and intelligent children, and for so many friends and young people with whom he had shared that life.  He hated to see that go, and the progress of his disease elicited his will to fight.  But some joys persisted through it all:  especially loving to be with Marie and eating ice cream.  Everly's illness took a different path.  But with both of them, we could honor their struggles and rejoice with their joys.

Herbie had been very clear about his approaching death while he was still able to communicate, before the strokes took his clear speech away.  He had had a good life, and he was ready to die.  It hurt him deeply that Everly's life would be cut short, while he might live on after having already lived a full life.  Like any parent, he would rather have taken her place so that she could live on.  Long before he died, he had "cast a wishful eye to Canaan's fair and happy land."  And as we numbered Everly's last days, she also faced with a willing heart that she was "bound for the Promised Land."

I think that in writing about this, both Nouwen and I are striving to be honest, to tell the truth.  Dying often is not, as many of us hope and imagine, an easy slipping away.  It is not only having family together and saying good-bye.  It is also a struggle to let go of the only good that we have known and to face the ways that we did not live in every way as we had aspired.  I can't think of any more appropriate way of handling our grief over Everly than being honest about our living and being honest about our dying.  We get so focused on our own experience of our loved one's death, and that is to be expected.  What Nouwen did, and what I have tried to do here, is also to collect and put together the clues we have of what our loved one went through.  We can't say we know it with certainty, especially those periods when they were not able to speak to us about it.  But we can take what they did say, and what their convictions have been, to see through a glass darkly, until that time that we see face to face in "one eternal day where God the Son forever reigns and scatters night away."

No chilling winds or poisonous breath
Can reach that healthful shore.
Sickness and sorrow, pain and death,
Are felt and feared no more.

Joseph Stroud Chats with Tu Fu

Joseph Stroud was reading some of his poems on the radio as I drove this evening.  All were intriguing, but one struck me particularly.  In it he affirms and re-asks a question from the Chinese poet Tu Fu about the measure of life.  It is not unlike a question that occupied the Greek Aristotle and drove his writing about virtue and ethics:  what constitutes a good life?  Intertwined in this shared set of inquiries is the puzzle of how the moments and relationships, the times and places, the stages and phases of a life hold together and converge to make a person, a whole life that one might call "good."  Rather than go any further down the path to windbaggery, let me just share Stroud's poem and what it spurred me to write as well.  You can find this poem in Stroud's most recent book of poems, Of This World.

I've never been one to do much revising.  The percolation and redisposition of my writing is more latent from days or months or years of thinking over and back over something.  So I'll just put this out there right away, even though it probably could be better.

Once I imagined myself a poet.

I wrote in bursts of inspiration

About loves and friends and

Potent moments of turning

Or grasping at life and death

When they walked up to me

To say, “Can you spare some change

For the bus?”

Prosish poems, not so artful,

Not so crafty, but with a clever turn

Of phrase here and there,

Always in a hurry to get on to what’s next.

I was on top of the world,

Or soon to be on the top,

Riding the momentum of a life

I had been given while being

Taught that I was

Making it myself.

The poems posed me

Over against and in among

People around me,

Or echoed my ambition to

Know the lifescape in which

Other poets had written their

Verses that now my teachers

Assigned me to study.

Then I stopped reading poems,

Went on to find other pages.

Embraced and embracing my beloved,

Making a home, walking a path together,

I wrote more than ever,

But not poems.

She was my poem.

The poem we were writing

Was an encompassing life,

A vision too close to my eyes,

Too deep in the ears for my eardrums,

Too far into my lungs to smell—

Somewhere in the flow of blood,

The respiration of mitochondria,

Amidst synaptic exchanges—

Organic flourishing,

Not composed:  it writing me

In rhythms of iambs, anapests,

Dactyls, trochees,

Rhyming or blank,

Unchained melodies.

A poem’s long unfolding ended.

She is not beside me.

The rhythmic feet falter,

A cataract grows and visions dim.

I go looking for books of poems

That they may read me and read to me

Of a life well lived and worth living

Even when the path disappears,

When sight seems untrustworthy,

When voices echo beyond hearing.

Such a long poetic frame—

It seemed to be the air I breathed.

