Category: Faith

Sacred Bears

When I shared the following events with my writer’s group and asked them to put a timeline on them, most guessed the 1950’s. Learning this occurred in 2002 disturbed them. Truly disturbing, though, is that, sadly, no one in this country right now would be surprised to enter a town square in nearly any southern state in the US and see again today what I saw then.

Black and White Teddy Bear on overturned children's chair

Sacred Bears

“Some old lady got my buddy in trouble!” was what I heard another pastor declare as I sat down at the weekly lunch of local United Methodist pastors in the county. (“Local Pastors” do not attend seminary but rather several years’ worth of courses in order to be allowed to preach from United Methodist pulpits.) I was running late, but I knew immediately what he was complaining about and I was annoyed to realize quickly he had only heard part of the story. “He was at the weekend school…”

“Course of Study,” I offered.

“Yeah. The Course of Study. Anyway, there was this festival on the square down there in Pulaski….”

“They called it ‘White Christian Heritage Festival’ but they were handing out KKK literature,” I added. He frowned.

“Okay…. so, this old lady just took what my buddy said all wrong. Then…then, she told the guy in charge.”

“Grady?” 

My colleague stared at me, determined to finish the story. “That old lady told Grady my buddy was part of the KKK!”

“Actually,” I said after I ordered my chicken salad with ranch on the side, “that ‘old lady’ told Grady that your buddy confessed to her that he could see where their teachings made sense. He said they made sense.’  So, since he is allowed to preach at a United Methodist church and to teach children and youth….”

“She probably just misunderstood.” 

Surely, I thought, this guy will catch on soon. I sighed. “So, I shoulda just let that slide?”  

The others at our table were clearly amused that my colleague didn’t get why I knew the story so well. In his defense, he attended a different Course of Study, lasting four weeks, in Atlanta for full time pastors in the United Methodist Church. His buddy and I were part time, which meant only 60 hours a week of work. Our Course of Study classes met over eight weekends a year with reading and papers in between those weekends, sometimes in Jackson and other times at Martin Methodist College in Pulaski. Pulaski, if you aren’t aware, is known for being home to some members  of the Mars candy family (think Milky Way) and is also generally credited with being the birthplace of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the KKK.  

I especially hated the overnight stays at these weekend schools. That particular weekend, I do not remember another woman in attendance. Not only was I away from my sons, but I was alone. In a motel room. In a strange town. A single woman.  Newly in recovery from trauma. In other words, someone who knew bad people did lurk in the shadows. Assuming all the men around were trustworthy was a luxury. So, I slept not at all. I took to wedging whatever chairs were in the room in front of the door in an effort to at least rest. 

On one particular Saturday, several of us left class to make a lap around the nearby downtown square on our lunch break only to encounter what was that day touted as a “Celebration of Southern Culture.” Displayed on the assorted tables were handtooled leather goods, canned peaches, okra and pickles. A brochure I found had previously invited area residents to join in the “family fun,” including a cakewalk.

Pretty quickly, though, I was stopped, jolted a stuffed teddy bear sitting among the books and maps under the magnolia trees. I believe God created Teddy Bears to provide a tactile reminder of love and affection, of comfort. This bear, though, had, through no fault of his own, become aligned with pure evil: he wore a white cotton robe and a white pointed cap that covered his face. This child’s toy was disguised, as if he, too, needed to hide his collusion with evil, like the men who had donned those robes and hoods in the night for so long. I thought they were a thing of our past and yet there they were, not hiding their affiliation at all and they had brochures, newsletters, books and even maps, the texts and visual aids to present these “Southern” beliefs. The first murmurs from the other pastors with me were indignant: how did these folks get to determine the definition of what was “southern”?

Eager to share with us about how God meant to order society, one of the men began to carefully explain the rationale for hatred, including their understanding that God, of course, looked just like them. In that moment,  the inference was that God most resembled a skinny, pasty middle-aged man in black slacks, a white shirt and a decades-old tie. A couple of pastors seemed interested in engaging. I was far from confident in my ability to face evil head on though; I, instead, focused on the contents of the tables.

Besides books and t-shirts, decals, key rings, watches, pins and flags, there were maps. I would not give them my money for books but I did consider buying one of the maps, a large laminated wall map designed to settle once and for all the mystery of the disappearance of the two “Lost Tribes” of Israel. Finally, I chuckled. They’d migrated, it seemed, from the Middle East and crossed over the Caucasus Mountains, stopping, of course,  in Scotland before heading into North America.  My ancestors were among those Scots who came through the Cumberland Gap and moved on into Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri. I hadn’t known, however, that we were either lost or a tribe of Israelites. This journey was credited with solving the mystery: the Lost Tribes were now known as “Caucasians,” according to the map, by virtue of having traversed the Caucasus Mountains. I kick myself now for not purchasing that map, but, at the time, I could not stomach giving these people my money.

I did try to offer them money for the Teddy Bear, for the sake of the children these men likely influenced, for the sake of the legacy of Teddy Bears the world over, and for the comfort and benevolence children had so long depended on them to provide, I wanted to scream, “How dare you?!” 

Gotta hand it to the KKK, though. Aligning an innocent source of comfort and safety with the evil of the KKK, twisting what a child loves and trusts and using it to promote hatred and exclusion is socially and theologically powerful. Teddy Bears are bordering on sacred, as far as I’m concerned, objects that carry children through those times when the adults are absent or preoccupied or already asleep.

The Teddy Bear in the hood and robe makes more sense when you recognize how much of the most destructive theology through the ages has been born out of childhood pain. We may never know who was the child who’d been hurt enough that he grew up and somehow chose to cover himself and his head and face with a white hood so his grandmother or his neighbors or his children did not see him when he was cruel and ugly. I wanted so badly to rescue that child, or at least rescue the Teddy Bear, to allow God to do what God does best: redeem both that Teddy Bear and whomever it was who dressed him up. 

I wanted so badly to rescue that child, or at least rescue the Teddy Bear, to allow God to do what God does best: redeem both that Teddy Bear and whomever it was who dressed him up. 

“He is not for sale” was the response, though, and so I left behind that embodiment of evil and prayed for the trust and spirits of all the children these pasty white men were teaching or had taught so far. 

I did pick up some brochures and printed newsletters and walked away before they realized I did not, in fact, agree with their understanding that our country was designed as a White Christian nation or that we ought to somehow respect men who hid behind masks to terrorize others. Later, I would discover the literature went so far as to advocate for internment facilities for those who had contracted AIDS, for example, or that we all were invited to a worship service that night, complete with “great white Christian fellowship” and a “brilliant cross-burning!” 

I was no longer hungry, so I walked back with one of the younger pastors. After a few moments’ walk in silence, I said simply, “I was not expecting that.” I was feeling shaken that this evil was so openly displayed and discussed; I’d been blissfully ignorant, I realized. I had honestly thought these clowns in hoods were anachronisms, relics of a bygone era, that they were no longer active, like the sundown signs I would later learn sat as sentinels along the highways at the edges of the town where I preached. Those signs–simple painted sunsets on road signs–were nonverbal warnings: if you were a person of color, you’d best not be found in this town after sunset. The signs had been taken down, but the sentiments, fears and prejudices were not so deeply buried. I would later be disturbed to find out, for example, that two members of my congregation had been “card-carrying” KKK members while  I was pastor there. As a white woman, I had been ignorant and thus, negligent.

As we walked back to classes that weekend, though, my companion, a pastor who was about 15 years my junior, pointed out that “southern culture” was his culture. Then he added, “They did make some valid points. Did you realize they’re Christian?” 

The hair on the back of my neck stood up.

“If you listen to what they are saying,” he went on, “you will discover that they make a lot of sense.” 

He was a pastor. 

He taught a children’s Sunday School class, too, and he seemed interested, not disturbed, but interested in the Teddy Bear in the robe and hood.

“How,” I asked as calmly as I could while placing one foot in front of another, “would you go about teaching this to children?” I wanted him to clarify, to make me realize I’ve misunderstood, to tell me he wasn’t teaching ‘southern culture’ to the children, but he didn’t say any more. As we approached the classroom for our last afternoon that weekend, I wondered what the other pastors might say. Turns out, very little. I remember watching the others in the rest of the day’s lecture and discussion, wondering why no one mentioned what we’d seen. Had they debated at lunch? Had they discovered  others open to these ideas? No one seemed angry, at least not that they’d admit. I felt like I was playing a game my sons liked where you had to pretend that the floor was lava, so don’t dare put your feet down; it was dangerous. I hoped that the overt racism we’d witnessed had shocked them too. I feared, though, they knew from experience not to admit out loud they “got” where these guys were coming from, that, like my walking companion, they knew to simply shut down the conversation if they thought they’d shown their own hood to the wrong person. 

Once we’d finished for the day and each of the pastors was headed home to prepare to preach the next morning, I found Grady, the professor in charge. I explained I did not want to cause an issue for a colleague but I was disturbed about what this pastor might be teaching, especially in Sunday school for children. I wasn’t sure what to do and had not felt safe addressing him directly. Grady listened, got the particulars, then told me it was his place to address it. 

I heard nothing else for a month until I received an email from Grady; he’d spoken to the younger pastor’s District Superintendent, who evidently had found “no reason to believe such reports” and had never even spoken to the guy. This information hit my inbox just before leaving for the next weekend class. Once there, I was dismayed to find that the young pastor was there before me, annoyed, and looking for me. He was pretty sure I was the one who had ratted him out. I was the only “old lady” there. 

He greeted me with “I got called on the carpet by my DS,” which was a stark departure from what my professor had been told.  “When can we talk about this alone?” he wanted to know. 

“Excuse me,” I said, walking away; that was as much as he got for the rest of the weekend from me.

I still count that entire episode a disappointing failure, though I didn’t know how to do anything differently at the time. Not tossing my books and overnight bag in my car and leaving right away seemed the best I could manage for the time being. Clearly, I needed to learn how to counter this twisting of theology openly, to be prepared to teach the children and youth in the churches I served that Jesus really meant it when He said He loved every body. So I stayed. For the rest of that weekend, I kept my distance. I kept my guard up. I didn’t sleep.

I wasn’t surprised then a few weeks later at lunch, though, when this “old lady” was being castigated and labelled a busybody sticking her nose in other people’s business. 

Just to be clear, I asked my angry colleague, “That old lady ought to have simply looked the other way?” 

“Exactly!” he said. “It was none of her…your business.”

Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm: A Pastor’s Tale of Smalltown Challenges

(Includes an excerpt)

With your support and encouragement, Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm, my first book, is out and ready for consumption.

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An excerpt:

From “The Women’s Kitchen Jug Band.”

Lela, Rebecca, Molly and Sally were all part of this impressive gaggle of hardy women who had lived long enough and worked hard enough to say they didn’t really care what anyone else thought any more, though they were not shy about telling you what they thought. What they “thought” often and vocally was that “Mildred was goin’ to hell.” That was because Mildred, who lived across the street from Lela, never let the shadow of the steeple at church fall across her path, even though she was mobile and still drove when she wanted. 

The first time I tried to visit Mildred, I called to ask if she’d mind a visit and she proceeded to cuss me out and tell me with every imaginable expletive why I needed to leave her the #*#* alone! Then she stopped and took a breath, but before I could apologize for bothering her, she asked, “Now, who IS this?”

“Your new preacher,” I offered. 

“Well, damn.”

Like many of the elderly I visited, Mildred, who was even tinier than Rebecca, and even more impatient with the younger folks around her, complained about the same issues every time. She also told me about her “constitutional.” Her need for me to know her bowel habits was, strangely, not unusual for this congregation which was, admittedly, mostly populated with folks old enough for regularity to be an issue. Nevertheless, I never knew so many people in one congregation who needed their pastor to know they were regular. I was not prepared for that. I expected they’d share what they were ashamed of or when they’d strayed from the straight and narrow, but not this. If I’d had a bingo board to take to every visit, “regular bowel movement” would have been the center spot. Mildred was no different. 

I learned quickly to move to another topic in those visits. If I’d been willing, I could have shared what was working or not working for others in the congregation and even wondered if I needed to copy those old timey door-to-door peddlers and carry with me a big black valise filled with stool-softeners, laxatives and Pepto-Bismol. I decided instead that this line of conversation was simply a warped reminder of my responsibility to keep boundaries and not share what was not mine to share. I chose not to take the bait in those conversations.  

