Wondering If We're Ever Gonna Get Home Tonight...

Some days just call for listening to the blues, and my go-to blues singer is Ruthie Foster.  For those who don't know her music, here's a little bio blurb from her website.

   In the tight-knit musical community of Austin, Texas, it’s tough to get away with posturing. You either bring it, or you don’t.
   If you do, word gets around. And one day, you find yourself duetting with Bonnie Raitt, or standing onstage with the Allman Brothers at New York’s Beacon Theater and trading verses with Susan Tedeschi. You might even wind up getting nominated for a Best Blues Album Grammy — three times in a row. And those nominations would be in addition to your seven Blues Music Awards, three Austin Music Awards, the Grand Prix du Disque award from the Académie Charles-Cros in France, a Living Blues Critics’ Award for Female Blues Artist of the Year, and the title of an “inspiring American Artist” as a United States Artists 2018 Fellow.
   There’s only one Austinite with that résumé: Ruthie Foster. And with the release of her latest album, Joy Comes Back, the Recording Academy might want to put its engraver on notice. Because every note on it confirms this truth: It’s Ruthie’s time.  The small rural town of Gause, TX, had no chance of keeping the vocal powerhouse known as Ruthie Foster to itself. Described by Rolling Stone as “pure magic to watch and hear,” her vocal talent was elevated in worship services at her community church. Drawing influence from legendary acts like Mavis Staples and Aretha Franklin, Foster developed a unique sound unable to be contained within a single genre. That uniqueness echoes a common theme in Ruthie’s life and career--marching to the beat of her own drum.

Having introduced Ruthie to any novices, let me get back to thinking about some of her songs.

Lots of times, when I've got some emotions to sort out, I will turn to some of my favorite singers to search for a lyrical line and a musical phrase that will help me dig deeper into what I am feeling.  In this case, the song just kept popping into my consciousness, so I knew I would have to dig into my Ruthie Foster collection and play "When It Don't Come Easy."  It's a song written by Patty Griffin, sung and recorded by Ruthie Foster on The Truth According to Ruthie Foster.  I linked the album version, and here below is a live version that lets you see her onstage performance.  (And here is  another live version with Patty Griffin and Melissa Etheridge, including a very touching story about music and healing when going through chemotherapy.)


It seems like I'm doing a lot more driving on the highway lately.  More meetings at work mean I'm driving back and forth to Raleigh more often.  Working on building better friendships means getting out on the road to go around the Triangle or around NC to meet up with folks.  I'm also spending more time with a specific friend who, as we have gotten to know one another better, has shown me how we've been able to bring goodness into one another's lives.  Living a couple of counties apart gives me another reason for driving.

The other side of those trips is that I have to drive back home.  And it is that moment the other night when this song kept pressing itself on my mind.  "Red lights flashing down the highway...wondering if we're ever gonna get home tonight."  There is a kind of feeling that comes when I have to leave, kind of like the feeling that comes at the end of visits with my kids or my dad.  All the joy of the shared presence seems like it starts draining out, opening up a little space of emptiness, a kind of heavy emptiness. 

I don't mean to be overly dramatic, and I don't think I'm describing something unique.  It's something that many people feel when they have to leave what has been a time of blessing with loved ones.  A version of it can come after a moving time of worship, a great discussion in class that has to end, and a deep conversation with a friend over dinner.  But I felt it as I got in my car to drive home that night, and this song kept asking for my attention.  I put it off and listened to the baseball game on the drive home; then, at home I fell asleep early.  But the next morning, it was waiting for me when I woke up, so I got out the Ruthie Foster music to listen.

There's a part in the middle of the song that seems to articulate images of what is stirring my own thoughts and feelings these days.

I don't know nothing 'cept change will come.
Year after year what we do is undone.
Time gets moving from a crawl to a run.
Wondering if we're ever gonna get home...

 

You're out here walking down the highway,
And all of the signs got blown away.
Sometimes you wonder if you're
Walking in the wrong direction.

I remember being twenty years old and not knowing what the future would bring.  But it seems like the not knowing at twenty years old is pretty different from the not knowing at sixty-one years old.  As a young adult, growing up middle class, single-family/nuclear family living, white, college-educated, church-going, called to ministry--there was a script written for me that I had largely accepted and agreed to act out.  I would marry after college, go to seminary, learn about adult life and decisions, find a job, consider further graduate school, have some kids, and follow a ministry or academic career trajectory that looked like the lives of people I had been watching for many years.

