Being Responsible- A Story of Two Men
The daily paper on Christmas Eve carried this story:
“Richard F. Morrow, 69, died when he was struck by a car in the village of Canton at 10:49 p.m. Mr. Morrow was pronounced dead at the scene. … Daniel W. Lester, 28, was driving northbound when he allegedly struck Mr. Morrow and fled, according to police. Police charged Mr. Lester with second-degree vehicular manslaughter, second-degree vehicular assault, leaving the scene of a fatal motor vehicle accident, driving while ability impaired by drugs, driving while intoxicated with prior convictions and aggravated unlicensed operation, all felonies.”
Who was Dick Morrow? He was a kind and gentle man, quiet but responsible. When he didn’t show up at his night shift as auditor at the local Best Western Hotel, the manager knew something was wrong. Dick was always there. Whether it was serving on the board of the Canton Church and Community Program (a local social service agency), or as treasurer of the local UU Church, volunteering with the Red Cross, advocating for bikers’ needs with a local biking group, shoveling the front walk at church (just because it needed to be done), teaching math at a local high school, or picking up the tab at the hotel for a struggling family, Dick was responsible. When he saw a need, he was there, quietly doing what needed to be done. He was my friend; he was a friend to everyone he met, but he asked for nothing but the opportunity to help anyone who needed it.
Who was Daniel Lester? I honestly don’t know. From the report in the paper, he was not a person known for being responsible… not responsible for himself, or for the rights of others. Anger swells up from within me. How could he have been so irresponsible that he got behind the wheel of his car, drunk and impaired by drugs? How could he run another person down and not stop to render aid? How could he continue on his way before crashing into another person’s house?
Anger is not an emotion commonly felt at this time of year, but it is anger that I feel today. Responsibility is what we all owe to each other. Responsibility was what guided Dick Morrow’s decisions throughout his life. I am angry today at all those who refused to be responsible that night – the one who chose to drive impaired, the one who left another human being dying on a cold winter road, anyone who was with Daniel Lester that night and who didn’t stop him from setting out on his deadly travels. I am angry because there are families tonight who must live with the aftermath of one man’s irresponsibility. I am angry at a culture that sees alcohol and drug use as a simple right, a personal matter.
What do I do with this anger? I honestly don’t know. I must of course pledge to take responsibility for my own actions everyday, but Dick’s model of responsibility to others is also a take-away from this tragedy. Responsibility as a neighbor and citizen must certainly play a role; it is simply not enough to shrug and say, “What can one person do?” One person could have saved Dick Morrow’s life.
Nelson Mandela
The great Nelson Mandela has died. Peacefully, after a long illness, surrounded by the love of his family, his nation, the world. To lose a hero is always an enormous grief, and yet Mandela was one hero who got to see his work through. This time we got the whole inspiring story – not just a man who stood up for his people and who suffered for his rebellion, but also a man who emerged from his long years in prison with a whole heart, with his capacity for love intact. Who was able to lead his country in the path of truth and reconciliation; who was able to walk a long ways down that road toward the land of freedom and justice.
What a gift. Too often we have the stories of the martyrs, the heroes cut down in their prime who live on in our memory and our aspiration, but who never got to step into the Promised Land. Of course South Africa is not a perfected Land of Milk and Honey. This is the real world and grave problems are never simply erased. But Mandela got to see his people choose justice over revenge. He got to see his country tear down barricades, reach across chasms that seemed like they could never be crossed.
In Mandela we had the story of a great man who suffered for his cause, but this time the suffering was the middle of the story, not the end. And as much as we owe to the martyrs, to Martin Luther King Jr. and Victor Jara and Megar Evers and all the rest, we owe still more to the people who live out decade after decade of speaking truth in the spirit of love, who never stop pushing the world toward justice.
Of course, most of these people we never hear about. So today, I will remember the tremendous legacy of Nelson Mandela. But I will also remember people like Molly Piontkowski, who came to this country as a young woman and never stopped working to make it meet up with her hopes of what she would find here. Who was already in her 80s when I got to know her, and was still pushing on the city of Chicago for fair housing, for services for seniors, for shelter for abused women. Who I remember not for the saintly gentleness we expect of elderly women, but rather for her cranky determination that the world simply needed to be a better place than it was.