All of these women, at different times, worried me to no end, and the challenge was to try to talk them down off those ladders at their age. Mildred prided herself on a perfect lawn, and no one could do it as well as she could. She was so tiny, though, that the brand new “Yardman” riding mower she bought would not start for her because she was not heavy enough for the seat to register that she was actually riding the mower. Undeterred, she doctored the spring system and drove around her steep and hilly lawn at least twice a week during the warmer months while the neighbors cringed and begged her to let one of their sons help her out. Her own son would not help, however, so she was damned if she would let someone else’s son show him or her up. She would not stop mowing, not even after she tipped the mower because she found a new gopher hole. One tire dropped into the hole but kept going even after Mildred fell off. Thankfully, it did not get far before it rested against a small tree and burned itself out. The jolt sent Mildred tumbling and she found herself stuck, headfirst, in a hole. It wasn’t a tight hole and her head had fallen into it so she hadn’t gotten hurt too badly. She would have easily been capable of extricating herself from the offending hole except she didn’t have the arm strength to push herself back upright and so she had to wait, head first in that hole, listening to her precious mower burn itself out against the silver maple tree until one of the neighbors smelled the engine burning and came over to see what was what. That neighbor got cussed out, too. Mildred was nothing if not consistent.

A couple of years later, Mildred died, still alone, and still cussing out anyone in her way, but also still quite regular. All she wanted was a short graveside service and that was certainly her choice except that she died during the coldest February I could remember. Only the Kitchen Band ladies attended and, as was to be expected, each dressed “to the nines” to send Mildred off to her fiery eternal home. Because the only people who would be attending on that frigid morning were these ladies in their nineties, I was grateful the funeral home was prepared with a small tent and some space heaters. I assured the Directors I would keep things brief, and only included a prayer and Proverbs 31. “Who can find a virtuous woman?” In retrospect, I had to admit Mildred had only sparsely shared about her past issues so talking about her as an excellent wife might have seemed disingenuous to the women who knew her well. At the time, though, we all were simply grateful to recite the 23rd Psalm and The Lord’s Prayer and be done with it. Unfortunately, as I took a flower from the pall and broke it up to crumble onto her casket, while I prayed, “Ashes to ashes,” a foul and acrid smell made me choke. I looked up to see one funeral director frantically trying to swat sparks while the other gagged. Rebecca, who’d ventured too close to the heater, had decided friends don’t die every day, so she would celebrate the occasion by resurrecting her fox fur stole, its head hanging where a nice brooch ought to have been. The beady eyes of the dead fox haunted me throughout the short service, but it was the smell that was most memorable. It was not just the smell of hair burning, which is foul enough; it was seventy-year-old fox hair we were smelling, an odor that stayed with me for days. I know, as we moved as fast as we could to get the ladies back into their cars, Mildred was either cussing up a storm or, perhaps, cackling gleefully. Maybe both.

Not convinced? How about some advance reviews?

“Here Lies Jimmie’s Arm is a treasure of a book, especially if you have ever attended a small church. The author describes her experiences growing up and becoming a pastor with much humor and great style. The reader is drawn into the dramas of small towns, small churches and in some cases small minds. How she survives and thrives and laughs along the way is truly brilliant and entertaining.” ~ Nancy B. 

“Very readable. And engaging. These pieces welcome the reader into this country setting, with all its charms, peculiarities and characters. The author juxtaposes the troubled histories of her parishioners with her own, inviting readers  into a novice pastor’s inner thoughts, worries and fears. Should be required reading for all would-be pastors.” ~ Charlie M

Eyes to See

I lived in Japan for three and a half years.  Both of my sons were born there. The whole time I lived there, I studied and practiced speaking Japanese.  In fact, I had known for a year I’d be moving there so I had started trying to learn the language a full twelve months before ever stepping foot off the plane in Tokyo.  My husband and I lived the entire time in an apartment building where we were the only “gaijin,” the only foreigners. In fact, we were often the first foreigners our neighbors had ever met even though there were in fact many foreigners living where we lived – in Himeji, a castle town on the inland sea. This is all to say that we spent our days immersed in Japanese; we learned quickly how to ask for what we needed or just to be able to understand what others were saying because, while most Japanese studied English in school, they learned to read it and write it but not necessarily to speak it. Teaching Japanese to speak the English language was what foreigners like us were hired to do.  A common belief we encountered throughout our time there was that gaijins could not learn the Japanese language any more than they could learn to eat sashimi, nori or yakisoba. While we (and most of the gaijin we came to know there) loved the food, we still encountered regularly the declaration that we could not possibly eat, let alone enjoy, the cuisine.

Even funnier was the fact that, more than a few times, we spoke to a neighbor in Japanese, only to be told in Japanese that we were not speaking Japanese.  

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Photos by Jodi McCullah

On a spring morning, I was part of a field trip up into the mountains to eat, of all things, roses prepared in a variety of ways, from batter-dipped and fried to jams. This was with a group of women I to whom I taught English every week for three years. I generally did not speak Japanese to them, but they’d known me long enough to have seen me converse with others who weren’t my students. Standing next to a couple of them, I could hear them talking about me in Japanese. I turned to them and said, in Japanese, “You know I can understand what you are saying, right?” I know I said it correctly because two other students snickered at their friends getting caught and the woman I had addressed turned red. Still, she turned to her confidante and said, “Good thing she can’t understand Japanese.” She could not see how anyone other than a person born Japanese and raised in Japan could possibly speak the language. This was not true for all our neighbors, but it happened, even after we lived next door to them for a couple of years, had worked alongside them, shopped in their stores, enjoyed holiday meals in their homes and gossiped together in the neighborhood’s public bath. Depending on the day, it was either humorous or annoying that a handful of the folks we interacted with regularly simply never could see it though. It went against everything they had been taught and they simply could not imagine, could not see that ever being possible. 

They did not have eyes to see.

Photos by (from L to R) Noelle Otto, Omar Alnahi, Pixabay on Pexels.com

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.

And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.

Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.

As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

Mark 9:2-9 NRSV

Jesus referred fairly often to us having eyes to see and ears to hear – meaning usually us being willing and able to see something new, a new way to see, because this life, this journey, this faith God offers us through Christ is meant to transform us, to help us to see, hear, understand and ultimately be different.  This requires that we enter into that relationship ready and willing each moment to be surprised and to change how we see what is in front of us.   

We are in good company if we often find that difficult to do.   We simply cannot easily change what we “see.” When I was exploring being called into ministry,  I was asked, “Do you see yourself preaching or serving communion?”  I simply said, “No.” I had never seen a woman do any of that and could not even imagine it. 

Here’s the difficult truth about life in Christ: you cannot enter into that relationship and expect to be unchanged; you cannot experience the transformation that is possible without being willing to see differently, even if that means seeing something that is surprising, or bewildering or that you do not know how to explain.

In Mark 9:2-9, we read, “He changed in front of them.” Transfigured is the word that we have become used to reading here. Transfiguration sounds more holy somehow, more theological than to say simply that he changed. But the Greek word here is where we get metamorphosis — or change.

So what happened on that mountain? Evidently it was something they couldn’t really explain. It remains hard to say what happened, except by repeating the words that we read there. He was transfigured; he was changed before them. What they were used to seeing they no longer saw; and something they had never seen before suddenly appeared to their frightened eyes.  We can be sure it was confusing and we can be sure they had choices just like we do: try to forget what they just saw, try to make sense of it or simply move closer because that is where we will be transformed by the renewing of our minds.  

“The Gospel of Mark tells us that Peter was so terrified by the transfiguration that he did not know what to say. The Gospel of Matthew reports that Jesus touched the disciples because they were overcome with fear at the transfiguration. And the Gospel of Luke records that the disciples were terrified after they entered the cloud along with Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. All three Gospel accounts record the transfiguration as an experience that was not shared with anyone else for quite some time.”

(Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol. 1, loc 16361, Kindle Version.)

By the time Mark was writing these Scriptures, he had already witnessed the crucifixion and resurrection. He already knew the end of the story.  When our three disciples were on that mountain, though, they did not know what to think and they were just as happy not to have to share the story.

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Pexels.com

Mark wasn’t even on that mountain.  He didn’t see what Peter James and John saw.   They weren’t supposed to tell so maybe they didn’t. They certainly would not have understood it at the time and if they indeed told anyone, whomever heard it would likely think they’d been drinking strong wine. 

Perhaps it would have seemed a lot less crazy AFTER Jesus had come back from the dead to see the disciples. Maybe then they would have had “eyes to see” and could have believed this story and so many others. 

He had told them already though. He had told them he’d be raised from the dead. They didn’t believe it apparently. 

He’s no pilot…is he?

In “Remembering the Night Two Atomic Bombs Fell—on North Carolina,” a story in National Geographic, we not only learn about a piece of seldom-told history, but also find an example of not having “eyes to see.”

Seems that sixty years ago, at the height of the Cold War, a B-52 bomber from Seymore Johnson Air Base, near Goldsboro, North Carolina, was carrying two 3.8-megaton thermonuclear atomic bombs when the plane disintegrated, killing four of the eight crew members. The plane crashed in a fiery mess, but not before jettisoning the two bombs, what the Air Force would call “Broken Arrows.”  Somehow the bombs both landed without exploding or this event would be a whole lot more well-known than it is.  

(All quotes from this story are from National Geographic, Bill Newcott, 1/23/21, told by eye-witnesses and Joel Dobson, author of a book on the subject (The Goldsboro Broken Arrow.) https://apple.news/AZQ4ng5GNQQ65TcanqBG4yg.)

What the people of Goldsboro did not know then was that their little air base had “quietly become one of several U.S. airfields selected for Operation Chrome Dome, a Cold War doomsday program that kept multiple B-52 bombers in the air throughout the Northern Hemisphere 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Each plane carried two atomic bombs.”

“A few weeks before, the Air Force and the plane’s builder, Boeing, had realized that a recent modification—fitting the B-52’s wings with fuel bladders—could cause the wings to tear off. Tulloch’s plane was scheduled for a re-fit to resolve the problem, but it would come too late.”  The plane started rolling and tearing apart and [The pilot] knew his plane was doomed, so he hit the “bail out” alarm.”

“Of the eight airmen aboard the B-52, six sat in ejection seats. Adam Mattocks, the third pilot, was assigned a regular jump seat in the cockpit. The youngest man on board, 27-year-old Mattocks was also an Air Force rarity: an African-American jet fighter pilot, reassigned to B-52 duty as Operation Chrome Dome got into full swing. At this moment, it looked like that chance assignment would be his death warrant.”

Mattocks’ only chance was to somehow pull himself through a cockpit window after the other two pilots had ejected.

“He was a very religious man, and telling the story later, said he  looked around and said, ‘Well, God, if it’s my time, so be it. But here goes.’”  

“It was a surreal moment. The B-52’s forward speed was nearly zero, but the plane had not yet started falling. It was as if Mattocks and the plane were, for a moment, suspended in midair. He seized on that moment to hurl himself into the abyss, leaping as far from the B-52 as he could. He pulled his parachute ripcord. At first it didn’t deploy, perhaps because his air speed was so low. But as he began falling in earnest, the welcome sight of an air-filled canopy billowed in the night sky above him.

“Mattocks prayed, ‘Thank you, God!’” 

“Then the plane exploded in midair and collapsed his chute.”

“Now Mattocks was just another piece of falling debris from the disintegrating B-52. Somehow, a stream of air slipped into the fluttering chute and it re-inflated. Mattocks was once more floating toward Earth. Looking up at that gently bobbing chute, Mattocks again whispered, ‘Thank you, God!’”

“Then he looked down. He was heading straight for the burning wreckage of the B-52.”

“Well, Lord,” he said out loud, “if this is the way it’s going to end, so be it.” Then a gust of wind, or perhaps an updraft from the flames below, nudged him to the south. Mattocks landed, unhurt, away from the main crash site.”

“After one last murmur of thanks, Mattocks headed for a nearby farmhouse and hitched a ride back to the Air Force base. Standing at the front gate in a tattered flight suit, still holding his bundled parachute in his arms, Mattocks told the guards he had just bailed from a crashing B-52.”

“Faced with a disheveled African-American man cradling a parachute and telling a cockamamie story like that,
the sentries did exactly what you might expect a pair of guards in 1961 rural North Carolina to do:
They arrested Mattocks for stealing a parachute.”

Nothing else made sense to them – they could see no other possible explanation. They did not have eyes to see.

“Of the eight airmen aboard the B-52, five ejected—one of whom didn’t survive the landing—one failed to eject, and another, in a jump seat similar to Mattocks, died in the crash. To this day, Adam Columbus Mattocks—who died in 2018—remains the only aviator to bail out of a B-52 cockpit without an ejector seat and survive.”

The guards that night could not see it though, could not see how this man could be the pilot of a US bomber. 

What can WE not see? What can we not accept because we cannot explain it, cannot see it, cannot imagine it being right?

We do not do this alone.  We stand together in open-mouthed wonder at the fullness of the Christ we worship; together we marvel at something we didn’t think could ever be, things we didn’t think we could ever see. The Good News then is that we don’t have to explain everything, only to follow and be willing to follow somewhere that perhaps we can’t explain and can’t understand, trusting the promise that we will have eyes to see, and we will be transformed, if we will follow.   

