PleaseGrace

This is a remarkable picture.  It’s remarkable in part because it points to a most unremarkable reality.  A tragic reality, really.  I heard a report recently on National Public Radio that said all the schools in Afghanistan have been closed to girls in grades 7 and up.  They used to be open.  Not that long ago, I imagine young girls got up in the morning, grabbed whatever books they’d been given, and headed out the door with their brothers and all the other neighborhood boys to go to school, to discover the world beyond.  But the report indicated that girls aren’t being given books anymore, not since the Taliban came back into power last year.  In fact, now the girls themselves are what’s being given.  Many are being given by their own families to be raised by other families, either because it’s simply safer for them to live somewhere else, far away from guns and bombs, or because their parents can’t afford to feed them anymore.  What a tragedy.  It’s Hagar and Ishmael all over again.

Why it was just last week that her child was playing with the other children.  But now a new sheriff has come to town, one who fears equality, and they send Hagar and Ishmael away to the desert, where they know, they just know, the water is going to run out eventually. When it does, Hagar is going to have to decide: go back to the new sheriff and tell them what you know they’re not going to hear anyway, because you’ve already tried to tell them—that you have just as much right as they do to be here. Or, send your child away.

In the case of Hagar, “She cast her child down under a bush, and then went and sat herself down a good way off, about the distance of a bow shot” (Genesis 21:15-16). Like a horrible, murderous car wreck, she can’t look upon it, and yet she can’t bring herself to look away. The child, her child, is going to die. She can see no other way. Her only comfort is to ask the Universe to shield her eyes from it. If this doesn’t work, she figures she can kill him herself with just one arrow. After all, he’s already dead.

For Hagar and Ishmael there comes an angel of God to rescue them. Proof positive that we can put each other away all day long—we can kill each other in body and spirit!—but to God we will always be just on the verge of resurrection.

Ishmael grows up to become an expert with the bow (Genesis 21:20). I don’t know if this means he can hit every rabbit and squirrel within a 50 yard radius, or if it just means he knows what not to use a bow and arrow for. He knows not to use it to kill a child.

It’s a remarkable picture. A child who was once almost killed by a bow grows up to become an expert with the bow, while a child who was robbed of an education in Afghanistan gets a seat on a beanbag chair in a classroom in America. Of course, the hope of this child is that one day, when she grows up, she will become an expert teacher, able to teach the hatred and inequality right out of the hearts of any adult who would try and tell her to sit outside under a bush when the school bell is calling her name.  

 

I really like the image of grown men following the light of a star, because it must have cost them some ego–dressed them down real good– to wander the earth trying to figure out where the starry light was coming down, and then to try and stand under it alongside Jesus, who they believed was a king, but who was also just a kid.  They lived in a pretty privileged world, those wise men. How else can you explain all the time they spent stargazing? The poor keep their nose to the grindstone. They could afford to keep their nose to the sky.

They had stared up at a million stars before, and always they knew what each one meant.  Then, one night, they see this other star, and they know what this one means too.  They know it means there’s a power shift going down in the world—power at the hands of a 3 year-old!—and they can either resist it and hold on to their privilege, or they can embrace it.  That they choose to embrace it blows my mind with hope. For what were they–40, maybe 50 years old? But not too old to leave their old dispensations behind, to launch out into the night in search of something more and else. Now, if grown men are doing it, what am I doing staying home? 

But I also really like the image of the star itself, beaming down from God only knows where.  And God does know.  God knows that if you’re following the light of a star in search of something more and else, you don’t need to look any further than where you are.  Because so long as you haven’t cluttered the sky above you with too much progress, a star is just as brilliant in America as it is anywhere else.  It blankets the rich and poor alike, not because they are rich or poor, but because this is what a star does: it falls down luminous in brilliant splendor. No one can reach up and pull its light down. Nor can we stop its light from coming. The stars belong to a world not of our own making. When they do come out, the truly wise will not stay in.

But maybe it’s not necessary to actually go anywhere. Maybe there is no need to mount a camel and travel the darkness. Maybe it would be enough to look up and see that, go or stay, the starry light of God is already upon you, and will never leave you.  This is grace.

It sure would be something, though, to see a grown man riding through a desert on the back of a camel, cutting left and right, always looking up.  In a world where we are caught mostly looking down, it would be an inspiring sight to behold. When people ask him, “What are you doing, crazy old man?  Don’t you know that star might not even be for you?” He tells them, “Of course it’s for me.  Don’t you know that it’s also for you?”  

The whole message of Christmas, and of our lives, can be summed in just two words: Unto You. 

