Elizabeth's 111th birthday

Elizabeth’s 111th birthday

“But Ruth said,

‘Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.’” Ruth 1:16

Young Elizabeth

In August we will celebrate my mother-in-law’s 111th birthday. She died when she was 81. Our church tradition remembers people on the day of their death. Our family still remembers those we love on their birthday. I think this is because we remember the ways we celebrated their birthdays, or maybe for some unknown reason their love, their presence seems  closer on their birthday. My daughter and one of our grandchildren are named for her. Elizabeth taught school, second grade, for over forty years. Her class was called Happy Town. I keep wondering if any of her thousands of students remember her. They do not know that August 30th is her birthday.

 I try to Google her to find out the exact day she died. I do not find her. There is no Google picture of her either. But my life was changed by knowing her, her acceptance of me, her love for her grandchildren.  There are so many saints like Elizabeth who changed people’s lives, many people’s lives, but are unknown to many. When Elizabeth died I remember asking her in my prayers to watch over our children like a guardian angel and I promised I would care for her husband she so loved, Bob who was left behind. Well, Elizabeth did a much better job of watching over our children than I did for caring for Bob.

Whenever our children were gone from home my prayers would be to Elizabeth to be with them. I truly know she was, reminding them in some way that they were loved, keeping them out of harm’s way.

I do feel her presence today, telling me that all shall be well, all shall be well.

My prayer is that others may remember the Elizabeth who taught them about unconditional love and once again know and feel that love.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com

On a Pallet

On a Pallet

“He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried; he descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead.” Apostles Creed

Bishop Jake Owensby of western Louisiana recently reminds us in his blog, Looking for God in Messy Places, about the line in the Apostles Creed where Jesus descended to the dead. (“Unbearable," Looking for God in Messy Places, July 1, 2018 jakeowensby.com) Bishop Owensby’s message is that our God goes to the places that seem like hell on earth to us. I also remember that our definition of hell is the absence of God. Perhaps the creed is telling us that even when we do not feel the presence of God, when life seems unbearable, God is still there.

When we are there in hell, when we feel unlovable, when our health fails, when our best friend dies, when depression lives not only in a cloud above us but flows in our bloodstream and in the synapses in our brain, this is a hard belief to remember.

This image of a loving, caring God must be written on our heart during times when we feel connected to God and live in what seems like heaven so that we  then can take it with us when our life descends into hell. This is still too hard. We cannot depend on ourselves to remember how much God loves us. This is why spiritual friends and community are so needed. This is why God calls us to community. When we become paralyzed with fear and loneliness and pain, we need spiritual friends to carry us on that pallet through the roof to God.  Otherwise life becomes too hard.

This is not the only answer, but it is the experience I have known best as my friends offer for me to be cared for by the God of love of their understanding until I again am connected to the God of love and compassion I once knew. Maybe more will be revealed.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com 

Clark Fork River and Love

The Clark Fork River and Love

“And so it is those we live with and should know who elude us, but we can still love them. We can love completely without complete understanding.” Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It. University of Chicago Press.

We are in Missoula, Montana, visiting our daughter, Joanna, and her husband, Dennis, with our oldest grandson, Mac, and his dad, John. Our hotel is right, I mean directly on the banks of Clark Fork, and the river is rapidly in real time running by our small porch on the first floor. We are mesmerized by watching the high-speed water, but it is the sound of the racing river that truly runs through us. It calms. It soothes. In its orchestral movement, it is peaceful. It sounds like a wind instrument, perhaps a distant native American flute.  Sometimes it has the “Om” sound that is chanted in yoga and eastern meditation. We begin to know the stillness of sitting or standing and just observing the wonder of something too magnificent for words go by. We can become so relaxed that we fall asleep.   Water, moving or still, has healing powers that we cannot understand.

I have watched Robert Redford’s movie, A River Runs Through It with all of our children and most of our grandchildren. We can often quote lines in the movie and answer back the responses to each other.   If you have not read the book or seen the movie, stop now because I am going to spoil it for you.

The story is about the Maclean family, a father and two sons, Norman and Paul, growing up fly-fishing in Missoula, Montana.  The words quoted today are near the end of the movie preached in one of the father’s last sermons. I could almost hear Norman’s father when we rode by that same brick Presbyterian church yesterday on the way to get ice cream.  The father is indirectly talking about Norman’s younger brother, Paul, who died an early traumatic death related to his addictions.

As I watch and listen beside the Clark Fork where the Macleans lived and loved a century ago, I think also of those I could not understand but wanted to love completely. My prayers today are to keep trying to hear these words by Norman’s father about them. Of course. there are also those I could not understand and never even wanted to consider loving the least bit, much less completely. I pray a little more to see them in a new light.  

Loving without understanding may be on the path to unconditional love, God’s love. Om.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com