Returning home, burying a brother, revisiting a church

Returning Home, Burying a Brother, and Revisiting a Church

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            This year has been interesting. I have completed reading more books so far this year than I probably read in the past five years. One of my favorites was The Invisible Girls by Sarah Thebarge. I read it in one evening.  I don’t remember ever reading a book in an evening. I believe it changed how I look at people. I realize when I see a person that they are always more than a stranger or what Sarah describes as those people who are invisible to us. I am learning to see people and think that they have a story, a dream, a struggle, a battle, a burden, and gifts waiting to be expressed. I saw one day where she recommended her Twitter followers to help out a young man fighting cancer. Her father was one of the pastors on staff at a church that had set the fund up for the young man. I discovered that the church was a church I had attended in college. I sent a donation and decided that the next time I was in the area where I went to college I would visit the church which in some ways helped launch me into the journey of faith. I worship in a different tradition now than that church worships in, but I figured it would be interesting to return to the church where I first went when I began to understand something of what it meant to live in Christ.

            I didn’t expect to return to Illinois until Thanksgiving time. My plans changed last week when my oldest brother, aged 75 had a massive heart attack. He walked in from working in his garden and collapsed into his wife’s arms. He was pronounced dead seventeen minutes later. We had watched my dad die of cancer, slowly and painfully. If my brother could have picked the type of death to take him it would have been this sort of death. But that did not make it any easier for his family, especially a grand-daughter who for the most part had my brother and her grandfather as her Dad. In one moment of time my plans changed. I was coming home to Illinois.

            I arrived at my sister and brother-in-law’s home where they live on a farm. My brother-in-law farms with a nephew in central Illinois. It wasn’t long and my nephew (in his 30’s) gave me a bottle to feed milk to one of their calves.

            It hadn’t yet really registered in my mind how my oldest brother Dave had passed away. I knew it intellectually. Emotionally it was barely real. But I hadn’t really accepted it yet as truth. Grief was building so far only slowly for me. Maybe living so far away from everyone else had dulled such senses. Yet I knew that the next time I saw him he wouldn’t crack a joke, or smile the smile of a slightly mischievous kid, the sort of smile he smiled even at 75. The grief I felt and his family felt even more would linger. As I fed the calf a sense of joy in the life of a calf momentarily relieved my sense of grief. I thought of something Marlena Graves had written in her book A Beautiful Disaster. She had described how when anticipating something we wish would come more quickly, or struggling with a season we wished was over, how in both instances we should wait by partaking in the sacrament of the present moment. She wrote it this way; “We wait well by embracing the present moment, as difficult as that can sometimes be. Jean-Pierre de Caussade calls this discipline the sacrament of the present moment”. [i] I could not yet actually reach past the hurt and suffering surrounding my brother’s death. But a moment of joy occurred because a calf needed milk and seemed to rejoice in drinking from the bottle I held to his mouth. I managed to rub the calf’s head behind its ears part of the time while I fed it. It was the sacrament of the present moment that Marlena had taught me to seek when I was impatient for some good or yearning for an end to an unwanted season in my life. Feeding milk to a calf was a moment of joy within a season of traveling on a road from sorrow to healing.

            Saturday was a pleasant sunny day.

It was also the day of my brother’s funeral. At the service in the funeral home, a nephew, a son of my sister-in-law’s sister gave a eulogy. He spoke of how he grew up without a father, but that my brother did things with him and helped him by showing him how a real man loved his wife, his children, went to work, and lived life to make the lives of his family members better. For Jeremiah, my brother was his hero. This is something none of the rest of us siblings had ever known about my brother.

