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."

On Jordan's Stormy Banks--Reposting

I have been looking at the CaringBridge site recently again because of an injury to a little girl whose parents I know and admire.  She was struck by a car and severely injured, but she continues to make progress.  As is usually the case on CaringBridge, we don't know how things will turn out or how quickly they will change.  The long journal of my colleague and friend Dwight Peterson reminds us that we do a poor job of predicting how a person's life will endure.  The chance to keep up with one another and share presence keeps people coming back and praying for one another.  I know my love and hope for Amelia is growing with each story and picture that appears.

     While in CaringBridge, I looked back at the website I set up for Everly when she was ill.  I continued to write there well into 2015, almost two years after she died.  I took a moment to read the last journal entry, written in reflection on both her death and her father's death.  With the attention I've been giving to thinking about the presence of death in our lives, it seemed to me that this entry spoke into the struggle of living and dying, displayed in many ways around us and in the lectionary texts of the last weeks of Lent.  Therefore, I'm reposting for any who might wish to continue on that road of reflection with me.

Jordan's Stormy Banks

Journal entry by Mikael Broadway — 3/16/2015

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 intial 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, that Nouwen described, 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 had 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.

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.

An Outpouring of Thanks for My Last Post: Here's What I Think It Means

When I posted last Friday about dealing with my emotional/intellectual/spiritual/material struggles with professorial and professional work, I kept hearing in the back of my head some advice about preaching and teaching I received long ago.  I believe it is good advice, which is why I keep it close in mind.  I was warned not to let my sermons and teaching presentations get too focused around my own experiences.  First, it betrays a kind of egocentrism (even egotism) that seems to think of oneself as the prime example of whatever topic is at hand.  Second, it presumptuously asserts that one's own experiences are the same as those who are hearing what one says.  I do agree that these are dangers and temptations.

Yet there is another side of this question about whether to use one's own experiences in teaching and preaching.  That side is the one that recognizes preaching and teaching is in part about building a relationship of teaching-learning between the teacher and the people in the classroom or other setting.  That relationship itself becomes a powerful part of a teaching-learning process.

In the past few days, some of the most encouraging words of appreciation I received were from fellow academics, people who find themselves in a similar functional role as I do.  Although I did not get too heavily into details of my own struggle, I tried to reveal enough to make some sense of it to readers.  Apparently it did make some sense, and there have been a wide range of responses.

Through the past two years, one of the most common responses to my writing about Everly, cancer, struggle, death, loss, and faith, have been those from people who told how my writing honestly about the struggle helped them to think about and deal with struggles in their own lives.  Over and over people have encouraged me to keep on writing, as many of you did this past weekend.

One colleague who wrote some beautiful encouragement to me sparked me to think about how dealing with this struggle has affected my teaching.  So I'm going to post here a response I sent to him about what I think it means that students are finding blessing in my current teaching.  Again, for all who teach and preach, I hope this will give some insight into why a certain kind of telling one's own story and reflecting on one's own faith can make a great difference in teaching and learning.

Thanks.  It has emerged through these two years since Everly's diagnosis in April of 2012 that my lived theological reflection is among the most important parts of my teaching.  As you indicated during your presentation last week, a personal story is powerful for impact and memory.  Add to that my sometimes raw emotions, and the students find this part of my reflection to serve their learning in many ways. 

At perhaps the first level, my up-to-date reflections as I "go through" are an example of how theology operates in a lived context with real questions people are asking.  So I will keep writing and bringing my reflections to the classroom as I make this pilgrimage that will not end until I end.

At another level, my reflections become a mirror to them.  While they are not going through the same thing (although sometimes it is very close with a terminally ill spouse or other family member), they are finding analogies to my story in their story.  Sometimes this has led to powerful testimony or confession on the part of a student in class who becomes willing to let her or his struggle become part of our conversation.  I have to say that they get a bit less "respect" from their peers, in that classmates feel more permission to comment on one another didactically than they do to comment in that way on my stories.  But that gives me a chance to talk about how we listen and do not rush to offer easy answers. 

Maybe it's a third level at which they find themselves in a new relation with me, walking along as a fellow struggler.  There is no small amount of recurring reference to Claypool's sermons in my ongoing reflections, as you may have noted in my refrain about walking one step at a time.  I don't doubt that this third element is significant in my being asked to preach by one of our students for the first time in fourteen years of teaching at the seminary.  Over the years, there have always been a small cadre of students who saw in me a colleague or mentor, someone whose overall faith and walk they might hope to emulate.  But they have been few, and it has much to do with my personality and background.  That seems to have changed as I have changed during this crisis.  Many more see in me an example of faith from whom they would hope to learn, not just a guy who knows about so many things and so many words and so many people. 

So I will, as best I can, try to let this season reshape me as a teacher.  It's strange that some of my most effective classroom teaching may be going on when I am by habits and performance so far from what I ought to be as a professor.  Bringing some of those good habits back into my daily life can perhaps give me a decade or so of teaching that will be the best of my career.