D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Eighty Years Later

Because coming home is just the beginning….

In a previous post, (“You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench,”) I introduced James, (not his real name), who struggled mightily with ongoing guilt and grief about his past actions. For years, I didn’t have a clue what those might be.

I did not know what troubled James, only that he was miserable, but when the Lady Preacher came by, he focussed on how I wasn’t preaching or leading worship in a way that would help him feel like he’d “been to church.” Apparently, as I explained in that eariler post, he was convinced that IF that Lady Preacher could dish up some good old-fashioned confession, that would fix things for him, at least temporarily.

My job, as he saw it, was to offer him a chance to relieve his guilt (for at least a week) through confession and some time on that mourner’s bench. There was no mourner’s bench at Wartrace UMC by the time I was sent there as pastor, though, and, unfortunately for James, I was not on board with the kind of spiritual bloodletting he seemed to want.

Wartrace United Methodist Church circa 1850
where a split log bench wih no back was reportedly the “mourner’s bench.”

Sadly, though, James, perhaps more than anyone at Wartrace needed his Preacher to see how guilty he believed he was, to convict him and then to help him leave that guilt on there, even if he never actually graced the church with his presence. I tried a few times to reprise my sermon from my perch on a sticky metal kitchen chair on his back porch, but the sad truth was that even if James had been able to feel forgiven by God every week, even if he had felt Scriptural preaching wash over him every Sabbath morning, he was in grave danger of never being able to forgive himself.

For years, I was unaware this was what he felt he needed. I would visit him regularly but we were not speaking the same spiritual language for the longest time. Until I preached about D-Day.

Wartrace United Methodist Church,
Greenbrier, Tennessee
(Photo Property of Rev Jodi McCullah) 2023

I finally learned why James was continually unhappy with my preaching on a sticky Sunday afternoon in June when I was directed to lift some old blankets and newspapers and take a seat on a sagging recliner in the corner of the porch at James’ house, a corner too dark and hidden even to be seen before. James had decided I was to be trusted finally, not because I had finally made him feel like the worm he thought he was; rather, on that sweltering Sunday in June, his son had called right after worship let out to tell Daddy that the Preacher Lady had shared a D-Day story in her sermon.

D-Day Promises

I had told the story of Rev. Herman Yates, a retired pastor connected to the church; he and his wife had moved there a few months earlier. He had never preached at Wartrace, not even in revivals, and he and his wife were homebound, too, but Wartrace claimed him because he’d grown up in the area. He was on my list of shut-ins to visit, and he had given me permission to share his story on the first Sunday in June. Herman, a sergeant in the United States Army on D-Day sixty years before, had joined other NCO’s who strapped on flimsy orange and white vests with large crosses on them in order to lead their platoons’ landing crafts and soldiers onto the shore. Eyes and throat burning from the acrid smoke, trying to drown out the screams, they were halted time and time again by the force of nearby explosions. Herman and the other Sergeants moved methodically forward, though, careful to move slowly enough for their men to follow and, of course, he said, slowly enough to be a perfect target. When I met him, Herman was able to tell the story calmly after relating it hundreds of times from pulpits across the area. He told powerfully of how he had bargained with God that day that, should he survive, he would dedicate the rest of his life to preaching. God took him up on the deal.

For those unfamiliar with World War II, “The D-Day operation of June 6, 1944, brought together the land, air, and sea forces of the allied armies in what became known as the largest amphibious invasion in military history,” according to the Eisenhower Presidential Library. “The operation, given the codename OVERLORD, delivered five naval assault divisions to the beaches of Normandy, France. The beaches were given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD. The invasion force included 7,000 ships and landing craft manned by over 195,000 naval personnel from eight allied countries. Almost 133,000 troops from the United States, the British Commonwealth, and their allies, landed on D-Day. Casualties from these countries during the landing numbered 10,300.” Combat would continue for nearly another year in Europe. (eisenhowerlibrary.gov)

Knowing what little I do about the massive undertaking that was D-Day, I have long been amazed at the instructions Herman received that morning before the terrifying landing began. “If you make it to the beach,” Herman’s orders had been to “go to the ‘big’ tree, turn right and meet up a mile down.” Herman and at least a few of his platoon somehow safely made their way onto the beach, somehow found some trees still standing on that battlefield, and somehow chose the right big tree from among many. Herman always knew how all that happened and how he had survived the rest of the war. He went on to serve churches for some forty years.

James was proud, he said that Sunday, proud I’d shared Herman’s story. For the first time since I’d arrived at Wartrace, sitting in the old recliner, I did the math and realized James was shaking because he’d been there as well. Tragically, though, James’ story was neither heroic nor admirable.

“I sent them all out there,” he said with litte introduction, “out there to die.” He paused and looked at the flickering television screen, his only constant companion for years. “One by one,” he continued, “the boats went out. We heard and we knew. We were wishing them a safe journey. We knew though. We didn’t know how many, but we knew, we knew. We were safe, right where we were.” He wasn’t in danger but he was painfully certain that his actions were killing soldiers – his own soldiers – on that beachhead as brutally as any bullet or exploding shell. After he shared his story, his voice trailed off and he mumbled to himself for a bit before I made a pitiful attempt to be helpful.

An estimated 20 percent of all combatants historically suffer from the effects of “combat trauma.”

Soldier’s Heart

nostalgia

“to be broken”

shell shock

“The affliction (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) has had many names over the centuries, demonstrating that it is a condition accompanying not just modern wars but all wars. Its cluster of symptoms was first diagnosed as ‘nostalgia’ among Swiss soldiers in 1678. German doctors at that time called the condition Heimweh, and the French called it maladie du pays; both mean homesickness. The Spanish called it estar roto, ‘to be broken.’ Civil War Americans called it soldier’s heart, irritable heart, or nostalgia. In World War I, it was called shell shock; in World War II and Korea, combat fatigue. ‘Soldier’s heart’ indicates that the heart has been changed by war. ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘homesickness’ bespeak the soldier’s anguished longing to escape from the combat zone and return home. Estar roto describes the psyche’s condition after war—broken.”

(War and the Soul: Healing our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, by Edward Tick, Ph.D, p. 99)

I doubt James heard anything I said that afternoon. I’d like to believe I offered him some kind of relief from his guilt but I’m pretty sure my words were wasted. I couldn’t do what he wanted, couldn’t agree with him that he should feel guilty, couldn’t acknowledge that he was indeed as guilty of killing Allied soldiers as any German bullet, bomb or soldier. I toyed with the idea of offering him one of the confessions we regularly used from the hymnal on Communion Sunday, but not one word I could think of was gonna do.

In every house of worship in the nation, veterans of wars are in the pews. Many have spent decades grappling with grief from their wartime experiences. Few of them feel like their part was heroic or admirable. Maybe they “won,” but too often, they are leary of telling us how ugly the “winning” was.

Evidently, James had been needing to visit that mourner’s bench for decades, so maybe telling Herman’s D-Day story created a space for James, as if we gave him permission to risk sharing the shame he felt. Perhaps being able finally to tell his story out loud was the confession James craved. Like too many combat veterans, though, he needed not only to share but also to not be shunned.

Years later, I would sit in a veteran’s retreat and listen to veteran after veteran tell their combat stories, usually with trepidation. So many were like the Iraq war veteran who shared his story of killing “anything that moved” from the helicoptor he piloted. That veteran believed himself to be a “monster” and was certain he should no longer be allowed in our midst. Like this combat veteran and so many others, James needed to tell his story and not have anyone, as one veteran feared, “run screaming from the room.” He needed to know I didn’t see him as a monster and that I would still visit, still speak to him, still consider him part of the flock. He had been needing to visit that mourner’s bench for decades, and telling Herman’s D-Day story gave him permission, at least in his mind, to risk telling his story out loud. Maybe Herman knew what would happen when I shared his D-Day story. God certainly did.

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“Good? Bad? Who Knows?

There’s an often told Chinese story, “Good or Bad, Who Knows?” about a farmer, his son and his horses. The farmer used an old horse to help plough his fields, but one day, the horse escaped and galloped off. When the farmer’s neighbors offered their sympathies to the farmer over the bad news, he simply replied, “Good? or Bad? Who Knows?”

As it happens, a week later, the old horse returned and brought with it a herd of horses! This time the neighbors congratulated the farmer on this good fortune. Once again, though, he replied, “Good? or Bad? Who knows?”

As it happens, a few days later, when the farmer’s son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses, he fell off the horse’s back and broke his leg. Everyone thought this was very bad luck. The farmer’s reaction again was, “Good? or Bad? Who knows?”

Some weeks later, then, when the army marched into the village requiring every able-bodied youth they found to enlist, they found the farmer’s son with this broken leg and he was not drafted.

“Good? or Bad? Who Knows?”

Banner Week? Week From Hell? Who Knows?

It was a banner week. Or the week from hell. Depending on when you asked me. Start seminary. Check. Get divorced. Check. Buy a house solo. Check. In one week. Ugh. Scheduling all three in one week had not been my choice: the seminary starting date was set, but the other two were simply the luck of the draw. I agreed because I wanted to be done with those moments where legal experts, signatures and explanations of terms and fees were laden with shame. Time to move forward.

Thus, on a Monday morning in 2003, I began what would be a four-year run at Vanderbilt Divinity School, one of many steps to ordination in the United Methodist Church. I had already been serving as the pastor at a small United Methodist Church. For seven years, I’d been what the UMC calls a Local Pastor, meaning I was the only pastor for that congregation and licensed (given authority) to preach, teach, marry, bury and serve communion for that congregation. During that time, I attended classes offered by the church but all the while I was waiting until my sons got a bit older before entering seminary and moving closer to ordination. I served at Wartrace United Methodist Church in Greenbrier, Tennessee, while living in Portland. Portland, Tennessee, lies about 30 miles from the church to the west and nearly 45 miles north of Nashville where the school is located. For those four years, the daily trek between the three locations would be my own little Bermuda Triangle, and I would clock 40,000 miles each year, though God knows I hated driving.

Images from Wartrace UMC, my first appointment.

God also knew that, when I was called into ministry, one of my biggest concerns was that I swore “like a sailor.” How’s this gonna work I wondered? God held my tongue, though, and miraculously, only one time did an obscenity escape my mouth while I was in front of anyone in more than a decade. (I’m gonna blame campus ministry and later working with combat veterans for my language eventually going south again.) 

Back to that week. I started seminary and the daily drive back and forth forth and through the back roads. I also would close on a house on Wednesday of that week, my first solo home purchase. Though my husband and I had bought two houses together, I still found the process baffling on my own. With the help of a patient agent, I got there though and much to the relief of my youngest son, we were staying in our little town which meant he could finish high school with friends.  More importantly, at least to him, we weren’t going to live in a trailer, apparently a fate worse than any other his teen brain could conjure.

I closed on this house alone on Wednesday after classes because the day before, somewhere in the midst of visits to shut-ins or the hospital and more orientation for my new Vanderbilt classes, I went to court to finalize my divorce. The court appearance was still required then and ours was early in the morning on that Tuesday. I drove down the ridge and sat in the courtroom as the judge appeared and called couple after couple to stand before him to ask if either had any other concerns or if they could agree to the final settlement.

Couple after couple said yes. Some answered quietly and sadly. One or two barked their answers as they stared at their soon-to-be exes. We were last except “we” weren’t there. The judge moved the process along fairly quickly so it was only 9: 15 or 9:20 when our names were called, but my soon-to-be ex was nowhere to be found. I went before the judge, wondered a minute or two whether or not I could change the agreement since my husband wasn’t there yet, then answered. “Yes, I am in agreement to the terms we negotiated with the help of a mediator.” 

And then I was divorced. Something I’d never believed I would be. My parents were not happy together, but they stayed married. His parents struggled too but they also were still married. I had never imagined myself divorced. Of course, I never imagined in my forties I’d be preaching or attending seminary and studying theology and Bible and the elements of worship or prison ministry, either, but there I was in classes 9 a.m. every day of the week suddenly. Even nine years earlier, it had not yet entered my mind that I’d be standing in a pulpit trying to help a congregation feel closer to God OR divorced OR buying a home as a single mom. I answered yes, the gavel hit the wooden block on the judge’s bench, and we were done.  

Wartrace United Methodist Church was approaching 150 years old when I went there in 1996 and the photo at the left is in front of the original building, taken around the turn of the last century.

I next saw my now ex-husband again as I walked out of the courthouse around 9:30. He was just then walking in a bit late even though he lived in the same town as the county courthouse. I had driven some thirty minutes down the ridge to get there.

“Are you here alone?” The judge had asked me before declaring us divorced. 

