Lamenting a Self-Inflicted Passing

Lamenting a Self-Inflicted Passing

Thoughts regarding a sad phenomenon

Written by Dan McDonald

 

          We mourn the passing of country singer Mindy McCready this morning.  Most of us, such as I, mourn from a distance never having known the woman.  Some may have liked her music and thus felt connected to her.  Others had heard the name and remembered how personal troubles had apparently afflicted her.  Suicide, according to most Christian perspectives, is a sin.  But suicide, to most of us as human beings, is also a tragedy helplessly recognized as beyond our normal moral categories.  We feel almost forced to confess it as a sin, but we surely lament every self-inflicted death as a tragedy.  We mourn the passing of a human being who lost hope.  As a Christian I mourn the sad end of a life that was, in its humanity, created in the image of God.  What I present in this article is based on words I wrote when a former employee where I work had been found to have died a “self-inflicted death.”  I passed this writing, at that time only to a few friends knowing it to be a sensitive matter.  I now present some of the same thoughts in connection to Mindy McCready’s passing.  Probably no one who knew her will read these words from an unheralded blogger, but if anyone who knew her reads these words I wish to express my condolences in the light of this grievous news and the burden of grief you now bear.  I am not sure how these words will speak to you, but know that I lift your experience to one in the heavens who knows more than I how to encourage the grieving and grant healing to them in their grief.  Remember also it is something of an honor to remember someone loved with your grief, for surely to die with no one feeling grief would be the most horrible of tragedies imaginable to those who are to live on once someone else has departed from this life we have been granted to know and experience.  Here are thoughts that were expressed for the first time long ago and are now updated for the same tragedy with a different human face.

          A rumor began to spread one morning this past week.  The rumor spread that a former employee was found dead.  The cause of death was rumored to be “self-inflicted.”  Unlike so many rumors that people want to believe and spread, those who heard it seemed reluctant to believe it, let alone speak of it.  Those who heard the rumor often picked up the telephone and called someone who perhaps could be trusted as an authority for confirming or debunking the rumor.  Eventually the rumor was confirmed but I never heard the full details.  For me I felt no such need to know.  Was it that I respected another’s privacy or that I simply did not wish to deal with the reality of death, and especially the inexplicable horror of a self-inflicted death?

When someone takes their own life, we usually try to pause and then move on.  We tend to view this self-inflicted death as an isolated event outside of ordinary human behavior.  We don’t imagine there are lessons to be learned or wisdom to be gathered in relationship to this horrific unexplainable event.  So we note someone’s passing and move on.

The reality is that self-inflicted death is a phenomenon that is far more common in human life than we ever wish to imagine.  In our conversations and discussions of the event around the workplace, one man with a good friend who was a paramedic made a comment that perhaps none of us should forget.  The paramedic had told his friend that though we often hear murder statistics, we seldom hear any official statistics regarding self-inflicted deaths and attempted self-inflicted deaths.  The truth is that we hear of murder and violent crime statistics and imagine ways of protecting ourselves.  We get a dog to watch our doors, or buy a weapon to use to defend self and family from the potential intruders we read of in the murder statistics.  But according to the paramedic the number of people who die a self-inflicted death is far greater than the number of people who are killed by a violent criminal.  But there is no weapon to buy to prevent us from destroying ourselves with a self-inflicted death.  There is only perhaps a cultivated prevention of allowing the dangerous temptation a way of entering our souls until the temptation having taken root bears its poisonous fruit and we read or, or we become the statistic of another’ self-inflicted death  The paramedic offered a sobering thought.  Many more die a self-inflicted death than die from another’s violent behavior.

Literature certainly confirms that “self-inflicted death” is a far more common phenomenon than we want to contemplate.  Ancient Greek and Latin plays dealt with it.  The Bible has instances of it.  Shakespeare seemed almost obsessed with it, with the most poignant example perhaps coming in Hamlet, in the words “to be or not to be, that is the question.”  For those words were the beginnings of a consideration of a suicide.  Hamlet was perhaps held back by an understanding rooted in Catholic theology.  He had to grapple with the possibility that one does not end his troubles by taking his life on earth but brings them into the future of eternity with him, either to be faced in purgatory or at the final judgment.  What if, when we have lost hope and imagine ourselves to be improving our situation we are only casting ourselves into a future where this course of action must still be confronted?  As Laura Nyro wrote in her song “And When I die” wondering if dying brought peace she also contemplated that though she would “swear their ain’t no heaven”, she also prayed “there ain’t no hell.”  For most of us death seems like the end of everything we treasure, but to a troubled soul it may seem like the only way to that peace that has been spoken of near every grave site.  Every minister needs to consider with care and caution that as he preaches at a grave site full of mourners that care is taken not to picture death as an escape from trial and tribulation.  Yes when the time comes for a person to breathe their last breath there is an end to that course of suffering one may have been called to run.  But that is an assigned end by God or providence and not a self-chosen end.  The dilemma understood by Shakespeare and vaguely if irreverently acknowledged by Nyro was that we couldn’t be sure if dying would bring us the peace we sought or simply add compounded debt for those things for which we will answer beyond the grave.

I have to admit that Laura Nyro was one of my favorite songwriters from the Rock n’ Roll era.  If you haven’t heard of Nyro, it is because we often ignore the songwriter and speak of the artists who perform the songs.  Nyro’s music was sung by such diverse groups as– Blood, Sweat, and Tears; and by other bands such as The Fifth Dimension, and Three Dog Night.  She was a daughter of musicians, one Jewish and one Italian; and it would seem that the skepticism, Judaism, Catholicism, and political progressivism coursing through her veins created a blend from which talent and trouble would emerge almost as a predestined fate for the quiet attractive black haired young song-writer that grew up in the sights and sounds of New York City’s eclectic music offerings.