Molly, like Mandela, is gone now. But we still have Bill Moyers and Wendell Berry—and thousands, maybe millions of you who keep on doing the work of justice and love and truth and peace because it is there to be done. The need won’t go away. I give thanks daily for the people who won’t go away either.
Raking Leaves
People regularly say to me that they wouldn’t want to live in California, because they would miss the seasons. As a California native who has lived in a variety of other places, I understand this. Who would want to miss the seasons of Oh My God it is Really Snowing in April, or It’s So Hot and Humid I Literally Feel as if I Am Melting? But the fact that we give those lovely seasons a miss doesn’t mean that we are without seasons here by the San Francisco Bay. At the moment, for instance, it is the season of Raking Leaves.
True, the weather is dry and sunny, and we’re expecting a high of 70 degrees, but the leaves are turning yellow and drifting into heaps along the driveway. Paradise makes fewer demands on a person than harsher climes, but there are still things that need to be done. Raking leaves is one of them.
There are worse jobs. Dry leaves aren’t heavy, and the scritch, scritch sound of the rake forms its own kind of meditative chant. There are many good ways to rake leaves: setting them as mulch around your garden or piling them in the green waste bin or creating great mountains for kids or dogs to play in. You can use a wide broom if you’re of a very tidy persuasion. Just please, please, never a leaf blower. You can’t think over the sound of a leaf blower. Heck, your neighbors can’t think over the sound of your leaf blower.
And thinking is what raking leaves is for. Raking Leaves is the season to remember that even in paradise, things die, that we and everyone we love will all drift to the ground at last. That each of our lives is merely one little leaf, different but nearly indistinguishable from every other little leaf. That we belong to a tree that will remain standing long after we are gone, whose branches are visible even in the height of summer, if we would care to look, but are so much clearer in this time of stripping down. Raking leaves, one might even consider that the only way to truly connect with the deep roots of that great tree would be to fall, and become soil, and so become nourishment for the larger whole.
Raking leaves, smelling the faint, sharp odor of decay that has already begun, one might long for the rain to finally come and nourish the thirsty ground, turning the hills green once again. Or one might wish for the bright days to never end, to live always in this comfort and beauty. Either way, if you spend long enough raking leaves you will be forced to admit that you have no control, that the rain will come or not come precisely on its own schedule, without your longings having the slightest effect. That the world will give you leaves or grass or flowers or dry earth exactly as it will, and that all you can do is to show up, rake or trowel or hose in hand, and do your best to be grateful for what you are given, and to honor the giver.
Reflections on death from the garden
The echinacea, once vibrant pink, is now black.
- A friend told me that the word for aster in Hungarian means, literally, end of summer.
This time of year, as we approach Halloween, The Day of the Dead, and All Saints’ Day, I am often thinking of death. Granted, I am always a little bit morbid—my astrologer sister would say it’s because I’m a Scorpio. (I regret that I was too old to go Goth in my teen years, because I suspect I might have enjoyed that.) But right now, death is often lurking just under my mind’s surface.
My garden is one of the sources of my thoughts, and it is a place where there is plenty of room for such thoughts. This lovely, non-judgmental community of green friends, lets me think about whatever I fancy. And the garden is full of death. Every day I am pulling up or lopping off plants that have given their all—the perennials having given it for this year and likely to return, the annuals having lived their whole life in this one year. Farewell, I say to the enormous squash plant, as I pull it up and hold it by its roots. Farewell, I remember when you were just a seed!
The longer I garden, the more comfort I take in the ritual of going through the entire life cycle each year. I adore picking out seeds in the fall to plant in the spring. My grow light table in the basement has gotten bigger and bigger because having those tiny green babies means so much in March and early April, when the winter here in Minnesota has just gotten so long that I may go berserk if some tiny waft of a spring breeze doesn’t blow through, some tiny green weed doesn’t poke up under the snow. Tucking those seedlings into the May earth has all of the drama of sending my kid off to kindergarten, tucking tiny invisible notes into their invisible lunch boxes as I plant them. And then cheering for them in summer’s fullness as they grow up and begin to live out their life’s purpose—as zinnias’ shiny red petals glow in the sunlight, as basil or cilantro graces my table. And then, Minnesota fall means that all growing, all producing of food or flower, will cease for another long winter.
