Kaddish

I have been learning about the Jewish prayer of mourner’s kaddish. This prayer is said by those who have lost a loved one and must be said in the presence of a minyan, or quorum of ten people. It is said daily anywhere from thirty days to eleven months. The theme of the text is the exaltation and eternal nature of God. Here is a translated excerpt:

May His great Name be blessed forever and to all eternity. Blessed and praised, glorified, exalted and extolled, honored, adored and lauded be the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He; and say, Amen.

Beyond all the blessings, hymns, praises and consolations that are uttered in the world; and say, Amen.

There are so many things I can learn from this about grieving. First, it is a healing ritual to repeat prayers in the presence of others. While so much of grief takes place privately, in tears cried in the dark night, the presence of others who care for the mourner is a way to honor and give voice to that grief, to reassure the person that not only are they not crazy for feeling it, but there are others who are willing to stand beside them and listen. The length of time given to these prayers also says that grief is not rushed, cannot be swept away as quickly as our western tradition seems to desire. There is length and space and community to give the mourner what The Message version of the psalms calls “wide open spaces for healing.”

Finally, the mourner’s kaddish focuses on exalting God. Beyond any consolation uttered in the world, beyond the searing pain of suffering and the impossibility of knowing how to go on, there is a God whose name and whose love goes on forever, who is to be praised and adored forever and all eternity. And say, Amen. Amen.

Breathing Holes

Walking in our neighborhood park, I see again the signs of spring: there are plugs of dirt all over, aftereffects of aerating the soil. You have to loosen the dirt, to poke holes through the layers of thatch in order to keep the grass healthy and growing. Soil that is not properly aerated will not absorb water because it becomes too compacted. The thick dead grass weaves together over the surface and keeps the nourishing rain from reaching the roots.

In the fabric of our life together, we can become like compacted soil. We grow rigid with the passage of too much time and too settled habits, crushing underneath like cement the path of our routine. Our work is to make space for the water of life, to cut away all that has grown shallow and dead, and get beyond the choked-off surface of things.

It’s much easier to keep things as they are, to smile and float along on the surface of relationships without daring to go deeper. And yet without a conscious choice to do something about it, our church services and our interactions never get beyond that tight, shallow surface of dead grass. It takes honesty and authenticity to cut away the pretension and get deeper to the heart of things. Without this work, we will eventually die off, with no room to receive.

The work of Pentecost is the work of God’s Spirit coming to us, like wind, fire, or the sharp metal blades of an aerator, to move away what is killing us, to help us grow and somehow in the process of change, once again to let us breathe.

Things That Don't Go Together

“… that they would seek God, perhaps grope for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.” —Acts 17:27

This past week I saw two things that didn’t seem to go together. One was a dusting of snow on our newly unfurled tree leaves. The other was a ridiculously active sloth at the zoo. Frozen spring leaves. A fast-moving sloth. Things that don’t go together. This got me thinking about other things that don’t go together, words that should never be in the same sentence like “child” and “cancer.” All of us, if we have our eyes open, will be called at some point to hold grace in one hand and pain in the other and wonder how we’re supposed to put them together.

The life of Christ perhaps best exemplified this holding of opposites, putting together things like “blessed” and “mourn,” “death” and “resurrection.” To ignore the places where these words clash together is to miss something fundamentally important about faith. And yet there are people who resolve the tension by choosing one side and ignoring the other; whose placid smiles choose grace and can’t really get their hands dirty on the pain side. The world needs more people who are willing to stand in that place of tension and be honest about pain, even the pain of holding on to faith in the midst of loss.

There are times we seek God with our minds and our rational beings and there are times when, failing everything else, we are left to grope in the dark. Times when there are no easy answers, when there are no answers at all. But we who are compelled to ask the questions stand there, hands open, looking now at grace and now at pain, and raising our hands in surrender to the one who reconciled opposites, who reconciled us, with his blood.

