Nouwen: Death

Nouwen: Death

When we lose a dear friend, someone we have loved deeply, we are left with a grief that can paralyse us emotionally for a long time. People we love become part of us. Our thinking, feeling and acting are codetermined by them. When they die a part of us has to die too. That is what grief is about: It is that slow and painful departure of someone who has become an intimate part of us. But as we let go of them they become part of our "members" and as we "re-member" them, they become our guides on our spiritual journey.”

Henri Nouwen August 26, 2018, Henri Nouwen Society, Daily Meditation, from Bread for the Journey, August 26, HarperOne 2006, henrinouwen.org

my grandfather and his 20 siblings. He is standing 4th from our right

The God of my understanding does not give us a person we love deeply and then let that relationship end with the death of that person. Ours is a God of love. The love from that companion we so deeply cared about is still there with us. Love never dies.We are still in relationship with that person but in a way we do not understand. Their love does not stop. Our love for them does not stop. Death is not a period at the end of a sentence, but more like a comma.

Sometimes when we bring to memory events and ordinary and special times with the person we loved, we will also feel their presence and their wisdom. We can still talk to them in this new relationship that is still a mystery. Nouwen believes that we sometimes can be even more intimate in this relationship than in life. It is their love that we feel. Love is what continues and never dies.

Some people find it helpful to wear a piece of jewelry or clothing as a physical reminder of a relationship that is now spiritual. Our loved ones are now in some way always present with us while in life they were only present when they were physically with us.

The grief recovery work that we have been involved with for at least twenty years called Walking the Mourner’s Path believes that one of the most helpful ways to stay in relationship with our loved one is to do something to honor the relationship we had. Amazing transformations have occurred. People have started suicide prevention programs, built walking trails, written books, developed new careers in helping professions, built halfway houses for those in recovery, given land where their loved one died to habitat for humanity.

For myself, I returned to church and stopped smoking when my Grandfather Whaley died to honor him.My grandfather’s love cared for me while he lived and saved my life even in death. I still feel his presence today even almost forty years since his death, and especially as I write about him this morning and now send that love on to my own grandchildren.

Joanna. joannseibert.com

4 Opportunities to purchase this book for Lent and have it signed.

Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Gulf Shores Alabama Saturday 10 to 2 February 23 and Sunday February 24
Wordsworth Books, Little Rock, Saturday March 2, 1-3 pm

St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Narthex after 8 and 10:30 services on March 3 and March 10

Proceeds from this book go for Hurricane Relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast

Merton: Epiphany

Merton: Epiphany

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” Thomas Merton

This is the first line of Thomas Merton’s famous mystical revelation and epiphany in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, described in his 1968 journal about the world of the 1960’s, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. pp. 140-142.

Merton had been a Trappist monk now for seventeen years and was on an errand for the monastery in the middle of an ordinary day on March 18, 1958. The story becomes so famous that the city of Louisville erects a plaque at the site in 2008 at the 50th anniversary of Merton’s revelation. Ordinary people and popes continue to visit the corner of Fifth and Walnut that was life changing for Merton and for those who read his works.

Merton’s experience seems similar to what James Finley describes in Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God as “having a finger in the pulse of Christ, realizing oneness with God in life itself.”

This experience may also be similar to what St. Francis realized in nature when he called the sun his brother and the moon his sister. Richard Rohr calls it finding our True Self, “our basic and unchangeable identity in God.” 1

Methodists might relate it to John Wesley’s experience at 8:45 pm on May 24th, 1738, at a Society meeting in Aldersgate Street when someone read from Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to Romans and Wesley says, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.”2

1 Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation,” Richard Rohr Meditation: “Thomas Merton Part II,” October 6, 2017

2 John Wesley, Journal of John Wesley, Charles H. Kelly, London, 1903, p. 51.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Home by Another Road

Home by Another Road

‘Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.” Matthew 2:12

The Epiphany readings from January 6th still ring in my ears. The wise men are told to return home by another road or way. In this new year what is the other road we may be asked to take? I keep hearing Scott Peck whispering that it is The Road Less Traveled. Barbara Brown Taylor also must have been intrigued by this message. She named one of her books of sermons, Home By Another Way. My spiritual director, Bridget, tells me the road for the wise men was away from Herod, away from power. Even more specifically it was away from corrupt, sinful power.

The wise men were going back home to the east. Facing the east is the rising sun. When I have not been able to sleep, I have often sat outside and watched the sun rise. Whatever has been troubling me frequently seems manageable. As I see the sun rise, light comes out of darkness, and I know it is a new day and I am enveloped with forgiveness and love for myself and for others. We do not need to stay in the darkness that has consumed us, but we learn a great deal about ourselves in darkness. We have been promised a new day where things will become brighter, clearer, where we are given another chance by a God who never ever gives up on us. We are called out of the darkness that has been festering inside of us into the light outside of ourselves. This light then illuminates the light inside of us, the light of Christ within us.

I am spending each day this year in prayer about what and where is the new path home I am being offered and asked to journey on.

My spiritual director suggests it may be more fruitful to start by considering what the road is moving away from.

This is beginning to sound more like a good Lenten discipline.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com