I would like to consider Nyro's "And when I die" as a beginning point to discuss the thoughts of death as presented by Nyro in her song with my thoughts as a Christian.  Certainly Nyro presents an important truth in our discussions about death.  From an experiential point of view there is a vast difference between our viewpoints of looking at death from the vantage point of either faith or skepticism as compared to what our experience of that ghost before us will bring.  As much as I would like to say, “no, no, the Christian faith is absolute truth and anything that deviates from it is not true”, the reality is that I have to admit that my looking at death no matter from how strong a perspective of faith will not be the same as my experiencing it.  If Laura Nyro were here to talk face to face with me about her song that is what I think we could both agree that there is a lot of truth to the sentiment about death that “only my dying will tell.”  Unfortunately cancer claimed her otherwise I could have counted it a true privilege to discuss these things with her.

There is one line in her song that I think is wonderfully true but also possibly untrue at the same time.  I wish again I could talk with her about this line.  She describes in the very beginning of the song that when she dies there will be one child born in this world to carry on.  There is wonderful truth presented in this line that every Christian should be quick to own as a beautiful sentiment.  The world of humanity does not end with an individual human being’s death.  Human life, created in the image of God is lived both individually and communally.  There is a tradition, a heritage, or perhaps best expressed a force of life that each individual contributes to the whole of humanity as their investment into humanity; and then each of us as individuals draw upon that capital invested by our forefathers in experiencing, understanding, and the guiding of our lives.  Human life can be illustrated in the passing of the baton in a relay race.  We live our lives having been handed a baton of life from those who lived before us and giving it to those who will live life after we have passed.  In that sense it is a beautiful and true thought that when I die there will be one child born in this world to carry on.  I would not be surprised if the Jewish and Catholic girl inside Laura Nyro, as well as the politically progressive woman Laura Nyro became, took this as a sort of article of faith in life.  The human tradition is a collective reality of humankind that nourishes us and into which we invest our lives and this is passed on to the next generation.  That is one of the greatest truths of humanity.  It is one of the great truths which distinguish mankind from the rest of the creatures who roam upon this earth.

But the same sentiment so wonderfully expressed by Nyro can be expressed in a way that is the antitheses of this beautiful sentiment.  From my Christian perspective it would be a mistaken sentiment if in Nyro’s words we saw only that a human life would not be missed when one dies because after all another child will be born in this world to carry on.  I would not doubt that Nyro’s words were meant as well to convey such a possibility of meaning.  She was the voice of the child wanting to believe as well as the skeptic incapable of believing.  There is this sense that we are on this global ship earth, all several billions of us and that we are just one in that number of billions, a face lost in the crowd of strangers with unidentifiable faces.  If I die what is that to the billions?  The moment we begin to think of ourselves as billions of human beings, we begin to feel like our human population is little more than flying swarms of insects countless in numbers, whose individual lives count for next to nothingness.  It was the genius of who Laura Nyro was that she may well have written and sung these words both as the Catholic, Jewish girl with a sense of progressive expectation and the skeptic who wondered in regards to any and every hope if it all wasn’t meaningless for a lonely individual lost in the swarming billions of human beings trying to hustle and bustle their way for their seventy or if due to strength eighty years on this planet.  As a Christian I must say never imagine that your one human life is meaningless.  The one human life, as well as the billions of human beings is most assuredly beloved by our Father who art in heaven.

I move from Nyro’s thoughts to an Anglican minister from long ago, the dean of St. Paul’s when the last great plague struck and killed so many Londoners.  I was a skeptic in high school the first time I saw these words written in a literature book that were passed over in our instruction, but I read anyway even though never assigned in the class.  They were the words of the poet John Donne:

DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,	5
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,	10
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

 

I remember the first time, reading Donne’s words and thinking, is this man crazy or inspired?  Is he deluded or insightful?  That is something I think of how so often we perceive the Christian hope that looks at death not as the ultimate enemy that shall take everything we have in life, but as the final enemy to be conquered as we live eternally through the life we are given by God through faith in Christ Jesus forevermore.  Donne sees that what death has done, and when death has been done, that in the mystery of Christ and the promise of Christ we will arise from our tombs at the last day and wake eternally and death, well we can look squarely at death and say “Death, thou shalt die.”  The Christian recognizes but does not really embrace death.  Death is an enemy.  Yes it may lead to a well-earned rest but that is not the promise of death but the promise of one who is greater than death.  So we seek to live, even if in living we suffer, and then in death he who is with us is greater than death and we look forward to resurrection and life forevermore where our enemy death is dead and gone forever, good riddance war, sickness, poison, chance, fate, kings, and desperate men.

The Christian view of death is like a double sided coin.  The first truth is that death is not to be adored or embraced as if death were a friend.  It is an enemy to life.  It is always an enemy to life.  That is the first reality a Christian learns to recite regarding the nature of death.  The second truth on the flip side of the coin is that death is an enemy’s whose powers have been restrained and limited by Christ who overcame both sin and death in his death, burial, and resurrection.  Death has been contained so that for the Christian it becomes the passageway of sleep into a new heavens and earth.  It is not a friend, but simply a conquered beast made to comply to the will of a greater power as we pass beneath its weakening grips on our human race.  Ultimately death is the last power that will be consumed in death’s own fury.  Death will die.

There you have a philosophical and theological consideration of death as I have learned of death by listening to the lyrics of Laura Nyro, by reading the words of John Donne, and by contemplating the Scriptures, the Christian and the human tradition.  But is there something practical I might say.  After all, I can defend myself from intruders by getting a dog or perhaps even a gun, but that is surely a subject and debate for another day, perhaps by another writer.  But what can you or I do to defend ourselves from self-inflicted death?  It turns out that our lives are much more vulnerable to the demented spirit within us losing hope and taking our own lives than for an intruder to enter our house and do us harm.

