Burton: Life After Death

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

Guest Writer: Larry Burton

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 ninety-two, 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 beloved grandmother who has been dead for more than forty years. She tells him that death is like stepping off a trolley car. Life doesn’t 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 stepmother. 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 stepmother 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

Frederick Buechner’s birthday is today, July 11.

Lamott: Prayer

“So prayer is our sometimes real selves trying to communicate with the Real, with Truth, with the Light. It is us reaching out to be heard, hoping to be found by a light and warmth in the world, instead of darkness and cold. Even mushrooms respond to light—I suppose they blink their mushroomy eyes, like the rest of us.”

—Anne Lamott in Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers (Hodder & Stoughton, 2001).

When spiritual friends are having difficulty praying, we talk about our present prayer life and what kind of prayer discipline has helped in the past. We discuss the multitude of ways to pray: walking and praying, praying in silence, using prayer books, Ignatian prayers, Centering Prayer, prayer with beads, praying in color, praying the hours.

Anne Lamott’s book, Help, Thanks, Wow, is a realistic, humorous, short down-to-earth discourse on praying with three subject lines: giving thanks, asking for help, and praising. The book is filled to the brim with simple “one liners” to remember and guide us through the day. One of my favorites is, “If one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.” Another is, “The difference between you and God is that God never thinks he is you.” She reminds us that gratitude is not lifting our arms and waving our hands on television but rather picking up trash, doing what is required, reaching out to others in need. When we breathe in gratitude we breathe it out.

Lamott’s section on “Wow” likens that kind of prayer to a child seeing the ocean for the first time. I still remember standing just inside the National Cathedral as a group of fifth graders walked in. I will not forget one small boy who looked up at the high, vaulted gray stone ceilings and exclaimed: “WOW!” These are upper-case wows. There are also lower-case wows, such as getting into bed between clean sheets. Lamott suggests that poetry is “the official palace language of Wow.” She also reminds us of C. S. Lewis’ view of prayer, that we pray not to change God, but to change ourselves.

My experience is that Lamott always stimulates us into new practices of faith or reminds us about those we have forgotten that can make all the difference.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

MLK: Finding Image of God

“Within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation who hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every person and see deep down within what religion calls ‘the image of God,’ you begin to love in spite of. No matter what the person does, you see God’s image there.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., in “Loving Your Enemies,” sermon at Dexter Ave. Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, 1957.

I once worked with another physician whom I thought totally incompetent. I thought the decisions she made did not make any sense and were not helpful. She often talked almost in riddles, trying to look at many sides of a question—while I already thought there was an obvious answer that, beyond question, was right. She was amazingly slow to make any changes.

Then one weekend I had to do her job when she was on vacation. Overnight I realized why she behaved as she did, the magnitude of her responsibility, and the constant number of real and imagined problems presented to her. I walked in her shoes, and it made all the difference.

Putting myself in her place did lead me to see God’s image in her as well as in so many others I was having difficulty understanding.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com