Waking the Dead to Life

Morning Walk in Deep Run Park, Henrico, Virginia - January 1, 2024

Dearest Friend (and yes - that means you),

When you asked who I hoped you might be after I die, I couldn’t answer, even though it was the question to which I have woken many nights since October 8. The question that greeted me most mornings for the past eight weeks and walked beside me down the stairs on my way to make coffee and to add seed and suet and peanuts before the dark-eyed juncos and the tufted titmice and bluebirds and mourning doves arrived at the feeders. Like all the best questions, she didn’t really say anything. Never spoke her own name out loud. She simply walked beside me, wordless and kind, knowing that I knew she was there: my patient and compassionate companion. Waiting.

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And of course, your speaking her name out loud told me that she walks beside you, too. 

Who are you to be? And who, if you dared to speak it out loud, do you hope those you love to be?

It is the question, after all; and it’s going to take some time and a lot of back and forth, I think, to answer it honestly. And I hope we can begin to answer it honestly starting now. Because when someone you love dies or is dying, or even when it is you, yourself walking with more certainly towards death, well, it seems easier, I think, to take long, deep breaths, to count to ten, and to consider the question with a sense of calm urgency. Someday-out-there-in-the-amorphous-then becoming sooner-than-that gently but firmly invites us to turn our attention away from the tyranny of the false-urgency and toward the wonder of the truly-urgent. These losses and the prospect of these losses invite us not only to examine our lives with renewed courage and honesty, but also to walk beside those we love as they examine their own, and when asked, to offer our perspective.

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I have a friend who talks about  thoughts-in-progress. That suggests to me that if you were to stick a toothpick into my answer and then pull it out, there would be flecks of chocolate sticking to it. That’s what this is, I think. A darkened toothpick. But I don’t want to wait until the toothpick comes up clean before we start to answer this together, because I doubt that it ever will. Not completely clean.

Hear is how I would answer the question today.

More than anything in the world, my hope and my truest belief is that you will find yourself increasingly overwhelmed, not by your circumstances, not by your loss or your aloneness, but by your capacity to love. By your capacity to love who and what are lovable. By your capacity to love who and what are not lovable. By your capacity to love those who know you best and love you best and earn your trust each day and give you new and bigger jars when there is just no space left for even one more trust marble. By your capacity to love those who betray you on the regular and spend most days smashing your trust jars to pieces and cutting you with the broken glass. That you will fall asleep each night exhausted by having poured yourself into the world completely and without shame and without fear, and that you awake each morning refreshed and completely overcome by the depth and the fullness of the love within you, young and restless and just clawing to make its way back into the world where it once lived and has always lived. That love will become so much more than just a verb or a duty or a task to complete. That love will be what you must be. That love will be who you are. And that all you do will flow out of who you are and there will be absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.

Not much to hope for, is it? And yet, it’s more than just a hope. It’s the hope I am giving my whole heart to. It is the belief that gently taps my shoulder before you stir most mornings and the hope that leads me down the stairs and reminds me to look at the juncos and to feel the cold air on my bald head and to breathe in the aroma of the peonies on the kitchen countertop. The belief that you will be loved, that you will be love, and especially, that you will  know your own belovedness - not just in your head but deep, deep, deep - and even deeper than that - in your own heart. That you will more than know. That you will believe in the Kathleen Norris way of believing.  Anything less than that hope would be for me to distrust the naked now in which we find ourselves, and to distrust the path that brought us here, and worst of all, to lose faith in what is yet to be and to lose faith in God, our God, who is in all times and all places. Anything less than that hope is no hope.

Nick Cave, another spiritual mentor (I know, I know…) suggests that I am not alone in this hope.

On facing unimaginable loss, the deaths of two of his sons, he says:

I think (after such loss) you can turn your attention on to the world and in your own small way help other people in that respect, or help the world in some respect, whilst remaining true to the one that you lost. It’s not a zero-sum game. There’s no — I guess moving on is the wrong term, and the idea of closure is the wrong term… Acceptance, I find, is not an ideal term either, because that, to me, feels like a returning to the way things were before.