The first suggestion I would make is our need to remain sober, in the sense of not allowing substances to impair either our minds or dispositions in life.  Alcohol and substance abuse often goes hand in hand with an extremely large number of self-inflicted deaths.  Sometimes pharmaceutically proscribed drugs have for some people a side effect of causing depression and tendencies towards suicide.  Sometimes such drugs are necessary and perhaps sometimes they are questionable, and if you have lived long enough you know of someone who died a self-inflicted death who received such drugs in a battle with a disease.  But even more common is the man or woman who found getting drunk or high with drugs and alcohol to be an enjoyable experience.  Yet these substances used in excess generally tend to weaken our long-term natural abilities to cope with the afflictions, sorrows, and discouragements of life.

Sometimes, it may seem to readers that I am being hypocritical to present on a blog site where I say I will write for ribs and ale with a reminder that alcohol and substance abuse is dangerous in that it tends towards weakening the natural human coping skills so necessary in dealing with life’s afflictions, sorrows, and discouragements.  I am a biblical Christian, and from my reading of it the moderate use of alcohol is accepted and spoken of with approval in the pages of the Holy Scriptures.  St. Paul proscribed use of wine for Timothy’s stomach, Jesus spoke of how he drank although John the Baptist did not, the Psalms record that wine was given for the happiness of man, and part of the Jewish tithe was commanded on being spent to provide wine and strong drink for the celebration of Pentecost.  If we may borrow from Aristotle it would seem that the Scriptures while not commanding total abstinence from alcohol does require moderation in the use of alcohol.  Moderation is it would seem sometimes the best enemy of excess as opposed to an opposing excess.  If God has spoken and approved of moderate use of alcohol then I will submit to his word and oppose both excess in the use of alcohol and excess in the judgment of those who moderately consume alcohol.  At the same time the Bible speaks high praise of those who choose not to drink any alcohol, and I will praise such an honorable course also.  But the moment one wishes to look down upon a brother for drinking a glass of Merlot I will drink a toast to the offended brother and give a look at the would-be judge.

My final comments on practical steps by which we might defend ourselves and others from the potential “self-inflicted death" comes from St. Paul’s instruction to the churches of the Galatians.  St. Paul writes in Galatians both that we are to bear one another’s burdens and to bear our own.  We are to watch over our brother in a time of weakness, knowing our own frailties.  The truth about the temptation towards taking one’s own life, is that such a temptation is often a temptation that if it had been given an alternative might have been overcome.  Depression, sorrow, and affliction are heavy but usually temporary grievous experiences that give way to new moods and experiences when given the chance.  We need to learn to watch for others in the grips of these dangerous experiences, for such weaknesses of the spirit can lead to that one moment of desperation wherein a beloved one becomes a statistic.  Watch for your neighbor, friend, co-worker, or acquaintance; for the one who has become listless, lacking a taste for life and life’s ordinary little adventures.  Sometimes a bit of friendship to such a person will deliver them from the depths of bondage to one’s own afflictions and sorrows.  My high school years were spent often in long periods of depression.  I can recall an acquaintance who more or less preached to me to take the high road and not the gloomy road.  He made funny antics as he told me these things.  We weren’t as far as I know, either of us Christians or religious persons.  But we were human beings and he sort of instinctively knew I needed a pep talk and to know that someone cared that I spent most of my days feeling that life was all gloom and doom.  My favorite song at that time was “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones.  That seemed to tell it like it was I thought at the time.  This acquaintance may have saved my life for all I know, with his pep talk and funny antics.

The other reality is that we are also St. Paul said needful of bearing our own burdens.  Once we identify an affliction as a burden, then we can understand it as something to be patiently borne until the burden is removed.  For the Christian identifying that we have been given a burden opens our minds to the possibility that this is something to be endured until we receive a reward for our faithful stewardship in carrying our burden without complaint and with faith as one who is a co-laborer in Christ’s sufferings as well as Christ's resurrection.  I would say to the man or woman who is not a Christian that if you suffer under an affliction then let your voice be heard asking for Christ to hear you and to help you with the affliction, to help you bear it until it is taken from you or you are rewarded for carrying it patiently.

I close with one final thought.  A Russian I knew once expressed how she had been going through some dark stripes and figured that white stripes would be ahead.  I had no idea what she was saying until I discovered that this was a common Russian view of life based on a highway’s alternating black and white stripes.  Life is that way, our journey of life passes along black stripes and white stripes.  We are to bear patiently those burdens until we vaguely remember the dark mood of the dark stripe due to our enjoying the pleasant experiences of a patch of the journey dominated by the white stripe.  That life is full of white and black stripes is something to remember.  It will help us feel that an end to affliction is surely coming.  It will also help us to realize that one very near to us may be under the influence of the black stripe.  So instead of taking the white stripe for granted, we will look from our serene side of the highway to another troubled traveler carrying a burden weighing them down near to the breaking point.  So let each of us bear each his own burden as we each likewise seek to help bear one another’s burdens.