I am still breathing.

Joseph Stroud converses with Tu Fu,

As I eavesdrop (having not noticed

The falling dark of this night

That burgeons mere hours before

Morning will again open with sunlight),

Suggesting I enter words in the ledger

Of a friendship

Spanning innumerable years.

Can We Be in Control?

One annual event on many church calendars is Men's Day.  As part of the Men's Day preparation, three preachers were asked to speak briefly at the Wednesday night Bible study and prayer time, all using the same text, 1 Corinthians 15:56-58.  We got our heads together to try to avoid too much repetition, and it worked well.  Thanks to Rev. Patrick Clay of Mt. Level Missionary Baptist Church and Rev. Dennis Horne of Monument of Faith Church for being my excellent partners in this enterprise.  I focused on verse 56 because it gave me the opportunity to think about the relationship of sin and the law.  The focus, according to the theme, was on men, but of course the same kinds of arguments found in this sermon can apply regardless of a person's gender.

1 Corinthians 15:56-58

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

I want to address the first portion of the passage, verse 56, a compound sentence which says, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.”  The question I want us to consider for a few minutes is “Can we be in control?”

One of the great unknowns of human existence is death.  Everyone faces it eventually.  We watch helplessly when loved ones die.  We remain on this side of a great, impenetrable divide.  The uncertainty of death arouses great anxiety in some people.  Others are able not to dwell on such fears, and some face the inevitability of death with a kind of calm resolve and peace.

            Those who put their trust in God can often put aside their anxieties about death and rest in the hope of God’s salvation.  With or without faith, most people manage to keep thoughts of death at bay through one strategy or another.  They keep focused on living and on building security in this world.  But that does not mean that fear does not break through now and then.  Death can be a powerful shaping force in our lives, even if we keep the subject buried just below the surface of our consciousness.

            Death, or its possibility, may drive us to change our diets, to start exercising, to take various medicines, to have surgeries, to break old habits and start new habits, to take a vacation, to change jobs, to move to another climate, to improve our relationships, to pray and meditate.  Death makes us act because it is the ultimate loss of control.

            If that is true, that death is the ultimate loss of control, then perhaps we might also say that the desire and efforts and strategies that people use to take control of their lives can be ways of warding off death.  And warding off death can be a good thing.  God made us for life.

            But there is a kind of striving for control that can get out of hand.  We talk about people with a “controlling personality.”  We say that some co-workers are “micromanagers.”  And we accuse people in our lives of being “control freaks.”  We protest to people who try to tell us what to do and how to live, “You’re not the boss of me!”  There is a kind of concern for control that is not good for relationships and gets out of hand.  It may, in fact, mask an underlying anxiety about losing control.  It may be a reaction to the fear of death.

            We don’t want an untimely death.  On the other hand, death comes to all, and in the right season it can be received with grace.  But when we let ourselves get so concerned with controlling every detail of our lives and the lives of people around us, could it be that we have let ourselves be controlled by fear of death rather than by the goodness of God’s gift of life?

            The Apostle Paul wrote in this text that the sting of death is sin.  He says that death has a sting.  The sting is what hurts us.  The sting is the harm that comes to us.  Death stings us because of sin. 

            On one level, that means that if we die in sin, we face a future without hope.  Death swallows us up, and we are in the clutches of an enemy we cannot defeat by our human power.  The sting of death, in this way, speaks of dying in sin and facing judgment.   I would like to say more here, but the time is short, and I can come back around to this in combination with the next important thing to say.

            On another level, saying that the sting of death is sin means that death gets its poison into us through sin.  Sinning puts us into the atmosphere of death, the sphere of influence of death.  Death sneaks its way into our lives and pollutes them and twists them and dominates them, and it does this through sin.

            One of the principle biblical concepts of sin is our desire to control our lives without depending on God.  All the way back to the Garden of Eden story, human beings believed that they had a better plan than God.  It’s not a story about a magic fruit tree and an arbitrary prohibition from God.  It is a story about human beings trying to become sovereign over their own lives and realizing how unready and how unqualified they are to take charge for themselves. 

