Lent Day 33: Turn, Turn, Turn

For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die...
~Ecclesiastes 3:1-2

Two people died last week: the mother of a dear friend, and a dear friend. Both were women, deeply loved by family and community alike. One death was anticipated through diagnoses; to the best of my understanding, the other was not. One lived a long and full life; the other lived a full but abbreviated one, barely making middle age. 

Lent is very much about death, in the sense that it is about being human, and death is one of the very few things that all human beings can expect to experience, sooner or later. On Ash Wednesday many Christians receive a roughly cross-shaped smudge of ashes on their heads (the ashes of palm branches, usually those with which Palm Sunday was celebrated the year before). When the ashes are being administered, these words are often said: Remember, [Name], that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. It is a lovely but heavy moment for both the person administering the ashes and the person receiving them, each of us contemplating our own span of life, Only once in my years as a pastor have I experienced the death of someone to whom I had just administered ashes the previous Ash Wednesday. He died on Good Friday, completely unexpectedly.

Lent is also about death in the sense that it is a season of preparation for an annual commemoration of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ--and also the resurrection. During Lent we ponder our shared humanity with Christ. We seek to understand it better, and we seek to live it better. The observance of Holy Week is a journey to the cross. 

Here's the thing, though. We are alive until we are dead. I've been thinking about anticipatory grief, and I have been wondering whether Jesus might have experienced that. The gospels show him driving out money-changers and teaching in the temple, getting into some disagreements with other religious leaders, and sitting down (or, really, reclining) to a meal with his closest friends. However Jesus' spirit was as he anticipated his own suffering and ending, it seems as though he succeeded in living until he died. Apparently, he did not let the shadow at the end of the week diminish his witness to love, justice, and peace along the way.

I imagine we would all hope for the ability to live and love until we died. I also imagine we would all hope that we had said everything we wanted to say, and shown our love and care well and clearly to those we love in advance of their departures. The problem is, we think we have time, and hard experience has told me that we do not. 

I am deeply grateful for the lives of the people I have mentioned here. They have all impacted my life in significant ways, have been friends, or congregants, or both. One gave birth to one of my favorite people. One gave me one of my most cherished pieces of wisdom and buoyed me up when I lacked confidence. One had the ability to make me laugh and laugh, and we shared experiences that I treasure. All are in God's hands now.

I live with gratitude for each life and with regret that I haven't told the people I love, that I love them. Not nearly enough.

Death is a bittersweet reminder to tell them, and tell them now. 

Turn, turn, turn.