I'm Just Asking a Question

“Jim, what are you doing?”
“I’m asking a question.”
—Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, on meeting “God”

“God may well slay me; I may have no hope. Yet I will argue my case before God.”
—Job 13:15

I’ve heard two people recently point to something good in their lives and give God thanks for it, along the lines of “God knew I needed this.” And while I am happy for their good fortune, I wonder if they have taken time to go the next step: if God knew they needed it, what does mean when someone else, someone equally loved and valued by God, does not receive the thing that is needed? God knew you needed it. Does God not know that she needs it too?

Even though I wish it were otherwise, a large part of me still believes the lie that God’s love is equal to God’s provision for me. God loves me, therefore good things happen to me. Bad things happen and I am thrown into doubt. God has not provided. I know the key to what we are promised is God’s presence with us, not abundance or smooth sailing or anything of the sort. “In this world you will have trouble.” That is what we are told.

But I want to ask God a question. I want to know how we are supposed to believe he is with us, trust that he has not forgotten us when all the evidence points to the contrary. I want to ask God: “Where are you? Where are you for all the voices that even this night are crying out for relief from sickness, sorrow, and suffering? Where are you? And why don’t you do something?”

I’m just asking a question. I am made bold by biblical companions like Job, the Talmudic tradition of arguing with God, and even the modern-day example of Captain Kirk. What am I doing? I am asking God a question. I don’t expect an answer. Just, for a while, to burn with the words I need to ask. And to hope, as a friend reminded me with a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, that I am able to “love the questions themselves” and trust that one day I will “gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The Cross, The Grave, The Skies

Every Easter the song “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” gets me in some deep gut place and almost always causes me to cry. I’ve sung it after the deaths of people I love with triumphant expectation, I’ve sung it in the midst of sadness as a prayer for newness of life, and I’ve heard it sung by a child with enough heartache in his life to make his unabashed alleluia’s humble me into hope.

But this Easter what struck me most was the part that says “ours the cross, the grave, the skies.” We want the resurrection, the skies, the triumphal alleluia’s. But ours is also the cross and the grave. There are times for the hopeful ascension of the skies and there are times to identify with the sufferings of Christ and say, yes, there is a cross that is mine also. There are times for feeling the pain of the women who could not stay away, who needed to lay their hands on cold stone and do something to mark the place where their beloved died, times for feeling their pain and saying yes, in the grief of my heart this day, mine is also the grave.

I am praying for courage to embrace not only the alleluia’s but also the time for bearing crosses and the unflinching death of dreams. And to realize that even in those blackest of times, the disciples were not alone. They had each other as they walked to the stone and its finality; they had each other to listen and cry and hear the story as they asked for the thousandth time “Is he really gone?” They were not alone.

And I have learned that the promise of those who are with me in suffering is enough. It is enough to let me survive till that lovely “early in the morning” time and the whisper I’ve waited my whole life to hear from the one who holds it all—cross, grave, and skies—who knows my name, and says to me cutting through a thousand deaths with these words of promise:

 “Woman, why are you weeping?” 

Enchanted

“The world is enchanted.

Lean closer to see it.”
—Aaron Niequist, “Enchanted”

I have been thinking a lot about imagination, and in particular finding extraordinary moments in the ordinary things of everyday life. I want to believe that just below the surface of things there is a glory, an enchanted beauty that sparks and flames if only I have eyes to see. Sometimes in the midst of routines, doing dishes, picking up laundry, and driving through the eternal mud of an Edmonton spring, I wonder about that. But if I can’t believe in that kind of everyday beauty, how can I believe in grace, in hope, in new life, in all the things that make my faith live?

So I decided to do a little experiment. To walk not more than 10 feet from my house and see if I could, by looking closer, find something glorious in the everyday sights of my front yard. And here are the results.

Tree with Berries

Muddy Road

Pine Tree

I think the world is enchanted. And if I lean closer to see it, I find God is everywhere. Even in the winter same-ness of my own front yard.