Just starting my weekly letters to you in that manner points to a problem which can trouble all priests: Because you are “beloved” and because over the years we have been together that reality has grown more and more in my heart for each of you, your deaths cut a deep wound in my heart. To write otherwise would be a lie. Truth be told, I love you too much too often. The bishop who ordained me to the diaconate told me: “Stephen, we know that everyone among whom we minister is going to die one day…without exception.” He continued, “Some people do not know that about themselves or those they love, but we clergy do know it and it touches every relationship we have with the people we serve.” Or more directly as Frank Turner often said, “None of us is getting out of here alive.” The bishop and Frank were right…death is a part of every life. To say that is to state a fact, not a morbid fact, just a fact. For us Christians we “believe life is changed, not ended” when death comes. Still, for those left behind the wounds death causes in our hearts are real and deep and require healing. Good grief weaves the healing.
Sometimes I wish I were a more detached priest…so that my heart would be less wounded and one could function with less of my maudlin manner at parish funerals. We are who we are. We have been together as priest and people for twenty years…years which have woven our souls and hearts into tight bonds. Your lives and your deaths, given the years together and the closeness of a small parish, matter to everyone who claims St. Thomas the Apostle as their parish church. We cannot go back and love one another less in order to avoid the wounds. Nor should we want contrived, antiseptic relationships. God has put us together for love and for that reason alone our common mortality, as our common vitality, touches each of us in this community of faith. If we insist on “welcoming” all comers, we also have to do the work of “letting go” all who leave us through death.
Remember, as I make myself recall, we are surrounded by a “great cloud of witnesses” here at this parish. Those who have gone before us and many of whom whose final ‘resting” places are in the church or garden make up some of those witnesses. Plus, for the newbie among us, the ceiling over us in church has written on it the names of many other “witnesses” whose names were put there during the reconstruction of the church by church members. We are always surrounded by their presence in a manner which we cannot see or know but which is, I believe, no less real than those surrounding us when we gather to worship any Sunday. We are all buried in Christ’s death in our baptisms. Our lives are hidden in Christ who has conquered death and given us the hope of everlasting life, taking away that awful sting of death. In that firm hope, we live on into God’s future.
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