“Yes, sir.”I had said, “It’s appropriate,” I explained, “It didn’t feel like he showed up for the marriage so I guess there’s no reason to expect him to show up for the divorce.”

The judge frowned, but declared I was no longer married to the man I’d expected to live with forever. I used to tell friends I imagined fondly the two of us walking hand in hand when we were elderly. Perhaps he’d wear a beret; I’d once seen an elderly couple walking together and the man wore a beret. They seemed to walk as if that was simply the most natural thing in the world. The two. Together. 

We’d walked through life together but, ironically, we had never actually taken many walks together until our twentieth year of marriage when we were in counseling and needed to talk out so much.  The only reliable privacy we had was to go for walks in the neighborhood so we could talk, or argue, without our sons needing to hear it all. I lost about twenty pounds that last year from stress and walking. I’d love to say I never found it again but that’s a different post.  

I stopped briefly on the steps leading into the courthouse as my now “ex” husband entered, looking at me quizzically. 

“It’s done,” I said, and he frowned. 

“Do you want some coffee?” he asked. 

My turn to frown. “Pass, “I said. “Heading to class.” 

“How’s that going?” he asked, He’d finished his own doctorate while we were married and was none too happy to be paying me alimony while I got my Masters of Divinity, but he also liked academia and worked in it, so he was happy to chat about that if I wanted. I didn’t. 

Me wilting. John Wesley Bobblehead, as always, expectant. Sensible boots and backpacks would become my uniform.

My day would be filled, thankfully, with the business of becoming a Vanderbilt student, and the myriad tasks that entailed would keep my mind occupied that day, I hoped. As soon as I got in the car, though, I wondered if I’d missed a chance. I should have planned to meet up with a friend and get drunk or find a rebound relationship or get a tattoo, I thought. Was I missing out on the chance to be self-destructive and not be judged? Damn.  

I drove silently to the campus for more paperwork. Classes began on Wednesday and honestly, at the time, it felt like they would be a welcome relief. Before that, there were school loan papers to sign, books to buy, an ID to be photographed for; time to don my student pastor identity. Orientation day at Vanderbilt Divinity School was, of course, as was the entire week, played out in the muggy heat of August in Tennessee. Sadly, that all required I move about the campus in the heat dressed as a professional without looking wilted. Complicating the day for me was the layout of the campus with the walks between buildings. Those walks meandered through the beautiful campus, but not in any grid-like pattern. While pastoral on cooler days, the campus on that steamy day seemed to confound me every time I had to leave the Divinity School quad to visit another building. The paths between buildings curved and intersected and wound around various statues and even the stone crypt of Bishop William McKendree, who, I would learn, was the first Methodist Bishop born in the USA and credited with establishing Methodism on what was the western frontier in the early nineteenth century. McKendree UM churches dot the countryside in Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri. He died near Nashville while visiting family and in 1876, his remains were interred in the grounds of Vanderbilt University, along with those of other Methodist bishops, in part because the school originally was created to help educate Methodist ministers.   

View of the gravestone of Bishops McKendee, Soule and McTyeire, and Amelia McTyeire, Chancellor Garland, and Dean Thomas O. Summers in 1925. Vanderbilt University Special Collections and University Archives photo archives PA.CAF.GRAV.002 (https://www.vanderbilt.edu/trees/mctyeires-grave/)

Pastoral, bucolic, flowering garden beds sat next to benches that encouraged rest and beautiful old stone buildings invited meditation, but those paths seemed designed to confuse me even though I had grown up reading maps. My father, who helped survey the paths for hundreds of miles of Missouri state highways, taught us how to read maps early, and every year at Christmas, he presented us each with the state highway version of “bling,” a new, revised state map. I was always particularly gifted at directions and maps; I corrected pathways to destinations regularly. It was a gift that I could tell you how to get “there.” Not that day, though and not in that place. The Vanderbilt campus walkways, I soon discovered, curved and meandered enough that, on at least three trips on that sweaty afternoon, I wound up at the wrong building in spite of the decorative campus maps posted prominently. I guess the designers felt students needed to be lost more often. At one point, after finding my campus mailbox, I followed a group who all said they were looking to get campus ID’s next. One by one we got pictures taken and laminated. Mine was a witness to my defeated state on that afternoon. Perspiration matted my hair and my cheeks were red from the heat. The bad news was no one would recognize me in that picture. Perhaps that’d be good news one day. My query about retaking the photo on another day was met with a glare. The clerk was spending her afternoon in the air conditioning, I thought. What’s her issue?

I moved along, aware a library card still needed to be acquired and a locker in the Divinity School building as well. If I could find the library, the Divinity School would be close, I reasoned, but the heat was getting to me. At one point, I stopped into the food court to find some lunch but found the choices bewildering and the process moved more quickly than I was prepared to navigate. Students who’d only recently attended undergraduate classes jostled me and moved around me and the hot food worker glared until I took my tray and moved to the salad bar. A few minutes later, I stabbed at my salad and wiped the sweat off my forehead trying to unstick my bangs. As I dabbed at my sweaty forehead with a napkin, another worker, a woman, stopped at my table and put her hand down and said, “You look like you need to put your head on the shelf now, dear.” 

“I’m sorry?”

“Put your head on a shelf. Take a break? Stop thinking for the day, you know.” 

I frowned.

“Rest your mind, sweetie,” she said and she moved on. Words of wisdom from a stranger, but I didn’t have time to rest yet; that’d come years later. 

On my way back to the library, my phone pinged to tell me I was late for an orientation I’d completely forgotten about, and I stopped and looked around me, lost again. I felt old. I felt like I wasn’t going to be able to keep up. How would I manage classes and single parenting and being the pastor and preaching and visiting and paying for all those books and driving? It was too much. What was I thinking? The next day I’d be signing papers to buy a house on a part-time salary and school loans. The students around me were twenty and thirty years younger and most were accustomed to the changes on college campuses that threw me, like salad bars in the cafeteria and computer charging stations everywhere. Those students didn’t seem lost.

I sat down on a bench, defeated. I would have just quit right then and there, if I could have found the damn Divinity School building.  Obscenity doesn’t count if no one hears you, right? I would be walking into the orientation with the other 60-plus students who would be in my cohort for three to four years. Only I’d be late, sweaty, disheveled and feeling defeated. I sat on a stone bench and looked at the backpack I had been steadily filling with more and more, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to make the locker work in order to leave some of the many required books in there. Tears filled my eyes as I began to pray.

“I can’t do this, Lord. It’s too hard. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was foolish to even consider I could manage. I still had a house to close on and God knows that process never made sense to me. How am I gonna manage that AND Divinity school? I can’t even find the damn school.” I was trying not to just start sobbing.

I took a breath and looked up at the elderly and majestic magnolia tree shading me, one that had been planted with a couple of hundred other southern magnolias in 1895 by Bishop McTyeire, one of the bishops buried near the Divinity School. I squinted to look through the dark leaves at the sun shimmering and the cross…. Wait. What?

There was a cross on top of that building. 

Suddenly, I was laughing as I cried. Of course, there was a cross on the top of the Divinity School Building! My guess is that everyone else knew that, except those of us sitting in our self-pity piles. Geez. Yeah, I’ll cop to a tendency to self-pity, fueled by a glass half full mentality. Sometimes I’ve wondered how I ever got anything done, but, then again, I’ve always been teachable. I wasn’t alone like I felt I was either, but there’s seldom been room for or recognition of any company in my self-pity dinghy.

In that moment, sitting on that concrete bench, though, laughing at the shiny cross against the blue sky, I kicked myself. Had I taken a moment to look up and to seek God in the midst of my exhausting week, I would’ve seen it. Like on the steeple of a Christian church in most places, shiny and bright, that cross topped the Divinity School building, there to guide us all day back home, like the North Star. I would have seen it if I had just looked up, if I had started my days with an awareness of God’s presence.

The rest of the week would be mostly a blur, but by time I stepped back into the pulpit that next Sunday, I would have “celebrated” or “survived” three momentous life changes in the course of one week. I was living in a new home, divorced, and a seminary student, but I was still standing, gratefully. I shared with my congregation about looking up and seeing the cross and realizing it had been there all along waiting for me to notice. I also shared the image of putting my head on a shelf. Both would carry me through the next four years of school as well as the decades I’d spend in ministry, reminders of who brought me to that moment and who would guide me through all the struggles, if I would pay attention.

D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness

Because coming home is just the beginning….

In a previous post, (“You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench,”) I introduced James, (not his real name), who struggled mightily with ongoing guilt and grief about his past actions. For years, I didn’t have a clue what those might be.

I did not know what troubled James, only that he was miserable, but when the Lady Preacher came by, he focussed on how I wasn’t preaching or leading worship in a way that would help him feel like he’d “been to church.” Apparently, as I explained in that eariler post, he was convinced that IF that Lady Preacher could dish up some good old-fashioned confession, that would fix things for him, at least temporarily.

My job, as he saw it, was to offer him a chance to relieve his guilt (for at least a week) through confession and some time on that mourner’s bench. There was no mourner’s bench at Wartrace UMC by the time I was sent there as pastor, though, and, unfortunately for James, I was not on board with the kind of spiritual bloodletting he seemed to want.

Wartrace United Methodist Church circa 1850
where a split log bench wih no back was reportedly the “mourner’s bench.”

Sadly, though, James, perhaps more than anyone at Wartrace needed his Preacher to see how guilty he believed he was, to convict him and then to help him leave that guilt on there, even if he never actually graced the church with his presence. I tried a few times to reprise my sermon from my perch on a sticky metal kitchen chair on his back porch, but the sad truth was that even if James had been able to feel forgiven by God every week, even if he had felt Scriptural preaching wash over him every Sabbath morning, he was in grave danger of never being able to forgive himself.

For years, I was unaware this was what he felt he needed. I would visit him regularly but we were not speaking the same spiritual language for the longest time. Until I preached about D-Day.

Wartrace United Methodist Church,
Greenbrier, Tennessee
(Photo Property of Rev Jodi McCullah) 2023

I finally learned why James was continually unhappy with my preaching on a sticky Sunday afternoon in June when I was directed to lift some old blankets and newspapers and take a seat on a sagging recliner in the corner of the porch at James’ house, a corner too dark and hidden even to be seen before. James had decided I was to be trusted finally, not because I had finally made him feel like the worm he thought he was; rather, on that sweltering Sunday in June, his son had called right after worship let out to tell Daddy that the Preacher Lady had shared a D-Day story in her sermon.

D-Day Promises

I had told the story of Rev. Herman Yates, a retired pastor connected to the church; he and his wife had moved there a few months earlier. He had never preached at Wartrace, not even in revivals, and he and his wife were homebound, too, but Wartrace claimed him because he’d grown up in the area. He was on my list of shut-ins to visit, and he had given me permission to share his story on the first Sunday in June. Herman, a sergeant in the United States Army on D-Day sixty years before, had joined other NCO’s who strapped on flimsy orange and white vests with large crosses on them in order to lead their platoons’ landing crafts and soldiers onto the shore. Eyes and throat burning from the acrid smoke, trying to drown out the screams, they were halted time and time again by the force of nearby explosions. Herman and the other Sergeants moved methodically forward, though, careful to move slowly enough for their men to follow and, of course, he said, slowly enough to be a perfect target. When I met him, Herman was able to tell the story calmly after relating it hundreds of times from pulpits across the area. He told powerfully of how he had bargained with God that day that, should he survive, he would dedicate the rest of his life to preaching. God took him up on the deal.

For those unfamiliar with World War II, “The D-Day operation of June 6, 1944, brought together the land, air, and sea forces of the allied armies in what became known as the largest amphibious invasion in military history,” according to the Eisenhower Presidential Library. “The operation, given the codename OVERLORD, delivered five naval assault divisions to the beaches of Normandy, France. The beaches were given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD. The invasion force included 7,000 ships and landing craft manned by over 195,000 naval personnel from eight allied countries. Almost 133,000 troops from the United States, the British Commonwealth, and their allies, landed on D-Day. Casualties from these countries during the landing numbered 10,300.” Combat would continue for nearly another year in Europe. (eisenhowerlibrary.gov)

Knowing what little I do about the massive undertaking that was D-Day, I have long been amazed at the instructions Herman received that morning before the terrifying landing began. “If you make it to the beach,” Herman’s orders had been to “go to the ‘big’ tree, turn right and meet up a mile down.” Herman and at least a few of his platoon somehow safely made their way onto the beach, somehow found some trees still standing on that battlefield, and somehow chose the right big tree from among many. Herman always knew how all that happened and how he had survived the rest of the war. He went on to serve churches for some forty years.

James was proud, he said that Sunday, proud I’d shared Herman’s story. For the first time since I’d arrived at Wartrace, sitting in the old recliner, I did the math and realized James was shaking because he’d been there as well. Tragically, though, James’ story was neither heroic nor admirable.

