Sunday Drive: The Lord's My Shepherd

The Lessons Appointed for Use on the

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

Today's readings from the Episcopal Lectionary speak to me in a special way; but today I wish to focus on another reading.

Yesterday, September 19th, was the fourth anniversary of the funeral of H. M. Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey, which was broadcast and streamed worldwide to billions of viewers.  It was deeply moving for me, and I particularly liked the rendition of the 23rd Psalm from the Scottish Metrical Psalter, set to the tune Crimond.  It was a favorite of the Queen's, who was raised by a Scottish nanny, who later served as her dresser (lady's maid) for many years.  

The Queen's Christian faith was the bedrock of her life and long reign, as she expressed many times in her annual Christmas broadcasts to her peoples around the world.  Here is the Psalm as performed at the funeral by the  Choir of Westminster Abbey:

The 23rd Psalm is, of course, deeply meaningful to all Christians, and is frequently used in funeral services.  It is dear to my heart because I learned it by heart in kindergarten at a Christian school, and it has comforted me through all the sad or lonely or grieving times of life.  And in my mind, it ties in with another comforting passage from the New Testament:

My grace is sufficient for thee: 

for My strength is made perfect in weakness.

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Sunday Drive: Amazing Grace

'Twas grace that brought me safe thus far,

And grace will lead me home.

The beloved hymn, sung a cappella by six Irishmen known as Celtic Thunder in 2010:

The Lessons Appointed for Use on the Feast of the

First Sunday after Christmas Day

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It's a Wonderful Life: The Real Bedford Falls

Distinguished journalist Ted Koppel takes us to the town that may have inspired the setting of that wonderful movie.

I think of it not so much as a Christmas movie as an inspirational one. Your Head Trucker saw this film in the student union theater during my first term at a big university, nearly half a century ago. Mine was not the typical college experience:  I was broke, friendless, and terribly homesick for a place I could never return to. But the quiet inspiration of Frank Capra's magnum opus gave me comfort and lit the way ahead; it was the grace of God that I needed in that lonely time. I am still grateful for that.

When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on tight.  When you come to the dark tunnel of despair, go through it -- and at the other end, you will find Hope.  

Keep on; do what you can.  Your life matters more than you know.

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Sunday Drive: Amazing Grace

What grace is meant to do is to help good people, not to escape their sufferings, but to bear them with a stout heart, with the fortitude that comes through faith.

--St. Augustine, The City of God

Alan Jackson, one of the grand old men of country music, sings the one hymn that it seems every American knows and loves, believers and unbelievers alike.  It seems particularly fitting today.

For the record, a frigid blast has settled over the land.  The wind chill here was 14 when I got up this morning.  It will turn even colder overnight.  Florida's doing all right, though.  Figures.

Click to enlarge.

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Sunday Drive: Over the Rainbow

 -- where bluebirds fly,

dreams come true, and

what was lost is found.

Comet.

Planet.

The pictures show us as we were nearly twenty years after we were young lovers.  By that time, we both had been through great suffering of mind or body, and we both had loved and buried other husbands.

Our love was joyful; our parting was painful in the extreme.  But he had to be true to his nature, and I to mine.  He loved to be on the road, I loved to be at home; it just couldn't work.  So we lived the lives we needed to live, and took the consequences.  We both were right, we both were wrong.  Passionate love is a sweet and bitter cup.

But perhaps it simply had to be that way, to teach us both the lessons we needed to learn.  (And the lesson is repeated until it is learned.)

Yet somehow, by different long and winding orbits, we have come face to face again, across the worlds.  Loved.  Understood.  Forgiven.  At peace with each other, and more besides.  A knowing:  don't ask me to explain.

I've learned a great deal in just the last two weeks, which I couldn't begin to describe here on the Blue Truck - about myself, about Karl, about love and life and other people too.  Believe me when I tell you, it's been a completely unexpected, unsought epiphany - a strange and wonderful gift.  

In the only grammar and vocabulary I know, grace has happened, and made a change in me:  I once was blind, but now I see.  Probably nothing you would notice on the outside, but within, an ineffable healing that words can hardly express.  Some kind of enlightenment.  And quiet happiness.

So I'm just going to sit with it now and ponder these things, rejoicing.  Alleluia.  

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Sunday Drive: Peace Prayer

I am posting Sunday Drive a day early this week, in hopes of encouraging all my truckbuddies and visitors to take a little time out from the usual weekend routine to reflect on just what we are called to be and do in this bewildering life.

