Sermon: Casting Out Fear

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Casting out Fear

By Charles Rush

December 9, 2007

[ Audio (mp3, 5.8Mb) ]

friend of a friend put me in touch with a guy that is only a few years older than me. He had been married for 20 something years when he gets a call one day on business that his wife has been in a car accident. They wanted him to know that she was in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. By the time he gets back to New York, makes his way to the hospital, he is met by a couple neighbors and some hospital staff. They take him to a room and they tell him that his wife is dead. She had been out jogging and a kid hit her with her car. It didn't seem that serious at first but she must have hit her head on the ground hard enough and that was that…

He had them repeat the story for him a few times… The girl that hit her was in High School… a cell phone may or may not have been involved… and yes, the child was very shaken up by the whole thing. It was so surreal, so random, that he didn't actually have much of a response. He said it was like a training exercise that they did in the military when you are responding to an emergency. Despite the imminent threat, you just keep doing one thing after another to try and control the situation.

He called his kids at college and got his daughter out of High School. He got all of his kids home, made sure they were each okay. His wife was one of those women that everyone knew, so all kinds of people came out of the woodwork to help him take care of the details for the funeral. And the funeral was very moving as his wife was very involved in the community. And then, there came the day when everyone was gone.

I asked him what that first holiday was like which he couldn't really answer because it was too soon after his wife had died. For that first couple months, he kept going through his normal routine, more or less, drinking more when he drank and drinking more often than he would normally. It helped him to sleep.

Somewhere in that time frame though, ordinary things began to cause him anxiety. It started with his wife's car, a vehicle that he had never driven. He had to move it around a couple times and all her stuff was in it, just little stuff, like pens and receipts. But it made him overwhelmingly sad, scared, confused. Sometimes he just stood there in the garage looking at the car but he wouldn't get in it.

That same feeling happened again around his house, places that had been emotional anchors in his life, suddenly filled him with vertigo, especially at night, when his daughter was asleep and he was alone. It would come up in waves like a panic attack. Rationally, he had decide that it was important for his kids to stay in the house but this very place was suddenly a risky place to be.

Somewhere in this time frame, he started having these dreams that he was a child again and he was going to the playground with his family. And there were all these people at the playground, all these families that were playing and milling around. At some point, people started leaving and he noticed that they were leaving. But try as he might, he couldn't find his people in the crowd… He would look… and then wake up completely awake and in a panic.

Sometimes he told me that he would wake up, get call the limo company, go to the airport and just get on a flight. He traveled a lot on business anyway, and he could hastily make the arrangements for his daughter. His family thought he was on business like usual. He would call his partners, just leave a message that he was out for a couple days, and go. They didn't know what to do, except to say 'Do what you need to do'.

Off he would go, doing what he didn't say exactly, and I didn't ask. But usually after just a couple days, he would decide that he had a real life back in New York and he would come back home. Part of it, he didn't entirely understand, and he was a surprise to himself. Part of he, he said, was just trying to feel something- what that was he couldn't exactly say. This went on for a few months.

And the next year, when two of his kids were in college and one was just out, one of his daughters suggested that they all go away for Christmas, he thought that was a great idea. And that is what they did. What the future holds, he doesn't yet know. He is just different now. I love the way men describe these things, "I'm just different"… not a lot of detail there.

The difficult part of death is the existential dimension that is day in and day out. Joni Mitchell has that haunting line in one of her early songs, "The bed's too big… The frying pan's too wide." It is all these very small, concrete things that we touch and feel throughout the day that ground us and keep us grounded in being who we are. I knew a couple- wonderful wife, difficult husband… One of their friends said, "She hugs him into reality". What a great line. And how powerful and profound are those simple, everyday hugs.

If you are blessed to be part of a family that has really solid traditions that bring people together in a positive way, it is funny how those very same traditions can become jarring when you are forced to live without a spouse, a sibling, God forbid a child, that has always been part of these traditions. Add to this the overwrought Muzak that is ubiquitous in retail shopping stores, the endless loop that promotes light-hearted seasonal cheer- "I've brought some corn for popping/let it snow/let it snow/let it snow"- the option for sleeping through the season is certainly understandable.

Curiously, our texts, our biblical tradition actually does not promote that light-hearted seasonal cheer. Curiously, when these prophets and angels actually speak about the real reason for the season they have a special word for you who grieve. I remember the day my sister-in-law died. I just drove straight down to be with my brother. He is a big guy. Tough guy -- a wrestling champ. It was like 4 in the morning the night after she died, I hear something. I go down stairs and he is already awake. He was so afraid. Confused… just worried. It was like we were 5 and 3 again. He's my little brother. I used to wrap his blanky around him so he wouldn't be so scared of the dark. It was like special protection. Here he is a grown man and this is way, way worse than when we were kids. That kind of worry is cruddy, just awful.

And this is the line of hope that the prophet Zechariah spoke of "By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us/ to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death/ to guide our feet into the way of peace." Forget the canned crap music, this is what is really real. This is what we need. We need someone to hug us back into hope and meaning. We need tender mercy. Amen.