Consider for a moment that Unto You is where it all starts.  In the beginning, says the Good Book, after God lit up the darkness with starry lights, and carved up the purple mountains majesty and planted the fruited plains; after God thought up the dolphin and the prickly porcupine, and made up a home for them in the forest and the sea; after God built up the tall oaks and the tiny marigolds, God then turned to Adam and Eve and said, “Unto you I give it all to care for and to keep.”  What an extraordinary sign of trust and grace on the part of God.  Adam and Eve hadn’t even been around on the earth long enough to put up a mailbox.  Even for being naked, they weren’t much to look at—made from the dust of the ground, unimpressive, barely noticeable.  And yet, “Unto You.”  Unto you the wonders of this world.    

You have to wonder if Adam and Eve were glad for the gift.  When God held out the Divine Hand, did they say with surprise, “For me?”  Did they reach out their own hand and then pull it back a bit, nervous to accept the responsibilities of such a gift?  Did they think about what receiving the gift would mean come the weekend?  “You know Eve, I was going to break ground this Saturday on that 4,000 square-footer you’ve been wanting me to construct for when we retire, but maybe God means to tell us we don’t need all that space just for us.”

The truth is, though, when God said to Adam and Eve, “Unto You,” they took it to the bank.  They either forgot, or just plain old didn’t care, that the world wasn’t made for them, that they didn’t own it, that, quite the opposite, they were made for the world.   

If you read the whole Bible, you’ll see that out of its thousands of pages, there’s only about four wherein all is as it should be.  Where God says, “Unto You,” and everyone knows what to do with the gift.  Give thanks and praise for it, open it up, share it, spread it around until everyone and everything is covered in its extraordinary grace.  But that’s only about four pages of the story.  Most everything else is about what happens when Unto You gets turned into Unto Me.  When that happens, nations go to war, power runs amuck, the earth suffers, the meek suffer, the poor suffer, compassion suffers, neighborliness suffers.

In spite of all this, there are some who still look up at the stars. On a night when what has come unto us is a world still anxious with pandemic, still burdened with sickness, still divided by fear, still absent of enough room in the inn for all, there are some who still dare to knock on a stranger’s door asking to be let in. There are some who still keep an open heart and hand, who sing with angels and refuse to stay home when the shepherds say, “Let’s go to Bethlehem.” What in God’s name are they doing if not holding out hope that in this weary world there is a better gift coming unto us still?    

I have to wonder if, when God said to Mary, “Unto you a child is going to be born,” Mary didn’t laugh nervously and say, “Is that a question, God?” But it’s not a question. It’s a statement, a glorious, grace-filled statement. If we choose, it can also be a promise.

For as many as there are who wake up each Christmas hoping to hear, “Unto you a bike!” Or, “Unto you a gold ring!” there are others who would love nothing more than to hear a knock at the door, and opening it, find that a child, or a long-lost friend, or an old dream they once thought had all but run out on them, has in fact come unto them, to claim them, to say, “I belong to you.  I am…unto…you.”   

You don’t have to be Mary, though, to know there are no such guarantees in this world, not even at Christmastime. Not all children do come home, some shepherds can’t run, or even get up on their own. There are virgins who will never get anything good, and angels can fall from glory. And yet, unto all these, UNTO YOU, God comes on the altar of a manger to offer us the gift of a child—God’s own.  In the babe Jesus, God comes to be born unto Mary, and if unto the likes of Mary, then unto the likes of the empty and lowly, unto me, unto you, unto this whole wide blessed world. That no one should be without love.  

I know people who will pick up a book and read the last page first because they can’t stand not to know how the story is going to end.  It’s not enough for them to be along for the ride.  They want to know how, when, and where the ride is going to end.  I have nothing against such people, I’m just not one of them.  I also know people who will pick up a book, read its first 10 pages, and put it back on the shelf saying the story just isn’t there.  It doesn’t grab them right off, and if it can’t do that, it’s not worth sticking with.  The book might still be a very good one, a prize winner even, but it’s not going to win a spot on their shelf, and I have nothing against them for saying so.  I’m just not one of them, either.

When I pick up a book I go cover to cover: Dedication, Table of Contents, Acknowledgments, right on through to any Epilogue or Author’s Biography.  In between it’s all page by page, paragraph by paragraph, one word at a time.  If my cup of coffee is especially large and hot and there’s no one to stop me, I might even check the publication date.  I’ll give any reader who skips right to the last page the benefit of the doubt that, finding the end to be excellent, they’ll flip back to the first page and give the whole book a fair trial. But having already discovered where the story is going to end, I simply wouldn’t find the rest of the book so marvelous.