Ash Wednesday, Valentine's Day & Burying a Dog

St. Valentine’s Day Co-mingled with Lent

Love, seeking humility, grief, burying a dog

 

         It was late the 13^th of February.  I’d had eye surgery.  Everything seems to have gone well but I was restricted in the weight I am to pick up, even in bending over.  Exertion leading to a rise in blood pressure can damage a healing eye after surgery.  So through the week until my return visit to the physician I am off work.  I had gone to church for it was Ash Wednesday.  I came home.  A neighbor’s dog barked at me.  It was different the way he barked but I didn’t pay much attention.  I didn’t see my dog.  It was dark by the time I got home.  He was resting.  He is pretty much a senior citizen these days.  He sleeps a lot, occasionally barks at a cat, or joins a chorus of dogs barking at whatever the first dog barked at, no one really knows but a score of dogs carry on being heard and responding to dogs they hear that no human ear can hear, so probably a city of a half million people and near as many dogs are there as dogs begin barking from the north to the south to the east and to the west until the whole metropolitan area hears dogs barking.  No dog is an island unto himself even when fenced in and unable to join the greater pack.

It is a different occurrence to have the beginning of Lent one day and Valentine’s Day the next.  One day we are to begin our vigil, our thirst for righteousness felt in acknowledging that we are poor in spirit whether we know it or feel it or not, and to be encouraged to know that blessed are those who mourn.  We are to seek meekness, for surely in such attitudes is the way one truly discovers an answer to their hunger and thirst for righteousness.  In the Lenten season we go out into the wilderness to pray, to acknowledge our sins, to consider how we have wounded and hurt others so that we might make our way right with them, and we seek Him who is not far away because He came into this world to seek us long before we gave a care to seek after him.  That is I guess what Lent is about.  If Judy Collins had kept Lent or sung about it she would have said, “I’ve looked at Lent from both sides now; from sacrifice and from seeking and it’s Lent’s illusions I recall I don’t really know Lent at all.”  I haven’t ever done Lent that well.  When it is finished I haven’t given the time in prayer, in grieving my sin, in finding the way of penitence near enough, but I suppose not all is a loss.  I finish Lent knowing I need a Savior whose cross I see blotted out behind a veil shrouded in deep black on Good Friday.  Thank God for the unseen cross behind Good Friday’s veil, it is alone the reason I will rejoice on Easter Sunday.  I know that hidden cross is there even if the whole earth is covered in utter darkness for that afternoon -- whether the sun shines or the heavens pour rain.

Lent has begun with Ash Wednesday on the 13^th of February.  I turn to Facebook and there is a humorous set of Puritan Valentine Day Cards.  Ah yes, this is the 13^th, tomorrow therefore is February the 14^th, St. Valentine’s Day.  It is a humorous selection playing on the dour reputation of the Puritans.  One says; something like “When I am around you, you make my heart almost dance, and dancing is forbidden.”  Another announces love in a sort of off-hand way by saying “When I am around you, I think all kinds of impure thoughts and I am ashamed.”  So we smile I suspect not so much at the Puritans of nearly five hundred years ago, but at our own crazy sometimes messed up souls that sometimes cannot distinguish between that which is simple humanity, or probably sin, or worst of all zeal gone astray.

Recently I put my profile on a web site for Christian singles – a site where you realize that most of the ladies aren’t for you, but that is alright most figure you aren’t for them.  In the end, and maybe this will be a means to the end God is the one who blesses the best unions, who brings them together, who is at the altar waiting for them to come before him, who blesses them and stays with them but never in a lurking way until the day he calls one of them home.  I suppose for me it has been something of a learning experience regarding myself and not just the persons out there.  I haven’t given seeking a mate much time or effort for twenty-five or thirty years.  I would like to say that I didn’t make much effort because I was content in those years.  But I suspect the closer adjective to describe my laxity in looking would be that I was pretty much calloused in those years.  If sometimes we fear being alone sometimes we simply fear feeling a bit of suffering.  So we take to being alone not so much as a calling but more as a path of escape.  When someone takes up something after leaving it off for a long time, he forgets how much things have changed.  He tries to pick up where he left.  I hadn’t looked much for twenty-five years, made some feeble attempts, and worried sometimes as much that a gal I asked out might say yes as she might say no.  If she said no then I would feel a bit down but part of me was relieved.  A strange way to be, I cannot explain.  Twenty-five years ago when I did want to look, well thirty year old women looked just right.  Twenty-five years later I tried picking up where I left off and found that my ideals of the woman to choose hadn’t really changed.  But generally men my age and thirty year olds aren’t a very good idea, not for the long haul.

Still I saw a nice profile of a woman around thirty, a conservative Episcopalian who gave a pretty decent perspective on a Christian life and showed a nice sense of humor.  She described herself as one who loved her churches high and her bars low.  Now that is an Episcopalian’s Episcopalian if there ever was one.  I wrote her a letter just to wish her well in her search and she sent a nice note in reply.  Maybe we’ll become friends.  That would be nice.

Afterwards I thought of logging back into Facebook.  This time my thoughts were focused on Valentine’s Day having been reminded that the fourteenth would start at midnight.  It is not often that Ash Wednesday morphs into Valentine’s Day.  I picked a couple of songs to post on Facebook.  The first song I selected was one my sister loved back around 1967 by the Association called Cherish.  The second song was a sort of classical folk song full of romance about a whistling gypsy rover who came over the hill and down into the valley.  It was that sort of classical folk song that echoed the lesson of how the husband/wife relationship reflects the love of Ephesians 5 where our Lord sought out his bride and made her his forevermore.   The whistling gypsy whistled until he found a lady who followed after him.  She left everything; her own lover, her father’s castle, all to follow the whistling gypsy rover.  Her father found his fastest steed and looked all over the valley for his daughter and the whistling gypsy rover.  He found them near a river where there was wine and food and dancing.  Here was the lady and the whistling gypsy rover.  She told her father the truth that this was no gypsy rover but the lord of these lands all over, and she would stay with him to the day she died.  Thus ended the folk tune.  Surely a picture I think of him upon whom we looked and esteemed him not, some sort of wandering whistling gypsy rover. But as he whistled and as he spoke his fair lady, the church for whom he died in agony, followed after him and left all lovers and all family for this wandering whistling gypsy rover.  He had come down from the great hills above and wandered into our valley to take a bride.  We thought him of no account but these were his lands all over.