            We, like Adam and Eve, often find ourselves trying to take control.  We want to run things.  We want the people around us to do things our way.  Men want their wives, their co-workers, their neighbors, their kids, their siblings, their girlfriends, their buddies, their teammates, to do things their way. 

            You know the guy I’m talking about.  He can’t seem to listen to others.  He gives long speeches about how to do things (Lord, help me here, I’m talking to myself.)  He gets angry when people don’t automatically comply with his plans and his wishes.  He always acts like the expert.  He’s got a plan for you and expects you to carry it out.  If he’s a pastor or deacon, he may try to enhance his control by invoking God as his sponsor.

            In the extreme, he may be like the prominent athlete in the news who wants control so bad he breaks out into violent acts.  He can’t be questioned or challenged.  And the odds are that every church, ours included, has in its pews men (or women) who have resorted to violence to control their loved ones.  It’s wrong.  It needs to stop.  God and the church can help you get help and stop.  You don’t need to demand to be in control over others and become violent.

            One thing Paul is telling us here is that trying to fight off death by controlling everything around you is really a way of giving in to death.  Instead of pushing death away, fear of death is pushing itself into our lives.  We think we can prevent the chaos by keeping everything under control, but the chaos is working within us, pressing upward toward consciousness, fighting our love for life and replacing it with control.

            Only God is capable of guiding our lives.  So I’m not saying don’t use your gifts of leadership and administration.  I’m saying let them operate in a realm of grace and freedom and love.  Grace means letting God work through other people, not controlling other people.  Freedom means being open to changes in plans and the choices of others.  Love means listening and valuing the many people God sends into your life, with all the gifts they bring.

            Paul expands his argument by saying that the power of sin is the law.  I could spend a few weeks talking about the ambiguous concept of the law in the Bible and theology.  There are many controversies over its significance across the history of the church.  But let it suffice tonight to say that the law has a limited good purpose.  It cannot save us.  But understood rightly, it can guide us.

            Our anxiety, however, makes us want the law to be our salvation.  We think it is straightforward.  It is simple.  It is clear.  There it is in black and white on the page.  We feel that we can follow something that is in plain view.  So we sometimes wish and long for the law to be our salvation.  It is, again, a strategy of control.  And as you know, the people who own authority over the law, own the rest of the people.

            Again, you have seen this guy.  He knows the regulations.  He has told you exactly what he wants done.  He wants it done this way, no matter what good idea you think you have.  In our churches, he says that we have always done things this way and it worked for our parents and their parents and the ones that came before.  He says the constitution and bylaws of a Missionary Baptist Church tell us what organizations and officers to have, and that should be good enough to do the work of the church.  He loves standard operating procedure and prefers no variations.

            But law cannot save.  It is by grace we are saved.  The power of sin is the law.  Law turbocharges our sinfulness.  Law boosts sin’s power.  Law becomes the lever to let sin shove the world around.  The law is a club in a violent man’s hand to beat down his opponents or any who question him.  That’s not the purpose of the law.  So when sin gets it’s grip on us, we use the law to intensify our controlling impulses.

            So don’t be one of these guys.  You can be a man without being in control of everything and everyone around you.  Let God send co-workers, fellow-travelers, teammates, into your life who can bring their goodness and truth and beauty with them.  Let it be life that flourishes, not death through the sinfulness of control and the power of law. 

           God gives the victory.  Jesus gave up control as he prayed in the garden.  He laid out his ideas for a good plan, but he acknowledged that there might be other plans that would work out.  He said, “Not my will, but thy will, be done.”  He went down a path that was not in his own control.  It looked like death would win.  Death tried to sting him, but he was without sin.  The law tried to condemn him, but he was the lawgiver himself.   
           When it seemed that he would be swallowed up by death, instead, death was swallowed up in victory.  Jesus knew that the God who loved him before death would still love him even into eternity.  In the world Jesus gave us, death is not a destroyer, but a passage to new life.  He showed us the way.  May we walk in it with courage, and not succumb to our fears.

Sitting Vigil

It's already July 18 in Scotland, where I sit in the little hamlet of Pittscottie, Fife, where Heather, David, Evan, and Andrew Moffitt live.  I'm awake in the middle of the night, listening to a playlist I made on May 24, 2013, the last anniversary Everly and I had while she was living.  I don't know if I'll feel like going to sleep tonight.  It won't be July 18 in the US for a while longer.