The script is never quite as complete as we imagined it would be.  Your companions often have a different version of the script.  You find that there are missing pages, rewrites, conflicting plot lines, and eventually that it fragments more and more into various possible directions without providing an ending.  But at the beginning, those things are not so obvious.  Thus, an uncertain future at twenty seems way more like a clear plan than an uncertain future at sixty-one.  Now one's life may have the look of either mid-career or of the final stage of a career, but which one is not certain.  Many of my students in graduate school come in their late fifties or sixties, starting a new phase in their lives after retiring from another career.  Am I at a point like they have found themselves?  Or am I just getting my stride in the place where I am already?

 

Being this age, according to demographic trends, is far from the end of one's life, even though I've been called a senior citizen for a decade already.  My dad is eighty-nine and thriving.  That's almost three more decades of living if I keep his pace.  On the other hand, Everly and Mom didn't match the years of their husbands.  And the fact that my dad and I live so far apart during this time of his life is another one of those nagging thoughts asking whether I need to make a change.  So life is ahead, and behind, at the same time.  The signs all "got blown away" is an image that makes lots of sense to someone who has lived through at least a dozen hurricanes in his lifetime.  When things get most uncertain, it really can seem that I might be walking in the wrong direction.  "Don't know nothing 'cept change will come."

Ruthie's version of the blues can stare straight ahead into the despair, as in "Ocean of Tears," "Harder than the Fall," or "I Don't Know What to Do with My Heart."  As the bio says, she isn't confined to one genre, and she sings plenty of soul songs that share the wisdom of her community heritage, such as "Mama Said," "Heal Yourself," and "People Grinnin' in Your Face."  Her gospel formation also appears in "Up Above My Head," "Woke Up This Morning," and "Lord, Remember Me."  Actually you can't quite separate these songs into a single or discrete genre, as blues, gospel, soul, jazz, and more intermingle into a mass of healing-struggling-hoping-sad-defiant songs.

However, many of her blues songs intermingle the pain with hope, as is not uncommon in blues tradition.  Foster returns again and again to a kind of hope that has been learned over time because of friendship, family, and community.  She has known and places confidence in friends and loved ones who show virtues of faithfulness in hard times and readiness to reach out, listen, and lift up when one feels lost and alone.

"When It Don't Come Easy" is one of those kinds of blues songs.  It delves into the confusion and pain that arises in our lives.  It expresses the lostness of feeling like one has nowhere to turn, or one who is questioning whether the hard times are ever going to end: "wondering if we're ever gonna get home."  But the self-focused sense of loss gets turned around in the refrain and becomes a message of empathy.  The singer looks away from her own struggle to realize that those she loves also are wondering about getting home.  Sticking with the image of driving down a highway, the song imagines a loved one's car breaking down on some lonesome road.

But if you break down,
I'd drive out and find you.
And if you forget my love,
I'd try to remind you,

Oh, and stay by you
When it don't come easy.

This refrain stands out as the song's hook, the powerful message of connection and care that will not be broken even by the power of disappointment and uncertainty.   The song doesn't depart from the blues genre and get simplistic and goosebumpy.  It doesn't tie up all the loose ends with a closing about living happily ever after.  The final stanza is back to the beginning, driving down a dark road and wondering if home will ever be there.  It keeps things real about life's struggles and our emotional ups and downs.  But sewn into the lining of the blues is a reminder that we can get through things together if we will stand by one another, if we will show mercy to ourselves and those we love, to get through the hard times.

 

A moment of critical self-assessment requires that I not simply hear and believe these words through the normative gaze.  The refrain could easily play into the cultural formation of white men (which I know personally from my own psyche) to imagine ourselves as the heroes of every story.  Conrad framed it through imperialistic and colonialistic eyes as the "white man's burden" to uplift the lesser races (and gender) toward the fullness of humanity.  Hollywood retells the story again and again through white messianic figures who enter into complex issues of socially structured racial and gender politics to fix the problems out of their inherent goodness (and superiority).  

 

I have had to learn through marriage and parenting the hard lesson of interrupting this narrative in my own imagination, to stop trying to fix the problems of my wife or children, and to learn to listen and "stand by" them as they make their way toward using their own strengths, their own power.  I'm not the guy in every story who has a monopoly on power.  I'm not the hero of every struggle that touches the people I care for.  Caring for someone and needing to be the fixer of all problems are not the same things.  But the steady caring, the readiness to give of myself for others, the walking alongside in the struggle--those are the real things toward which the song can encourage my aspirations to be human and to be good.

Ruthie doesn't write all of the songs she sings and records, although she has written some great ones.  But she fills each of them with a soulfulness and power that doesn't leave me asking whether this is "her song" or someone else's.  Thanks, Ruthie, for trying "to remind" me that even when by myself and feeling a little empty, the music can fill up that space with memories and commitments made to "stay by" one another "when it don't come easy."

