Oh, Ann, Rest in Peace

Today I presided at Ann's funeral.

Her brother and her son both gave eloquent and heart-felt eulogies. I told her son afterwards that  I've heard lots of tributes and his was in the top three. He began with this great line: "How can I put 65 years of my mother's life in this short, 90 minute speech."

Humor is a great tribute in a funeral eulogy. Humor gives honor to the dead and to the living.

Communion was a big problem since we were in the parish hall--the church is too small--and people were standing 4 wide and 20 deep in the center aisle.

So we gave them communion right after the family and sent them to the upper hall until the others could receive.

I said of Ann that she was a 'dear soul' and a 'fighter'. Her soul was deep and wide and her son captured that in his remarks. And she fought cancer three times before losing the fight.

I saw her the day of the night she died and though she was pretty full of morphine, when I said, "Ann, it's Jim Bradley", she opened her eyes for a moment and smiled.

There were all these pictures on boards--as most funerals these days have--and she was smiling in every single picture.

A dear soul and a fighter--can't get much better than that.

I always quote St. Francis of Assisi in a funeral homily: "Death is not a door that closes, it is a door that opens and we walk in, all new, to the presence of the one who loves us best of all."

Death, to us, certainly is a closed door. I'll never see Ann's smile again. But I pray for Ann it was that door that opened....

Oh, dear soul Ann, rest in peace, and be 'all new'.

Barr's testimony

Did you watch any of it?

It was cringe-worthy and painful and revealing.

Amy Klobuchar, Sen. Whitehouse and Kamala Harris, in that order, made Barr fumble and fib. Harris tied him in knots and he couldn't really answer her questions.

But the highlight came when Mazie Hirono, Senator from Hawaii, lectured him.

She called him everything but 'middle-aged white man'. Equated him with Rudi Guiliani and Kelly Ann Conway and accused him (correctly!!!) of lying to Congress.

Days after he received a letter from Robert Mueller himself, criticizing Barr's four page memo that essentially 'exonerated' the President, Barr told a Congressional committee he had 'no idea' what Mueller thought of his memo!

Sen. Hirono then told Barr to resign and Linsey Graham chided her for 'slandering' Barr.

Like telling the truth is 'slandering'.

No one knew until yesterday about Mueller's complaining letter which said Barr had 'misrepresented' the report in his memo, giving the President over two weeks to brag that there was nothing damning in the Mueller report.

Probably not, unless you consider the 10 instances of obstructing justice that Mueller enumerated and did not indict because, as it said in the report, there is a standing opinion that a sitting President cannot be indicted. But his report said clearly and in no uncertain terms that Mueller DID NOT 'exonerate' the President from obstruction of justice.

Another weird day in a weird and painful two years of this presidency.

Alas and alack...

So, I went to my Tuesday morning group primed to talk about Game of Thrones and none of the people there had ever watched it!

I was shocked--I thought the only thing more people were talking about than what an despicable idiot our President is, would be Game of Thrones. I talk to people in the grocery store and filling up our cars with gas about the show. But none of these people I care deeply about have ever watched it!

I took a deep breath and decided, instead, to talk about how all the Yankee stars are on the injured reserve list and they are still only 2 games out of first.

Then I checked their faces and realized that people who didn't watch GofT wouldn't follow baseball either.

It was great because I usually think I'm out of the 'mainstream', but maybe not as far as I thought....

"Go Yankees!!!!"

"Go Dragons!!!!"

OK, here's the Truth

Whether or not you read the books and whether or not you've only 'been aware' of The Game of Thrones TV series or fanatics about it like Bern and I. you should go to HBO on demand, if you have it, and watch Sunday night's episode.

It is beyond words.

And I may watch it again to count the 'words' spoken in over an hour.

It was pure battle from beginning to end.

All the blood and death and terror of all that came before was overwhelmed by this episode.

I won't even begin to try to write about it.

It is beyond words.

It must be experienced to comprehend.

Please check it out and let me know what you thought.

It was all the wars ever fought condensed into just over an hour.

Amazing. Terrifying. Astonishing.

Beyond words.