“I sent them all out there,” he said with litte introduction, “out there to die.” He paused and looked at the flickering television screen, his only constant companion for years. “One by one,” he continued, “the boats went out. We heard and we knew. We were wishing them a safe journey. We knew though. We didn’t know how many, but we knew, we knew. We were safe, right where we were.” He wasn’t in danger but he was painfully certain that his actions were killing soldiers – his own soldiers – on that beachhead as brutally as any bullet or exploding shell. After he shared his story, his voice trailed off and he mumbled to himself for a bit before I made a pitiful attempt to be helpful.

An estimated 20 percent of all combatants historically suffer from the effects of “combat trauma.”

Soldier’s Heart

nostalgia

“to be broken”

shell shock

“The affliction (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) has had many names over the centuries, demonstrating that it is a condition accompanying not just modern wars but all wars. Its cluster of symptoms was first diagnosed as ‘nostalgia’ among Swiss soldiers in 1678. German doctors at that time called the condition Heimweh, and the French called it maladie du pays; both mean homesickness. The Spanish called it estar roto, ‘to be broken.’ Civil War Americans called it soldier’s heart, irritable heart, or nostalgia. In World War I, it was called shell shock; in World War II and Korea, combat fatigue. ‘Soldier’s heart’ indicates that the heart has been changed by war. ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘homesickness’ bespeak the soldier’s anguished longing to escape from the combat zone and return home. Estar roto describes the psyche’s condition after war—broken.”

(War and the Soul: Healing our Nation’s Veterans from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, by Edward Tick, Ph.D, p. 99)

I doubt James heard anything I said that afternoon. I’d like to believe I offered him some kind of relief from his guilt but I’m pretty sure my words were wasted. I couldn’t do what he wanted, couldn’t agree with him that he should feel guilty, couldn’t acknowledge that he was indeed as guilty of killing Allied soldiers as any German bullet, bomb or soldier. I toyed with the idea of offering him one of the confessions we regularly used from the hymnal on Communion Sunday, but not one word I could think of was gonna do.

In every house of worship in the nation, veterans of wars are in the pews. Many have spent decades grappling with grief from their wartime experiences. Few of them feel like their part was heroic or admirable. Maybe they “won,” but too often, they are leary of telling us how ugly the “winning” was.

Evidently, James had been needing to visit that mourner’s bench for decades, so maybe telling Herman’s D-Day story created a space for James, as if we gave him permission to risk sharing the shame he felt. Perhaps being able finally to tell his story out loud was the confession James craved. Like too many combat veterans, though, he needed not only to share but also to not be shunned.

Years later, I would sit in a veteran’s retreat and listen to veteran after veteran tell their combat stories, usually with trepidation. So many were like the Iraq war veteran who shared his story of killing “anything that moved” from the helicoptor he piloted. That veteran believed himself to be a “monster” and was certain he should no longer be allowed in our midst. Like this combat veteran and so many others, James needed to tell his story and not have anyone, as one veteran feared, “run screaming from the room.” He needed to know I didn’t see him as a monster and that I would still visit, still speak to him, still consider him part of the flock. He had been needing to visit that mourner’s bench for decades, and telling Herman’s D-Day story gave him permission, at least in his mind, to risk telling his story out loud. Maybe Herman knew what would happen when I shared his D-Day story. God certainly did.

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For Combat Veterans, Memorial Day is No Picnic

For those who survive combat and return home, the duty to keep the memory alive of the ‘true heroes’ can become a lifelong, sacred mission lived out daily.

Conversations with veterans of war will teach you one thing quickly: for many, the only true “hero” is the one who didn’t come home. Thus, for so many combat veterans who have lost a battle buddy, a friend, even an enemy, in war, the duty to keep the memory of the “true heroes” alive can become a lifelong, sacred mission lived out daily.

Sadly, Survivors’ Guilt is one of the main contributors to veteran suicides that continue to plague this country. Living with the fact that you survived when so many others did not then means Every Day Becomes Memorial Day. 

For many combat veterans, the survivor’s guilt, or the belief that you have done something wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others did not, can be debilitating and disturbing. Survivors of all sorts of traumas will question, feel guilty, and often even begin to believe their survival makes them somehow responsible for the other person’s death. 

“Why did I survive?” 

“I stepped one way and my buddy went another. He took the bullet.”

“I switched seats with another pilot and he was killed. It should have been me.”  

“If I’d leaned forward, I would have been the one hit, not him.” 

The grief of losing those under your command or knowing that another person died saving you is a particularly heavy burden. Especially plaguing for so many combat veterans is the reality that they were responsible for taking the life of a child, whether a combatant or just an innocent bystander.

Even just returning when so many others did not, though, can feel like too much to bear. Thus, remembering and honoring the “real” heroes with some kind of meaningful ritual or task that honors the fallen then becomes the new mission.  

Eddie G.

His Sergeant Major brought Eddie G. to my campus ministry one rainy day in 2011. He’d already deployed into combat as an engineer three times and he was only 25-years-old.

“Got any work our guy can help with?” Eddie stood by his truck across the parking lot, out of earshot.

“Well, I was needing to make this entrance accessible. Probably a ramp….” I nodded to the young vet leaning against his truck.

Seems Eddie was sleeping in that truck. He was not allowed to see his daughter or go home. Sergeant Major was running out of ideas and Eddie was not the only vet in crisis in Clarksville, which is adjacent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, home to the 5th Special Forces Group and 101st Air Assault. At that time, the base was dealing with more active duty suicides than any other U.S. military base. Eddie was just one of many vets in crisis but he’s the one Sergeant Major brought to see me that day.

“You need something built; Eddie’s your man,” said Sergeant Major. Eddie had been building bridges for combat transport. Never having done that, I could not and did not at the time realize the frustration and grief of building a bridge to transport your unit into combat only to watch them be destroyed almost immediately. Too often at the cost of the lives of your buddies. “He just needs a task. To be useful. Helpful.”

And just like that, a hurting vet was building a ramp for our campus ministry. He showed up at an ungodly hour the next morning in the pouring rain. For the next four days, our only conversation was me asking him if he wanted a cup of coffee or needed anything. He never needed anything but the coffee. I’d stand out there with him, attempting to make some small talk but everything I said seemed pretty lame.

He worked silently. Alone. In the rain. For four days. Didn’t need any help. Didn’t want to talk to anyone much. I watched him a lot those four days, wondering about how we could help him. I called another, older veteran I knew and asked him for suggestions, ways we could help this guy who worked so methodically, silently, almost prayerfully to build a ramp to make our building accessible.

“Leave him alone, and let him build,” my friend said. “You ARE helping him.”

For four days, Eddie worked in the rain, silently, taking only the occasional break to smoke a cigarette and stare at the ramp as it took shape. The day he finished, he sat for a couple of hours, I guess, in his truck, smoking and looking at the finished ramp.

I was afraid to let him leave, afraid he needed so much more, but painfully aware I didn’t know what that might be. I went out and took some pictures and he said I could send them to Sergeant Major and he’d get them. I said thank you and he stabbed his cigarette out, then said goodbye. As he turned to leave, though, he added so quietly I almost didn’t hear it: “At least nobody is gonna blow this up.” I never saw him again. I pray he found another project.

“Survivor’s guilt is a complicated kind of grief and treating it needs to be very individual,” says counselor and combat veteran Lantz Smith, former Executive Director of Soldiers And Families Embraced (SAFE), a free counseling program near Fort Campbell.

Often, he says, the kind of complicated grief carried by war survivors is never finished. Certainly, he says, there seems to be no straight progression through the many stages of grief, and little hope of the grief ending neatly with any sense of closure.  

“Quite often,” Smith says, “survivors of combat are more afraid of forgetting than anything else. Their fear is that NOT feeling grief intensely is dangerously close to forgetting, and forgetting would be unforgivable.”   

Ask any combat veteran and they will tell you whose memories they personally are keeping alive.

In his invaluable book, “Warriors Return,” Dr. Edward Tick of Soldier’s Heart explains, “Survivors shape their lives and suffer their nightmares as ways to not break faith with the fallen. Canadian Lt. Colonel John McRae’s World War I poem, ‘In Flanders Fields,’ reads, ‘If you break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep…’” 

Poppies are still reminders of those who have fallen in conbat.

“Civilians taking oaths of military service become bound to serve and sacrifice no matter what is asked of them, even unto killing or being killed,” says Tick. “Combat also binds, producing an intense intimacy between brothers-and sisters-in-arms and with foes. Survivors often take oaths to remain loyal forever to those with whom they have shared the experience of hell. They strain to honor the memories of their fallen, prove themselves worthy of their sacrifices, and fulfill last promises, such as delivering messages home,” he explains.

Tick, Edward, PHD, Warrior’s Return: Restoring the Soul After War, Sounds True Publications, Boulder, Colorado.

Helping these survivors find ways to remember a fellow service member’s death without constantly emotionally reliving the trauma is the challenge for trauma counselors.  

The New Mission

While many combat veterans will never finish the healing process after they return home when their brother- or sister-in-arms did not, they can find ways to make peace with and live with this new mission in life. Memorializing is one effective method, says Smith. Like Eddie G., for example, they can build something that will not be destroyed.

Memorializing means creating places and activities to hold part of the grief and help the veteran find a healthy way to keep alive the memory of those who have fallen in battle.  

One veteran, a fighter pilot, was haunted by the way he could take another life while staying “above the fray,” and be an anonymous danger to those below him. His memorial? He has loaded as many pennies as he can in a large bowl; each one represents a life lost in a bombing raid.

He regularly picks up the weighty reminder because, he says, he needs to feel a physical weight to accompany the emotional burden of those whose lives he took, who shared the hell of war with him but who did not ever see him. He feels the weight of this grief and does his part to remember the weight of war.

A sailor who cannot “unhear” the voices of those who could not be saved from drowning becomes a counselor to help those who are drowning emotionally like he once was.

Some veterans find help for the guilt of surviving by sharing it in music or stories. Ancient cultures are said to have brought warriors home and, after a time of cleansing, asked them to tell the rest of the community everything they saw and felt and all that they did. When they finished, the community then helped them carry the burden of their memories and guilt. Sharing is also a way of keeping a memory alive, of honoring the fallen.

Aaron Voris, combat veteran, attending a SAFE songwriting retreat. Used with permission.

One young soldier, who was wounded himself when he returned, was haunted by the memory of having to carry the body of a small child to a burn pile after a battle. He knew nothing about her, and her family could not be found. Perhaps they did not survive either. For the longest time, that memory was disturbing and his greatest desire was to drive the pain of that moment from his mind.

With the help of a counselor, however, he chose to see the memory not as a haunting spectre but as a desire to be honored and remembered. That child – whoever she was – deserved to be honored and remembered, too, and, he realized, there might be no one else to do that. Remembering this innocent victim of war was his new mission and embracing that gave him some peace. He gave her a name and then he planted a tree dedicated to her in the field behind his home. He tends to it and hopes she is at peace as well, knowing she was remembered.

“If you break faith with us who die / We shall not sleep…’” 

Canadian Lt. Colonel John McRae’s World War I poem, “In Flanders Fields.”

These rituals will never erase the profound sense of loss or the survivors’ guilt, but they can keep the veteran from turning the grief and guilt inward in destructive ways, Smith says.

Veterans build raised gardens to provide hands on therapy “giving life,” rather than taking it .

Finding Meaning in Survival

Rituals also serve as regular reminders that survivors were likely spared for some reason. These acts and memorials become the new missions that can help combat survivors bear the duty of remembering.

I believe Eddie was deep in thought the entire time he was building our new ramp, promising his fallen buddies that each nail driven and each step taken on this ramp was a reminder that war was not all there was and that those who fell would be remembered and honored every time someone entered that campus ministry building.

Accepting their new mission, embracing this sacred duty to remember and honor, can, with the help of families, friends, counselors and ministers, ease the survivors’ guilt enough for today and help them cope with the fact that, once a combat veteran returns home from battle, every day becomes Memorial Day. 

Thank a veteran next time you see him or her but remember, they don’t think of themselves as the heroes. In fact, it may disturb them to be called a hero. “Thank you for your service” is enough. Even better, how about we all just take a minute and reflect on why we have designated a Memorial Day in the first place?

This is first of a series of posts about war, loss and healing.