This isn’t to say that every book is a good one.  As the American philosopher Mortimer J. Adler once claimed, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”  I take this to mean that if the book doesn’t stir your conscience and cause you to love and hate, all at the same time; if it isn’t to you as it is to Madeline L’Engle, “a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe;” if it doesn’t, in the wisdom of Oscar Wilde, “make you to find beautiful meaning in beautiful things;” then I suppose the book may not be very good and that perhaps Charles Dickens was right to say, “There are books of which the backs and covers are the best parts.”  But such things should only be decided after you’ve read more than the first or last 10 pages.

For what it’s worth, my favorite books tell stories whose endings I didn’t see coming.  This is one such story.

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It was many years ago now on a Saturday morning.  The sky was bright blue.  I pulled up to Bernard’s house in my minivan and waited for him to come out.  At 9 a.m. he appeared looking like a Nike fashionista.  Sporting blue workout shorts with a bold neon green stripe down each leg, a solid navy blue tee-shirt with a matching cap, and a pair of white sneaks with the infamous Let’s Do It flash embroidered (also in blue) above the heels, he was poised to sweat it out in battle.  In a little less than an hour we would step to the starting line of Bernard’s first ever 5K road race.  But first he had to get in the passenger seat, which he did in the most human way possible.  “Looks good,” I assured him.  “You’re all lined up.”  With that, he bent forward and fell backwards, trusting that my words, and the seat, would not fail him.  I buckled him in.   

I’m sure that had I asked him in that moment if he had ever imagined himself pounding it over 3.2 miles—16,404 steps—of dismal pavement, surrounded only by dull scenery and 1,000 perfect strangers all mindlessly rushing past each other on their way to a finish line of free bananas, he would have told me straight up, “No.”  Maybe he would have taken to a slow stroll in the woods, freely stopping at will to lean on a rock and admire how crinkly the leaves sounded underfoot.  But a foot race?  Ludicrous!

Yet here we were, no less than 810 days from where it all began.  

On that day, 810 ago, Bernard was cruising his motorcycle along New England backroads at a mellow 40 m.p.h.  His iPod, safely perched on the dashboard, was blasting out Beethoven, because that’s how Bernard rolled on his Harley Davidson.  The sky, like another one soon to come, was bright and blue.  At 2:30 p.m., Bernard decided to turn the handlebars towards home.  What happened next—call it mystery, mayhem, only those who can look into the darkness and still see the light would call it mercy—is a memory only Bernard can recall, and he doesn’t.  With the force of someone who had just been sucker-punched to the head, Bernard tipped over.  Because there was no way to see it coming, there was also no way to protect himself from it, or from what was coming next.

The accident report, which no one saw much point in reading, suggested that when Bernard fell into the guardrail, the combination of his posture on the bike (which I’m sure was being maintained according to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration standards), along with his speed (which never went above the posted limit), angle, and the damn summer breeze blowing in from the east at that moment, all made for the perfect combination of mangled-up hash.

By the time we got to see him it was 9:00 p.m. the next day, 807days ago.  By then he’d already had both his arms sawed off.  His right leg looked like it had been twisted up by a tornado.  For all the blood his body had lost and for all the fluids he was being pumped with, he looked like a balloon ready to pop.  His neck, though broken, and his head, though dented in spots, had both been saved by his helmet.  In the morning, a short 8 hours from now, some of his intestines would be added to the spoils.  

“It has to be done,” the doctors told us. “It will save his life.”  

What we’re never told of course, because really, we already know this—how unavoidable this is, how unavoidably necessary this is, how unavoidably necessarily painful this is, so please don’t remind us again—is that our lives are never merely saved.  For every act of saving also requires an act of sacrifice.

806 days ago, 805 days ago, 804, 803…  For 65 days straight we went in and out of the hospital waiting room.  In the mornings we tuned into Regis and Kelly, who never failed to show up every day at 10 a.m. to keep us company for an hour.  In the afternoons we slumped over chairs in the corner.  Drifting in and out of our own listlessness, we were beckoned back to life only by the long-lost relative rifling through our pockets in search of another quarter to feed the vending machine with.  (It is one of the odd wonders of waiting rooms to be able to reduce everyone to immediate family.  A doctor walks in to give an update and they’re hard-pressed to figure out who the next of kin is.  Who is weeping?  Who appears the most stoic?  Who is everyone huddled around?  In the waiting room appearances can be deceiving, not to those who are waiting, because they all know who is who.  But what is the woman whose husband is presently getting a couple yards of digestive tract cut out of him doing letting his co-worker weep inconsolably on her shoulder?  Who is she, and who is he to be so grief-stricken?)  So it must be said that “we” doesn’t do much for describing exactly how many people flocked to the waiting room at first. 