(Chris’s note: God forbid that we would ever return to the way things were before!)

And I don’t think you do. I think, in fact, we just grow in magnitude that’s predicated on those we lose. It’s an amazing thing. I say this with a huge amount of caution, obviously, because I’d love it to be the way it was, actually, and just have my children, obviously, right? But having said that, one feels an enormous and new capacity to love, I think. One can feel that way.

Stephen Colbert says it this way:

I learned to love the thing that I most wish had not happened.

Watch the whole thing if you dare.

I was talking to a friend this week, and together we considered all those who, in giving themselves away, willingly or not, had offered to us an enormous and new capacity to love, so much deeper than we could ever have imagined. Sit with that for a while (but be prepared to bleed). There are many, so many -  for me at least: Lopey and Abi and John and Jesus and too many others to count. And I wonder what it might look like simply to stop to consider this thing. This precious gift. And once we do consider it, how do we continue to live as we always have?

But here is the important part. I am not asking you to work to become love. I am not leaving you with an impossible task. I am not asking that you read better books of love or read better poetry or paint better landscapes. I am not asking that you write me love songs or read to me or give me wedding rings. None of that. I am hoping that you will - with neither effort nor striving - simply and fully and finally accept who you are and who you have always been, even before you had a name. That your lens will be wiped clean by this terrible loss, and that you will get a glimpse of, or even behold the one beholding you - and smiling. That you might more fully accept that you are beloved and all that is asked of you is to accept God’s morning mercies over and over and over and over again. As a friend says, that you simply let your yes grow (and grow and grow…).

I believe that once we know this truth by heart, the question, “How is God making his love known to us?” is answered in every single breath. In every bird and every leaf and every sunrise. And when that happens, when we know by heart that we are loved, we are free to marvel at our own ever-increasing capacity to love, and everything and everyone around us becomes yet another irresistible invitation to be love in a world that simply can’t get enough love, and a breathtaking invitation to be an icon pointing to the source of all love that animates our every breath. How I hope this for you, dearest friend. How I believe it.

Where will I be? I will be with you.

No. I really will. I will be with the source of that love who is and will be with you and so I will be with you. It’s the transitive property of with-ness. Of always with-ness. I have no doubt of this. 

I don’t know exactly what that will look like or sound like, but in my imagination, which might be where some of the deepest truth lies, you will see me in the blue jays and in the wispy clouds and in the cut flowers on the kitchen countertop. In my imagination, you will hear me in every version of Book of Love, but especially the Magnetic Fields version because it’s the best version and it’s not even close. In my imagination  you will remember me by the aroma of the ferns on a misty-dewy walk in the woods of summer. In my imagination you will feel me in the cool November breeze on your face and every time you sip a cup of coffee. I could go on and on.

 And each time you notice me with you, always with you, you will remember and know by heart that you are beloved and that you have nothing to fear. Not here or ever. And you will be overwhelmed. Again, not by your loss but by your capacity to let that love flow out through you, beloved one.

Oremus,

Chris

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You wake the dead to life by Rumi (Translated by Haleh Liza Gafori)

You wake the dead to life,
you fountain of grace,
you fire in thickets of tangled thought.

Today you arrived beaming with laughter—
that swinging key that unlocks prison doors.

You are hope’s beating heart.
You are a doorway to the sun.
You are the one I seek and the one who seeks me.
Beginning and end.

You greet need with generous hands.
You flood us with spirit,

rising from the heart,
lifting thought.

Rare one, you reveal the pleasure
of wisdom and practice.

Beyond these, what is there
but excuses and deceit?

We lust after the afterlife.
We stew over trinkets.
We stage battles between black and white.
Our ears are plugged with twisted delusions.

You carry the cure.

Silence!
I’m in a hurry. Leave the paper. Break the pen.
The cupbearer is here, jug in hand.

Meet us in the land of insight,
camped under ecstasy’s flag.