I am a veteran, retired United Methodist Minister and co-founder of Soldiers And Families Embraced (SAFE), a non-profit offering free counseling to combat veterans and their families.  In 2011, at the height of the US military’s largest scale armed conflicts since the Vietnam War in Iraq and Afghanistan, I served as the campus minister at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, which is adjacent to Fort Campbell, Kentucky.  At the time, more than 17,000 Soldiers were deployed into combat from the fort, which had the highest suicide rate of any other base in FORSCM.  Veterans, their spouses and their children began bringing to campus the effects of multiple, year-long combat deployments, including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Traumatic Brain Injuries.  In response, with the help of a veteran studying social work, we began a free and totally confidential counseling program based on the story of Lazarus emerging from the tomb, still wrapped in the trappings of war and death.  SAFE continues today providing free counseling to those affected by all wars.

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You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench

Rituals are meant to be the beginning of the healing process, not the end of it.

Rituals can be powerful for healing, and we need them to help us heal after loss and tragedy. That memorial service we hold when someone dies? It is for the living, not the person who died. Those impromptu memorials after shootings? They help us come together to start the healing.

Rituals are just the beginning, though. This is especially true when our own behavior is part of the problem, when we keep doing the same things and expecting different results. At that point, our rituals are pointless and empty. Visiting a shut-in about once a month for nearly a decade taught me this.

By the time I started preaching, James (I changed his name for this post.) and his wife of close to 60 years were both homebound shut-ins and so were on a rotation of homes for the pastor to visit after worship. Visiting their home was ever the adventure, though.

The entry of the home was a strange mix of antebellum and 70’s influences. A folding metal lawn chair leaned up against one of the original plaster columns that framed the ten-foot-high wooden doors, for example. Heavy enough to kill you if they fell on you, the doors were never allowed to completely close as long as I knew James; opening them would have required at least two grown men. A makeshift screen door was all that separated visitors from the cluttered yard and the porch strewn with more folded lawn chairs, some dead potted plants and a half-empty bag of mulch.

The first time I visited, after knocking several times, I gingerly pushed the screen door open and started towards the voice of a television newscaster beckoning me from the farthest end of the great entry hall. On my right, was a set of partially closed doors, and from them I could see Jame’s wife, whom I also had not met, but whom I was told was not interested in visitors. I later did manage to introduce myself and be admitted to her room but that was apparently only out of necessity: I was allowed in long enough to change the channel on her nearly-antebellum black and white television for her. I was only in her room long enough to realize that, though she was hooked up to an oxygen machine, sitting next to her on the bedside table was a pack of cigarettes and a full ashtray. I declined to empty the ashtray for her, and she waved me out of the room.

I passed two more sets of floor-to-ceiling wooden doors on either side of the great hall before arriving at what must have originally been the site of the grand staircase. Evidently, the top floor of the old home had been caving in, so James’ predecessors had lopped it off before moving it to the current site facing a four-lane highway. The opening to the old stairwell had been boarded up with thin, dark paneling, creating a wall for a now-enclosed back porch. From an opening on the far left I could see the shadows from the television news cast flickering. I peeked around the opening to see the now rather annoyingly loud black and white television, a tv tray lined with medicine bottles and half-opened packages of lemon cookies, and James in a recliner.

He looked up that first visit and asked, “You the lady preacher or are you here to check my sugar?”

“Lady Preacher,” I offered and he pointed to the ottoman next to his recliner, the only other piece of furniture I could see in the dark, enclosed porch under the stairwell. Sitting on the ottoman meant I was looking up at James as we chatted, as if I had been relegated to the children’s table at Thanksgiving.

In my eleven years serving that church, James sat in that recliner for every conversation. The trajectory of our conversations and our relationship, however, determined the seat I would be offered. My perch progressed over the years from the lowly ottoman to a metal and vinyl kitchen chair and eventually to a second recliner, the offer of which required clearing away a years’s worth of mass mailing ads and cookie wrappers. My own recliner. I though I had arrived.

Preaching “Scripturally”

Even after my graduation to adult seating, though, our struggle continued. Over the years James’ oldest son indicated that James did not believe I was preaching correctly. I was not, in James’ words, “preaching Scripturally.” Though James did not actually attend and only heard secondhand about my preaching from his son, evidently, when his son told him about my sermons, James’ complaint remained the same. “Not preaching Scripturally.”

Years would pass before I would be able to grasp the kind of preaching he would consider “Scriptural.”

Every sermon I preached began with a Scripture passage, intentionally allowing the text to speak for itself. I trust the Scripture to tell us something about God and ourselves. I didn’t always like what I learned but I respected it, so I knew James’ accusations either were incorrect or misinformed. His son had reassured me he was reporting my sermon Scripture choices and preaching points, so neither of us realized for some time exactly why James consistently was disappointed. It took me years to realize that, for James and likely for many others of his upbringing, church was supposed to “convict.”

Someone went to the mourner’s bench or church had not broken out.

From the moment you entered the sanctuary apparently, church was meant to be a frightening experience; God knew what you had done all week and before the sermon was over, an honest-to-God, bona fide pastor would have directed your miserable self to come forward and sit on the hardest bench, a single bench at the front of the sanctuary, the one without a back, the “Mourner’s Bench.” There you were expected to confess that you were a sinner – lower than a worm on really bad weeks in spite of being a baptized believer. You were directed then to confess, then you were forgiven and then the congregation would sing, “Shall We Gather at the River” or “Just As I Am” before heading home.

Take me to the real church. Find me a mourner’s bench. God knows what I did all week.

This process, I learned, what James would call “preaching Scripturally,” would render backsliding baptized members “Good-to-Go” for another week. Sadly, though, it was usually then a week of the same damn behavior that had made you feel so guilty the week before, but it was fine because you could count on the Preacher to help you confess and be forgiven all over again the next week. That was apparently how folks knew they’d been to church.

Sure, not everyone went to the mourner’s bench every week but someone did or preaching had not really broken out.

By the time I got there, it didn’t matter that there was no longer a mourner’s bench in the sanctuary; the expectation was still that sitting in the pew on a Sunday invited guilt and shame and the preacher must offer a chance to ask for forgiveness so folks could feel better about themselves for at least a few days.

Full disclaimer: this is not Methodist theology.

For James to feel like he’d “been to church,” he would need to go through the whole ritual, to confess and be forgiven before he was good to go. Then, though, he apparently felt that he would be free to live his life however he wanted…until he needed to come back and do it again.

Nothing in his life changed after that ritual. It was empty. This is the kind of empty ritual that God does not want, we are told in our Scriptures. As much as God loves a good ritual, even God does not seek or require ritual simply for ritual’s sake without any change in behavior. 

In Isaiah 58, “God mocks people who seek God as if they were ‘a nation that acted righteously.’  God accuses them of saying they want to be close to God, but ‘you do whatever you want…oppress all your workers… quarrel and brawl…hit each other violently.’  In classic Hebrew style, [Isaiah makes God sound] like a Yiddish grandmother saying, ‘Oy vey! You call this a fast? Enough with the thoughts and prayers, already!’ (58:5)”

Harnish, Jim, https://jimharnish.org/2022/05/26/is-god-fed-up-with-our-prayers/

Isaiah 58 is tough to read.  God rejects empty piety. God rejects our “lying down in the mourning clothing and ashes” while we still oppress, quarrel and brawl, rejects us going through the rituals but then continuing the behavior that caused us to need to mourn in the first place. More to the point today, God calls us to concrete actions, not simply thoughts and prayers:

“Isn’t this the fast I choose:

releasing wicked restraints, untying the ropes of a yoke,

setting free the mistreated, and breaking every yoke?

Isn’t it sharing your bread with the hungry

and bringing the homeless poor into your house,

covering the naked when you see them,

 and not hiding from your own family?

With God’s command comes God’s promise:

Then your light will break out like the dawn,

and you will be healed quickly….

Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;

you will cry for help, and God will say, I’m here.

Isaiah 58

God loves a good ritual, but even God does not seek ritual simply for ritual’s sake without any change in behavior. 

A few weeks ago, a second-grader fell at a school in the Nashville area, less than an hour from the Covenant School. She stumbled and fell, sadly, during an active shooter drill, cutting her knee and scraping her elbows, after the teacher had screamed at the children to “Run!” A sweet gesture from another child helped ease the pain and panic in that moment: one of her classmates stopped, helped the distraught child get back up and ran with her to the safe gathering spot.

The good news: her friend didn’t leave her behind.

The horrible terrible very sad news: our response to people who take AR-15’s into schools is to step up active shooter drills.

For God, our rituals mourning all of these shootings are empty and meaningless if we continue to do what we do and wonder why things never get better.  As a nation, we’ve gotten pretty good at this, though, acting as if our stint on the mourner’s bench is sufficient.

After the Covenant shooting, a large number of Nashville neighbors including many clergy colleagues participated in actions beyond candlelight vigils and prayers and leaving stuffed animals and flowers and balloons at an impromptu memorial. Thousands staged a sit-in and even marched on the state capitol. The overwhelming message to the politicians who would not consider bans on assault weapons was “Save your ‘thoughts and prayers.'”

With no apparent policy changes, though, the best efforts are still empty rituals, something we are sadly proficient at in this country.

We mourn, but we still can legally purchase an AR-15 and make up for it by telling our children to learn to run faster.

The horrible terrible very sad news is we still think the best response is teaching children to run faster and hide better.

Maybe you believe the problem is guns. Maybe you believe the problem is certain types of guns.

Maybe you support more police in school or arming teachers.

I know I want people to understand there can never be enough equipment for any SRO to combat an 18-year-old in a Kevlar vest and a helmet with an assault rifle. 

Maybe you believe the problem is broken families, no prayer in schools, the lack of mental health care, or children who come to school having never sat down with an adult to read a story book. The truth is, it’s likely some of all of these but focussing only on mental health care without limiting access to the weapons that leave small bodies in shreds is mourners’ bench behavior. That renders our thoughts and prayers empty.

What is critical here is that we do not make our rituals empty, that we do not sit on the mourner’s bench and cry and pray and then go home and keep doing what we have been doing. Because that is making a mockery of our faith and rituals.

Whichever side you fall on, God asks what are you doing to help fix it? Are you just making more room on the bench?

To lament, to pray, to mourn, and then to change nothing is to miss the point.  It is, in fact, to fail–to fail our children and to fail our God.

At the very least, educate yourself. And by that I don’t mean just read what people write who agree with you. Read what people write who don’t agree with you. Learn the actual issues in your area. Every state has different issues and different laws. More than anything, listen to people who disagree with you.

Everyone of us is afraid and sad and none of us has answers that will work for each situation, but God calls us to work together to keep our children safe. Look up your community’s Peace and Justice Center and join in. No Center? Look into starting one.

Grieve, pray, then do something that shows you have truly taken in the gravity of the situation; but for God’s sake, let us not keep acting as if nothing has happened.   

Our children

need us to

figure it out.

  1. Nancy Bradshaw Avatar
    Nancy Bradshaw

    Challenging piece about an horrific plague on our land. What are our lawmakers thinking? They hear the voices of the people and yet do little to address the problem. I need to do more, I know. Letter writing is just not getting it either. Thanks for your focus on what’s going wrong in our world.

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  2. Martha Ann Pilcher Avatar
    Martha Ann Pilcher

    Amen!

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  3. D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Emptying The Backpack Avatar
    D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Emptying The Backpack

    […] a previous post, (“You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench,”) I introduced James, (not his real name), who struggled mightily with ongoing guilt and grief […]

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  4. D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Eighty Years Later – Emptying The Backpack Avatar
    D-Day Promises, Guilt and Forgiveness – Eighty Years Later – Emptying The Backpack

    […] a previous post, (“You Can Have My Seat on the Mourner’s Bench,”) I introduced James, (not his real name), who struggled mightily with ongoing guilt and grief […]

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Drawing the Circle Wider: Prison Ministry and Family

The last time I read the Scriptural passage about the woman who insisted Jesus heal her even after he likened her people to the dogs under the table, it made me think of my youngest son. And jails.  For several reasons.

"Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 
But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” 
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 
But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 
He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 
Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly."  Matthew 15:21-28

First, my son is a lawyer, working as a public defender.  He’s the guy who gets assigned to people who don’t have money for a private attorney when they have to appear in court.  He thinks it’s a hoot that he can call his mom whenever he wants to and say he’s headed to jail.  Haha.  

Second, he LOVES to argue.

And third, he likes rules. To be specific, he likes knowing where the line is.  When he was younger, we’d tell him the rules and he would make us hold that line.  We’d tell him not to step over that line and he’d put his toe right up to it and ask, “You mean this line?”  For the longest time, his constant testing of our boundaries and rules for him was frustrating. After a while though, we realized he really DID want to know where the line was because rules helped him feel safe, helped him know where he stood.  That may be WHY he became a lawyer, that love of rules.  He ate all that up, all those laws and statutes, just his cup of tea.  So he likes being a lawyer, at least most of the time, likes helping folks who find themselves in trouble but can’t afford a private lawyer.  

We’d tell him not to step over that line and he’d put his toe right up to it and ask, “You mean this line?”

