Death and Relationships

“We are given each other in trust. I think people are much too wonderful to be alive briefly and gone.” —Marilynne Robinson.

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When I talk with spiritual friends who have experienced the death of a loved one, I remind them that the God of my understanding does not give us an amazingly loving relationship with someone else and then abruptly take it away. Death is not a period at the end of a sentence but more like a comma. The relationship still goes on.

Our loved ones continue in relationship with us, but in a way that we don’t yet understand. We can sometimes feel their presence. We often intuit the reality of their prayers. Frederick Buechner has written in his book, A Crazy, Holy Grace (Zondervan, 2017), about doing active imagination with those we still love who have died. We can converse with them in the silence of our mind; but often we merely feel their presence, supporting and loving us just as they did when they were alive.

I also remind friends that those we love are now with us at all times—beside us—again, in some form we do not understand. When they were alive, we were present with them only when we saw them physically. They are now always with us in a closer relationship than we can explain.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Release party!!!!!!!!!!!

Come and get a signed copy of the new book

Just in time for the holidays

A Spiritual Rx for Advent Christmas, and Epiphany

The Sequel to A Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter

Both are $18

All Money from sale of the books goes either to Camp Mitchel Camp and Conference Center in Arkansas or Hurricane Relief in the Diocese of Central Gulf Coast

Seibert’s, 27 River Ridge Road, Little Rock, Arkansas 72227

10 to noon, Saturday September 14, 2019

RSVP joannaseibert@me.com

Gibran: On Children, Steady Bow, Smorgasbord

“Your children are not your children …

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You are the bows from which your children

as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

and He bends you with His might

that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies,

so He loves also the bow that is stable.”

—Khalil Gibran,“On Children” in The Prophet (1923).

This may be some of the best advice about relating to our children we can find. Parents are to be the steady or stable “bow.” Our children do not belong to us. They are the most important guests we will ever have in our home.

Another piece of wisdom came to us from a counselor, Phyllis Raney, who led a parenting class at our church. She told us our job was to provide the best smorgasbord of possibilities of experiences for our children to sample. What they choose, however, is up to them. We are to be the best possible providers of opportunities for them to experience; but we cannot control their decision as to what they become interested in.

We have three children, and as parents we had busy lives as physicians at a children’s hospital. We wondered how to give quality individual time to each of our children. At the birth of our second child, my mother-in-law gave me a book, Promises to Peter (Word Books, 1974), by Charlie Shedd. We read in it about taking each child out to dinner one night a week. We let the child choose the restaurant, within reason. So, one night a week, usually Monday, was “date night” with one of our children. It was a gift to concentrate on letting that child tell his or her story without distractions, and to appreciate how much you loved him or her.

We also went to many medical meetings each year and tried to take one child with us, again hoping to spend quality time one on one. This was one more offering on the smorgasbord.

Our children are older now with children of their own. It is easier to be the steady bow.

The steady bow image has now also become an image for our relationship for God. We learned about it as we tried to raise our children. Now it is teaching us more about how God cares for us. The smorgasbord has also become the image of the innumerable ways God has provided for us to learn more about this One who so loves us like a parent.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Release party!!!!!!!!!!!

Come and get a signed copy of the new book

Just in time for the holidays

A Spiritual Rx for Advent Christmas, and Epiphany

The Sequel to A Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter

Both are $18

All Money from sale of the books goes either to Camp Mitchel Camp and Conference Center in Arkansas or Hurricane Relief in the Diocese of Central Gulf Coast

Seibert’s, 27 River Ridge Road, Little Rock, Arkansas 72227

10 to noon, Saturday September 14, 2019

RSVP joannaseibert@me.com

Gould: Kindness

“Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoticed and invisible as the ‘ordinary’ efforts of a vast majority.” —Stephen Jay Gould in The New York Times (9/26/2001).

Dr. Reed Thompson, a man of great kindness

A longtime friend, Dr. Steve Thomason, Dean of St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle, sent out this nearly twenty-year-old Gould quote several months ago for all of us to consider. Humans seem unable to avoid being dualistic, viewing life as a well-balanced struggle between good and evil. In fact, it is difficult to avoid considering evil and failure and missing the mark to have the greater power and strength over us in our lives. We receive all “A”s but one “B” on our report card. We agonize and only remember the “B.” We remember only the one line we missed in our class play and discount the great lines we remembered. We obsess over our rejection letters rather than celebrating our college acceptance or new job promotion. We doctors think daily about the diagnosis we missed, and forget about the thousands we correctly made. We forgot to visit our friend the week or day before she dies, but in our grief we discount all the hundreds of other visits we made during her illness.

The morning, noon, evening, and late night news can seem overwhelming when we are hit with all the human tragedy, deaths, and violence. On a good day, perhaps there is one last thirty-second segment about someone’s kindness.

Gould, evolutionary biologist and historian of science, contends that the forces in the world are not evenly divided, and that reality is overwhelmingly composed of kindness, not evil. Gould believes the problem is that these acts of kindness are so small that they go unnoticed. Evil and failure stop us in our tracks, immediately get our attention, and blind us with their bright orange glare.

How can we put on a new pair of glasses and begin to see the world differently? That is the pathway to even more obvious acts of kindness. It begins with a small, simple step called gratitude. I have so many friends who survive unbelievable tragedy by making and reciting a gratitude list each day, most often at night before they go to sleep. I have spiritual friends who even send me their daily gratitude list. By their act, they are encouraging me to do the same.

Gould is challenging us to remember the kind acts we see constantly, especially when we feel overcome by some act of evil and begin to believe that darkness has overtaken our world.

Joanna joannseibert.com

Release party!!!!!!!!!!!

Come and get a signed copy of the new book

Just in time for the holidays

A Spiritual Rx for Advent Christmas, and Epiphany

The Sequel to A Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter

Both are $18

All Money from sale of the books goes either to Camp Mitchel Camp and Conference Center in Arkansas or Hurricane Relief in the Diocese of Central Gulf Coast

Seibert’s, 27 River Ridge Road, Little Rock, Arkansas 72227

10 to noon, Saturday September 14, 2019

RSVP joannaseibert@me.com