Monday - March 29, 2010
Another Lenten Season - March 2010
On one of the doors in our dining room hang some braided palm fronds. Some are bent and knotted into traditional Easter crosses. Others are plaited together in long intricate curves. They are the handiwork of Jessie and Sarah from three years ago, when both girls were alive on a Sunday morning, and joined a crowd of singing, chatting friends and families, shivering in the cool air, following a shaggy white pony down the muddy river path in Ipswich, listening to the bright chuckle of a rushing current roll past.
By then, we knew that life and family time had become precious due to Jessie's second relapse with leukemia. Around us, everyone carried slender pale green palms, newly peeled away from their stock and handed out to a congregation of celebrants, symbolizing the same triumphal walk of Christ 2000 years before.
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On one of the doors in our dining room hang some braided palm fronds. Some are bent and knotted into traditional Easter crosses. Others are plaited together in long intricate curves. They are the handiwork of Jessie and Sarah from three years ago, when both girls were alive on a Sunday morning, and joined a crowd of singing, chatting friends and families, shivering in the cool air, following a shaggy white pony down the muddy river path in Ipswich, listening to the bright chuckle of a rushing current roll past.
By then, we knew that life and family time had become precious due to Jessie's second relapse with leukemia. Around us, everyone carried slender pale green palms, newly peeled away from their stock and handed out to a congregation of celebrants, symbolizing the same triumphal walk of Christ 2000 years before.
Later during the church service, the palms were bent and shaped into creations of hope and renewal. Along with crosses, Sarah and Jessie made their own plaited variations that looked like the long braids of a princess. They hang still in our house, green shoots now aged and brittle, blonde and crackly as straw, but still braided into their playful shapes, and always within sight.
Of course, most leftover palms become the smear of Lent tattooing foreheads one Wednesday every year: a smudge of oil and last year's ashes. Our palms weren't burnt. They're with us still. Instead, we have spread Jessie's ashes.
Another Lenten season is here. We live in this tension of energy and exhaustion, of inspiration and despair, of playfulness and anger, of past hurts and current troubles and the belief that we may find something more beyond this reality.
We could use some hope.
Although we have gone through a Lenten season of preparation, our community...and our family...has also endured great harm along the way. For instance, March has already been a month of swollen rivers and flooded banks, violent storms, sudden snow falls and warm temperate days that draw out the first spring blooms.
In this month, hurricane-force winds and small micro-bursts like tiny tornadoes uprooted literally hundreds of trees. The storm tossed them upside down across roads and power lines, taking out power and heat in thousands of homes and dozens of communities up and down the coast. Tore roofs and structures apart.
Then torrential rains found the leaks in the patched roofs, and dripped percussively day and night. We endured days and days of rain.
Waters rose higher than the carved-out winding contours of the riverbed, and swamped nearby walkways, parking lots, basements, and streets. Ipswich's downtown business district, which backs up onto the river, looked more like Venice than ever. Unlike the Mother's Day flood a few years back, it didn't claim lives, and it didn't wash out Ipswich's bridges (although some others were impassable for days). Up and down the state, routes were closed, detours added time, delays and inconveniences occurred, and some businesses were closed due to the flooding.
Due to storms and floods, there has been a cost in funds, business income and physical bricks-and-mortar damage...but not measured in human life this season. Unlike older storm and flood sites such as New Orleans, where whole neighborhoods and sections of the city have not been re-inhabited and folks are still displaced. Unlike Haiti, where the media attention has died away, and many doctors and emergency clinics and floating military hospitals are now pulling out, leaving behind only the same teams that have always worked there (such as Partners in Development and Partners in Health), trying to stabilize conditions against the onslaught of diseases that follow such disasters, when there's no infrastructure to help provide clean water, sanitation or shelter. By contrast, our challenges were manageable.
It's not just the storms and floods that reminded us of what we have...and don't have.
As in many other towns across the United States and other parts of the world, Ipswich businesses and organizations and schools are collecting food and toiletries, because even in our own community, "food insecurity" is a term that is familiar. People who once donated to the food pantry are now coming there for assistance. It's a more quiet and persistent form of loss...income, financial independence, jobs, medical insurance, rent or mortgage payments, funds for groceries and utilities...long-term and chronic...wearing away confidence, dignity, purpose and stability.
At the same time, catastrophic situations have challenged people in other ways. Recent parental deaths have created single-parent households. Childhood diseases are causing phenomenal stresses in once-ordinary families.
Our community, which has weathered the floods and rallied to stock the food pantry, has also reached out to such families, too. Friends organized two bone marrow donor drives, trying to add potential matches to the database of willing donors, because a young girl in our town has recently been diagnosed with AML (form of leukemia) again. Neighbors, friends and colleagues have established assistance funds and coordinated networks of volunteer support to help families through crisis.
As we write, it's the final week of Lent: the season of preparation. For some people it's a time to make a promise. Sometimes people choose to go without something they especially like, such as chocolate or cigarettes or coffee or television. It is treated as a time of sacrifice or fasting, atonement and getting ready...for whatever comes next. Other people decide to do something extra...exercise, volunteer, making time for themselves or others...asking more of themselves as another kind of promise or preparation.