So most of the folks he defends have very little means and many of them don’t get bailed out while they wait for their day in court.  That’s when he calls mom and says he’s going to jail.  It’s been frustrating for him often but every so often, it is also quite rewarding.  For one exxample, a couple of years ago, he was visiting a young client at the jail and the client asked how old my son was.  He shared that he was in fact turning 32 on that very day and the client was floored. “You mean you have to come here on your birthday?” he asked. “Are you gonna get to have a party or a cake later?” he asked. “Probably not,” my son said, shrugging it off. He didn’t think about it again until he saw the young client again a couple of weeks later and the client, in his twenties, pulled a folded up napkin from the pocket of his orange jumpsuit and unfolded it to reveal a cookie.  “This is for you, man,” he said.  “Because you didn’t get a birthday cake.  I saved my cookie from lunch for you.”  My son was speechless, which is significant for him. He’s never at a loss for words.  

Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

It’s not a stretch, though, to say that most of us are not terribly comfortable with courts and jails and prisons so I don’t feel like I’m bragging when I say my son is comfortable going to jail because his mom went to prison.  No no – don’t get me wrong.  I went to prison the way he goes to jail.  

When I was in seminary, we were offered classes that met in Riverbend Prison, classes that were populated half by seminarians and half by inmates.  We studied issues surrounding prisons, legal systems, punishment and forgiveness.  I did that for the entire time I was in seminary, every week, and I can tell you I learned a great deal and came to know about a dozen of the prisoners pretty well – guys in for everything from murder to arson to rape – all of whom were taking the same graduate level classes the seminarians were taking.  When it came time for me to graduate, then, I was invited to continue visiting by getting on the visitation list of one of the inmates.  When you visit Riverbend, like lots of state prisons, you visit during set hours in a large open room and there might be as many as fifty inmates also having visitors in the same room, all seated on molded plastic chairs, all attached in groups of twos or threes. At the corner of many of the sets of chairs are the all-valuable tables.  Tables are at a premium and desired because, all around the walls of the room are vending machines for snacks. Most of the foods in those vending machines are cheese and peanut butter crackers, tuna fish sandwiches and peanuts and candy. None of the items appealed to me much, I realized, because the daily food I had was better and more varied than those offerings. To the men who lived there, the stale hamburgers were a real treat.

Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com
Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com
Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com

Visits generally were on the weekends and lasted several hours; if an inmate had visitor privileges (and those were earned), they could possibly see family or friends who’d been approved by the prison system on Friday evening, Saturday morning and/or Sunday afternoon, for example. Visitors were subject to body searches and metal detectors and not allowed to carry in much, not even key fobs and certainly no phones.  The nice thinga bout the open room was that you can easily visit with several inmates at the same time and that’s what some of us from the classes did.  Usually on Friday night or Saturday morning, we’d go to visit one of the inmates who had been in the class and be able to see several of them and catch up on their lives and share about ours. 

While I always visited as a friend and not as a minister, the inmates always asked about my ministry and the church I was serving and, for a couple of them, it eased the loneliness of not receiving visits from family.  One thing we had learned was that inmates who served their time and then were released were 5-10 more successful staying out of trouble when they got out if they had continued to have relationships that were positive.  So, we particularly focussed on being supportive of those whose families were not involved in their lives and didn’t visit or call. 

Some of us spoke to one or more of the inmates by phone as well.  They were allowed to have up to ten people they called and most looked forward to having someone to call on occasion to break up the monotony if nothing else.  I agreed to be on the phone list of one of the inmates, who is, by the way, not eligible to be released for another decade, if he lives that long.  It was safe.  For an inmate to call you required a LOT of paperwork and clearances and then when they called, you heard a voice say, so and so from Riverbend Prison is calling you, do you want to accept the call?   I was careful and the school and the prison were careful but I know it still made people nervous who knew me. That included, not surprisingly, my parents, who were at that time retired and who worried alot about me anyway. 

Mom and Dad were especially struggling with my being friends with inmates because neither of them had ever even  met someone who had gone to jail, not even for a DUI, and they didn’t even know anyone else who knew anyone who’d gone to jail.  It was too foreign a concept and just not acceptable. So one weekend I went to Missouri to visit them and told them I was visiting an inmate and he was allowed to call me, they were angry.  I assured them that inmates could NOT call cell phones and they only had my home phone number in Tennessee so they could not call me while I was at my parents home in Missouri.

For an inmate to call you required a LOT of paperwork and clearances and then when they called, you heard a voice say, so and so from Riverbend Prison is calling you, do you want to accept the call?  

Nevertheless, while I was there with them, while we were arguing about whether or not this was acceptable behavior on my part be friends with some guy who was sitting in a prison cell, the phone rang and my mother answered, then handed me the phone angrily.  It’s your criminal friend, she said. I took the phone trying to answer while also explaining to them that it couldn’t be him because he couldn’t call me at their house when I heard the voice on the other end say, “…an inmate from the Greene County, Missouri, jail is calling.  Do you want to accept the call?”

I realized suddenly that call was not coming from my friend in Tennessee but rather from my brother, who apparently had been arrested the night before.  And suddenly, the inmate in Tennessee – whom they were sure was dangerous and not to be trusted – was sitting on a hard metal bench next to my brother, their son, in a jail cell. And just like that, the circle of their care and compassion grew a whole lot larger.  

My own circle of care and compassion grew exponentially because of my time visiting prisons. When I was sent to another church, turned out that nearly one quarter of the folks in the church had family or friends who had served or were serving time and it helped my ministry greatly that I knew first hand what it was like for them to constantly to worry about the safety of their loved one, to struggle financially because of lost income, to struggle not to be ashamed of what another person had done, to wonder how things would be when they returned home.  

Those families were grateful when their pastor talked then about visiting the prison regularly. For the first time, their pastor was there with them when they sat in the visitation gallery on Christmas Day or Easter or celebrated with them when their son got his GED in prison, sharing hopes he could change the path he was on.   Their pastor seemed to speak the same language and was one of their people, one who at least accepted and cared about their “kind.”

All of that is what leads me to one of the most troubling aspects of this story in Matthew 15: how the disciples AND Jesus treat this woman, who is not one of them, not one of their “kind.”

We find first that Jesus refuses even to answer the woman, then denies he has anything that she could possibly want and then even likens her to a dog.  This is definitely a troubling passage.

 We may believe that Jesus was “truly human,” but usually we don’t want him to be too human. So over the years, people have tried to clean up this story. But Matthew doesn’t clean up this story.  He lets us see this encounter in all its unvarnished glory.   

The woman is a Canaanite woman – and she is NOT one of Jesus’ “people”. But he is in her part of the world –  Tyre and Sidon. This is her home.  

Nevertheless, this woman seems to know who Jesus is. She has tracked him down in order to ask him –  to beg him –  to heal her daughter who is tormented by a demon. This is a desperate woman and apparently,  comes at Jesus shouting. The disciples want nothing to do with her and want Jesus to send her packing. 

She isn’t going anywhere, though. She may not be “their kind,” but she somehow knows enough about this healer to find him and call to him in the language of the Jewish prayer: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” She has come prepared to fight for her child, it seems. 

Even so, Jesus isn’t even impressed by her using the language he knows is not hers. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” he tells her, and still she doesn’t give up.

 “Lord, help me,” she begs. This is where Jesus says what we really wish he hadn’t said, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But this woman is feisty and stubborn.   Having a special needs grandchild, though, means there’s one thing I have learned about people who know their children’s lives are in danger –  they will get in your face if necessary – they do not care if you do not like it.  That’s their baby and the hair on the back of their neck stands up every time someone or something threatens that child’s safety.  The life of this woman’s daughter is at stake. She does not back down at all but throws Jesus’s words right back at him: “Yes, Lord,” she says, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”  

And all of a sudden, just like that, Jesus changes his tone. He says, “Woman, great is your faith!” 

Interestingly, she hasn’t made any confession of faith, though. There’s no sign she’s been converted or planning to become a follower. She simply told him what she had heard – what many in the region had heard – that there had been by that time more than one instance where thousands had been fed when they came to see this healer, this rabbi called Jesus.  “I’ve heard that there were enough crumbs to feed thousands,” she seems to be saying.  “You can’t tell me there’s not enough for me and my daughter.” 

That’s what I believe Jesus finally heard and that’s why he not only changes his mind,  but he changes his mission. “For saying that,” he says, “you may go — the demon has left your daughter.”  And just like that, the circle, the line, that defines his mission on earth is widened to include everyone.

It is disturbing to some folks to think of this episode, such harsh words coming out of Jesus, but one thing was clear that Matthew wanted his listeners to understand: in that encounter, Jesus was converted – he understood something he had not understood before – and the circle of his mission and ministry was much larger than he had realized before.  The Kingdom of God had been revealed to him in the face of the Canaanite woman. The Canaanite woman taught Jesus that she and her daughter and so many others like her deserve more than crumbs. After this encounter Jesus went on to feed those who had not yet been fed, went on to include everyone in God’s kingdom to come.

We saw here something that ought to surprise us, certainly surprised me the first time I saw it: Jesus drew a line – as surely as if he had used a stick to draw a line in the sand and said, this, what I am sent to do, is not for you.  I’ve done enough. I am tapped out. I gave at the office.  I don’t have any more energy to help anyone else, to get to know anyone else, to include anyone else in my circle.  He dismissed her and not in a kind way at all.    

IF we are pushed, we will get ugly too, though; we’ve been known to let others see our disdain for that person who does not deserve any help or who needs to go somewhere else to find it.  “WE” don’t know people who go to prison and we don’t want to….

At least not until one of them is sitting next to our child in that jail cell and suddenly our circle is a little wider than we knew.  Any time this happens, it can be frightening, and it can feel like we are out there where we don’t feel so safe any more, and we might be really unsure about how this is gonna go.

If we look again, though, really look, chances are good we will see God in that cell, sitting there with all of them, sitting next to our child and all of them will be sharing cookies.  Amen

4 responses to “Drawing the Circle Wider: Prison Ministry and Family”

  1. Nancy Bradshaw Avatar
    Nancy Bradshaw

    Jodi, sitting here on the deck of a cruise ship. My eyes are watering and not from the sun but from the eye opening beauty of this piece that you wrote which reminds me that Jesus was certainly human as well as divine and that the divine is also in me , in you and all humanity. We just need to be reminded. Thank you for doing just that. ❤️

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    1. Jodi McCullah Avatar
      Jodi McCullah

      You are a poet, dear friend. Thank you.

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  2. a. getty Avatar
    a. getty

    Amen.

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  3. Nancy Avatar
    Nancy

    Your ability to unite seemingly unrelated life experiences with a scripture and a message is your special craft, priceless. I bookmarked this weeks ago and I’m glad I came back to it. Forever faithful are we, Amen.

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Talking About Death Won’t Kill You.

Pulling death out from the shadows and examining it in the light does not make death happen. In fact, it does just the opposite. Thinking about death, learning about it and accepting it, makes life happen.

Virginia Morris, “Talking About Death Won’t Kill You,” Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.

Death is a funny thing. And I don’t mean in a dark humor kind of way but, rather, funny as in strange: we all do it, and, these days, we all know we ought to muster up our courage and talk to our loved ones about what we know is coming at some time, and yet few of us do.

Talking about how we want to die and what needs to be done when we do is a gift to our families and friends, kind and considerate; sometimes that’s the last gift we give loved ones. Pastors and health care workers and counselors encourage us to start the conversations early but far too few of us ever get our courage up to start, even though we surely love our families.

We often don’t even talk to our loved ones

AS we (or they) are dying.

The first person I sat with who was dying, died alone in a hospital room while his family waited out in a waiting room. That was thirty years ago. We did not know how to help him not be afraid and nothing we said could ease the fear but no one wanted to name that or claim it either, so we talked around him when we were in the room. We talked about the weather, the dog, the cost of eggs, anything except death and eventually most went back out into the aptly named “waiting” room.  I, just starting out as a pastor, stayed in the darkened room with this man who no longer wore his own clothing but rather a hospital-issued and worn cotton gown and asked for some socks that weren’t neon blue or orange and didn’t have those silly dot on them or some salt for the instant potatoes and who was just plain furious. He was angry about sox and pajamas and dying without some damn salt and without any choices: no choices about dying and not even any choices about how he would die. Thus far, as a pastor just starting out, I had read and discussed one book about how to minister to someone who is dying and could remember none of what the damn book said. I drove home that night screaming in my car. I had not signed up for that, and I was unprepared both for his anger and mine and this helplessness we shared. The journey into ministry was going to be rougher than I ever could have imagined.

