Birthdays

August is a month of birthdays in our household. There are sons and daughters and nieces and nephews and cousins and friends and relations all who have birthdays this month. So we leap from birthday to birthday with barely a day in between sometimes. In many ways it is a lot of fun and I have learned to begin gift buying months in advance or the budget gets a little strained.

But as I have gotten older some sadness has crept in.

Today for instance is my Dad's birthday. He and I had a tricky relationship so sometimes I am ambivalent about him but today I simply miss his hearty enjoyment of the celebration of his birthday. He was a big noisy man who loved to party and it is very strange to be still and quiet this evening. He and I were so close in so many ways and in recent years my mother allowed me to cook his birthday dinner. I am thinking this evening that we would have been at the planning of the menu for weeks. He would have changed his mind a dozen times and oh we would have laughed our way through the process of choosing a menu. A path that lay between what I could cook for however many were invited and what he wanted.

This month I am also looking forward to Vetboy's twenty first birthday on the 19th. Again it is a day that is a little strained and has been since his younger sister was stillborn on the same day when he was two. Always I wonder on this day, what would she have been like? Would she be a tomboy or a girlie girl (in which case she surely would have picked the wrong mother)? Would she have liked books or horses or dancing? Yet I have a living, breathing son who equally deserves to have this day celebrated. Sometimes it is very hard to deal with the joy and the grief all together.

Other birthdays are mercifully easier and simpler.

So here's to the birthday boys and girls. Have a very good year all of you.

Ordinary people

A friend of ours died suddenly and unexpectedly yesterday.

A chest infection kept me still and inactive so I listened to many of the visitors who came with shocked expressions to see and to comfort and to help in any small way. I watched those who had got there, the first responders, friends of many years. It was they who called the doctor and funeral home. I watched the nearly adult children's god father reassure them that he would fetch them from the plane. I watched others make and pour endless tea. I watched still others make beds for the sudden influx of people. I watched them step back and give a shocked and grieving wife something to do. I watched others bring milk and tea and cake and beer and wine and snacks (the flights arrive late in the evening.......there is going to be a lot of waiting around).

So I watched ordinary people do ordinary loving things well and with a fullness of heart.

In the grand scheme of things not a big deal but down at the frontline of life, a difference that may make it possible for resilience to sprout and grow in the face of overwhelming grief.

Grace from Grace

I am not good with little girls, even less with teenaged girls.

I know that some of my difficulty arises from my own childhood, and even more from the death of my full term daughter in the womb. A still born child who is horribly deformed is a peculiar kind of grief, such a mixture of feelings. Ever since I find myself wondering what my daughter would have been like at five or ten or fifteen, wondering what books and colours and movies she would have liked and the grief spills, fresh and new. Over and over.

Recently one of my husband's oldest friends remarried, acquired a five year old daughter called Grace and returned home.

We met at Mass one fine but quite ordinary Sunday morning. Grace and I.

It was not love at first sight, not on my part, yet Grace took no notice of my lack of enthusiasm.

I discovered that even if I did not know how to be with her, she most certainly knew how to be with me. Gradually over the last four months we have become friends. She loves Winnie the Pooh and laughs hysterically at the stories of A A Milne, rolling on the floor with delight. I have learned a great deal about Barbie and Ken, about the giant purple dinosaur Barney, about playing in the rain, about laughing, about playing hide and seek, about sitting peacefully with a dozing five year old on my lap, about other ways of sadness and loss.

The thing about Grace is that she draws others into her magical circle that takes no account of years lived, being as she is, fully and seriously concerned with living vibrantly. She sometimes looks at me with sadness and asks how I never learned to play but brightens with the thought that she will teach me.

And teach me she does. In her lessons I find my raw grief for my own small daughter is transmuted in a way that I do not understand into something I do not recognise but which I receive with gratitude.

Grace from Grace indeed.

Preaching

Grief can be a tricky thing.

Yesterday at Mass we had a large number of visitors, as the school was being used for a meeting of the Jesuit schools, in addition to a full compliment of  boarders due to the sports going on this weekend and a surprising number of new visitors and there were four priests concelebrating Mass. Not our usual quiet still worship. The New New Rector (as the boys call him as opposed to the New Rector or the Old Rector - the result of having three rectors in the last couple of years) introduced the priest who was to give the sermon. As he did so he said that in the two months he had been Rector at this school he had discovered that the boys AND the adult congregation did not like long homily's so he had recommended a shortish homily to the guest.

The guest priest said that he had been given his instructions with more of an explanation, and that the New New Rector had set out to discover why there was quiet anarchy in Chapel and what could be done to change it. The boys had told him that they liked the singing but disliked long homilies that begin with quoting the scripture just read. He has radically changed his preaching style and most certainly captured the boys interests and attention and surprised them by allowing their voices to be heard.

Hearing this story I suddenly could hear my father telling much the same story. He went to an Anglican Church school during the Second World War and just after the war ended received a new younger Rector who set out to discover what the boys wanted in a service and discovered much the same thing as the New New Rector. He too listened and became known as Eight Minute for his sermons never lasted more than eight minutes. 

Suddenly I missed Dad more vividly and painfully than I could bear and fled my seat by way of the side chapel close by. Once there I met an acquaintance, younger than me, whose husband died four months ago and has since joined our congregation. She also could not stay because of the crowd and I learned that she had joined our congregation for the quiet, stillness of our Masses and the great beauty of the choir and because amongst us she was reasonably anonymous - something she needs at present. 

We sat together on a bench in the bright May sunshine bonded in silent grief until the New Rector, who was visiting Harare this weekend and not saying Mass, and marking our exits arrived with a tray of tea which he poured out before joining us in the sunshine on our bench.

Ash Wednesday Words

For a while now Ash Wednesday and Good Friday have been difficult days for me to observe. The crushing grief of these days has robbed me of myself, and the lovingly prepared liturgies have rendered me incapable of movement.

Last year I did go to the Mass at my sons Jesuit high school and was given warmth and love by the boys who had been or who were in my confirmation group and that made the solemnity and grief bearable. This year I took a deep breath and chose to attend Ash Wednesday Mass at the school again. In the interim there has been a new Rector appointed, only in the last few weeks, so the preparation for the service was undertaken by  lay people who are members of staff. Both of them are incredibly conservative and the service reflected this. As such it was a potently painful service, full of thundering and hell fire and damnation and seven hundred boys sat restively and disconnected from the proceedings. In that moment I gave thanks for Terri Pilaski and those she works with saying that Words Matter, for here before me was the living evidence of the alienating power of words.

Where, I wondered from my seat at the back, is the Grace of God in all this? Where is the celebration of that Grace which to my mind should have been the focus to the service. We are sinners. Yes. But what we celebrate during Lent is that God’s Grace reaches out to us, offering reconciliation and healing in the form of His most precious gift. His only son.

I have lost an eighteen year old nephew who was in my care for several years as the result of suicide and I had a beautiful, if physically incomplete, still born daughter. Last year my Dad, who was also my friend and mentor died suddenly. Those losses, amongst others, have marked my life with grief and sent me out to dwell in desert lands where the Living God is silent, where his language is silence. Once more on Ash Wednesday, and no doubt also on Good Friday I will wonder at a God who is silent yet sacrifices his most precious possession, his only son for the forgiveness of my sins. 

I wonder at his own sense of loss, and how he bears it. For mine has been nearly unendurable. 

I wonder when I feel so alone how he is able to connect ...