Guest Writer: Larry Burton, Life after Death

Guest Writer: Larry Burton, life after death

“So, what do you think about life-after-death?”

  As an Episcopal priest, I have heard that question, or others like it, more times than I care to count.  I’ve come to think that the Resurrection event may not cover the question of what happens when we die, like I would have thought it did.  “But,” a friend said, “that was Jesus.  This is me.”  Fair enough.

A group of us have been reading Frederick Buechner’s A Crazy, Holy Grace. Buechner, now 92, is a prolific author and theologian for whom many of us have great admiration. In part of this book he imagines a conversation with his grandmother who has been dead for more than forty years. She tells him that death is like stepping off a trolley car. Life does not stop but rather continues as a further deepening of understanding of God's grace and love. That imagined conversation stopped me in my tracks.

For most of my life as a theologian I have thought (and taught) something similar, but it was far more abstract, and ultimately not quite satisfying.  Buechner has his grandmother put humanity on my abstractness, and offers an image of continuity in God that, as I said, stopped me flat.  Did I believe what I had been teaching.  Yes.  No question.  But now the abstract has taken on a form that both challenges and delights. 

So, I had my own conversation with my preacher father and step-mother.  Both are dead.  But they were delighted to talk with me.  “Sorry you had to wait so long to understand,” Dad said after I told him about Buechner’s book.  (My father was a Buechner fan, and so he was clearly way ahead of me.  My step mother added her two cents worth: “I always thought suddenly I’d ‘get it,’ but it didn’t happen that way.  There are always new layers or new heights, and my heart!  My heart just continues to open wider and wider.”

My words in their mouths?  Or, their words in my mouth?  Buechner’s grandmother challenges her grandson, just as I am challenged.  Buechner’s major point is that memory can be an astounding portal into the wonders of God.  So, what do I think about life-after-death?  I am more convinced than ever that as a beloved child of God, access to the reality of God’s love is far more cosmic, mysterious, and wondrous than I had imagined.  It is more than Resurrection; it is a continuing transformation moving toward God’s very heart.

Larry Burton

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Frederick Buechner’s birthday was two days ago on Wednesday, July 11.

Sighs too deep for words

Sighs too deep for words

“Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” Romans 8:26

natalie collins   unsplash

Trent Palmer reminds us in a recent post about this Daily Lectionary reading from Romans how the Roman’s passage has changed his prayer life. He is trying to wait for the Holy Spirit to lead him in prayer, knowing that God is doing for all of us better than we can pray for or imagine ourselves.2 I need to hear this from The Daily Lectionary, Romans, The Book of Common Prayer, and Trent each week.

My prayers, especially for others, are a way to move out of the orbit I live in and know there is something going on greater than my mind, my feelings, my world, which is only a small piece of God’s world, perhaps like a grain of sand. But still, the God who loves us so much cares deeply about us, each grain of sand, each hair of our head, and loves us beyond what we can imagine. It is comforting to know that no matter what we pray for that the Spirit is there to guide our prayers. Sometimes I try to remember this by leaving a period of silence in prayer followed by a few signs of my own, hoping they will catch up with the sighs of the Holy Spirit!

I have friends who simply say to God, “I turn this day over to you for your care.” I admire them. It takes me more than ten words to turn over the day and those I care for and those I pray for. That is why intercessory prayer has become so important in my life. I aim for the shorter versions but for today I am praying in long division.

1Trent Palmer, “Morning Reflection” from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Fayetteville, Monday, July 9, 2018.

2“Prayer for those we Love,” Book of Common Prayer, p. 831.

Joanna   joannaseibert.com

Waiting for God

Waiting for God

 “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,

My eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvellous for me.

But, I have calmed and quieted my soul,

Like a weaned child with its mother;

My soul is like the weaned child that is with me.” Psalm 131

I come to early church with all the  concerns of the day and the  present week and the past week. I am not playing the harp because I am having difficulty putting in new strings for two that have recently broken. It is the first meeting for discernment for the Daughters of the King at St. Mark’s. We have a wellness forum during the adult formation hour that I have been working on.  There are some pages missing in the Eucharistic Prayer for the next service in the Altar Book.  I decide to go and sit at the back of the church and try to quiet the busyness about these concerns and more. The church is absolutely quiet.  The long green season hangings are more calming and  simplistic with a hint of the ornamental. The candles are lighted and flickering. The summer flowers are in honor of the mother of a friend.

 I am in a beautiful place built to bring us closer to God, but my head is still a mess. How can I see or taste a glimpse of the holy before the service starts? Must I wait for some moment during the liturgy, at the scripture, in the prayers, the sermon, the music, the Eucharist? I pray for guidance, actually for help. The message comes. Start intercessory prayers. You have not said your private prayers  this morning before church. Too busy. I start praying for those I am committed to pray for each day. If I know them, I imagine them with Jesus. Almost immediately, I feel that peace that passes understanding, a calm.

Time after time this is my experience. I begin to know a peace whenever I can get out of myself and my world and my concerns and send love to my neighbor by visiting, calling, writing, serving or a multitude of other ways, but especially in intercessory prayer.  I rarely know how these prayers affect those I pray for, but with each prayer, my mind and my body also take me to find Jesus as I try to connect others to that healing love.

Joanna joannaseibert.com