A poem I've never shared

The Poem I Can’t Write

For days now I’ve been trying

to write a poem that just won’t come.

It’s for our anniversary and about my love,

so it should flow out without any effort,

since I love you so very much.

But the poem is hiding from me,

peeking at me from around the corner,

avoiding me at all cost, it seems.

Page after page I throw away

(or, more accurately, erase from my computer).

Forty-six years of marriage (and years before that)

of loving you—the words should pour out,

full of passion and wonder and amazement.

This time I realized something,

my love for you isn’t something ‘out there’,

that I can examine, reflect on, put into words.

That love is in those letters in the attic.

That love has altered, changed, become incarnate.

The love I feel for you is, quite simply, me.

I am my love for you. It is my very ‘being’

That cannot be captured and enclosed in words.

That is ‘who I am’. So, I am your poem.

This poem is ‘me’, my very being, the “I” I call myself.

I am yours. Your anniversary poem….

September 5, 2016

A poem not many read from 2015

Monday, December 21, 2015

Mimi's home

Which is always good. She is my love. I love Josh too, terribly much, but Mimi just slips into our lives and barely makes a wave and is so welcomed.

I probably did before, but I'll share again, a poem I wrote about her on her birthday when she was in Japan with the American Ballet Theater.

                          PHOTOS OF MIMI

The house is full of pictures of her.

In some of them, she is a tiny, chubby baby.

In others, she is a little girl possessed.

In one she gains speed, running

down a hill in front of my father's house,

her tongue out, her blonde hair flying,

her small arms churning

like the wind.

In another, taken the same day,

she is solemn, not looking at the camera,

considering something out of the frame,

unsmiling, gazing at the future, perhaps.

She grows through the pictures—though they are random

on the walls and shelves, so she doesn't grow evenly.

A beautiful, awkward teen, smiling in spite of braces,

her jeans decorated in ink, a hole at the knees,

her shoes half-tied, embarrassed, I think, by the camera.

There is a sagging Jack-O-Lantern at her side,

smiling a smile as crooked as her own.

A whole group pictures when she was finishing

high school—a lovely, wistful, long-haired girl

exploding gracefully into life and what comes next.

I love the photo from her college graduation,

the four of us, this little family, her brother posing,

Mimi—short-hair and sun-glasses—smiling.

Just the four of us, a tiny clan, so different and distinct,

frozen in time on a mountain in Vermont, timeless, eternal.

I walked around the house today, looking for her visage--

bride's maid at Josh's wedding, clowning in a hotel doorway,

holding one niece or another with her boyfriend

(she natural, laughing, Morgan content on her lap,

Tim is a bit anxious and Emma is pulling away from him),

sitting on our back deck at an age I can't remember

when her hair was a color not found in nature,

and she is, as always glancing away from the camera,

playing on the beach as a toddler, sandy, nude,

hands in the sand, staring backward through her legs

(a photo a camera shy person would hate later on!)

I made my circuit, stopping before each photograph,

amazed at the memories that leaped out of the frames

and enthralled me.

Amazed more that such a beautiful child and woman

could have lived with me so long

and left imprints on my heart so deep.

She is half-a-world away.

In a land I can only faintly imagine.

I will not talk with her today—her nativity day.

I cannot even remember, as I gaze at photos,

if it is today or tomorrow in Japan.

Or yesterday.

Then there is the photo I love most.

It is pinned to the cork board beside my desk,

where I sit and write.

She is framed in a glass doorway. Her hair is long.

I can't remember how old she way—in college, perhaps--

and beyond the door you see, fully lit, dunes of Nantucket.

Mimi is in shadow, almost a silhouette cut from dark paper,

in full profile. Only the back of her hair is in sunlight,

shining, translucent, moving in the wind.

I love that picture because it is Mimi stepping through the

Door of Life, moving away from the infant shots,

the little girl, the teenaged child,

moving into life beyond me...half a world away.

All grown and still, all new....

jgb/July 21, 2008

Finitude

(I've seldom posted something three times, but last night a dear, wondrous friend died and I've been pondering over finitude today. So here's something you might have read before.)

