The Empty Seat at the Table
By Charles Rush
November 30, 2008
Isaiah 40: 1-5
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(mp3, 2.9Mb) ]
mfort, Comfort My People”… words that are among the most elevated in all scripture. And they are more so when you consider the sum total of human suffering down the long course of history.
As a colleague of mine noticed recently, when he reflects on
the breadth of suffering and scope of ignominy that so many people have endured,
he is surprised anyone ever expected a positive answer to the question of justice on this side.
Jesus taught us that the Kingdom of God will be like a
wedding feast. It is like our family reunions only everybody will be there (at
each of our family reunions, usually when you go to make the photo, you notice
who is missing from last year), more than that they will all be healed (all of
our families are so funky, odd, and full of problems). What would that look
like for us all to be healed and for us all to be healthy? It is actually
beyond the scope of our imagination but it very positive and hopeful.
“Comfort, Comfort My People”, these are the first words we
read in Advent, and how appropriate they are for a holiday weekend. Often it is
precisely going through the family rituals of the season that you notice what
is missing, who is missing. The joke that is not told, perhaps the song that may
even be thankfully not sung, but it is not sung for better and worse.
No, on its good days death leaves
most of us battered up quite a bit, and that is when it is uncomplicated. That
is when you have been blessed to love and respect the person you grieve, that
is when the person who has died is really a role model. You have a profundity
of sorrow that corresponds to a life that blessed you and loved you into
becoming who you are. That is hard enough.
But death is usually more complicated than that. Death is
stressful on families. It is not always the integrated unity that you wished it
should be. Hurtful things are said. There is sometimes disagreement on a plan
of treatment. It is more stressful than is generally realized. I'm waiting for
the paper to be written on the subject. Anecdotally, I would guess that
something like 15% of families begin to fray after the death of both parents.
Essentially, when the generation changes over, about 15% of the time, one of
the siblings of the generation will withdraw and have virtually no more contact
with their extended family- it is a phenomenon that also takes people by
surprise, partly because scores are being settled from so long ago and partly
because of the emotional intensity of the entire episode. Comfort is precisely
what is missing for reasons too complicated to detail. Comfort is elusive and
difficult to embody for many families.
And death comes at us in layers to boot. At the same time, an
internal dialogue with yourself- “I'm still here, let's get a move on”. And
that conversation with yourself varies entirely as you move further down that
one way escalator of time.
“Comfort, comfort my people” takes on a personal immediacy
the older you get.
And most of the time, it is just complicated in our extended
families. Just as we were taught to pray in the Episcopal liturgy it is ‘things
done' and things left undone'. Ways that we got the blessing,
and things we wished had happened and never did. Things that
we are grateful to pass on to the next generation and personal traits that come
to an end with this generation hopefully.
We honor what we can and we should. We light a candle for
that. And sometimes it is important for us to light a candle and recommit
ourselves to a new and different direction than we inherited from the past
because that is the healthier thing for us to do. That is a form of honor too.
The characteristic feature of grief is that it cycles back
around in different ways over time, perhaps more subtle, but they are still
there, and often profoundly so in our lives. It is funny just hearing a song on
the radio with the autumn leaves falling can take you right back to a moment from thirty years
ago, like it happened last week. It is just woven into the tapestry of our
lives spiritually.
So we come to light a candle in someone's honor, for a lot of
different reasons, but take them all together, to bless and be blessed. And we
put them in the bays of the stained glass windows to remind us that we really
are encompassed about by loved ones and saints. We release the blessing around
us.
In the movie ‘Field of Dreams' Ray Kinsella
starts hearing strange whispers in mid-life, as the ‘other world' starts
talking to him in his ordinary world. The actual line that he hears is so
wonderfully mid-life, “If you build it, he will come”. He has no idea what it
means…
His zany wife encourages him to follow the message in an off beat spiritual quest that takes him back to baseball in
the twenties and a circuitous journey of self-exploration about his past and
the father that was absent from his actual childhood, about the baseball that
he never really got to play. Honor and memory work together like that and the
point is that the touching need to be blessed is matched by our longing to be a
blessing. And some of the most profound parts of ourselves
are really quite simple. I give you the closing scene of the movie…
© 2008
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved.
