Thursday, April 2, 2020

We Have No Place, No People, No Time...But We Have the Story

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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.”

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.   

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