Today is All Souls' Day, known in the Episcopal Church as the Commemoration of All Faithful Departed, a twin feast of All Saints' Day. As Forward Movement puts it, "This is a good time to remember the unspectacular children of God: those whose Christian witness may have been weak or faltering, but who are still very dear and important to God and to us."

It is a good time to remember and give thanks for all those "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love," done by those we love but see no longer, that have fostered, comforted, encouraged, and sustained us throughout our lives.

It is also a good time to recall, as someone has said, that "Though we cannot all do great things, we can all do small things with great love."  And that makes all the difference, doesn't it?

By sheer coincidence, this weekend marks ten years of M.P.'s residence in this little bungalow, and twelve years of our friendship, which has given us both abundant occasions to practice those not-so-small things - along with forgiveness and patient forbearance, as need may be - and for which we are very thankful.

Your weak and faltering Head Trucker has long been fond of the Prayer for Peace, so appropriate for the present age, which beautifully summarizes the actions of love and grace, and recalls to my forgetful mind my duties in this life.  Here it is movingly sung by John Michael Talbot:

Sunday Drive: Amazing Grace

If you haven't heard the eulogy for the Rev. Senator Clementa Pinckney that President Obama gave on Friday, do listen to it below. It is one of the finest presidential speeches ever made, an elegant, apt, historic statement about race, grace, and America that will be remembered long after you and I are dust, my friends.

Two Prayers Answered

Sometimes grace happens, against all odds.  Oklahoma City, yesterday:

"I Came Out First to God"

Andrew Sullivan on faith, honesty, and grace:



Part of a longer interview at Big Think on blogging, politics, religion, and gayness - worth watching in its entirety.

Unexpected Meeting

Maundy Thursday

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, "Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.

My religious history is a long and winding road, from my christening at the age of six months down till now:  a story much too tedious to relate in one sitting, and of no use or interest to anyone but me.  Nor has it been a casual stroll down a blossom-covered lane; rather, times without number it has seemed a stony, uphill path leading only to Calvary.  As C. S. Lewis phrased it, I have "learned my driving in a hard school"; though whether anything I have learned can be of the slightest help to anyone else, I cannot possibly say.  I can only share and relate what has happened in this obscure life of mine, for whatever it may be worth to anyone else, and that is probably not much.

And I can speak only in Christian terms, because that is the only religious grammar and vocabulary I know.  Though I have come to realize at this late age that God is bigger than the Church, and bigger than the Bible; inconceivably bigger than we can comprehend:  a mystery, a joy, a boundless love at the heart of things I can in no way define but merely affirm.

Tonight I will share with you my Maundy Thursday story; and all I can do is tell it, not explain it. 

Continued after the jump . . .

Four Years

First anniversary, November 2000

Four years ago tonight, at right about 9 p.m., I saw my husband alive for the last time. As we always did, I kissed him goodbye at the door when he left to go practice the organ at church for the next day's Sunday service. I'm glad we had that custom. You never know when the last kiss, the last touch, the last look will come.

I checked my email, surfed the Internet for a while, finally had a midnight snack of cake and milk and went to bed about 11:30, watching an old movie on TV. Cody wasn't home when I drifted off to sleep before midnight, but that wasn't unusual; he was a professional musician, that organ was his glory, and he often practiced 3 or 4 hours before coming home, so I expected he'd be back when he was done.

Usually I wake up momentarily at least once or twice in the night, sometimes to make a bathroom run, but that night I fell into a deep sleep and was conscious of nothing at all until morning. At five minutes to seven, long before the alarm was due to go off, I suddenly opened my eyes for some reason. I looked at the clock. I looked at Cody's empty half of the bed, obviously untouched. And I knew something was terribly wrong.

I stumbled into the living room - perhaps he came home and fell asleep on the couch? No, not there. His car was not in the driveway. The porch light was still on. Groggy, unable to focus my thoughts, I couldn't quite figure why he wasn't home. I called the church, knowing he could hear the phone ring in the choir room. No answer. How strange.

I pulled on some jeans, my boots, a sweatshirt, and drove my truck over to the church, less than 2 minutes from the house. There was his car, parked by the choir room door. I got out, pounded on the locked door. No response. It was cold and overcast, with a light mist falling, the sky was gray like the jacket I was wearing. My mind was still in a fog; I couldn't figure out why he would stay there all night, why he wouldn't answer the phone or come to the door. I walked around and tried the public entrance on one side of the church. Locked. I walked around the building and tried the other big door. That was locked too. It made no sense.