After a while though, around day 780, maybe 779, could have been 769, most of us had to return to work and to cutting the grass and doing laundry.

It’s a bittersweet fact of life that most of us can endure a hospital waiting room for only so long.  Giving comfort and finding solace are among the noblest human ventures.  We stumble into the waiting room as strangers, stricken and lost in our own sea of questions, faith, and grief.  We’ve joined the huddle on the field but we don’t have the equipment or size necessary to keep us safe from the hits that are about to knock us flat.  We leave the huddle, however, and eventually the game entirely, as family.  We pat each other on the back and head for home believing that we used every play available to us in the book.  Come hell or high water, we must let ourselves sleep well tonight. 

The irony of course is that no one was working the plays harder than Bernard was, and yet he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, least of all to home.

A few people continued to hold-up at the hospital, and one in particular would go in and out—100 miles door-to-door—everyday.  755 days ago, 754, 753, 752…  

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The love of Bernard’s life is a woman named Gail. At the time of the accident they were not married.  That she was the one who had told Bernard years earlier that he deserved to buy himself that motorcycle, that I call her my mother-in-law, that she was the first one to the hospital every morning and the last to leave every night, should say it all.

A couple of us continued to drop by the waiting room whenever we could.  These were mostly women, friends of Gail’s from bygone days.  I never thought much about what they were doing there alongside Gail, what they might have whispered to her in the quiet of the dawn.  They knew Gail long before Gail knew Bernard.  Back when she was just a child and didn’t care about boys and tomorrow; back when she was working in retail, pinching her nickels and dimes and hitting the books at night with no time for a guy; back when she told them in sacred tone that she, she had met a man who turned her heart on.

“If Bernard doesn’t come out of this, you will,” they intoned.  It’s the kind of thing priests say just before they pour sacred water over the head of an infant to proclaim that, though barely alive, they are fully grown with love and all its possibilities.

What I knew of these women is that they always called ahead to the waiting room to see what they could bring for whoever was there.  A pizza, 6 coffees from Dunkin Donuts.  Like Mary and Martha carrying spices to Jesus’s tomb to embalm his body, to stave off the smell of death and make the pain of their loss feel just a bit less cruel, a couple BFFs continued to drop by the waiting room every day.

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732 days ago, 731, 730…   All the way through to day 701 we prayed without always knowing how or even why.   Do we pray for life, death, a greater good, a lesser evil, or just the right person to come along and decide for us?  Frederick Douglass once said, “I prayed for 20 years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”  He, of course, was talking about the wicked oppression of slavery and what can happen when we decide to free ourselves. 

After 200 days in rehab and doing all he could to make the old self work again, the insurance company told Bernard he was “good to go.”  Of course, that’s only how the rep who stopped by his room one morning put it.  Bernard was sipping coffee through a hard plastic straw when when a young man strode in looking like someone who’d been sent to announce the winning lottery numbers, only to realize the winner couldn’t reach for his wallet anymore.   “Good news, you get to go home.”  Translation: We trust you know where to find more straws.  

The truth was/is: Bernard had come a long way.  He’d figured out how to maneuver one mechanical arm, and was already working on a second.  He’d never be able to keep a spoon level enough to feed himself ice cream again, or be able to pull a shirt over his head, or reach up high enough to prune his beloved Japanese Maple, or feel the pulse of another person’s hand in his. “We can give you hands that look like hands but won’t ever do much for you, or we can give you hooks for hands that will allow you to grab a tissue and scratch your nose,” the arm mechanic said.  Bernard took the hooks. 

At 61, he was suddenly bruised, dented, disabled, and starting out again.  But 500 days ago, he drew his heels back as far as he could and heaved himself into a standing position at his kitchen counter. 

It had been almost a year since he looked around his house.  Before the accident, he was always looking around the house.  Checking every battery in the smoke detectors, changing them out before they even needed changing.  Patching up the tiniest knick of wood trim before it got any bigger.  Unraveling the hoses, then winding them back up into a perfect display of geometric symmetry.  In Bernard’s house, nothing was ever given a chance to become bruised, dented, or disabled.  Now, with one great exception, everything still looked the same.    

“I have to do this for myself,” he insisted.  Shuffling over to the bottom of the staircase, he looked up.   Stairs was one thing therapy hadn’t given him a ton of practice at, and the few stairs he had tried out were wide and short.  To get to bed every night, and to his straw of coffee every morning, he would have to balance himself up and down 14 narrow, tall steps.  “We don’t have to do everything right now,” I told him.  “Remember, we’re just here to check things out today.  We’re not staying the night.  You’ll be coming back.”