I stayed up sort of late and went to the door, by now it was surely the fourteenth.  I whistled a bit a little of a song.  That was usually enough for my old dog to come making his way.  Lately he hadn’t been moving as quickly as he did in earlier years.  I waited but he did not come.  I thought for a moment that he had probably dug a way out and went visiting the neighborhood.  I called him again.  I got the flashlight out and went to find a hole dug under the fence.  I didn’t notice one and then saw him on the ground still.  I saw his eyes opened but not even a dog spirit or soul at home.  It is times like these that one wonders if dogs are just animals without spirits.  Some like to declare one truth based on the silence of Scriptures and others another truth all created out of thin air and imagination.  Perhaps there is a heaven for dogs, I won’t say or perhaps dogs have never had eternity placed upon their souls.  Their lives are meant to be enjoyed for the now and since eternity is not placed on their hearts they accept their end when the time comes.  But who knows if animal spirits descend while human spirits ascend at death, this is something the Psalmist asked somewhere I recall.  But now the strange bark my neighbor’s dog made when he saw me earlier perhaps it all made sense.  They had an understanding of one another from across the fence.  Maybe the neighbor’s dog was telling me in his own way of why I didn’t see my dog when I had come home earlier after having the ashes put on my head.

Suddenly my world seemed a lot lonelier on Valentine’s Day than ever I had expected it to be this year.  I tried to go to bed, but didn’t sleep much.  I didn’t try to weep but the tears came.  Did he die of natural causes?  I am not really so sure.  I saw this bone.  It looked like one I gave him a few weeks ago, but usually bones don’t keep near this dog a few weeks.  I didn’t want to think about it, perhaps someone thought he had barked too much, or didn’t like a ferocious pit bulldog in the neighborhood, when in reality he wasn’t much different from the lovable one that America fell in love with in the Little Rascals.  In those days pit bull terriers were the loving pet needed by every active little boy, now there are no end of newspaper stories announcing how one went wild, but I wonder how often the one that went wild had a kind gentle owner who just enjoyed a little rambunctious critter with personality galore.  But maybe the bone was really just a coincidence.  He had been moving slower in these last days.  At night he snored heavily.  Maybe his heart gave out.  I had treated him twice for heart worm.  His master had on occasion forgotten his medicine when working long hours and one month just sort of melted into the next without being noticed.  Sometimes it took a couple of weeks before the calendar month got changed.  Bachelors forget about time, dogs don’t care about it, but worms spread by mosquitoes count on it.  Anyway, he was gone.  He had been a good companion.

Perhaps all of this will make this to be a more deeply moving Lenten season than any before it.  I know I will grieve this year for the dog that left me on the eve of St. Valentine’s Day during the first day of Lent, otherwise known as Ash Wednesday.  I would dig him a hole but I am not supposed to do much physical work this week.  So I will call upon a friend, and probably my priest who is also a friend.  I will ask them to come dig a hole and then I’ll ask them to help me remember a dog by going to McNellie’s (one of the better pubs in our fair city) and we’ll each take our time downing a pint while mourning a space my old companion.  Then I’ll return to Lent.  Maybe that’ll be the only pint I down this Lenten season.  Perhaps the grief today will help me more earnestly to seek a companion for next Valentine’s Day.  Perhaps also the grieving for a four-legged dog will be turned into a seeking after the eternal God, whom I believe I know as an acquaintance but I could know him far more.  So maybe today my prayers to grow in grace have been answered a bit, hard as the circumstances do now seem.  When you take home a dog you know the day will come when one of you will mourn, for a dog’s life is generally short and we always make the bet that we’ll live long enough to bury the pooch.  But when the tables have been turned well the story of good ole Lassie of Gray-friars comes to mind.  She followed her shepherd master to his burial site in Edinburgh’s famous cemetery.  The city tried in vain to arrest her until the whole city knew the cause.  She came every day to lay vigil over her master’s grave.  The city ordinance was clear a dog was to be impounded who had no master, but a way was found for Lassie of Gray-friars to roam and be the friend of the city when she was honored for her reverence to her old master and given the keys to Edinburgh.  That is how the story goes.

I guess that is one of the great lessons of Valentine’s Day; whether for those in love or looking for love.  The day one falls in love it is to be understood that a day will come when one must depart first from this earth or into this earth.  Then there will come that test which grades all great loves.  As one’s heart is torn and broken, with tears flowing, will the grieving soul of truth say with a Scotsman who understood it all, “Tis better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.”  Or as one standing on the mountain before coming down to the valley said, “Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted.”  My dog’s final lesson to me is that grief is a small price to pay for a journey of shared love in this life of ours.

I will let the young lady know the words I write this day, not for each other, but maybe for each of us this will be a lesson on keeping our focus as we would seek love.  I used to think I wasn’t sure it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.  Now I am sure that a good love is something worth so much and more; even if a day will come when someone can only mutter in grief “tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.”  This is a thought I will ponder this Lenten season until on Good Friday I look upon a cross covered in the darkness of a black veil.  Then I will know that on Good Friday there is the 22^nd Psalm, on the next day there will be the 88^th Psalm, and then on Easter Sunday glory will fill the skies.  I will then understand a bit more that He is love.