In the Christian faith, all of this leads up to Easter. And before Easter comes Holy Week: the last several days in the life of Christ. It spans his triumphal entry into Jerusalem listening to crowds shouting Hosannah, then to meals and prayers with friends, to private time of contemplation and wrestling with the outcome of his life, to betrayal, arrest and trial, and finally death and resurrection.
So many challenges have come to this community, and this larger world, just as the Lenten season commences. And we are finding ways to get through, or get by, but we feel beaten down. Accosted. Dismantled. Uncertain. Set back.
Yes, we could use some hope. But sometimes it's hard to believe in.
At the same time, we are finding each other. Neighbors and friends got check swabs at the marrow donor registration drive in the hope that they might help someone who needs a second chance at life. Gave blood. Stocked pantry shelves. Organized meals, rides, donations of food and clothing, emergency assistance funds, and other acts of kindness. Worked out ways to continue living in this community, with dignity and sufficient resources.
Over the past few years, in the midst of grief, we have found that any experience that we're having is probably reflected during the events of Holy Week. Every possible loss or hurt was felt there, too.
At the end of March and the beginning of the Holy Week, we're all somewhere on this journey between Hosannah and grief and hope. In our family, the palm fronds are still hung in the house. And some ashes of Jessie's are in the ocean and others are in a box on our mantle. And the hope...well, it's here, too. Sometimes. Somewhere.
In past years, Easter symbolized the renewal of life, the rebirth of healthy cells, the healing of bodies damaged by disease...for us and for other families compromised by life-limiting illnesses. Of course, we hoped it would be a promise of long life for Jessie, though we always knew the statistical realities, too. For others, perhaps it meant a new time of sobriety, or transition to a more stable family life, or a new job or a new experience...something new.
For us, the Easter promise added six years to Jessie's young life. And yet...in the end...she died. And so, our hope in the flowering of the cross...the transformation of an instrument of death and torture into a beautiful shape covered in spring blossoms and made anew...is bittersweet.
And yet, Easter has always meant second chances. And even now, we need another chance. So we're holding tight to that promise this year. As we struggle within our family, doing hard work with healers and each other, trying to find a way through this experience...there's something more coming. Something better. Something different. Something new.
Yes, this is life. Here and now. And we're each certainly living it. Riding bikes on every bright day, getting ready for the fundraising rides of the summer. Kick-boxing. Walking on the beach, seeing how winter storms once more changed its shape. Working on creative projects such as writing, painting, illustrating and poetry. Running spring track and performing with youth dance ensemble in mid-season shows.
But there's more. There's our connection to each other, which has been frayed and strained and stretched and put to hard use without tenderness for a long time. Now's the chance to pause, ease up, and nurture those bonds with more attentiveness, more gentleness, more introspection, more energy, more honesty, more love. We don't know what shape will emerge.
And there's also the need to tend to ourselves. Along the way, we have lost touch with our own deepest identities and emotions. We have pushed hard, kept going, gone through the motions, moved along...we have not stopped to honor or tend sufficiently to that part of self that is the spark of life, the seat of emotion, the flame of intellect, the flicker of spirit and creativity and energy.
Second chances. They mean something different to each of us. But we all need them.
This March, we're reminded of what we have...and what and whom we don't have. We're challenged. We're lost and asking a lot of questions and struggling for answers and purpose and direction and healing. We're on that journey that is documented in the spectrum of days of Holy Week, celebrating and breaking bread with friends, or turning inward to wrestle with big questions and putting our own lives on trial, facing life-altering circumstances and crying out for help and hope, and waiting for the new life that may come out of all of it.
As March winds down and April comes, holding spring and the promise of Easter, we're all on this road that leads toward a dark cavern where death once lay, and a boulder that holds the door between life and death, between past and present, between loss and hope, between harm and healing. In our faith tradition, on Easter the stone is rolled away. The cave...the tomb...is empty.
In our church, we have a chance to pluck a daffodil dripping from a water-filled bucket, and place its green stem into the wire twisted over the cross, slowly changing its shape and meaning. It takes a congregation...a crowd...a community...to make this transformation. But it happens one blossom, one stem, one hand reaching up at a time, too. We each have this power and opportunity and chance.
In some ways, what we once hoped for an Easter promise didn't come true. In others, it did. But we still need other kinds of hope and chances. All of us do. We each want a second chance. And sometimes a third and a fourth. As many as it takes.
There's no day when it's too late. And we need those new chances, over and over.
Ask a woman entering her next decade, who set aside many years to rearing children and focusing on family, and is now trying her hand at being a writer and artist or starting a new business venture. Ask Chris's dad, who sent a photo of himself on a zip line as he celebrated his 74th birthday, saying he's "Still flying!"
It's not too late. And whatever another chance or new beginning might mean to each of us...the possibility is there. Maybe we don't get what we hoped for. At least not in the shape or reality we imagined. And maybe we're going to go through hell along the way to reach for the next part of our lives or experiences...but we can reach. We can struggle and ask questions and find tenderness and forgiveness and silence and thoughtful touches We can reach across distances and address losses.
We can wave the green tender palm fronds and fold them into shapes of hope and transformation. We can wear them as oil and ashes, or hang them in our house as a reminder, letting them turn golden and sacred in their own mellow, knotted way.
We can believe. We can hope. We can cry out. We can try again.
The journey continues.