“We’ll see,” he said, as if looking to the steps to confirm his hope.

Lifting his right foot onto the first step, you could see the 8 inch surgical scar from where his shattered knee cap had been puzzled back together stretched out, spots of iodine still visible.  Raising his left foot up, he didn’t stop to rest it next to his right one.  Instinctively, he went straight for the second step, only to realize too late that he couldn’t stand on one foot for even a split-second.  Falling into the wall, he dropped to the steps like cheaply hung wallpaper.

How he managed to get himself back on his feet, I honestly don’t recall.  As other stumbles have since come to prove, it involves the loss and discovery of both dignity and gravity.  “I have to do this for myself.”  Whatever else this might come to mean, for the moment it meant that Gail and all the rest of us would have to let Bernard fall, and he would have to let us pick him back up.

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“Ready to go?”  The early morning sun caught the flash emblem on his cap, casting a glare onto the dashboard.  “Grampy, you’re shiny,” my daughter, Lillian, called out from the backseat.  All of 4 at the time, she and her younger brother, Rowan, were going to walk with us—no small feat for such small feet.     

It was now 9:08 a.m.  At the registration table, I picked up number 611 for Bernard.  “That’s a good sign,” he said as I pinned it on him. “Is 611 a significant number for you?” “Any number that isn’t 9-1-1 is a significant number.”  We both laughed.

9:50 a.m.  We stood at the back of a pack so large we couldn’t see the starting line up ahead.  “I want to start last.  That way I won’t get bumped or knocked over.  It doesn’t matter how long it takes to cross the finish line.”  Or the starting line, I thought. 

9:57, 9:58, 9:59…Bang!  In a matter of minutes, we were our own pack of 5. 

Anyone who has ever run a road race knows that each mile is marked by volunteers handing out Dixie Cups of water that you can grab on your way by.  It took us 24 minutes to reach the first table, where they were already closing up shop.  “You got this!” a woman shouted.  Suddenly seeing us, she pulled out a few cups and quickly filled them.  I took one and tipped it into Bernard’s mouth, pouring another one over his head.  Thinking that looked like great fun, Rowan took one and threw it at Bernard’s face.

At Mile Marker 2 there was no table, just some wet spots on the ground, already half-dried.  “I’m tired,” Lillian groaned.  “Can I have a turn in the stroller?”  We’d been walking for about 45 minutes and still had a mile to go.  I figured I could probably run all the way back to the car to get another stroller and still catch up with them before they reached the finish line.  “I’ll keep walking with Dad,” my wife said. 

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It was her idea to walk a 5K with Bernard in the first place.  Back in the ICU, over 800 days ago now, she had stood on the other side of the curtain from him reading a letter she wrote.  She absolutely hates hospitals—the alarms, the plastic bags hanging up and down, the smell of sanitization, the feeling of uncertainty in a place of protocols.  “Whatever you need to do, Dad, you go ahead and do it.  Fight, or don’t fight, it’s okay.  You will be okay.  We will be okay.”  They say a person’s sense of hearing is the last thing to go.  She aimed to test that theory.

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By the time we reached the last bend in the course, cars were back on the road, relegating us to the sidewalks and shoulders.  Up ahead, we could see the finish line.  The stop clock was frozen at 61:32.  They must have stopped counting when they figured the last person had crossed over.  Little did they know #611 was still out there.  When one of the race workers saw us coming, she put down the stack of tee-shirts she had been lifting into a box and began to clap.  A man who was built to look like he must have finished the race an hour ago came trotting out.  We were still about 100 yards away from whatever free bananas might still be left.  He had a cup of water in hand.  He went to give it to Bernard went he realized, Bernard had plastic arms!  “No thank you,” was all Bernard said.   

Soon, everyone who thought the race was over began to clap, as the trotting man kept trotting, now more jumping up and down.  “Look at this!  Look…at…this!” 

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I never crossed the finish line that day.  With about 50 feet to go, I stopped to let Bernard go on ahead alone.  ________________________________________

I don’t know how many days it’s been now since Bernard wore #611; so many that I’ve lost count.  Then, a couple days ago, Gail called me in the late evening to say that Bernard had taken another fall on the steps, and could I come over to help him up.  When I arrived at his house, he was sitting on the fourth step, looking his usual embarrassed self.  He had a raspberry patch on his forehead from where he hit the wall.  “You okay?” 

“Yep.”  

Back on his feet, Bernard wanted to head right back up the stairs.  “Hold on.  Let’s at least take a walk around the living room first to make sure you’ve got your balance.”  He didn’t want to, but I insisted we do it my way.