Loneliness and the Mystery of Friendship--Walking with the God of Pentecost

A year ago, I was taking a couple of days for exploring historical sites about the conflicts between the European settlers and the Dakota in Minnesota after an academic conference in St. Paul.  While in St. Paul, I had been with some long-time friends as well as some brand new acquaintances as part of our regional group of Baptist professors who take a weekend a year to hang out with our Catholic colleagues, talk about theology, Bible, history, etc., as well as worship and party together.

As I mentioned in a recent blog post, this time of year brings out more intense emotions for me because of various memories from my life spent with Everly, including the last weeks of her life.  Last year was no different.  I found myself deeply appreciative of the time spent with my old and new colleagues.  We worked on our academic topics together, and we also learned about one another's lives, whether as graduate students or teaching faculty.  A group of us were presenting a panel dealing with various baptist statements on sexuality which had been published in the past couple of years.  In the midst of getting ready for the panel, news kept breaking about Paige Patterson's history of sexist attitudes and sermons, as well as his overt attempts to repress reports of rape and sexual harassment in his role as seminary president.  The main point of mentioning all this is that we were keenly engaged with one another, talking about matters of significance for the church, the academy, and the lives of our students and ourselves.

As I drove up the Minnesota highways, I found myself thinking back on time with various people during the weekend.  I had been deeply moved and surprised by a new friendship that sprung up at the meeting.  I marveled at the thoughtfulness and attention shown to me by people with whom I had not previously grown a history of exchanged kindnesses.  I found myself overwhelmed by the grace of unexpected friendships during our days together.

The other side of that warmth and gratitude as I drove alone was the realization that we had all gone our separate ways, and it would be unlikely that many, if any, of those people and I would spend time together until the next May rolled around.  So there was a weight of sadness as well.  I found myself pressing deeply into my experiences of friendship, my capacity to make friends and sustain friendships.  One of the side effects of being a student through so many degree programs is that I have developed very deep and close friendships while working with fellow students toward a degree, only to fulfill those academic years by having all of us relocate and leave one another behind.  I find that I can hold on to friendships with long breaks between contacts, but that I am not so good at keeping them steadily growing by communicating regularly while living far apart.

This inconsistent communication is a flaw in my practice of friendship.  I am too easily affected by the habits of "out of sight, out of mind."  But I think there is another key factor in how I maintain friendships that has also affected this lack of communication with people who are in remote places.  While I have often had a circle of friends with whom to enjoy talking and hanging out, I am most likely to have one or two very close friends at a time, not five or ten or twenty.  That leaves me most likely to be in a close relationship with friends who are close by, to whom I have face-to-face access, and whose lives are present and connected enough to my own that we are able to maintain a deep awareness of what is happening with each other.

For over thirty-five years, from our late teens until her death, Everly was the primary friend to whom I turned and with whom I shared my life.  Depending on where we lived at the time, there would always be one, or maybe two, other close friends.  I am an introverting type of person who can find a great deal of satisfaction entertaining my own thoughts.  It is part of what helps me be a good researcher, to gain mastery of subjects, write about them, and recall extensively from stores of knowledge to use in teaching.  Hours of focused study, thinking, or writing are not nearly as taxing of my energy and vitality as an hour or so spent in a large social gathering, especially if it involves trying to converse with people whom I have not previously met and who share little in common with my areas of expertise and knowledge.  When mingling in a crowd, telling someone that I am a theologian or an ethicist is a pretty sure-fire conversation ender.  Struggling to find common ground for conversation can quickly wear me out.

By the way, Everly was pretty much the opposite.  She gained energy from social occasions.  She was likely to find her way into being the life of the party.  She maintained many more close friendships than I seem capable of doing.  I admire all these things about her, and marvel at how her way of moving in the world was so different from mine.  I often miss one of her greatest talents.  Everly could "read" the crowd.  Now while I may be able to get a sense of a room full of people's mood or bias, she could also quickly discern the demeanor and body language of most everyone present.  Most of these signals and signs go over my head or bounce off my forehead.  I often miss the tone and tenor of what is going on between people in social gatherings, including how people are reacting to me.

Because I was driving alone, I turned on some music.  I often do some of my important thinking through the poetic insights of songwriters.  On this day, I was listening to Carrie Newcomer and the Indigo Girls, both of whom have helped me think through issues over the years.  I took note of a particular song (with a strange title) by Newcomer that day, "Cedar Rapids 10 AM."  The song's refrain is an invitation to continue in friendship.  The singer is needing some time to think, and has determined to do so by hiking up to a promontory to rest, look at the sky, and mull over what is on her mind.  She wants her friend to come join her.

Will you come with me to the ridge top?
Lay all your burdens bare, right there.

