First
Presbyterian Church
Jamestown,
New York
12
March 2008
Lenten Lessons
The
Rev. Mary L. Krahn
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Lent Came Early
Lent
came early --
in September.
Standing
at my father’s grave,
freshly turned earth at my feet,
I
learned a Lenten lesson
again, for the first time:
Surely,
and perhaps too soon,
I shall return to dust.
The
life that lies deep buried,
neath pain or guilt or fear,
springs
new by God’s own grace, when
the earth turns, or we do.
Holy
and healing, then, are
pardon and peace: so may we,
forgiving
and
forgiven, live.
--Mary Lee Krahn
I
would like to begin with the caveat that I am an absolute novice as a poet, but
several months ago I unearthed a manuscript that makes a lie of that claim. It
must be the first poem I ever penned, and it was one that -- until now -- I had
– mercifully -- completely forgotten. It
is entitled “Moe Crow,” and it reads thus:
Moe Crow had a bow.
Moe Crow had a show.
If Moe Crow lost his bow,
Moe Crow lost his show.
If Moe Crow lost his table,
I think he would not be able.
By this time you realize
Moe Crow had a few problems.
I have found it instructive that, even at an early age,
I was thinking and writing about loss – and that I saw loss as a problem.
And here I am, forty years later, a hospice chaplain, still thinking and
writing about loss, and still pondering the many ways in which loss can cause
the pain and grief we experience as all manner of problems.
As
you may already sense, this poem is woven from three different strands of deeply
personal experience. The first is my
father’s death last fall and the effect it has had on me, coming at a time
when I was already, self-consciously, at mid-life.
The
second element shaping this poem is one aspect of Lent as I experience it,
observed in a liturgical worship tradition.
I have found the liturgical observance of Ash Wednesday a particularly powerful and moving experience,
embracing, as it does, first, a corporate litany of confession, and then the
imposition of ashes, followed by the ritual exchange of peace, and the
celebration of Holy Communion.
For
me, personally, the litany of confession is a difficult but meaningful and
important spiritual practice, a formal and fearless moral and spiritual
inventory, spoken aloud each year, with words now familiar enough to me that I
can meditate on them before and afterwards.
It is completed, for me, by the ashes which remind me of my mortality and
humanity, and by the Peace and the
Eucharist, as invitations to and vehicles of the reconciliation that creates
true Christian community and communion with God.
Also
woven into this poem is a third strand -- the theme of forgiveness, which has
become a prominent concern in my thinking, especially in the years I have served
as a hospice chaplain. Listening
to the hopes and fears and stories of so many people at the end of life, I have
heard one message like a refrain repeated in so many different songs -- and that
message is that regret is one of the
most painful and powerful realities in life, and that it is wise to cherish and
nurture our relationships while we can, rather than to live and die under the
shadow of guilt or regret.
For
some people, the most painful broken relationship is with God, as they have
known God; for some it is with a family member or friend; for some it is with
themselves; each of us has our own story. One
encounter, in particular, has influenced me greatly, both as a poignant event in
the life of a particular family, and as an example of this greater truth that
increasingly guides my life.
One
morning when I at the bedside of an older man, who was very near death, I
answered the phone in his home, and found myself speaking with a family member
of his whom I knew to have been estranged from this man for more than thirty
years. I knew her, and I knew she
had been struggling with the pain of this broken relationship for all that time,
and that her life had been shaped in many ways – too many ways – by anger,
bitterness, sadness and guilt – guilt, chiefly because she wanted to be able
to forgive him, for his sake and for her own, and she wished to be freed from
the burden of her emotional baggage, but she could not distinguish between
forgiving him spiritually and reconciling
with him emotionally or relationally.
And the latter she could not do.
She
had heard that the man was very ill, and when she called, she asked if he would
be able to read a letter that she had written to him.
When I explained that that was no longer possible, she asked if I could
read the letter to him, but even that, I explained to her, was probably more
than he could take in. So she asked
if I could speak one sentence to him on her behalf, and that I said I could do.
“This is what I want to say,” she said: “Please forgive me.
I forgive you.” And she broke down in tears and hung up.
I
did manage to find a moment, when this man was marginally awake and responsive,
when I could relay this message to him on her behalf.
He seemed to be more at peace and less agitated after hearing this, and I
dared to say to him, that it seemed he felt the same as she did.
I would later tell the woman that I had spoken her message to him, and
that I believed that he had accepted it. She
told me then that she had composed her letter many months before, but had never
mailed it. And then it was too late.
Several
weeks later, when I spoke with this woman again, she read me another letter.
It was just a note, really, but it was something the man had written and
addressed to her, many months before. It
had been found, tucked away among his papers, and was passed on to her, after he
died. It offered no words of
apology, and neither asked nor offered forgiveness, but it was a conciliatory
gesture the likes of which she had never seen in the previous thirty years.
These
two un-mailed letters -- and the
peace and healing and freedom they just might have brought to two heavily
burdened lives - all this often comes to mind when I pray the prayer Jesus
taught his disciples.
As
you read this poem, you will be conscious, I hope, of the deliberate ambiguity
that runs through the lines. Life is
ambiguous, and complicated. Relationships
are complex, and often confusing, and sometimes conflicted.
Our relationships with each other, with ourselves, with our God -- they
are all thoroughly connected. The
words we speak to our loved ones, the prayers we lift to God, the thoughts that
echo in our minds -- they reverberate in ways beyond our understanding or our
control. So also, the words and
lines of this poem can be taken on many different levels.
And
in particular, the concept of “life” – “the meaning of ‘life’” –
if you will, can be understood in several ways. Biological life, daily living,
the fullness of life, abundant life, eternal life – it is all related, and, it
seems to me, it is all shaped by how we receive or resist, embody or experience
or extend grace.
Throughout
our lives we have reasons and opportunities to ask, to offer, to accept, to
receive forgiveness, to or from one another, from ourselves, and from God.
And as we do, as we turn to one another and to God in honesty, humility
and humanity, we experience and receive life in a new way – as new life –
eternal life – in this world, on this earth, before the earth is turned over
us, as it were.
And
whether the forgiveness comes from us or to us, for me, it is all by God’s
grace. Acts of grace, gifts of grace,
means of grace – they are the way of
and the way to the life that we would
most desire, and the life that God would will for us, the fullness of human
life, life as we were created to live it.
This
poem began with Lent, and Lent, which begins with a reminder of our mortality,
and ends with a remembrance of Christ’s death, is followed by the Easter
celebration of resurrection and new life. So
that is how we end. With Easter.
Lent
can come early, sometimes too early, but if Lent can come early, so can Easter.
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