My brother had served in Korea after there was an armistice and before Vietnam began to heat up. He was given a military funeral. He had never been especially gung-ho, but military service was the sort of service that almost anyone who had participated in military service felt a connection immediately to someone who had served near the time he had served. I watched how carefully everyone sought to fulfill their role in the tradition of a military funeral. There were the seven riflemen firing three shots in unison for the 21 gun salute. I watched two active service persons, one male and one female carefully folding the flag. The ranking officer bent down and offered the flag to my brother’s widow thanking her as he represented President Obama in giving her thanks for my brother’s service. I wondered for a moment. Why is it that when there is a church tradition, so many people think such a ritual meaningless, while we stand in awe of a military tradition? I fear that it is because we think service to a nation in the military something to be reverenced while service to Christ is somehow not to be thought of as somehow sacred. I could not help but notice that the personnel who folded the flag taken from my brother’s coffin did so not as a rote action but as something akin to a sacred duty.

            Sunday was a day for Church and grieving family.

            On Sunday I went to church at the church I had gone to decades before when I was in college.  Somehow it seemed appropriate that the Thebarge family was on vacation. I found my way to the sanctuary which was at least a little different from when I had attended three decades ago. There were no hymnals. There was a singing group leading us as the words of the music appeared on a screen in front of the congregation. The music was worthy of singing praises and giving adoration to God. The people who greeted me, and the ones I met, were warm and friendly. I have a hard time remembering the names of people I met, but I remembered one gentleman’s name, Victor. When it came time for a sermon I felt as if God had indeed planned on bringing me to this church for this day as the sermon was on what happens to believers when they die. The pastor carefully distinguished between what he thought and what he was confident was the truth according to the Scriptures. It was a good experience being with my old church. I have changed traditions but I discovered something very important for me to understand. There are times when God leads or allows us to move ahead in our personal journeys of life and faith and he remains with us. But simply because God remains with us when our journeys leads us from one place to another doesn’t mean that he leaves those we left. That is something important for many of us to realize. I saw too much proof at the church in Normal that God had remained with that church even though he went with me in my journeys to new churches and different traditions within the Christian faith. I hope I never forget this and I hope something of that is communicated with what I write.

            In the afternoon I went north to where my brother had lived and where his wife, two daughters and a grand-daughter lived. They were all there, the girls he loved. The grand-daughter was taking it the hardest. She had described the day her grandfather died as the worst day of her life. She was emotionally distraught and not ready to hear encouragement or comforting. It was painful to behold and I could only grieve with her and commit myself to prayer for her. As for his widow she understood when I said to her I understood how she might wish to be alone as much as she might be upset that no one visited and as the day went on she seemed grateful for my visiting their family for several hours.  I talked with the daughters, especially with the youngest one who I had not seen in decades. It may have been twenty years since I had last seen the youngest of my brother’s daughters. But maybe there was a special connection because implicitly we had been sheltered from some feelings because we had both at a young age moved out of state and limited our ties to our family back home. We both viewed this grief thing more objectively at points than our siblings. But we also both had a sense that we had missed out a lot of what went on as family. She described her leaving at age 20 to get away and live independently as something she did because, well because she was 20. I left for a sort of Promised Land after I left college, for a church I thought was “the” church. It was a good church. But David’s daughter and I for all our differences had a lot in common and it was wonderful to see her again even though the circumstances weren’t so good. Maybe that too was a bit of a drink from the cup of the “sacrament of the present moment.”

            I guess strangely enough entering the house of mourning often presents us with the bread and cup of the “sacrament of the present moment.” The only thing I could think of to try to encourage those mourning and grieving the loss of my brother, their husband, their father, and their grand-father was to know that God was not upset that they grieved and sorrowed. I told them that grief and sorrow was a form of praise for someone we realized we would not see again in this life and so grief is praise offered in sorrow. I think my sister-in-law felt comforted by such words. There are moments of comfort in the house of the mourning, an instance of participation in the sacrament of the present moment as we journey along the roadway from grief to healing. But we remember that he who died for us was also raised on the third day that we too might follow him in the resurrection from the dead.

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[i] Marlena Graves, A Beautiful Disaster (Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, MI. 2014) 103