HOPE IS FOR THE DEAD

The great spiritual writer and thinker – and one who certainly lived what he wrote and thought because he truly believed – Thomas Merton: "Hope then is a gift...total, unexpected, incomprehensible, undeserved...but to meet it, we have to descend into nothingness. It is the acceptance of life in the midst of death, not because we have courage, or light, or wisdom to accept, but because by some miracle the God of life himself accepts to live, in us, at the very moment we descend into death."

I don’t know about you, but I never looked at hope like that before. In other words, hope is for the dead, not for the living. While we have life in us, there is no need to hope. We are alive. It is when we are dead that we need to have hope. And because we are dead, because there is no life in us, hope, as Merton says, is a "gift... total, unexpected, incomprehensible and undeserved."

That means we have to reserve the word "hope" to very few occasions in our lives. Hoping to win the lottery, to make an "A" on the exam, to get that job: those are all desires of the living. Most of the work of bringing about those desires is up to us. But when we are dead, it is all up to God. When the doctor says "there is no hope," that's when we begin to find hope, in and through God. It is when God, the God of life, not the God of death, accepts to live in us that we truly find hope. But it is only when we "descend into death."

All of that may seem rather profound, theologically deep. And it is, if you think about it. It is for me now that I have been thinking about it. The word "hope" like the word "love" -- and maybe even like the word "faith” (I'll have to think about that more) -- is bandied about rather blithely without ever really understanding what is being said.

The commitment of love comes from the very depths of our being and demands the very soul of our being. Anything less isn't love. It may approach love, but it isn't love and we dare not call it such. Think of Jesus's death on the cross because of his love for us: that kind of depth (that came in death!). So, too, with hope. It comes from the very depths of our being and demands that we give that being over to God. The reason we dare to hope is that life, this part of our life, is now out of our hands. We can do no more. All we can do is give our life over to God and hope that God will bring new life.

We have all discovered this because we have all died at one time or another. When we gave the moment, the situation, the person, the life over to God because we could do no more, because we were dead, we were totally, unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, undeservedly surprised by the presence of God. But not until then.

We do take God for granted -- until we're dead, dead to whatever has been holding us back from God: pride, doubt, self-sufficiency. And God lets us be that way, maybe the better to surprise us by his grace and love in the midst of our despair, depression and, ultimately, death. Personally, I would rather have hope come more easily. But then, I'm not God.

SOMETHING ALWAYS HAPPENS

We are all wounded. It goes with being human, being alive. We will always be wounded. Heal one wound and another opens up. Several wounds may be festering at the same time. The bleeding never stops until we die. Until then we are a mess of wounds, often a bloody mess.

The wounds are usually more spiritual, psychological, than they are physical. Would that all our wounds be only physical. We could deal with those even if they could not all be healed. It's the other wounds that are the real stinkers. They make the physical wounds even worse. Many physical wounds are simply that: physical. If there is a psychological scar attached, it is usually the result of our own foolishness and nothing more deep-seated than that. Break a leg: we know why. Injure our back: we know why.

But there are some wounds whose reason is beyond our comprehension. For those, we find a reason, a spiritual one: sin. The fundamentalists are good in this area. Their standard reason for anyone being sick is that the person has sinned. Cancer, MS, diabetes, etc., are all the result of personal sin. Repent of that sin and one will be healed. And in a way the fundamentalists are correct. Sometimes our own sinfulness causes injury to our physical being. A smoker who gets lung cancer knows the reason for the cancer. But for the most part, no one deliberately sets out to do something sinful so that the action will cause a debilitating and life-threatening disease.

Yet, even though personal sin is not the cause of breast cancer, for instance, if one wants to be healed of that cancer, one must want to be healed and must believe that healing is possible. If we believe breast cancer is an automatic death sentence for us, it is; and there is nothing that the medical profession can do about it.

On the other hand, the medical profession can determine that there is no cure for our disease and we can still be healed -- physically and spiritually. But the spiritual always comes first. We must want to get better before we can get better. And it does not matter what the cause of our illness was -- sin, foolishness, or the luck of the draw. It is only after we are wounded that the healing process begins.  We are wounded: now what? Now let the healing begin. And once we want to be healed, once we begin to pray for healing, something always happens.

What happens is not always what we pray for, the outcome we may desire. But something, some good, always happens. Prayer brings God directly into our lives because we have personally asked God to be directly involved in the healing process. God never says "no" to that prayer.

How God answers our prayer is up to God. Without God we will surely bleed to death, physically and spiritually. Even with God, we will never be free of wounds, given our humanity; but we will always be healing, getting better spiritually, if not always physically. Something always happens when we let God into our lives, something good, no matter how wounded we are.