Watching him from behind as he headed up the stairs once more, I remembered what it was like seeing him cross the finish line that day in last place, from the back of the pack, and I realized that if he fell, I wouldn’t be able to stop him, or catch him.  In this way, life can be fragile.  Lucky us, it can also be brave.     

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We have 40 days. 
We should be able to do something with that. 
  
Old Noah bobbed
up and down in hell for that long. 
Carcass like driftwood sounding Morse code outside—
     —All has been killed here. 
  
When the sun shone again, even the giraffe had to
     step high not to knock over the
     piles of family trees now cut down
     to debris. 
  
Who gets off in a world like that? 
58,000 names on a sloping wall. 
20 children to 1 gunman. 
  
Still,
the old man walks down the plank. 
When we’ve had
     enough,
     start something new. 
We have 40 days. 
  
Let us go into the wilderness where
God wants to take us. 
Learn to trust in what we cannot
earn.  God will be our shepherd who
feeds us, and
  
our daily bread, God’s daily word. 
  
Throw down the weapons that defend
and define.  Be known as those
who have come through the waters carrying in our
hands a towel and basin, and
  
upon our backs, a cross. 
  
In the wilderness, there is only one
  Beloved Community to which
  all belong. 
Let us be a people who
walk together. 

We will
 starve ourselves of hatred.  And
 feast on love.  Sacrifice
 power for humility. 
 Look out over the world and call it
 our temple of service. 
  
Let us go into the wilderness. 
 

Ash Wednesday.  What does the name mean to you?  If you didn’t know that on this day, millions of Christians around the world—from Catholics to Protestants, Baptists to Episcopalians, Rhode Island to Russia—put ashes on their foreheads in the sign of the cross to remind ourselves that we belong to the God who through death gives life, what would you think this day is all about? 

Two words: ash and Wednesday.  Ash is the image of gray, of black.  It is color without being colorful.  It is what’s left over after the fire.  After the house and everything we have loved and worked our whole life for is burned up. 

After the cigarette we’ve been dragging on all day long—to distract ourselves, to calm ourselves, to keep ourselves from having to deal with what’s hard—after we’ve run out of easier and better options, ash is what’s left. 

After this life is over, at 5 or 95, and our last breath has escaped us, and the friends and family gather around to sum us up in eulogy and song, and the preacher says, “Into your hands, Almighty God, we commend your servant,” ash is the part of us that gets lowered into the ground, or spread to the wind. 

Ash is what remains of us when nothing else does.  When all the identifying markers have rotted to bone, and bone has deteriorated beyond recognition, ash is that part of us that goes out into the ether, and becomes one again with the earth. 

Wednesday is that day of the week we work so hard to get to, and then to get over. Hump Day.  It’s not the beginning, or the end. It’s just, the middle.  It’s not Sunday or Monday—full of newness and possibility. Nor is it Friday—full of relief and completion.  It’s just Wednesday.  To make it even less significant, less wanting, today we call it Ash Wednesday.

It shouldn’t surprise us, perhaps, to discover that the setting for Ash Wednesday is the wilderness.  For like Wednesdays, the wilderness is just out there, in the middle somewhere.  People who find themselves in a wilderness will struggle to know which way they came from, or which way they are going.  The land can look vast, empty, and desolate, with few signs of life, and no road signs to follow.  Whatever regrets we have about the past are just that. We can’t go back now.  We’ll have to deal.  Should I turn to the left or to the right? Which way is north, and which way south?  Stuck in nowhere land, we sit down in the only seat available—the ground itself—to think about who we are, and what we’re becoming. 

The ground, of course, is the place of our ending.  It’s the ash heap. And yet, the fact that we are here, that we are still pulsing, tells us that we are not ended, and the ash heap may be good for more than just endings.  It may also be good for beginning again.

So sit down today. Right where you are. On the ground. The same and only ground everyone else has to sit on. Sit deep. Feel the cold, hard ash of the earth. Know the embrace of God our Maker. And give thanks that this is the place, and this is the time, and this is the stuff of our redemption. 

My brother’s initials are J.W.P.  He is a junior, which means my father’s initials are also J.W.P.  The “W” stands for Woodfin.  It’s a family name—originally a last name—from my paternal grandmother’s side.  Back in the late 1800s the Woodfin’s settled in Marblehead, Massachusetts, an old whaling town on the beautiful Northshore that ends where the ocean begins.

Admittedly, Woodfin is a peculiar name, and when my brother was in college down south, his roommates spared no mercy in poking some fun at it, calling him everything from Woody to Woodster.  But my brother, proud of his heritage and his namesake, wore Woodfin like a badge of honor, promising his roommates that one day he would take them north to Marblehead, and show them the street named after his family, the street called Woodfin.

