This past Wednesday morning, riding in the car, Richard asked if I had any idea what I might say in my reflection for this Sunday morning. I said, “As I’ve been thinking about the past few months, what’s at the front of my mind is that my mom died in February and two good friends and colleagues, Allan and Gregg died in April, from COVID. Our lives on this earth come to an end, and none of us knows when that might be.” I went on the say, “And as I’ve been thinking about the deaths of these people I love, the last line from a favorite Mary Oliver poem* keeps coming to me: ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’ And then this other line from Psalm 90 has also been echoing in me: ‘God, so teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.’ That’s what I’m planning to talk about,” After a little pause Richard responded, “That doesn’t sound very upbeat.” His comment kind of took the wind out of my sails. So, for the next few days, I tried to figure out something else to reflect on this morning.
But I kept coming back to these loved ones who died, and to the words of Mary Oliver’s poem and of the Psalmist, and I knew that this is where the Spirit of God was speaking into my life right now. So I settled here and began asking: what is the Spirit wanting me to hear, to feel, to understand about myself, my life, my unconscious thoughts, my longings in relation to these losses? What am I wrestling with? How am I being changed and invited to grow?
Forty-three years ago, when I was just 21, I moved away from my family. My parents raised me to become the person that God created me to be. Of course, none of us had any idea where life and the Spirit might take me. When I was old enough to think independent thoughts about my future, I dreamed of moving away from my little town of Hudsonville where bike-riding on Sundays
*Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” https://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html, accessed August 8, 2020.
was forbidden, and we tried to hide all of our sinning from one another. I imagined I would move away to England and come home for visits wearing lovely hats. I don’t know where that came from. I hate hats. I just know I wanted more freedom, and greater independence for myself.
When I did move away, first to Arizona, then New York City, then briefly to Taiwan, then Jersey, then here to Kingston, it wasn’t easy for my folks, especially for my mom. She had imagined that I would get married, have some kids, maybe a career of some sort, but all within easy driving distance of her. Mom was always supportive of what I was doing, but it was a grief to her and a loss to both of that we lived far from each other. Over years we stayed connected through phone calls and visits. After my dad died and my mom got older, I imagined that I would retire and then spend more time with her, take her places she always wanted to go, help her make beautiful quilts, and just be together.
When she died in February, all of that slipped away. I can’t get back the years that we were physically distanced. I can’t call my mom or see her in the present. All kinds of things prompt me to think about her and to tell her out loud how much I love her and miss her. I am not only grieving the past and her absence in the present, I am grieving a future that I envisioned we would have. I have been feeling these layers of personal sadness, and also feeling all of the losses that have come with COVID—the deaths, the isolations, the loss of control and certainty, of work and steady income. Consciously or not we are all feeling loss.
I was raised to push through grief. Get busy. Get on with it. Don’t wallow. Don’t dwell on it. Sometimes, we do have to push through our feelings to do what must be done. But as a default mode of being, this is not healthy, and I’m realizing it’s a fairly big part of me.
I don’t like to feel sad. I’m good to be with others who are grieving, but not with myself. So in these weeks of COVID, even though I so miss the steady stream of people who are usually at the Church throughout the week, I miss all the interaction, but without all of this activity around me, I have been finding room for my grief. I have let myself sob more often than I have ever done in my life. I sometimes cry walking home from the experience of Sunday worship in a mostly empty sanctuary. And I am learning that when my life is once again busy and full of people, I have to hold this space and be more willing to share my grief and sadness with others. I need this for my own well-being and for the health of my relationships.
When I got word that my friend Allan, a minister and professor of theology, had died, my response was, “he can’t die, he’s in the middle of all kinds of important projects.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized how ludricrous it was to say this. People die all the time in the middle of all kinds of unfinished business. As I have reflected on this response, I have seen my unconscious mind. I’ve seen it before and I know it is deeply entrenched in me. I have this kind of magical and false thinking that if you just stay busy, if you are doing matter-full things, if you are needed, if you are productive, then you just can’t die. And at some deeper, daily existential level, (not just in relation to physical death), I recognize my busyness as a way to avoid ego death, a way I work to achieve a fuller sense of self-worth and value.
This week as I was reflecting on death and grief, the Spirit gave me this line from Mary Oliver’s poem: ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?’ and invited me to re-hear it. To listen again. Because what I automatically hear is: “Don’t waste your life, your time, your talents. Get busy. Press on.” Which is the opposite of what Oliver is saying. Her question comes at the end of a poem describing a day she has spent strolling through the fields, watching a grasshopper with “enormous and complicated eyes” eating sugar from her hand; a day she has spent amazed by all the life around her, a day she has spent “being idle and blessed.” And Mary Oliver spends her day this way exactly because, as her poem says—at last, everything dies, and too soon.
And this week the Spirit gave me the Psalmist’s words: “God, so teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom,” to remind me that I wasn’t created to spend my wild and precious life being busy and productive. A wise heart isn’t in a hurry, but takes time to see and cherish the intricate beauty of all the wild and precious life that surrounds me. And a wise heart takes time to grieve because life is precious, and tears are the fruit of love. And a wise heart rests, really rests in knowing that all life comes from God and all life returns to God. So I pray, “God teach me to number my days that I may receive the wisdom of your heart.” I’m a pretty slow learner when it comes to this stuff. But the Spirit of God is a patient and persistent teacher.