It's an invitation to honesty and struggling to get through to the truth of things.  The lyrics continue to speak of the value of deep conversations between friends.

Take away all the white noise;
It getting hard to hear.
Souls stretched as thin as tissue paper
Edged with cuts and tears....

You've always been a cup of coffee;
You've always been the cream.
You've always believed that I was better
Than I could ever dream....

So much for all the chips we've earned.
So much for all the things we've learned.
So far it is still you and me.

Dealing with the erosion of a life by the daily disrespect, frustration, and longing for something more--all that can wear someone down.  That image of being stretched, with cut and torn places scattered across a tissue-thin surface, is something I can identify with.  It's a picture of wearing away one's substance until it seems little is left, and even that remnant could dissolve so easily, with just a shred of dignity and energy left.  In some moments, even one's length of experience makes little difference for understanding, like round after round of poker, gaining chips whose exchange value  you don't care about, or knowledge that makes no difference in the current situation.  Sometimes, it is only the presence of a faithful friend that can hold one together.

Last May, having seen a a valued time with friends come to an end, and sulking a bit over the state of my own life, I was feeling that, unlike the song's character, I didn't have anyone available to hike up to the ridge top and work through whatever could be on our minds.  I was having a bout of self-pity, and I knew it.  But knowing that didn't make me feel any better about my situation.  For almost five years, I had not had Everly, my "go-to" friend.  And having returned to live in Durham, I kept seeing other close friends move away, making it harder to keep that kind of presence I need when things get hard.

I started to realize that one issue for me was that in having had Everly faithfully available as my friend for such a long part of my life, I had come to take the availability of friendship for granted.  It's not that keeping a marriage friendship functioning well isn't it's own kind of hard work.  But having grown into mostly good habits of relating with one another, I hadn't needed to put out much effort to cultivate other friendships.  With Everly gone, and later some of the other friends no longer nearby, I had come upon a new challenge to make my life work well.  The kind of friendships I needed were not just going to walk up to me day after day.  I was going to have to figure out how to work at being a better friend so that I could have friends.

I realized at that point that there were a number of people in Durham who had already been generous in their friendship toward me.  There were friends whom we had known since arriving in North Carolina in 1986, with whom our family had been through many important events in our lives.  They had not pulled back from their hospitality and availability to me.  I simply had not been taking the opportunity to spend time with them and to make sure I was a friend to them as well.  Another small group of friends who had invited me on several occasions to join them for conversations, dinner, or an outing, had not put up any barriers to my seeing them more often than I have been.  As I stated above, I was becoming aware that there were people ready to be good friends with me if I would put in more effort rather than simply waiting around to see what would happen spontaneously.  And in the year since that time, these good people and I have shared our lives and hearts in what is a pleasant relief from the pattern I had fallen into.  It's what your momma or grandma always told you--don't take good things for granted.  That was one of the insights that was dawning on me last May.

But there was another very important thing I was realizing about friendship on those highways. During my drive across the prairies of Minnesota, I spent some time reflecting on the mystery of becoming friends.  It is commonplace in contemporary popular wisdom to assume that friendship is chosen.  "You can pick your friends."  I'm not saying it's a completely empty aphorism.  When a person has "run with the wrong crowd," there may be the possibility of walking away from that set of friends, but it may not be easy in all cases.  People often try to pick their friends by picking a neighborhood to live in, a school to attend, or a club to join.  These decisions do have some impact, but whether the type of friendship that allows a person to find support, honest communication, and love will come about is not so easy to plan.

There is a mystery to friendship that can't be explained by choosing who will and won't be our friends.  The Indigo Girls song, "Mystery," reflects on this hard to explain part of becoming close to another person.  It puzzles over whether friendship happens by fate or choice.  It asks whether the unplanned and unexpected coming and going of a friendship means that it never was real.  It's likely many readers have wondered about the same kinds of questions.  The person one is sure will become his best friend is just a passing acquaintance.  The person she hardly even noticed grew to be the truest friend.  Two people who might seem to be different, even opposite, in so many ways find themselves becoming friends: "My heart the red sun. / Your heart the moon clouded."

It's common in the popular theology of the kinds of churches that I have always been part of to think of our associations, friendships, and loves to be arranged by God's plan.  I've written about my understanding of the will of God in at least four previous posts, but it seems to me that such a commonly discussed topic deserves attention again and again.  I'm not inclined to think of God as a master chess player, moving all of us pieces around a board to meet some grand plan.  I did not say that I do not believe God has plans for us, which I know to be that we ought to become more like the image of divine love revealed in Jesus Christ, living in community with those who gathered to him and found bounty and healing even without a permanent home and a truckload of possessions. 