GARAGE SALES / GARBAGE SALES

 Rummage sales, garage sales, are all the same to me. They are ways of getting rid of garbage, stuff we don't want, junk that is cluttering up our life, our house, our space. We all have garbage in our lives, literally and figuratively. Garage sales are one way to get rid of the garbage and come out with a financial profit – although we never get back what the stuff cost us in the first place – which brings up the question of why what is now so needless was once so necessary. But that may be getting a little too personal.

I once heard someone describe the ministry to the dying as helping them get rid of garbage. Over the years that has been my experience as well. I have ministered to a number of people in the throes of death who were still hanging on. They could not die or would not die. More often than not they would not let go of life until they had said the last "good-by" to the last loved one.

But so many others would not let go of life until they had gotten rid of the garbage they had been carrying around for many, many years. It had loaded them down in life, kept them from living in peace, and now was preventing them from dying in peace. It was only when they dumped the garbage, usually by some sort of final confession, that they could die in peace. The constant and surprising part of it was that the garbage was usually no big deal. But it was to them.

That is why in death it is now nothing more than garbage. It was once a big deal, perhaps a very big deal. It was once important, even very important. Now, in death, it has no value. It is just cluttering up their lives, preventing them from entering into God's fuller life in death.

All garbage was once somehow in some way important and in no way garbage. Now it is not to the person for whom it is now garbage. But, as garage sales remind us, our garbage is now someone else's treasure. That's why garage sales work. True garbage goes to the dump. The rest we recycle.

We all carry around garbage which, while we are carrying it, seems important, even seems like a treasure. But what it is doing is keeping us from one another, from another.

Garbage is something that has lost its value for us. The problem is that sometimes we do not recognize that what we still think is valuable is not. We're still hanging on to it, whatever that "it" is – past slights, prejudices, bigotries, old ways that don't work, traditions that have seen their day, the past.

No one of us is immune. We all carry excess baggage, baggage filled with garbage. Not a nice thought, I know. But it's summer. And we all know what garbage smells like in summer. Maybe it's a good time to look into our lives to recognize the garbage and get rid of it. Take it to the dump. It can't be and shouldn't be recycled. Why wait until we are dying to unload what we should have unloaded years before? Why waste our time and our life carrying around garbage?

 

ANGELS EVERYWHERE

A story (not mine, but I wish): When an ice cream sundae cost much less, a boy entered a coffee shop and sat at a table. A waitress put a glass of water in front of him. "How much is an ice cream sundae?" he asked. "Fifty cents," replied the waitress.

The little boy pulled his hand out of his pocket and studied a number of coins in it. "How much is a dish of plain ice cream?" Some people were now waiting for a table, and the waitress was impatient. "Thirty-five cents," she said angrily. The little boy again counted his coins. "I'll have the plain ice cream." The waitress brought the ice cream and walked away. The boy finished, paid the cashier, and departed. When the waitress came back, she swallowed hard at what she saw. There, placed neatly beside the empty dish, were two nickels and five pennies – her ti

A powerful story, that's why I wish I could claim it. But it is also a powerful reminder to me that it is so easy to judge another person, to make judgments about another person, simply because of first impressions; or even worse, because we are having a bad day.

Even worse than that is to have already pre-judged a person sight unseen. We do that, too, like the waitress. She worked for tips. Little boys don't tip well. And boys-being-boys, well, they are often more trouble than they are worth, especially if a big tipper is waiting for their booth.

The wonderful part of it all, even the humor of it all, especially because the joke is on us, the ones who pre-judge, is that the victim of our prejudice is not the victim. We are. And it is only when we realize this that we learn any lesson.

The Letter to the Hebrews reminds us that we often entertain angels unaware. We also often abuse them unaware. And when the table is turned, we are the ones who really feel the pain. The little boy was probably unaware of the waitress's impatience with him, upset because he was taking her time and thus losing her money.

But angels are like that. They somehow see through us, put up with us, so that we can see through our own impatience – or whatever it is that for the moment blinds us to the real person in front of us – and see.

Prejudice makes us blind. The only way we can regain our sight is to be healed, to have someone open our eyes. If the story is true, as I suspect it is, it was probably told by the waitress on herself. She was not proud of the way she treated the little boy, but she was thankful that he taught her an important lesson. She could not undo the past. But she could go into the future having learned a lesson taught by an angel who looked like anything but.

But, again, angels never do look like anything we would expect. That is why we encounter them unaware and why the lessons they teach are so profound, so moving and usually so life-changing.