Well, a couple summers after they all were out of college, he got his chance when his roommates came to visit.  Woody wasted no time.  On their first day in town, he took them to Nick’s Roast Beef in Beverly, to Singing Sands Beach in Manchester-By-The-Sea, and ultimately to Marblehead.  Now it’s important for you to know that my brother had never actually seen the street in Marblehead named Woodfin. As a family, we’d been to Marblehead a bunch, and he’d heard it was there, but he’d never actually seen it himself. So, rolling into Marblehead on Route 114 that day, his audience still not convinced by his claim, he was relieved to find on the map “Woodfin Terrace.”

“See, I told you it’s a real place.  And it’s a terrace. Not a street, not even a lane, but a terrace.  Only beautiful things are named terrace.  And it’s a dead-end,” he added.  “Probably a nice little neighborhood.”

A couple more turns, a bend in the road, and the moment of truth had arrived.  There it was, a sign that said, “Woodfin Terrace: Welcome to the Town Dump.”

We are confronted in this season by a most unexpected sign.  We set out several weeks ago—some of us—from our homes.  We took to the stores and malls in search of Christmas.  From there, we R.S.V.P.’d to a couple holiday parties—one work party and one with the cousins from the side of the family we never see anymore.  A couple nights we stayed in and tried to do nothing.  We watched Jimmy Stewart in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” We sent-off a few cards, made a few phone calls, got back in touch with some friends we wish we’d never lost touch with.  Some of us even found the courage to reach out yet one-more-year-in-a-row to those people who never seem to reach back.  We stopped off and bought a tree.  We got one for Grandma too, because she told us she wasn’t going to decorate this year and we decided that’s just not right.  When we delivered the tree, we bought her some homemade cookies.  We gave some to the neighbors and our kids’ teachers at school as well.

It’s been a long few weeks.  We’ve packed a lot in and gotten a lot done, and for some of us it’s made us feel a lot closer to Christmas.  For others of us, we don’t feel like we’ve gotten anywhere.  Despite our best efforts, the Christmas spirit just never seemed to come this year.  It’s felt like a dead-end terrace.  Then, a couple nights ago we came across a most unexpected sign (where were we again when we saw the sign?): “To you is born this day a savior, who is Christ the Lord.”  Well that’s not so bad, we told ourselves.  Actually, it looks pretty good.  “And this shall be a sign to you: a child wrapped in cloth and lying in a manger.”  On second thought, maybe not so good.

In a world that has become as hard and cruel as ours, it’s not exactly a sign of relief. It doesn’t quite read: “And Here You Shall Find Peace on Earth.”  A child wrapped in cloth and lying in a manger—but where’s the knight in shining armor?  Where’s the seasoned politician who can unlock the gridlock between parties?  Where’s the miracle-worker who can cure our cancer, mend our broken relationships, and build that better world we’ve been wanting for our children?

Why does Christmas insist on giving us the same one sign year-after-year: a child wrapped in cloth and lying in a manger.

One of my favorite Christmas carols has to be “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear:” O ye beneath life’s crushing load / Whose forms are bending low / Who toil along the   climbing way / With painful steps and slow / Look, now, for glad and golden hours / Come swiftly on the wing / Oh rest beside the weary road / And hear the angels sing.

Some of us have come a long way to get to get to where we are.  Like those prophets and dreamers of old, we’ve traveled many miles, if not along the road than in our hearts.  We’ve heard God say, “You are favored, you are holy, and I’m coming to lift you up,” and we want to believe it’s true.  But the signs all point to a dead-end.  Others of us feel like we’ve been parked at a dead-end forever.  But here we are, stuck all together in this season, unable to speed up or slow down.   With Mary and Joseph, and the shepherds and the angels, and that pesky innkeeper who was maybe just too tired to open the door and squeeze yet one more person in, may we be discovered in that place where all signs point to a child wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.  For what a good sign it is: a baby, a new-born, opening his sleepy eyes to the world.  In his lifetime, he’ll grow  exhausted in body and spirit.  He’ll touch pain and be touched back, and all to heal and redeem.  But for now he comes simply as a sign that something is different in the world today.  At the end of the dead-end street, where things go to die, life is beginning again.  In the cold darkness of night, something is creeping in: light.  Beside the weary road, you can hear the angels sing.

For the blessing of mothers everywhere, we bless you.

For you who like a mother feeds the earth with rain and sunshine, who gives the sparrow a home, we praise you.

For you who like a mother endures the joyful pain of bringing forth new life, who gives life to redeem life, we love you.