God's will for me and for you is beloved community, and we are the agents to share in the plan and the construction of a world that bears marks of God's Reign.  Our efforts are partial, local, frail and temporary, yet they are real products of the goodness, beauty, and love in which God has made us to live.  Nor do I think of God as a scriptwriter and puppeteer.  There is not a single predetermined path for all of history.  God works in history with infinite creativity, capacity to repair and heal, and patience with the failures, shortcomings, and outright evil projects that humans get caught up in.  The calling is persistent and repeated whenever we can hear it, to turn our efforts toward the good of one another, and in loving and just ways to remake the communities in which we live.  God is in the midst of the living and unfolding story.

In either image, whether the chess master or scriptwriter, God is more remote from us than the God revealed in Jesus Christ and coming in the power of Spirit on Pentecost.  In Jesus, the Word became flesh and moved in the neighborhood.  Jesus associated with everyday people, not the boardrooms and ruling halls of the elite.  He couch surfed his way around Galilee and Judea, walked confidently through the "bad neighborhoods" of Samaria, fell in with the rough crowd and got run out of Gadara, and he built a movement of the masses that made him dangerous in the eyes of the rulers.  The Spirit came to the people and gifted them to share good news in the language of all who were present on Pentecost.  There was not a booming voice from the clouds, but the many voices in many languages of people who had learned who God is by following Jesus.

I am inclined to think of God's working out God's will in ways that accord with these manifestations of God's presence.  Rather than moving a chess piece near me to become my friend, or moving me around to make a certain person be my friend, I am inclined to think of God as a caring companion, present with us, not scripting or manipulating us as a puppets.  As we live our lives, people come our way, or we come upon people in our pilgrim journey.  We will not become fast friends with everyone we meet.  But as our companion, our guide, the one who is shaping us to be more what we are made to be, God will be at work to help us discern and appreciate the allies, friends, and beloved companions who can be part of the beauty that God intends our lives to be.  It may sometimes seem like choosing, and other times an unexpected mystery.

Thomas Aquinas echoes the words of Jesus from the gospel of John chapter 15 when he says we can grow to be friends of God (Summa Theologia, Second Part of Second Part, Question 23). With God as a friend, an ever-present companion, our prayer without ceasing opens our hearts and minds to hear the gentle prodding of God. Maybe at times it is not a gentle prodding, but a strong push to move, a wake up call to see what is right in front of us, or opening our ears to hear the cry that requires our response.  In this way, God leads us into opportunities for friendship, by being the one who cares enough to get us going in the right direction, to speak up to greet someone, and to above all to listen to people.

If I think about some of my own experiences (and I'm not going to give a long inventory), there is much that is unexpected and unchosen in the process of our becoming friends.  One very close friend was a graduate school colleague of mine, but everything about our demography other than being theology graduate students worked against our becoming close friends.  However, when we each had a three-year-old daughter taking a Saturday morning dance class, dads with coffee and time on their hands struck up a friendship and found they were able to talk honestly about the most difficult things they were dealing with at work, home, and church.  An unanticipated intersection of daddy responsibilities created the groundwork for a long-lasting friendship. 

In another case, an acquaintance came to offer prayer for me one Sunday during worship, and the conversation that followed led to recognizing a deep commonality in our longing to deepen our loving relationships with our children.  If an observer judged by our different ages and background, one probably would not lay odds on a budding friendship coming from what could have been merely the formalities of performing a religious duty.  If this post were a study of all my friendships, I could easily describe other cases that could be even more unexpected friendships.

Friendship isn't strictly a choice.  It emerges out of contingent occurrences.  It comes as a gift more than as a choice.  Friendships grow as a kind of grace.  That was another lesson I was beginning to learn last May.  I can't predict where friendship may arise and grow.  Half a year earlier had met an academic colleague from another school almost by chance as we were participating in the same conference.  It was a break in the programming, so we sat down and became acquainted, learning a few things of interest about one another.  I enjoyed the conversation, but I didn't expect much to come of it. 

By May, we had met several more times.  I was surprised that someone would make that much effort to get to know me, not being in the same town, the same academic discipline, or having very similar networks or background.  By then it was already clear to me that grace was at work to allow our friendship to blossom.  As I indicated in the first part of this post, I was struggling both with needing  a friend, and with needing to be a better friend.  And here without any plan or effort on my part, a friend had walked into my life.  It's reasonable to say that I was puzzling over the same kinds of questions Emily Saliers was in the lyrics of "Mystery."

Why do you spend this time with me?
May be an equal mystery....