The more years I participate in this cycle, the more I love the dramatic resurrection stories so many of my plants tell me. Some are, simply, perennials, and I know as I cut them to the ground that they’ll bounce back in the spring, shiny green and new again. Others are busy throwing their seeds around the yard, winking at me and saying I’ll be impressed by their progeny. Other annuals are simply done, with no tales of regret to whisper in my ear as I say good-bye to them. All are amazing role models in giving it all away, in surrender, in generosity.
Some people believe that we’re perennials, that after our deaths, our souls reside eternally in one place or another. Some say we’ll be back, though perhaps in a different form. Whatever is and will be, I live my life as if I’m an annual—acting as if, if some part of me is to survive, it will be in the growth of the seeds I have sown in my lifetime.
With the help of wind, and birds, the exact location of the seeds which grow is unpredictable. Similarly, I don’t know which of the seeds I’ve sown will continue to bear their own seeds and keep growing after I’m gone. Given what I’ve seen in my life so far, my only prediction is that what of me keeps growing after I’m dead will be nothing I would ever predict.
My own mother, dead eleven years, increasingly comes back in memories that make me giggle. She wasn’t excessively funny when she was alive, but the memories of her humor are the ones that keep whispering in my ear now. Silly things she said forty years ago at dinner make me laugh out loud. This time of year she has more to say, I notice, as do other beloved ghosts. The pagans say that this is the time of year when the veil is thinnest between life and death, and in the garden, I feel that thinning all around me.
I don’t believe in a heaven in the sky, where St. Peter welcomes some and turns others away. But this time of year, in my garden, as the crows shout, squirrels scurry around, and geese fly over and honk their farewells, in the sweet grief of letting go and saying goodbye, I touch a tiny bit of heaven on earth.
A Former Member Asks the Minister for a Favor
She says her family
shuns her. She says
it has something to do
with God. She says
the cancer has gone
way too far. She says
when her brother died
the family pastor said
he went straight to hell
and “Let that be a lesson.”
She says, “Will you do
my funeral?” A light rain
falls on the lake,
circles in circles.
On “Faith”
Faith is a noun. It’s a person, place, or thing.
An online etymology site tells me it came into English in the mid-13th Century.
The word means, the site tells me, “duty of fulfilling one’s trust.”
The word comes to English from Old French: feid, foi, which meant “faith, belief, trust, confidence, pledge.”
The word came to Old French from Latin: fides, which meant “trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief.”
The word ultimately derives from from the oldest known ancestor of English, Proto-Indo European: *bheidh- which also gave us the Greek word for faith, the one that appears in Christian scripture, pistis.
The dictionary notes that the word in its theological sense dates from the late 14th Century. Meaning this: What religions today mean by faith, as in “you gotta have faith,” did not exist as a concept when the Christian scriptures were written.
I’m just sayin’ . . .
See for yourself: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=faith
Thank you, Rhoda Morgenstern!
Rhoda Morgenstern changed my life.
As a chubby, opinionated, smart and mouthy teenager in Akron Ohio in the early 1970’s, I had never seen anyone on television who remotely resembled me, anyone I might be someday, or anyone who might be my friend. Rhoda changed that.
For those who weren’t born in the1970’s, Rhoda was the best friend of Mary, the lead character in the Mary Tyler Moore show. Unlike Mary, who was willowy, strove to be perfect in all things, and was never loud, Rhoda was a mirror that reflected someone much more like me and my friends. We loved her.
Another history lesson: In the 1970’s, you either watched a TV show when it ran or you waited for reruns. Mary Tyler Moore ran on Saturday nights. While it didn’t cause any males to weep that my girlfriends and I never missed it, we did choose it consistently over movies, driving around, and the other boring activities we had previously done on Saturday nights. We would either go to one anothers’ houses to watch it or we would call each other afterwards to discuss. (#Nohashtag)
First of all, we had never experienced a show that had as one of its central plots the friendship between two single women. This just wasn’t done! Marlo Thomas had blazed her way as a single career woman, so that wasn’t new. But if she had girlfriends, I sure don’t remember them. She had Her Donald (boyfriend) before there was The Donald!