For your mothering spirit that weeps when we weep, rejoices when we rejoice, disciplines us when we go a wrong way, and runs from the front porch to welcome us back always with open arms, we come to you.

For all who have known the loss of a mother, for mothers who have known the loss of children, for women who have had motherhood thrust upon them, for women who have wanted but for some reason could not have, for women who have loved in ways no mother perhaps ever has, we pray to you.

For all who have lived with a disappointment and hurt of motherhood so deep that it has led to rage and fear, heal us and help us to forgive.

For your children who woke up today in a world that feels absent of a mother’s touch, because there is no food to eat, no shelter big enough to hide the sound of bombs, no money with which to see a doctor, no one to teach them what other children are getting to learn,  we work for your justice.

For all who have no day to call their own, no day that speaks their worth and tells their story, may we know who we are in you—holy, blessed, and loved, Amen.

My wife and 7-year old daughter are sitting at the kitchen table right now reviewing worksheets that my daughter brought home from 2^nd grade today.  My daughter loves school.  Part of the reason for it may be that it seems to come pretty easy to her.  I don’t say that to brag, like she’s Will Hunting kind of smart.  I also don’t mean to say that she doesn’t work really hard.  She does.  But she really loves learning and exploring and discovering.  She’ll sit in her bed at night and just write about whatever.  In the middle of July she happily does math sheets.  All this to say, school is not hard for her, which means it’s not hard for us either.  Except on Monday nights when she brings home her work from the previous week and my wife, a 4^th grade school teacher, gets to asking her a few questions about why she didn’t capitalize the P in Pennsylvania, or why when the question says to give two facts about deserts, she gives only one followed by an op-ed piece about deserts.  Lately, this exercise in detail always results in my daughter bursting out into some kind of hysterical crying that is followed by ridiculous comments. A couple minutes ago I heard her say (while panting!) to my wife, “Why are you mad at me?  I had a sub last Tuesday!  She didn’t give us very good instructions!”  To which my wife of course said, “Honey, no one is mad at you.  I just asked you to correct this sentence so you’ll know how to get it right the next time.”  But I can tell my wife’s cool calmness isn’t working as hoped for.  My daughter is ramped up a particular level of adolescent ecstasy tonight.  Right now she is asking to have a minute to herself in her bedroom, to “gather my emotions,” she just told my wife.  “No, sit down and stop crying about this.  You don’t need to go to your room.”  This will go on for another 5 minutes at least.  My wife telling her to simply fix her p; my daughter telling her mother she doesn’t know why she’s mad at her and she needs to be alone; my wife telling her she’s overreacting, she’s not leaving the kitchen, it’s just a p.   I could walk out there from my spot here in the bedroom and tell them both that I think they need a break from one another, but that seems neither wise nor helpful.

I don’t know but I think what’s going down in my kitchen right now is the stuff covenants are made of.  As young as my daughter is and as old as my wife is, they both know that neither of them gets to decide on their own how this is going to end.  This isn’t a contract.  They didn’t agree on anything before it all started.  They got into it by virtue of one being the mother and the other, well, being her mother’s daughter.  On the one hand, my wife has experience enough to know that second grade worksheets aren’t going to do any permanent damage to their relationship.  My wife has already decided that no matter how much my daughter cries and says she wants to walk away, my wife is never going to walk away from her.  What my daughter doesn’t know of course is that this unrelenting love is her saving grace.  My wife isn’t feeling personally injured by any of this.  And yet my wife is feeling deeply pained for my daughter and what she doesn’t know how to let go of.  There is an absolute autonomy that can only be reconciled by an absolute mutuality—an agreement that even though they don’t know how to work this out, and even though they don’t actually know what it is that they are trying to work out, they will work it out, because their relationship not only depends upon them doing so, their relationship is defined by them doing so.

It’s too early still to tell how it will end but like all covenants its ending will simply be its beginning again.  Like going to church in search of answers and someone offers to show you to the nursery where the children are sitting on the floor happily passing Cheerios and making sure everyone has just 5.  Who convinced them that 5 is enough?  Such is the wonder of sacrament.  Tonight it may be a warm bath or a shared plate of cookies.  Hugs, that holiest of incarnations where parent and child get close enough to touch each other’s skin and wounds, will also be passed around.  And surely they will ordain one another all over again.  They will issue statements about how special and blessed the other person is.  They will say, you have a gift, you are a gift, you are my gift.  And finally, my daughter will no doubt fall asleep in bed next to her mother tonight.  She’ll stay there until I pick her up and move her into her own bed, from which she’ll get up tomorrow morning, happy to eat breakfast at the same table where her mother loved her the night before.