Psychologists and other social scientists, philosophers and theologians--we all can bring some general insights into understanding friendships:  characteristics of good friendships, the likelihood of friendships to last, the needs friendships bring, the goods friendships help to produce, the virtues that support friendship and vices that undermine it, examples of good and bad friendships.  When all is said and done, a great deal comes down to the simple acceptance of who shows up in one's life, the contingent events that get our attention, the opportunities we take to show concern for someone, the willingness to be honest and vulnerable, and the interconnection that grows from having a history with one another that has made us better people. 

I think people can reasonably put in the effort, even choose, to become the kinds of persons ready to be friends with others.  Yet there is a remainder in the narrative of friendship that is housed in mystery. Perhaps you met at that time that your soul was "stretched as thin as tissue paper," with so many cuts and torn places you did not know how you could make it much farther without someone to share the burdens.  It could be that sitting to share a cup of coffee, maybe adding some cream to soften the bitterness, led to that mysterious realization that your friend can see good and power in you that you have not been able to find--"You've always believed that I was better than I could ever dream."

I'll close out this far too verbose post with perhaps the most powerful lines of the Indigo Girls' song that say a great deal to me about entering the grace and gift of friendship when loneliness seems to be the only possibility.

Maybe that's all that we need--
Is to meet in the middle of impossibility.
We're standing at opposite poles,
Equal partners in a mystery.

Mom's Death and What Is Lost with Her

I've written a few things about Mom over the past three months--mostly short comments on facebook.   For those of you who remember my outpouring of pain and suffering in dealing with the death of Everly, you might notice a difference in my grieving this time.  Some of you remember that the family has endured a series of losses, beginning with the long illnesses of Herbie (Everly's dad) and Everly, Everly's death in July 2013, Herbie's death in May 2014, Aunt Dot's death in June 2015, and Hugh Delle's death on February 15 this year.  Each death, each relationship, has it's own weight on our family members' capacity to cope.

I was not surprised by the incapacitating grief that overcame me when Everly died.  I was a little surprised by the different kind of grieving I've had since my mother died.  People's experiences of loss don't come in a standardized schedule.  As a child and a very young man, my grandparents' deaths happened at the stage of life in which it was not unexpected.  Through the sadness of losing them I somehow made sense of their deaths.  But there was a turning point in my psyche with Everly's death, a different understanding of what a human life is and what anyone can expect from living in the world.  Dealing with loss moved from the margins to the center.

I go to this effort to write and post about grief, as I have said before, because many of you have told me that you appreciate thinking through these things with me.  Some of you say it helps you grapple with the confusion of grief and loss in your own lives.  So what follows is some storytelling about the past few years with Mom, with particular attention to her declining health.  More than any other reason, I write about this to help myself gain insight into how to live through loss and grief as a follower of Jesus.

Hugh Delle and I were privileged in the past few years to be together more than we had been since I left home for college.  Everly and I moved in to W. D.'s and Hugh Delle's home in 2010 to share life on a daily basis.  During that time, we developed everyday household routines as well as working through big decisions and life changes.  It was planned to be a short stay while Everly and I worked out housing, but it dragged out longer because the real estate market made it hard to sell our house in Durham.  By the time that finally happened, we were seven months into cancer treatments, and buying a house did not seem like a wise next step.  Mom and Dad welcomed us to stay, and we continued in our habits of living in one house that branched off into two wings, each with our private retreats when needed.  The common space for meals and conversations was a blessing to us all.  After Everly's death, I continued living with Mom and Dad for another year while I sought the direction for the next steps of my life.

Going through so much together built a mature kind of intimacy of mother-son relationship.  Growing closer, we knew much more about one another's lives than before.  Closeness brings blessings and warmth.  It also can give opportunity for disagreement or conflict.  We had our share of both, but I guess even the disagreements and conflict are a kind of blessing.

While Everly was so sick, Hugh Delle played down her own health issues, always claiming that "everything is fine."  Yet it was not fine, and long hospital stays, times of being near death, and the ever-present yet hidden matter of her chronic heart failure made it impossible for the rest of us to ignore her tenuous condition.  One of the pitfalls of living with one's parents is that too often adult child and aging parent revert to patterns of relationship that hark back to the child's adolescence.  In my own way, I sometimes reacted resentfully or critically toward Mom, especially about her health.  It frustrated me that she could not openly accept that her shortness of breath represented an underlying health issue to confront directly.  I could confess a whole range of my shortcomings of kindness in communicating with her, but let it suffice to say that our closeness included both harmonious times and painful times.  I suspect that is true for many of us.

After I moved back to Durham in August 2014, our time together was drastically cut back.  I had hoped to be able to continue a cycle of long stays in Texas with Mom and Dad, but as my faculty responsibilities returned to normal and my community involvement increased, I found it harder than I had expected to get away for more than a couple of weeks at a time.  Consequently, each visit met me with evidence of advancing health issues and change, and not much time to try to deal with the newness.  Mom became less able to do the things she wanted to do.  We would discuss options for making things better, and we added some support and help. 