So there were Mary and Rhoda, fighting about things girls fight about, helping each other out, upstairs/downstairs neighbors in an apartment building. I knew that Mary would never have been Rhoda’s friend if they hadn’t been in such close proximity, and she would never have been my friend in high school or after. A popular girl, if a single one.
So, how did Rhoda change my life? First, by accompanying me through those last miserable, lonely years in Akron, Ohio, making me laugh and feeling like a true friend. But then, after college, a friend asked if I might want to move to Minneapolis for a while to live. I’m not saying that I literally believed Rhoda would be here—even if I were that delusional, Rhoda had spun off her own series and moved to New York—but the fact that Rhoda HAD been here made it feel more like home; less scary to move. Sure, I said. That was 1978. Though I’ve lived other places in the intervening years, Minneapolis is still my primary home.
And now, Valerie Harper, the beautiful actress who says that Rhoda was her friend, too, is dying. She’s been on the cover of People magazine and made a very moving video saying goodbye to us all. I have wept, reading the article and watching the video. (Watch the video: http://broadwayworld.com/videoplay.php?colid=474142) As she is dying, she wants to remind us ‘no one is getting off the planet alive…we’re all terminal.’ In the video, besides saying goodbye, she is wishing everyone had the quality of healthcare she has. These things tell me yet again why Rhoda such a good friend to me. The actor inside her is also a good friend.
I imagine myself, on my deathbed, thinking, “Well, Rhoda’s already gone through this gate, so I guess it’s not so scarey.” Bless you, Valerie Harper, for all of the chubby lonely girls you have befriended, and for the love which surrounds you still and which will be stay alive until the great-grandchild of the last person to watch a Mary Tyler Moore or Rhoda show rerun has died.
Faith to Live, Faith to Die
I spent yesterday with an almost 90 year old woman I’ve loved for decades, just home from the hospital following congestive heart failure.
A cracker jack team of doctors, as well as a bevy of loving friends and family members, have surrounded her all week, attempting to figure out exactly what is causing her heart to weaken and not pump efficiently. They’re talking about medicine and diet and possible surgery.
She’s clear, herself, about what’s going on: “I’m old,” she says calmly. “My heart is old.” She seems completely at peace with what will happen next, be it more tests and fussing, be it, ultimately, drawing her last breath on this planet sooner rather than later. I can see from her strength that she won’t do anything she doesn’t want to do, but she isn’t troubled by what other people need to do around her either.
Her devout Catholic faith brings her great comfort now, as it has every day of her life.
The priest has been to see her at her hospital bedside, performed what she says is no longer called last rites but “prayer for the sick” and told her, “Your sins are all forgiven now, so don’t mess it up!” She twinkles when she repeats this.
Her daughter, who practices Vipassana Buddhist meditation, spoke to her in awe about her clarity and peace. “Mom, this is what meditation is all about – developing the kind of serenity that you have, no matter what happens! How did you get this way?” to which she simply smiled, and shrugged, as if it were nothing. Just another day in a quietly heroic life.
I’ve watched a number of people meet their deaths over the years, or face sickness and old age, and each time I see someone exhibiting this kind of grace, I pray that I will be like them. I pray that I won’t be fussing over the annoyance of an oxygen tank or telling people to get out of the room and give me some space, but that, rather, I will welcome the presence of others with this kindness and acceptance.
My own mother was a mentor. A lifelong atheist, she told me in her dying days, “They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but here I am. I’m not afraid to die!” Her courage and strength in her final days caused everyone at the hospice to comment on her faith. This seemed a little ironic to me, so I told my Mom what those around her were saying.
She responded, “Faith is how you live, not what you believe.” And when a hospice nurse started praying over her in the name of Jesus, my Mom waved away my scowling reaction. “It’s for her, honey,” she said quietly. “It makes her feel better. I don’t mind her prayers at all.” I, ostensibly a person of faith, pray I won’t be snarling at the well-meaning nurse by my side about church/ state separation.”