Lent & the Church Calendar

Lent & the Church Calendar

Why bother with any of this?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent in the Roman Catholic and the Anglican or Episcopalian church calendars.  I am writing this article to fellow Evangelicals and Protestants who regard the use of a Christian church calendar with suspicion.  I can recognize that many Protestants can look at such a practice and smell Roman Catholicism as if everything evil can be described simply by describing something as Roman Catholic.  I wish to use this article to set forth three things.  First, it is quite likely that some of the earliest Christians used a Christian calendar based on a Jewish calendar that existed prior to the beginnings of the Christian era.  Secondly, I would like to show how the Christian calendar was used especially in the weekly observance of Holy Communion to highlight the central events of Christ’s life, ministry and teachings.  Thirdly I would like to suggest that this practice was used by God to help form Christian cultures wherever this practice took root.  Finally I would like to emphasize that my goal is not so much to change existing practices in Christian worship, or to make uniform the present diverse practices of Christian churches, but simply to encourage understanding among differing Christians so that seeing a Christian worshipping differently from what you are accustomed will not lead you to necessarily view that believer or his church with suspicion.  I think we live in a time when we as Christians know that our churches are divided by various practices and so the first step towards greater Christian unity is simply to understand what is the motive and thinking behind those with very different practices from our own.  May God grant us grace to differentiate between those differences that must be regarded as improper and not in accordance with Christ’s Gospel, and those differences that can be tolerated as it is recognized that God is worshipped in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit in spirit and truth.

Church calendars appear to have been used throughout the Christian church at a very early time in Christian history.  We can think of the ancient Christian churches and almost always there was a Christian calendar.  That was true of the Latin Church centered in Rome, the Eastern Orthodox churches, but also churches outside of the Roman Empire such as the churches of Armenia and Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains, and the early Irish Church that did so much to evangelize the British Isles.  The churches in Egypt known as the Coptic churches have had church calendars throughout their history.  Some of those involved in these traditions would suggest that the Apostles taught the churches to have calendars.  From a Protestant perspective that is not something capable of being proven from Scriptures.  But perhaps we can come up with a reasonable theory as to why the early church might have very quickly adopted something of a church calendar to guide the worship of the early Christian church.

The early church may have begun celebrating certain Christian events in conjunction with the preceding Jewish worship calendar.  Here is how that would work.  We know from the Scriptures that Christianity was first proclaimed in the synagogues.  St. Paul sought wherever he went to preach the Gospel to proclaim the Gospel first to Jews and then to Gentiles.  The early church was rooted in historic Judaism.  The Jewish religion had a calendar for observance of holy days.  As Christians began practicing their Christian faith within a Jewish context it would be natural for Christians to begin focusing on the events of Christ’s life that were seen naturally in the Jewish calendar.  Perhaps the first two Jewish holy days to be given a Christian understanding by Christians not yet fully separated from Judaism were the Passover and Pentecost.  Both of these holy days were Jewish in origin.  But both of them had strong connections to the life and ministry of Christ.  It was during Passover that Christ was crucified, died for our sins, was buried, and then rose from the dead on Easter Sunday.  As Christians tried to use the Jewish calendar before Christians were wholly separated from Judaism, Christians began proclaiming Christ as the Passover.  Pentecost came fifty days after Passover, and the Holy Spirit did a remarkable thing on the first Pentecost celebration following Christ’s resurrection from the dead.  The Holy Spirit came upon the church as Christ empowered his apostles and his new church with the power of the Holy Spirit to advance the cause of the Gospel.  It was thus natural for Christians to begin highlighting how in between Christ’s resurrection during Passover and the gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost that Christ lingered for forty days teaching and appearing before the disciples and then how he ascended on the fortieth day, and then how the Holy Spirit was given at Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Christ’s resurrection.  So Christians began recognizing Passover with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ; and the next forty days as the days of the risen Christ’s lingering upon earth, the ascension on the fortieth day, and Pentecost on the fiftieth day.

Judaism had celebrated in the darkest time of the year, the festival of Chanukah, also known as the Festival of Lights.  There had been very little oil on an occasion to keep the temple candles lit, but instead of the candles burning out they miraculously burned for eight entire days.  Christians seeing Christ as the Light of the World, and as the one who filled the temple began to see Christ as the embodiment of Chanukah.  He was proclaimed as the Light come into the world.  The gaps of the newly emerging Christian calendar were filled with a string of events that highlighted Christ’s life and ministry.  There was an advent season remembering how God’s people throughout the Old Testament had waited for Christ’s coming and how New Testament Christians also continue to wait for Christ’s return.  The fulfillment of Christ’s coming is celebrated in the birth of Christ on Christmas Day.  Afterwards, it was essential that God made manifest who Christ was in a season known as Epiphany.  The season before we observe Christ’s death and resurrection during the Passover is that of Christ’s own preparation for the work he had to do on earth.  He consecrated himself to his calling of ministry and sacrifice in the forty days in the wilderness; days of fasting and prayer.  The early church knew we could not duplicate Christ’s forty day fast, but Christians began to enter into a period of humbling themselves, seeking repentance, and seeking to consecrate themselves for lives of service in and unto Christ.  Lent began to be practiced both as a way of expressing gratitude for Christ’s work on our behalf, and as a way of committing ourselves unto the faith, humility, and repentance to which Christ has called us and which can be obtained only thorough a prayerful dependence upon Him.  The first half of the Christian year is focused on these highlighted aspects of Christ’s life and ministry.

In the second half of the Christian year, the focus is set upon consideration of how the Christian is meant to be fruitful in yielding the fruit of the Holy Spirit in accordance with the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ.  These emphases are especially the focus of the weekly ministry of the Church in the giving and partaking of Holy Communion.