Naomi and I went to Edinburgh on Thursday, the 17th.  We visited the Divinity School where our friend Chun-Pang Lau earned his doctorate.  We climbed up the rocky crag and visited the Edinburgh Castle.  Then we walked down the Royal Mile, stopping at various sites, finally reaching the Holyrood Palace.  Along the way, we had lunch at the Elephant House, where J.K. Rowling often went to write her famous Harry Potter books.  We had a great evening with the Moffitts over dinner and cobbler.

David finished his drive back to Austin to be with Lydia on the 18th.  He also will be packing, hauling some things to Salado, and doing some cleaning in preparation for moving out of the Austin apartment.  Lydia is in school, and she is working out the tension and grief with some time in the open air of parkland along the Brazos River.  I love the name of that river--Rio de los Brazos de Dios, which translates to "River of the Arms of God."  I hope she is feeling those arms around her.

Events are blurry to me now.  Pastor Travis Burleson came by to offer prayer last July 17th.  Nancy Ratliff came with dinner and sat up talking to me until Everly told us to go to bed.   Lydia stayed up to sit with Everly.  In the morning, Everly had labored breathing, and it was not long until she breathed her last.  You will surely understand that our hearts were broken last July 18.

The pain can still be very intense.  Please don't expect us to be "over" this loss.  How can you be over the force of nature that was Everly?  Yet, we also are not in the same grieving place that we were a year ago.  We've had to make some decisions about living the lives Everly expects us to live.  David is moving to Ann Arbor to work and be with his partner, Michael.  Naomi is getting ready to start graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill, studying social work.  Lydia is putting on the final press toward graduating with an engineering degree from Baylor.  I'm trying to buy a house and relocate back to North Carolina where my work is.  I would not claim to speak for each of them, but I suspect they like me struggled with knowing how to make such important life decisions without being able to talk it through with Everly.

So we are not and won't be over Everly's dying.  It will be with us and in us.  But we also realize, as Everly sought to instill in us during her last days, that we are not to abide in a place of death.  We have to be about life.  The people who sell plaques about people's names associate Everly's name with the great-great-grandmother of all of us, according to the Jewish creation story, Eve.  And they say that name means "Life; to live; to breathe; enlivening."  Everly enlivened us.  She expects us to live.  She sent us forward, even without her, to breathe, to live, and to give life to others.

Now at 3 am I am listening to blues singer Lizz Wright sing The Youngbloods "Get Together."

You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both--
It's there at your command.

Come on, people now,
Smile on your brother.
Everybody get together--
Try to love one another right now.

It's a choice we have to make, made more real by the grief.  Sinking into the pain and fear of grief is tempting, but not the path that we and Everly have traveled down and lived for.  "Anyone knows that Love is the only road." (It's okay to feel afraid.  Don't let that stand in your way.) 

It's the week of Peace Camp, the nickname for the annual gathering of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America.  Our family went to Peace Camp for countless summers.  Everly made important life decisions based on her experiences and conversations at these gatherings.  She loved being with the folks who she got to see only at this time of year.  Sometimes she felt it was her only church all year.  It was during their gathering, which of course we could not attend last summer, that Everly died. 

We and many others gave donations in Everly's honor to support students who need help to attend the BPFNA gathering.  We got a wonderful thank you note from one of Everly's Peace Camp buddies, Alice Adams, letting us know that those funds had helped four Burmese students from Louisville, KY, be able to travel to Peace Camp in Canada this week.  She would be very pleased to have a part in that.

Darrell Adams, a kindred soul, has often sung at Peace Camp, and we have his CDs and have listened often.  One song he has recorded that we love is a traditional hymn whose author is unknown, "How Can I Keep from Singing?".  It says one thing that I want to say on this sacred day of remembrance.

My life flows on in endless song
Above earth's lamentation.
I hear the real, though far off hymn
That hails the new creation.

Above the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul--
How can I keep from singing?

I also want to remember Everly's motto for her season of struggle against cancer:  Don't Postpone Joy!

I think it's time to get some sleep.