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Woke up today and it was cold. My mother would have said it
was “Dogwood Winter,” or something like that. She and my grandmother made
pronouncements about time: Dogwood Winter, Blackberry Winter, even “Indian Summer,”
an insensitive term offered with no malice, about the small heat wave/s that
would come after the winds of winter began to blow.
People mark time, don’t they. Anniversaries, birthdays. Or
they try not to. One of our older members said, when I called to congratulate
her on her 92nd, that it was “just another day.”
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| Tom, Bob, Mike and Bill |
“NO, it’s not,” I said. Nor did she really think so. It
thrilled her that so many people had called and sent cards. People notice the
attentions of their special people. And when their special people, and special times,
are gone.
Which is why I go to Nashville I always drive by where I
grew up. I regularly visit the cemetery where my parents are buried. My
maternal grandparents, too. And, next to them, the twin brothers I never met—they
died very young. A sad day for my parents, who are buried across the street.
Separated in death as they were in life. As much as we mark time, we also mark
special places. 
Which is also why, every time I go to Nashville I go to Brown'd Diner, a hole-in-the wall and legendary dive with the best cheeseburgers, chili, and shoe-string French fries in the world.
Churches, too, are places that have special meaning and significance, even among non-religious
people still. Which is why, often, people want a "church wedding," with a priest or preacher presiding (as
opposed to an on-line-ordained friend). Not simply because the
room is pretty. More like an instinct, a sense that the place, the priest or minister,
offers a kind of gravitas and grounding—a sacred place for a sacred moment:
representing less a “destination” than a starting place.
Do I think all of those feelings are identified or
articulated? Of course not. But I have talked to many couples on their way to
their vows, and you get the sense. I
always try to get them to build-on that nascent call to the holy and make faith
and discipleship a part of their married life. Rarely do I succeed, and especially
when church, worship, prayer have not been part of their story till now.
Along with our times and places we all have our defining
stories. As individuals, of course—how and when you got your Eagle, or how and
why lost your first love. How the last-second shot went in, or just rimmed-out,
or how (in my case) you never got off the bench (and I tore up my knee anyway!).
How you wound up in Charlotte, or got this particular job. How you had planned
on two kids, but the third one… Stories. Each of us has them.
There are family stories, too; and if a good bit of counseling
and therapy is a matter of trying to un-tease and tell the family story, so much comedy and drama begins in the inexhaustible
hilarity and tragedy of family stories. A family’s places and times.
Towns, states, regions, nations have stories. Just as all
those entities have special places, special times. We mark time, we mark
places, we tell stories. That is what makes us human.
So, what if we are separated from those things?
With amnesia or dementia, we lose identity because we lose
our stories. If we lose or stories we lose our people and places. What if our
places are bulldozed or, in my case, sorely mistreated by the next generations
of residents? When we don’t know our days or celebrations or sadnesses because
we can’t tell our times?
I have been thinking about all of that during the lock-down,
because the Church has its stories clustered around the week that is soon upon
us: Palm Sunday, the last days of Jesus’ life, his last teaching, the last
gestures of his self-giving love, his betrayal, arrest, trial, scourging and
crucifixion, his Resurrection, too. Christians are coming up on their most
sacred time, their holiest days—which we call, of course, Holy Week—and in some
ways as uncalendared as Dogwood Winter (the calculus of its appearing varies,
year-to-year, but we discern it nonetheless).
We tell our specific stories in specific, special places,
with special services: at sunrise in the cemetery, or gathering in silence in a
darkened church. Shivering in the Memorial Garden at midnight, around a new fire
that lights our candles as we process. Brass voluntaries pierce the morning, candles
strike out against the darkness, the warmth of this time, and our people warm
our shivering souls. The old Story, ever new, is proclaimed: darkness and death
do not have the last word. Our Story, told in our place, with our people at
this time—together it makes us Christian again.
So… what do we do this year?
When our places (and normal gestures and rituals) are not available
to us? When we cannot stand shoulder-to-shivering-shoulder with our people?
When we are so tangled and strangled by fear and death and
distance? When the stories we hear are bad news, and the worst yet to come, by
all indications?
What do we do?
We gather how we can—with our families, online, in a new
place: the virtual sanctuary (and thank God that, unlike other disrupted eras,
during black plagues and terrible wars, we have such an opportunity). We get
dressed-up, maybe, and take Easter pictures at least of ourselves to mark the
time.
We celebrate at a distance, light the fire of our memory and
hope and imagination. However we can we proclaim again the Story that
Christians cannot and will not forget—how Jesus, dead as dried wood and buried
in a tomb, was raised from the dead by the glory of God. That is a Story not bound
by time or place or population or circumstance.
But in every time and place, and especially this time and
place, a Story for the healing of the nations.
We have lost a lot this Lent. We have not lost the Story.