I can almost hear a Christian minister from a Protestant tradition begin to say, “Well I prefer to preach through books of the Holy Scriptures instead of a church calendar.”  I suspect the Church Fathers might have responded by asking why anyone would want to get rid of one manner of teaching when both ways can be presented.  The church calendar was especially applied to the weekly practice of Holy Communion.  In the observance of the Holy Communion it was understood that the preaching of the Word to precede the participation of the church in the Holy Communion was to be focused on the event at hand, wherein the church body partook of Christ’s body and blood by the Spirit of God.  How exactly that is to be explained is something I refuse to do.   It seems to me that to try to explain what exactly happens when we partake of the sacrament Christ commanded us to take leads not to the edification of the church but the dividing of brethren.  The early church while meeting on Sunday did not neglect the teaching of the word on other days of the week, and in other kinds of services.  The practice of the early church, wherever possible, was to open the church for the sake of praying and the teaching God’s word with morning and evening services known as Matins and Vespers.  The early Church, and the Church Fathers, often used such times to exegete the Scriptures in a careful manner and within their Biblical context.  Part of the genius of the early Church was to recognize the need to apply the Scriptures to people varied in their Christian walk.  The weak brother was not taxed by overly long sermons in Holy Communion and the brother especially interested in growth was not neglected by limiting the Word proclaimed to the short homily expressed in conjunction with Holy Communion.  The Church had a variety of services offered to meet a variety of needs within a Christian church.  There does not need to be a neglect of teaching the Scriptures while presenting the church calendar.

The use of the Church calendar likely helped grow Christian cultures in the nations where this practice became the general rule.  The leaders of a united church, in the early days of a church selected passages and themes to be expressed on the days when Holy Communion was being served.  Imagine the benefits of Christians learning the same Scriptures emphasizing the life, ministry, and teaching of Christ in conjunction with the weekly practice of Holy Communion.  A whole nation of Christians would be able to speak intelligently of the Scripture passages used in the third week of Epiphany or in the First Sunday in Lent, or from Pentecost Sunday.  Christians having a common focus in their weekly Holy Communion services could then connect that to the varied teachings they were hearing in the Scripture teachings from other morning and evening services.  Diversity of weekly teachings could be connected to the shared the passages and themes used in the Holy Communion services.  This helped forge a foundation of common themes expressed in an entire culture.

I have tried to set these things forth not to say this is what each and every modern church should try to do.  That has not been my goal.  My goal is much simpler.  We live in a generation when Christians are divided.  Part of this division is caused when people seeing different practices than those in their own church begin to believe that one practice has to be right and the other has to be wrong.  But sometimes we need to remember that John the Baptist and his disciples participated in fasting and did not drink wine; whereas Christ and his disciples did not fast and did drink wine.  Was one practice holy and the other not holy?  No both were accepted by God in their faith.  So my goal is fairly simple.  For those who are surprised when a Christian brother keeps a church calendar, just recognize that his practice is a long tradition of the church and need not be offensive against God and the gospel.  As for those of us who use the church calendar, let us not judge our brethren who differ from us but recognize that it is our great enemy who divides us against each other and it is our Lord who by the Spirit prays for each of us and teaches us to love the brethren.

A Movie Review:  “The Mill and the Cross”

Review written by Dan McDonald

 

            If you are looking for a fast-paced suspense filled action movie, you will be sorely disappointed in this movie.  But if you are looking for something original that will enable you to broaden your movie watching horizons this may well be something that will interest you.

          The movie was filmed in 2009, but premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2011.  It was a co-produced film involving Swedish and Polish film-makers.  The film employed English speaking actors Rutger Hauer, Michael York, and Charlotte Rampling.  It sought to create a moving picture from a classic 1564 Dutch painting by Peter Bruegel the Elder entitled “The Procession to Calvary”.  The movie was the offspring of Michael Francis Gibson’s book The Mill and the Cross.  The movie brings you into a conversation between Bruegel, the artist played by Rutger Hauer, and a patron of the arts interested in purchasing Bruegel’s work, Nicholas Jonghelinck portrayed by Michael York.  On a personal note, seeing several of York’s movies in the seventies it was a bit interesting to see him as an older man.  I guess forty years will do that to a person.  Bruegel begins to explain what he is trying to do in his piece.  Bruegel is doing something rather interesting in the movie.  On the one hand the painting is based on the theme of Christ’s suffering as he proceeds towards Calvary and is placed on the cross.  But Bruegel makes no attempt to place Christ into his original setting in the ancient Roman province of Judea.  The soldiers instead of being Roman soldiers are the occupying Spanish soldiers ruling over Holland and the lowlands (“The Netherlands”) in Bruegel’s times.  I was most fascinated by Bruegel’s conscious decision to portray Christ’s death in his own times and setting rather than attempt to picture it with historical accuracy.  There is one discrepancy in this depiction.  Bruegel understands that Calvary and Christ’s death on the cross took place on a mountain just outside of Jerusalem, so you have this mountain scene in an otherwise Lowlands setting.

          As a Christian that has been involved in congregations where I had a number of ministers who sought seriously to understand the historical context of a Biblical passage they were preaching, this is a fascinating study of the difficulties of getting the original setting understood correctly.  That is why I so loved this movie.  If Bruegel did not care if he had the historical setting of Christ’s passion set accurately in the area of ancient Jerusalem; the Polish and Swedish film-makers involved in this project were extremely concerned to set forth the Reformation era backdrop to Bruegel’s painting.  The goal of the movie was to bring to life the townspeople and the culture that Bruegel painted in his work.  Bruegel’s ambitious painting had at least 500 people set forth in this single painting.