For the most part, she continued to treat symptoms as passing acute illness rather than declining abilities.  In retrospect, I can't be sure whether her approach of proceeding as if things are fine while continuing to seek medical answers led to any different results than if she had done as I imagined her doing and aggressively pursued solutions to her heart failure.  As her heart grew progressively weaker, it may not have mattered whether she had been more aggressively attentive to that problem.  So probably part of the disagreement we had was about how to handle the grief of her decline. 

She preferred not to accept the idea that she was in rapid decline and hope that things would reverse and improve.  That's not such a bad approach, in that she could without much effort keep herself in a fairly happy condition at least part of each day.  Maybe she saw my perspective of admitting the progress of the chronic condition and dealing with it "head on" as a form of giving up hope.  I can't begrudge her her own way of facing challenges, of dealing with the grief of her declining health.

One result of her way of facing down the struggle was that most of us did not see the rapid decline she was in for the last eight months.  Only W. D. and Lydia were very aware of it.  After graduating form Baylor, Lydia had moved in the room where Everly and I had lived.  She was job hunting, and interviews were slow to get started.  She was glad to be able to offer some care for her grandparents, and she became increasingly concerned for the advancing pain and weakness Hugh Delle was displaying.  Remotely, the rest of us did not get the full impact of the night and day pain and struggle she was having.  Hugh Delle could usually muster up her happy and hopeful self for a phone call.  Sometimes she let us in on the harder parts of her life.

When the doctors began to tell Mom, at the beginning of 2016, that her heart condition was so far advanced that she should not expect it to improve, the seriousness of the condition became clear to all of us.  Jerene made the first trip down to see her.  At the end of a hospital stay for tests and decisions about next steps, it became clear that all the interventions that the doctors had considered were too risky for Hugh Delle's weakened condition.  They thought she probably had a limited time for her heart to continue working.  Already heart monitors revealed that her heart had brought her near death, and sometime in the next few weeks or months it would finally give out.

As we made the decision to bring her home and begin hospice care, I was able to go and stay for a while, with the cooperation of my employer and students.  I went back to teaching my North Carolina classes from Texas for an indefinite time.  Mom was glad to have her two kids home, and we helped organize her medications and treatments with the expectation that she and Dad would continue the routines with assistance from the hospice team and their fellow church members.  Almost as soon as we would make decisions and get the house in order, Mom's situation would change.  Spending many hours sleeping, she would sometimes become alert and join us for meals, only to get fatigued and go back to sleeping soon after.  Every few days, the obvious changes made clear to us that she was growing weaker and losing ground.

Eventually, she became confined to bed.  She did not have the strength or muscle control to help us get her up and move her around.  She stopped wanting to eat.  She was less and less able to communicate.  Her niece and nephew, Pat and Tim, both came to stay and help care for her.  All of my children made their way to Texas to be with their MeeMaw.  They sang to her, sat with her, talked with her, did everything they could, as she held on for her last days.  She lived to see her 86th birthday.  She was no longer very communicative, and she was not really eating.  The best we could do was touch her mouth with a little bit of cake and icing.  We read the scriptures, sang to her, and prayed with her.  On her last Sunday, we shared communion around her bed and offered prayers.  The next day, she died, surrounded by us.

I was very worried about Dad and Jerene.  I knew how I had fallen apart with Everly's death, and I felt some kind of responsibility to try to hold them up in the immediate crisis of Mom's death.  So I was feeling the emotions of losing Mom very differently than I had expected.  Grief is a strange thing.  It is not well scripted, although liturgical and poetic scripting can be a great help in uncovering thoughts and feelings that are hiding just below the level of consciousness.  The funeral service, planned by Hugh Delle, was filled with beautiful tributes and familiar songs.  Mom was beloved, and many people came from near and far to honor her life.  That day was an emotional day for me, and the structured events served me well in drawing out my pain and ministering to me.

On Easter weekend, March 27, I was surprised by grief.  If you go through our family's photo collection, you would find that year after year, there are family pictures taken at church on Easter Sunday.  For many years, David, Naomi, and Lydia are wearing outfits sent to them by Hugh Delle.  Easters were family days.  Even if we could not regularly spend them with Hugh Delle and W. D., there was a kind of presence of the whole family.  As I walked into church on Easter Sunday I felt overwhelmed by the loss of my mother and my children's loss of their mother.  It was a very tearful weekend for me.