Once I’d calmed down a bit, a pastor with more experience offered this simple advice: “Next time,” she said, “name it. Fear. Uncertainty. Anger. Questions. Whatever is in front of you while you sit there, name it.” There was a time when I would have discounted such a ridiculously simple suggestion, but it turned out to be great advice. In fact, in any difficult situation, naming whatever is in “in the room,” especially if it is scary, lessens the fear and opens up the space for questions, laments or even the jokes, all ways of sharing.

I buried about a couple of dozen members of that church over the next few years, including a suicide, my 18-year-old communion steward and a couple who had been married for more than 75 years and who died within a week of one another. All of those deaths brought up questions, and I tried to name what I saw and reassure us all that talking about death would not kill us. Most of those folks’ deaths happened fairly quickly, but one member of that first church took almost a year to die after receiving what he called his “death pink slip.” Over that year, David showed an entire church how to die a good death. Diagnosed with metastasized prostate cancer already destroying his back and ribs, the construction engineer who could no longer build houses started building birdhouses. He built hundreds of them in the months he was dying. His mind and his hands still moved well and in sync and he was grateful when his friends’ eyes lit up. He designed bird homes that celebrated the University of Tennessee for a Vols fan, several that looked like our little white country church and one I requested that mimicked a Lincoln Log cabin.

Birdhouses built by a former construction foreman who could not keep building homes for his friends so he started building them for the birds in the area. He built hundreds in the months after he was diagnosed with advanced Prostate cancer.

More importantly, though, as David died, as he dealt with the diagnoses, the treatments and the rapid onslaught of decay and death, he shared. He talked about what was happening to him to everyone who visited him. He taught us what the Hospice folks were teaching him, even describing what death might look like, how he might have some better days right before he died and what to watch for in his breathing as death grew nearer. In short, he did not hide or try to protect us from what was happening.  He named all of it and we are grateful for this evidence of his courage and love for us.

Because of David, I also found a great resource and over the years referred to it both for personal help and also to preach and teach. In, “Talking About Death,” Virginia Morris addresses so much of what keeps us from these important discussions. First of all, she says, “Pulling death out from the shadows and examining it in the light does not make death happen. In fact, it does just the opposite. Thinking about death, learning about it and accepting it, makes life happen.”

When I started this project a friend of mine called me, all upset. She felt that this endeavor was not only morbid, but dangerous. By studying death, she said, I might make it happen. A friend of hers had died of cancer while studying Portuguese death rituals. I, too, might be on a suicide mission. This subject was better left untouched. Her concerns may seem a bit odd at first, but they are not unusual. Death is the boogeyman, hiding in the shadows of our bedrooms, arousing all sorts of anxieties and fears—some valid, some silly, some we don’t readily admit even to ourselves. Most of us can’t imagine the end of our existence as we know it. We dread the process of dying, the pain and disability. We panic at the thought of leaving loved ones, or having them leave us.

Morris, Virginia. Talking About Death (p. 7). Algonquin Books. Kindle Edition.

What Did COVID teach us?

So many died during COVID alone and unable to be comforted by family or friends and we are more aware now than ever of the importance of being there for one another.

NEVERTHELESS, we struggle with starting the conversations before we are ill, before we are hospitalized, before we need hospice care.

Part of the issue is that we simply don’t have to talk about death much anymore. We simply do not talk about death, not even in churches even though a church seems like the best place to talk about death.

Wartrace United Methodist Church, est. 1849. Homecoming suppers were “on the grounds.” For most smaller Methodist churches, the cemetery often surrounded the church building.

In so many of those little churches we attended, all of the “Saints” who’d gone before were buried all around the church in the cemetery just outside the doors. Every few months, we would have “supper” on the grounds, meaning we spread our biscuits and fried chicken legs and pickles on platters on old checked table cloths on top of the graves of our ancestors, who were buried all around us.

There was no pretending they weren’t there with us, bodies underneath and souls swirling overhead, whispering in our ears, reminding us all they’d taught us and all they’d done, good, bad or just human. Don’t slouch. Eat your greens, too. Wipe your fingers on that napkin and not on your shirt, young man. These were the folks who’d walked through those cemetery gates and into that old wooden sanctuary each week and they had taught us how to follow those 10 rules Moses brought down from the mountain AND to turn that other cheek. Still, they didn’t have to create a moment to talk about death because they reminded us of it every Sunday and during revivals as we entered that sacred space.

Today we don’t have those reminders.  We do not see the cycle of life and death firsthand on a daily basis now. We do not wring the chickens’ necks and pluck them ourselves; few of rely on butchering hogs to have food for the winter, and we no longer prepare loved ones’ bodies for burial ourselves. We have people called to and trained to do these tasks and so the majority of us will never touch any dead body, never be faced with the need to handle a lifeless body, never have to be reminded we too will die, never find an occasion to talk about our deaths.

Easy for You to Say.

You might be thinking that as a retired pastor, of course, I have lots of experience sitting with people who are dying, sitting with the family and friends of someone who has died and just talking about death in general.  That is true, but all that professional experience did not make it any easier to start the discussions with my own family or to begin the work personally. In fact, I am embarrassed to say that it was a neighbor who suggested the book that started me on the process for myself and my family, by suggesting the book she’d found: “I’m Dead, Now What?” (See below.)

I want to offer some suggestions, then, some topics and some resources to help you do what is one of the most loving things you can for your family: discuss with them, prepare and plan so they are not left with the burden when you are gone or can no longer help. We can do this.

Excellent planner to provide peace of mind for those who need to settle your affairs. Helps organize your information, from pet needs to email and social medea to banking. Available on Amazon. By Peter Pauper Press

Start with the easier stuff.

If talking about death at all is just difficult for you, start with putting your papers in order and maybe your mind will become more used to the idea of realizing there will be a day when you (posthumously) say, “I’m Dead. Now What?” When you are gone, will your papers be in order? Will whomever is left to pay the bills, deal with property, take care of Fido or make other decisions know where to find what they need? Thankfully, there are wonderful resources for that as well. Starting here will often help us begin the many conversations we need to have around our own deaths.

Passwords, please. Can I get an amen?

If nothing else, safely providing a list of the seemingly thousands of passwords we all have now is one of the greatest gifts you can give these days. Don’t forget to tell them what the site is for the password; you know how you have spent hours trying to get back into your Netflix account. Think about how that’s going to work when it’s time to close out the account and stop the automatic draft for that times about fifty or a hundred, depending on how many apps and accounts you have.

Talk About How You Want to Die

We all hope to die at a certain way if we are honest and think about it for a moment and sharing that with one another around a kitchen table is a way to learn about one another.

Some of us want to die quickly, instantly. Some of us only hope for no pain. Many of us in my culture hope to die at home in our own beds surrounded by family and friends. Some of us hope to die with a silk parachute inflating overhead one last time; others of us hope to die in in satin ballroom shoes, our hips responding to the beat on the congas as a Latin band plays a cha-cha. Still others of us would love to take our last breaths in the arms of a lover. Some of the sweetest couples I’ve known debate who should go first: some do not want to be left alone after a longterm companion goes but most are more concerned about their sweetheart and hope that the other will go first so they are not left alone to grieve. They would take that grief upon themselves.

Consider doing a bit of research, then sharing.

In Japan, at least thirty years ago when I lived there, everyone in the neighborhood chips in to help pay for the costs of a neighbor’s funeral knowing that everyone else will do the same when their own time comes.

Funeral traditions there offered us a number of occasions to talk about dying and our own deaths. Once, a neighbor came to visit after her father had died and shared with me about the funeral since I had not been in town on the day of the funeral. I remember trying to put my finger on what was wrong as we sat and looked at a picture album of the funeral gathering and ceremonies until I realized that what was strange for me was that there was a photo album of the event. I had never known anyone to photograph a funeral.

There’s some fascinating and/or disturbing historical examples of cultural differences around death, such as mummifying and burying with everything you’d need to survive in the afterlife, including, sadly, your pets, and others we pray have been banned forever such as the Hindu custom of a wife immolating herself on the funeral pyre of her dead husband.

Write down your information first, then your wishes.

Think about what you want for a service, write down your wishes and share them with a family member and a pastor or another family friend who can help when the time comes. What are your wishes around being kept alive? Wishes around resusitation, extreme measures and even feeding tubes are much more difficult for family members if they are not aware of your wishes.

Do you want certain songs included in your service? Have a favorite verse? Talk about what you want and need or don’t want. Tell a pastor or trusted friend who can help you when you need to let your loved one die the way they’ve chosen, whether that means no , no on every possible intervention, i.e., their choices as best can be honored.

Clean up after before yourself.

In some societies, sorting through all your belongings, “death cleaning” is an established tradition. They are aware of the stress and pain of leaving all our “stuff” behind for our family to have to sort and clear and give away or sell or keep.

“Death cleaning,” or “döstädning” is a Swedish term that refers the process of downsizing before you die. Death Cleaning, explained in “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” is an gift you give your family. Sorting through, clearing out, giving away or selling all the “stuff” we can accumulate throughout our lives is an indication, the author writes, that you love your family enough to clear our unnecessary things and make your home nice and orderly well before you think the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet. The idea is that our spouses and children or grandchildren are not burdened with what can become a beast of a process, yet another source of pain for those grieving us when we’re gone, yet another indication that we didn’t want to talk about death.

(Magnusson, Margareta. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter (The Swedish Art of Living & Dying Series) (p. 2). Scribner. Kindle Edition.) Also available on Amazon.

Start the conversation any way you can.

We all face it; people all over the world face it, but not always in the same manner, using the same customs, so, I’m thinking maybe talking about cultural differences around death and dying might be a way to start a conversation.

Did you know that those death masks, usually made by taking a cast of a person’s face after their death, were often kept as mementoes or used for the creation of a portrait or perhaps a scupture after the person had died and been buried. That could open a conversation. A lock of hair often is kept, a tradition started by Queen Victoria after the death of her husband. Tiny brooches might hold cremation ashes. Do you want to be cremated? This is the time to make sure a loved one knows that.

Just start.

Finally, to start the conversation, if none of the suggestions above have spurred you to sit down with your spouse or children or companion or pastor or priest yet, here is a poem I wrote after sitting with a man at my last church who was dying. Perhaps you can start simply by sharing this poem over a cup of tea, a pint of beer or some lovely scones your neighbor dropped by to share. “Hey,” you can say, “I read this poem about death and dying today and it made me think. Can I read it to you and you tell me what you think?” You get a yes and maybe some discussion will follow. Have some questions ready. Maybe a version of “Would you rather…?” Would you rather be buried at sea or on a mountain? Would you rather have everyone sing happy songs at your funeral or maybe tell their favorite joke?

Every time I have spent time with someone who is close to death, I recognize I am closer to my own death and my own fears and though both death and the fear of dying creep ever closer, neither seem to crowd out the peace I have found in talking about, in naming, what is before me, even death. It’s pretty much the one thing we all have in common. Let’s talk!

Sitting with the Dying

I used to think sitting with someone who's dying took courage.
Now I think it is much more selfish than I might ever want to admit.
It is an act of hope, yes.
If I am honest, though,
the hope is that someone else will sit with me when I'm the one who's dying.
There is prayer
but the prayer is that someone who knows me will wipe the drool
from my chin when the time comes.
There is the seeking of promises, guarantees, bartering if
necessary,
so that someone whose face I used to recognize will
cup my face in the palm of their hands when I cry like a baby, or
pluck the hairs from my upper lip because even a dying woman
deserves to feel pretty.
The first time I sat with someone who was dying, I went into that dark room because no one else would and because I couldn't bear
anyone dying alone.
Except now I know we too often do anyway.
Still, if there's any comfort to be offered there, I will selfishly offer warm, gentle and soft touches if only because I know I want the return.
I confess then that sitting with someone who's dying
is a selfish act for me.
It is my way. A way to make the world the place I want it to be,
where no one dies alone
if only because I cannot bear to live in a world where we do.

~Jodi McCullah 2022

4 responses to “Talking About Death Won’t Kill You.”

  1. Anne Culver Avatar
    Anne Culver

    Thank you for these reflections, Jodi. As a hospital chaplain, I’ve found that many people who’ve been told “some bad news” (that they’re dying), desperately need someone willing to help them work through just what that might mean for them and their loved ones in our culture in which even thinking about death seems to be taboo.

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  2. A. Getty Avatar
    A. Getty

    Thank you for sharing. We have been having more of these conversations lately and your reading suggestions are helpful.

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  3. Earnie L Avatar
    Earnie L

    I was raised with grandparents who took me to their church’s dinner on the grounds. One of my favorite places to photograph is a cemetery. I imagine all of the lovely lives and interesting people there. And, my Mother taught me that there are far worse things in this life than dying. Thanks for the lovely article.

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  4. Joan Butler Avatar
    Joan Butler

    Jodi, thanks so much for these thought provoking words. We’ve started the process, but need to go deeper.

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