It was fascinating to see a late 16^th century way of life awaken on the movie screen.  There is one quickly passing slightly risqué but wonderfully humanly accurate scene where a family living in a common thatched roof cottage with dirt floors is waking up to begin a new day.  It is a home with an extended family living under the same roof where one of the boys hearing a mature sister or sister-in-law rising up to face the day, runs over to a knot hole he has discovered to try to catch a glimpse of her dressing.  One realizes that privacy did not come easily to the common classes.  Then you are reminded how the cottages were dwelling places not only for people but also for farm animals.  One has to smile at a mother’s patience growing thin as with a family of probably at least a half dozen little children, she is trying to do her sweeping of a dirt floor when a good sized four-legged animal in their home has to be pushed out of the way.  The movie also captures the loudness of the times.  The Mill-keeper walks up long winding creaky steps and releases the mill to start grinding the wheat – a very symbolic part of the movie where the grain has to be ground down to give life to the townspeople.  The mill, driven by the winds of the North Sea, is terribly loud and the miller’s home is not separated from the equipment of the milling business.  It is a wonderful depiction by the film-makers of a Reformation era village.  As a Protestant, and as one whose religious traditions have a Reformation era imprint on them it was fascinating to see how these people whose traditions had such an impact on how I view the Christian life actually lived.  It was also interesting how the film-makers who were Polish and Swedish sought to present in nuanced manners the life of the more Calvinistic Dutch and Reformed reformation perspective of 16^th century Holland.

The film-makers captured something that few of my friends who loved the English and Dutch Puritans, or the somewhat Calvinistic Anglican Reformation under Cranmer have emphasized, and certainly I never have recognized the emphasis these film-makers recognized.  The person presented as Bruegel’s depiction of the Blessed Virgin Mary speaks of how her son had been connected to the fates, and made us believe that we could rise above them.  That is something I have never heard from any of my contemporaries, and certainly not something I had ever thought about, even as we imagined ourselves to be “Reformed” and “Reformation Christians.”  But the statement made perfect sense when I thought about it.  The Reformation era was a transition time when Europe was moving from a caste system where everybody’s life was generally determined by their place of birth into their lives determined almost wholly by the family into which you were born, the marriage to which you were arranged, and the vocation into which you were placed as an apprentice.  But that old European world was changing.  Those participating in the Reformation were churchmen who looked at Christ’s predestination as the foundation for the Christian’s life of freedom.  These Polish and Swedish film-makers understood that the Reformation theologians were fixated on predestination as the price Christ paid to set humanity free.  He was destined to suffer and die so that we who had been enslaved to sin and death could rise above the fates and destiny as conquerors in him.  Now that is something I found that these movie producers understood of Reformation theology that I had never once considered.  But it all fell wonderfully into shape the moment Charlotte Rampling spoke of her son coming to struggle with the fates and making us believe we could be free.  There was in the Reformation articulation of the Christian faith an emphasis both on predestination and Christian freedom.  The film-makers who presented this movie captured this nuance in such a wonderful simple moment which like an individual movie frame passes by our eyes almost unnoticed.

The final thing I would like to say about this movie is that it made me see the importance of contextualizing our understanding of the Christian faith.  There would have been a time when I felt that the great duty of the Christian preaching on Biblical passage is to get the original setting correct.  But that is not the whole of the Christian duty to understand the Scriptures in their original setting.  The second important work of the Church and of ministers and of everyone who has any role in teaching the faith from priests, ministers, parish school teachers, Sunday School teachers, to parents with their children is that our “portrayal of Christ and Biblical truth” must be translated into the setting of the lives of the ones we are teaching.  St. Paul in the Book of Romans captures this when he describes his preaching of the Gospel connecting our Lord’s death for sinners to sinners living in a different time and place from where our Lord Jesus actually suffered and died.  He deals with the past and the present simultaneously saying, “But God demonstrates his own love to us in that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners.”  Christ’s death is not enslaved to time.  It took place when we were sinners even if we were born some 2000 years following his death.  This is one of those misunderstood points of agreement and contention between Catholics and Protestants.  To a Catholic, Christ’s death took place before God from the foundation of the world even to the summing up of all things in Christ.  They will agree that Jesus did die specifically nearly 2000 years ago.  But the concept of the mass in which Christ is sacrificed for our sins is not being repeated every time a Roman Catholic priest does the mass, rather the sacrifice of Christ is being brought forth into time and space every time the priest breaks the bread and pours the wine which becomes the body and blood of Christ.  We who are Protestants might find some aspects of the Roman Catholic understanding different from our own, but it is not as different as we sometimes imagine.  For what every Christian, whether Protestant or Catholic seeks to do in the presentation of Christ’s death, is to demonstrate in the now that which Christ has done in the past without binding the work of Christ to some piece of ancient history; for his own suffering is once and for all time.

This movie is not one however that preaches at you, like perhaps I am guilty of doing in this review.  Someone studying art for the sake of his love of art might see almost none of what I have talked about.  Nevertheless he will appreciate how Bruegel thought about his painting, how he selected an anchor point for developing his painting, and then both revealed and concealed Christ in the very middle of his painting just as Bruegel understood this event to have worked out in real human life.  One realizes that an artist is a creator, an intellectual, picturing a view of life and symbolizing it in his painting however realistic he aims to be instead of symbolic.  A painting may not be gaudy with contrived symbols, but every time paint is applied to canvas, an artist necessarily symbolizes to those around him what he sees to be the truth of life.  For Bruegel, Christ is the one who had come to live and die for the people of his time and place.  He was the one who came to set us free, to set us free to live that one true life in that freedom which is true life and freedom.  This son of the handmaiden, of the Blessed Mary had come to the 16th century, to Bruegel, to the European Lowlands, and he had died there in accordance with the Gospel, hidden right there in plain sight in the midst of the people going about their business in everyday life.