Alleluia and Re-membering

December 31, 2008

Our song shall still be Alleluia!

In the Burial II service of the Book of Common Prayer, the Commendation prayer includes –

 “You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind; and we are mortal, formed of the earth, and to earth shall we return.  For so did you ordain when you created me, saying, ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song:  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” (Emphasis added by me)

Today’s New Year’s reflection in Hickman includes “singing again” – hearing the voice of Daniel singing again and together with him singing again someday.  This reminded me of the phrase embedded in my consciousness from the prayer book cited above – even at the grave, we make our song:  Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

December 16, 2008

Random Thoughts

Losing a child feels like having most of my skin peeled away and needing months just to begin growing some skin to restore some normalcy to my sensations.  I walk around feeling emotionally exposed – like I have no protection from my pain – it is constant, always present, always throbbing.

Life seems surreal when you are grieving.  It is like you are somehow floating or hovering above your normal or past experience of life – looking down at your life and watching yourself go through the motions, but not really engaged in it or experiencing it as you did previously.

Focus:  when grieving, I can maintain focus on tasks or projects for a period of time, but then I reach a pause and my mind goes back to the wound – the reality that Daniel is gone from this world and I have an intense longing to see him again – to touch him, hear his voice and his laugh, and see him engaged with his siblings and friends.

Given this constant sensation of emotional pain, I often feel an overwhelming urge to talk constantly about it, in an effort to understand it and hopefully deal with it more effectively and maybe even make it go away or subside to some extent.

 

“God wishes us well and He knows what is going on” – a simple statement I read today in Hickman’s entry for 12/28 – simple and yet profound.  I will never parse out and understand the concept of God’s sovereignty as it relates to Daniel’s death.  I find no comfort in thinking that God planned it or willed it.  To the contrary, those concepts still strike me as malicious, mean, or worse.

But to think that God knows what is going on – knows that Daniel was in an accident from which he could not recover – and that He (God) also wishes us well – that gives me hope and some sense of peace.  God knows how badly we miss Daniel – He knows how unfair it all seems to us (and perhaps, that it is truly unfair to Him as well!) – He knows how much Daniel loved Him, us, and so many others – He knows what is going on and He wishes us well.

Perhaps it needs to stay that simple.  I don’t need to complicate it by demanding more explanations.  Perhaps this is what “child-like faith” is – God knows and He cares, and that is good enough for me.

When we demand to know everything and we feel that God must be in control of everything, it seems to me that we quickly paint ourselves into a corner of anger and resentment when we have to disagree with God over decisions or choices that we attribute to Him.  The worse result of this sometimes is that we have to stop believing in God’s goodness because we are so hurt by His decisions.

Re-membering:  Brian McLaren talks about “re-membering” deceased members of a community through an active process of “keeping them alive” in some sense by keeping their memories alive as “important, ongoing members of the community.”  In this sense, remembering is a verb and is the act of re-connecting someone into membership in a relationship – to re-relate them to oneself and one’s community – to spiritually “set a place at the table” for them as a member of the family.

We need to re-member Daniel, to keep his place at the table by recalling his life, the relationship each of us so enjoyed with him, the things we appreciated about him, the concepts we now realize we learned from him, and more.

This process of re-membering seems imperative, to not only not forget him but also to somehow keep his memory alive.