I walked back around and stood there staring stupidly at the choir room door, wondering what to do, the cold mist falling silently on my hair, my face, speckling my jacket. I hadn't brought a cell phone with me. I was about to decide to get back in the truck and go to the house and call somebody when I heard someone calling my name. I turned and saw a little old lady who lived a couple doors down from the church, walking up to meet me. She had noticed Cody's car there and was wondering about it too. I told her he hadn't come home last night, and she offered to go back to her house and call the preacher to come unlock the church, which I was grateful for.

I sat in my truck and smoked a cigarette, maybe two, and by that time the preacher was there, pretty quick but it was a very small town. She unlocked the main door, and we walked into the sanctuary. From the back row, we could see Cody sitting slumped over in the big red bishop's chair next to the organ. The preacher hugged my shoulders for a moment, then went to her office to call an ambulance. I walked on up the aisle alone, up the chancel steps, and knelt in front of the chair, holding my darling man gently in my arms, speaking softly, telling him how much I loved him.

No response. Cold. Stiff. Gone.

It is very hard to describe the shock to the mind when you realize that this person, this warm, living, breathing human being that you love oh so dearly, is now a thing - like a log, a stone, a fencepost. Not moving. Not seeing. Not feeling. A thing, not a man.

It must have happened quickly; a comforting thought later. His music books and organ shoes were sitting neatly on the bench, as if he had just walked in and set them down. He was sitting very neatly, very naturally, just as you would if you had just sat down in that chair, feet on the floor, one hand resting on his leg. But the other arm was hanging off the chair, and his upper body was leaning in that direction too. It must have hit him, the heart attack, just after he placed his books on the organ bench; perhaps he felt a little odd, and sat down to take stock of himself. And then he was gone.

Now of course it was a great loss to me, and many others. But when all that is taken into account, what a good, good death he had. There in the heart of the church he had devoted his whole life to, only a few steps from the altar, in the shadow of the great golden cross suspended overhead - and next to his beloved organ, which he so loved to play, and with which he had touched many, many hearts with magnificent sacred music for decades.

What better place, what better way could there be to go - if you have to go?

I wept a lot, of course, in the days that followed. But for me. Not for him, knowing my darling man was beyond all tears - forever. Gone home so quickly, quietly, easily. No agony, no lingering, no dread, no fear. What a blessing for him. For anyone.

Blessed are the merciful; for they shall be shown mercy.

I've written before about Cody and me here and here. A favorite of his:

Sunday Drive: Grace Happens

"Wherever You Are" by Mary Chapin Carpenter

Cody, 1998

My sweet cowboy

We met online ten years ago tonight. From a thousand miles away, his voice came through the wire like a warm rain, a familiar embrace, an old friend. A lifeline; I was sad and alone, drowning my sorrows and running out of gas on a dark and unfamiliar road. We both had loved and lost, tragically so; not much reason remained for going on.
 

But somehow, against all odds, we found each other in the darkness; we held on tight, and we never let go. Tonight, all those years ago, my life and his changed for better, for worse--forever. Oh yeah, we had our ins and outs like every couple; as my mama used to say, you have to take the bitter with the sweet--but the good parts were very, very good. We fit together, like a pair of comfortable old boots. After so many false starts, so many dead end roads, finally--finally--we found the way home.

We had five years together; a great loss, a big big hurt when he died, all unexpected. But some people never get that much. I'm glad we did.

So what was the point of all that? Perhaps just this: in a very needed way, it healed me, it healed him; two lost, lonely travelers pulled out of the bar ditch, put back on the pavement. Grace.

We were brought together in that time and place for a reason, no one can tell me different. How and why, I can't say, can't explain. All I know is this: grace happens. It just does, sometimes, some places, some people now and then, and that's all the theology I'm sure of anymore.

Grace happens. When and where are not of our choosing. Road maps and explanations not provided; we have to figure it out on our own, learn to enjoy the gift of this particular moment, every moment we are given in this short, short life. And give what you have to give, without holding back. With all your heart.

Even the smallest kindness counts. That's why you're there; to do that small deed of love, of grace.

Gratitude; gracias; grace. Something you just have to live through to understand.