Watching these beloved women, and so many others, meet their final days, tells me that faith is indeed how you live, not what you believe. Their beliefs couldn’t be further from each other. And yet, for each of them, as for the rest of us, how they’ve lived, and how they die, is truly faith in action.
Love & Grief: Two Sides of the Same Coin
One night as the on-call hospital chaplain, I witnessed the end of three marriages, each representing over 50 years of love and struggle, as death claimed the husbands. The depth of grief of each wife haunted me for days. Was this the price of great love? Such great pain? This is what I have to look forward to after years of joy with my beloved?
I found myself restlessly meditating, pacing and praying, trying to unpack the promise of pain. In a sudden flash of insight, I realized that grief and love are two sides of the same coin – AND this is not cause for despair.
Life is about spending that coin. Loving with all my heart, grieving what is lost along the way, and loving more.
I learned to find gifts in sorrow, learning in the bad times. Hope.
I do not grieve what I do not love. Great grief is a sign of great love – and great love is a gift beyond compare. When my parents die, if they die before I do, I will mourn deeply, painfully, for years. Just the thought of not being able to call my mom and dad is enough for tears to spring to my eyes some days. But I have stood with children who do not mourn the loss of their parents, who mourn more for the lack of love they felt as a child than for the grief of their parents’ death. So I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt that love is the gift. I would far rather mourn the loss of a great love, than have no love to grieve.
This really is hope for me. Not that loss is inevitable, no – but that if I love with all my being, the grief will be sharp and deep and clean. The pain will be intense and there will ever be an ache – but an ache of life well loved, not the ache of regrets nor of despair. I look to the beautiful and the sweet, because it will always lift me towards hope. The price of love is steep, but it is nothing compared to the life sucking numbness of not loving, not caring, not trying.
The great deception is that there is safety – that we can protect ourselves or our loved ones from harm. The truth is that life is mystery, change is constant, control is a figment of the human imagination. When I can be present to the truth that nothing is promised – all life is gift, then despair has a harder time getting a grip in my psyche. Each involuntary and thoughtless breath is amazing, is unearned and unearnable. Grace, by another name.
Years ago, I read the words of Anne Lamott, “I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” “Ah,” said my soul. “Yes!” My source of hope lies in that mystery. I trust the universe to be endlessly creative, to be rife with paradox, to seek generativity. Life will! In the most inconceivable places and times and situations, life insists most creatively and assertively. And death will too. Two sides of the same coin, much like love and grief.
And so, I live holding all that I love lightly and tightly.
Lightly enough that it may take its own path, tightly enough that it never doubts my love.
It is a spiritual practice.
It is a daily struggle.
It is a daily joy.
Thoughts on Death and Lasagna
Last night, as I lay dozing on the couch, I awakened with a start at 10:30 and jumped up. It was time, I suddenly knew, to make a pan of lasagna for a family where a death was imminent. Right now. Not in the morning, as I had planned. Now.
As I went into the kitchen to layer the ingredients into the pan, a sense of peace and well being came over with me. I knew without a doubt that the dying woman, who had been in a coma for almost a week, had passed out of her body. And I felt clear, though I had no memory of a dream or any message from her, that she had instructed me to make this food as a symbol of my ongoing care for her twelve year old daughter.
This morning I learned that the woman had indeed died last night, at 10:31 PM.
When I took the lasagna over today, I told this child, who is still trying to absorb the fact that one of her parents is not on the planet anymore, about being instructed to make lasagna, and the sense of peace that I had felt as I made it. I told her that I thought as her Mom’s spirit left the earth, she visited people to tell them to be sure to care for her beloved daughter after she was gone. The twelve year old told me that she, too, had been awoken from a sound sleep, but not by her Mom’s spirit. It was the telephone, she said, looking a little embarrassed about how pedestrian that sounded.
Later, at home, when I was doing some mundane chores, it suddenly occurred to me that this child might be really angry about my experience. So I called and left a voice message and said,
“You know, it occurs to me that you could be really mad that your Mom’s spirit visited me to say goodbye, but didn’t visit you. I need to tell you that every time this has happened to me, and it has happened a number of times when people are dying, it has been someone telling me to care for their loved ones who are still alive. It has never been someone I am particularly close to. When my parents died, and when the two closest friends that I’ve lost died, they didn’t contact me in any way.