Friday, April 21, 2017

Finitude, again

I was sitting on our back porch pondering how I'm 70 years old and have no idea how this happened. Then I remembered a post about Finitude that nobody much read. Thought I'd share it again.And, about granddaughters, I have another one, only 8 months old. If I live to be 80, she'll still be a pre-teen....just an addendum to this more than 8 year ago blog post.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Finitude

For some reason I have been talking with people lately about 'what happens when you die."

Actually, I have no idea--not any, not one--about what happens when we die.

Since I'm a priest, I'm around death a lot and I'm not much help. People seem to assume I know what this whole 'hereafter' thing is all about. Imagine their surprise!

(A joke from years ago: A boy says to his date, "do you believe in the 'hereafter'?
Being a Christian girl she says, "of course I do." Then he says, "well, let's have sex." She is horrified. "Why would you ask that?" she says. He replies, "that's what I'm 'here after'.")

"Is Daddy/Mommy/Brother/Sister/Child/Husband/Wife...on and on...in a better place?" I've been asked more than once by the death bed after giving last rites and watching the person slip away through that unmarked door.

First I smile sadly. Usually that is enough. The one left behind bursts into tears and I hold them. But some are tougher--"Well?" they say. And I say, "I have no idea."

Once someone said to me, "Why are you a priest if you don't have some belief about the after-life?"

I resisted my first impulse to say, "I'm not a priest for the 'after-life', I'm a priest for the living and the dying." Instead I said, meaning it with all my being, "I simply leave 'what happens next' to God."

That's what I do. Oh, I do believe there is something after death--so long as you are willing to acknowledge that the 'something' might be 'nothing'. I would think no less of God if when life ends, it simply ends. Dead as a doornail--whatever a door-nail is.

As I grow older--I'm over 60 now (I never imagined being this old!)--I do ponder death more than when I was 22 or 37 or even 53. Even if I live to be 80 some, that's only 20 or so more Springs, more Christmases, more baseball seasons. My granddaughters will be in their 20's-when I shuffle off this mortal coil, if I'm lucky enough to be 80-something, and my children will be 50 or so, but there will be, as the song says, "a lotta things happening" after I'm dead and gone.

One thing I know, I hope there is an option to the streets of gold and angel wings for me. In fact, since I know (because I'm theologically educated) that noone ever suggested the dead become angels--angels are a whole other species of beings--I'm just worried about those streets of gold. Doesn't sound like good urban planning to me.

I wrote a poem about finitude a few years ago. I thought I'd share it here.

The Difficulty with Finitude

I try, from time to time,
usually late at night or after one too many glasses of wine,
to consider my mortality.

(I've been led to believe
that such consideration is valuable
in a spiritual way.
God knows where I got that....
Well, of course God knows,
I'm just not sure.)

But try as I might, I'm not adroit at such thoughts.
It seems to me that I have always been alive.
I don't remember not being alive.
I have no personal recollections
of when most of North America was covered with ice
or of the Bronze Age
or the French Revolution
or the Black Sox scandal.
But I do know about all that through things I've read
and musicals I've seen
and the History Channel.

I know intellectually that I've not always been alive,
but I don't know it, as they say, 'in my gut'.
(What a strange phrase that is
since I am sure my 'gut'
is a totally dark part of my body
awash with digestive fluids
and whatever remains of the chicken and peas
I had for dinner and strange compounds
moving inexorably--I hope--through my large
and small intestines.)

My problem is I have no emotional connection to finitude.
All I know and feel is tangled up with being alive.
Dwelling on the certainty of my own death
is beyond my ken, outside my imagination,
much like trying to imagine
the vast expanse of space
when I live in Connecticut.

So, whenever someone suggests that
I consider my mortality,
I screw up my face and breathe deeply
pretending I am imagining the world
without me alive in it.

What I'm actually doing is remembering
things I seldom remember--
my father's smell, an old lover's face,
the feel of sand beneath my feet,
the taste of watermelon,
the sound of thunder rolling toward me
from miles away.

Perhaps when I come to die
(perish the thought!)
there will be a moment, an instant,
some flash of knowledge
or a stunning realization:
"Ah", I will say to myself,
just before oblivian sets in,
"this is finitude...."