I was feeling a new kind of loss for the first time on that day.  It has recurred on most Sundays since that day.  I was trying to explain it this week to Ruth, Everly's sister, and to a friend and fellow minister.  The experience of no longer having my mother living in this world with me seems to have opened up a space of loneliness that I did not know before.  For a long time, when I went to church or to a restaurant or some other place familiar to me because of being there with Everly in the past, it was as if Everly's palpable absence was my companion.  Her absence somehow took on a kind of presence through memory and familiarity of her having been there so many times by my side. 

Yes, that is a form of loneliness, but in recent weeks the loneliness has changed.  I found myself in the foyer of the church wondering whether I would have anyone to sit by.  Now inside, of course, were pews full of people.  I know most of them and would, as an act of fellowship or ministry, gladly sit on any pew with any person.  There is a kind of joy and purposeful satisfaction in doing that.  But it was not that kind of question my mind was pressing on me.  The question came from a lack, an empty place, a need.  I was feeling the need to sit with someone to whom I am already beloved, someone whose presence already speaks to me of their care for me.  My first thought was to look and see if Willie and Joanne Jennings were at the service.  Because they were out of town  that day, I found myself looked around for others. 

The point is that with Mom's death, I am finding myself again in a new place in the world.  Even living far away from her for most of my adult life, there lurked in my consciousness her presence to me at all times.  The one who had nurtured me, believed in me, prayed for me, and done all that she could to seek the best for me is no longer in the land of the living.  Where does that leave me?  Without Mom, I am alone in a new way in the world.  She had borne on her tired shoulders all of the burden of Everly's struggle with cancer and our family's grief at her loss.  And now she who held us up is also gone, leaving me alone in a new way.  Of course I am not absolutely alone.  I have my family and friends.  My church and coworkers look out for me.  God has never deserted me.  Even so, God's presence mediated through my mother's love has been muted by her absence.  I will need to recognize new habits and different relationships in which God's love will be manifest in my life.  It took some time for that to soak in, and I'm just now figuring out how to describe it.

Another Look at Elijah

I was listening to a Rich Mullins song this morning.

The Jordan is waiting for me to cross through.
My heart is aging I can tell.
So Lord, I'm begging for one last favor from You:
Here's my heart--take it where You will.

This life has shown me how we're mended and how we're torn;
How it's okay to be lonely as long as you're free.
Sometimes my ground was stoney,
And sometimes covered up with thorns.
And only You could make it what it had to be.
And now that it's done,
Well, if they dressed me like a pauper,
Or if they dined me like a prince,
If they lay me with my fathers,
Or if my ashes scatter on the wind,
I don't care.

But when I leave I want to go out like Elijah
With a whirlwind to fuel my chariot of fire.
And when I look back on the stars
It'll be like a candlelight in Central Park.
And it won't break my heart to say goodbye.

There's people been friendly, but they'd never be your friends.
Sometimes this has bent me to the ground.
Now that this is all ending,
I want to hear some music once again
'Cause it's the finest thing that I have ever found.

But the Jordan is waiting,
Though I ain't never seen the other side.
Still they say you can't take in the things you have here.
So on the road to salvation,
I stick out my thumb, and He gives me a ride.
And His music is already falling on my ears...

It is an insightful reflection on the uncommon life of the prophet.  It suggests the roller coaster of emotional and mental states the itinerant messenger of judgment must have faced.  Of course, Mullins intermingles his own life with Elijah's, bringing them together in the refrain by saying he wouldn't mind going out like Elijah.


At the heart of the lyrics (the quote above is only partial--for more click here) is the weariness Elijah must have felt after so many difficult years spent in isolation, under threat, and bearing the heavy weight of a message it seemed no one wanted to hear.  He felt like a pariah, and he wondered whether he had a friend anywhere.


But Mullins also captures what must have been a deep assurance in Elijah's being.  "Only You could make it what it had to be."  That abiding hope in God would allow Elijah or Mullins to ask one last favor:  take my heart, and take me where you will take me.  It is the basis on which he can say that his hope for salvation means risking it all on God:  "I stick out my thumb, and He gives me a ride."


Having turned the screws on Elijah recently by employing the hermeneutics of suspicion, let me come back to him with a sympathetic reading by means of Mullins's theological imagination.  Elijah bore the burden of unwanted leadership in one of the most difficult episodes of the history of Israel.  It is understandable that he resented how he was treated and that he wondered why he got stuck with this gig.  

Whatever else one might say about him, he stuck with it and pushed back the darkness to let in the light.  He set a standard of boldness (even though he sometimes ran away) that nourished the subsequent prophetic tradition to stand against the crowd.  So with Little Brother Rich, I think I can feel the old prophet.  Going out on a chariot of fire, looking back on a world that treated him bad--that's a pretty fine poetic ending.