But what I do have with the ones close to me, who have died, is a clear sense that they are with me at particular times. I dream that we are together. I feel them around me. I have seen their spirits in birds or in butterflies. I think they didn’t say goodbye because they weren’t leaving me. I think they knew we would be in touch later.”
This experience last night made me think of the times I have experienced contact in the moment of death. At the graveside of one young man who died from AIDS in the early 90’s, a chain smoker, I learned that a number of people’s smoke alarms had gone off at the moment of his death. I didn’t actually have a smoke alarm at the time, but his death caused me to wake up as if someone had grabbed me by the throat—DEMANDING that I care for his partner, submerging me in the hellacious grief of his partner’s heart and mind and spirit for a moment so that I experienced a sense of complete freefall, no connective tissue, utter disorientation, as if it were my own. OK, OK, I sputtered. I get it, I get it! I will help your beloved go through the motions of life until he is alive again! And immediately that grip loosened and a sense of peace came over me.
When I’ve talked about these experiences with other ministers, they generally nod their heads matter-of-factly. Yes, they say, and tell me of their own experiences that mirror my own.
I know a lot of folks will dismiss all this as hogwash. I probably would too, if it hadn’t been my lived experience. Honestly, I don’t pretend to understand it a bit. But for me it’s a reminder that, as much as we try to act as if things make logical sense, we are surrounded by mysteries we can’t begin to comprehend.
And, ultimately, whether we feel connected to the dead or believe we walk only with the living, it all comes down to making lasagna for one another when the going gets tough.
Saying Goodbye
A few years ago, a member of my congregation with a background in science asked me why, in his words, “so many people insist that there’s some kind of life after death?” I don’t think he was prepared for my response, which was to say that it’s because there is.
I believe that that death is not an end, but a change in the way we are in this world.
I believe that life and death are, in the words of Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro, a “twisted vine sharing one root.”
I believe that though what we call “life” may end at death, existence does not.
Surely, our molecules do not die—whether they are burned and scattered, or buried in the ground, the molecules of our being become part of the Earth. They are recycled in the clouds and the rain, falling into streams that sing as they rush towards the sea. They are reclaimed by the bacteria of the soil, reused by the tree that grows in that soil, and then consumed and changed by the flame that feeds on the wood from that tree.
Any student of advanced chemistry can tell you that matter is neither created nor destroyed. Again and again, our molecules will cycle through all of life, for all of eternity. They will change and be changed, they might be converted to energy or infused with more through complex pathways. But our substance exists long after our life has ended.
Surely, our actions do not die—they are remembered in the thoughts and deeds of our loved ones, they are used by people seeking to learn, they serve as inspiration or lessons, memories or building blocks for something new. Every interaction we have ever had with another being changed the pattern of neurons in that person’s brain. We have made imprints—tangible, concrete imprints—in the lives of many, and those imprints spread out like ripples. Our deeds live on in the lives of others. Our presence in a particular place at a particular time creates a different future for all those who would follow us.
So, even if the conscience dies, if there is nothing of a soul to carry on after we are gone, can it really be said that the dead are really dead if there is someone to remember and celebrate them? If there is someone, somewhere that carries their genes or something, somewhere that is using their matter? If there is someone, somewhere, whose life is different for having encountered them?
Can it really be said that the dead are no longer with us if there is someone among us who reads what they wrote, or cooks from their recipes?
Someone who is warmed by the quilts they stitched by candlelight or who treasures the picture of an ancestor they never met?
Someone who has been inspired by their life, someone who has made better by their work, or someone who has learned from their mistakes?
This week, I had the honor and privilege of conducting a funeral service for the father of a member of the congregation I serve. Funerals and memorials are among the very hardest thing I do as a minister—and yet they are also among the most meaningful.
Part of how I face this task is by making visible all of the ways in which the departed loved one we are celebrating lives on. It means we are not so much saying goodbye, as learning to live together in a new and different way.
