Scripture: Song of Songs 2:8-13
My life flows on in endless song, above earth’s lamentation. I hear the real, though far-off hymn that hails a new creation. No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that Rock I’m clinging. Since Love commands both heav’n and earth, how can I keep from singing?
My grandfather, John Leishman Unwin was born into a very poor family in a small coal mining village called Twechar in the lowlands of Scotland. He was one of nine children and he only attended school through the third grade. He started working in the mines at age ten along with his father and brothers. When he was fourteen, there was a collapse in the mine and he was among twenty-two men and boys who were trapped. They were only able to rescue my grandfather and two others. When they pulled him out, my grandfather had a scar that ran the length of his back, but he was also psychologically scarred, too. From that day forward, he saved up any money he could and emigrated from Scotland at age eighteen and never went back.
When my Grammie, a child of the Highlands of Scotland who made many trips back, would say, “but John, it’s such a beautiful country.” He would reply, “yes, but you can’t eat the scenery.”
He described his experience of the class system in Scotland as a caste system. You were born poor and died poor and everything was set up to ensure that nothing deviated from that equation. The analogy he used was that he and all the other poor people were Kleenex people. People would blow their noses on you and then throw you away.
When he came to the US in 1925 he became very active in the labor movement and joined a union. He worked diligently for an eight-hour workday, for collective bargaining, for a weekend, for safety standards, and a whole list of policies that boiled down to treating workers as full human beings and not Kleenex people.
On this Labor Day weekend, I pause and give thanks for my grandfather and grammie and the countless people who refused to be treated as Kleenex. And I am very aware that the labor movement that they helped build has been systematically weakened and is threatened with being weakened even more in this election cycle.
Along with these memories, on this Labor Day weekend, I’ve also been remembering other parts of my grandfather’s story. One of his favorite sayings was, “enough is as good as a feast.” He loved to grow berries and make jams and jellies and share them with neighbors. He loved to grow flowers and dreamed of having a farm. Although he never fully recovered from the trauma of being buried alive and surviving, he also spent much of his life focused on gratitude and beauty and acting so that others had enough.
8 The voice of my beloved!
Look, my beloved comes,
leaping upon the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
9 My beloved is like a gazelle
or a young deer.
Look, there my beloved stands
behind our wall,
gazing in at the windows,
looking through the lattice.
10 My beloved speaks and says to me:
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away,
11 for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
12 The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.
Our scripture for this morning is entitled “Springtime Rhapsody” in the New Revised Standard Version. And, its famous verses, ““Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away, for now the winter is past, the rain is over and gone,” describe the joy that takes hold of us after surviving the winter. But this text also describes an orientation toward life no matter the season: it is important to pause, to take in the sweetness, the beauty, the awe-someness of being alive- especially after enduring hard times and even in the midst of difficulty.
The writer of the Song of Songs encourages us, “the time of singing has come!” How do we live as people who know that the time of singing has come? Not, as the author of our Confession this morning says, “as toxic positivity or neglect [for] the pain of the world” but rather rooted in hope because we know the power of the time of singing to transform even the deepest pain.
[pause]
One year ago today, Maggie, Susie, Michael and I were hit head-on at 55 mph. The man who hit us didn’t survive. All four of us sustained injuries, and Susie and mine were particularly serious. Anniversaries of grief and trauma are amazing in that the body does keep score. I have been moved by my need to pause, to reflect, to write, to talk with people, to re-member as many details as possible from the twelve days on the trauma unit and the month in the Transitional Care Unit. As one wise friend said to me, that time in the hospital was filled with your doctors literally sewing your body back together, it makes sense you would need to re-member, re-knit yourself together emotionally and spiritually.
And, it’s true, I do continue to need to re-member the experience. I’ve needed to reflect on the surgeries and the months of nausea and the slow slog of physical therapy and the months in the clamshell back brace and the dependence on so many people- to go to the bathroom, to change my clothes, to go anywhere. Yes, that re-membering has been a kind of necessity for me this past week.
But amidst that kind of remembering, the vast majority of what I’ve written has been about the visits on the trauma unit like the one where a clergy colleague came in the day after the accident, kissed me on the foreheard, told me I looked terrible and we laughed together and prayed with fervent gratitude that I was alive. And the quiet clarity of my PT in the transitional care unit who, as we walked down the hall with a walker in a painfully slow manner told me without fanfare that I would be walking on my own by Christmas. And the aide who, on a daily basis helped me use the bed pan but as she did so told me a joke or asked me about my family or told me about her son, transforming what could have been humiliating into a situation of sacred connection.
Arise, my fair one, and come away, for now the winter has passed, the rain is over and gone.
I definitely do not want to suggest that we practice toxic positivity. But I have always been taken by one of Lyndale’s older mission statements in which we talked about en-joying God. I did a little googling around about the en-joy and it’s about inhabiting joy… it’s about living within joy. What does it mean, in the face of whatever pain and injustice and sorrow our lives are faced with to live within the joy of God?
I don’t want to pretend that I have it all figured out, because I don’t. But as we mark the first anniversary of the car accident, amidst Labor Day weekend, I am reminded of my grandfather’s time being buried alive in the coal mine and the inflection point it was in his life. Enough is as good a feast… let us live so that no one is a Kleenex person… making jams and jellies for neighbors and planting flowers…
Our car accident has certainly been an inflection point in my life… I’m still not sure where I will be led, or how… but I will re-member all the hands and hearts and laughter and acts of dignity that literally prayed us to life.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away, for the winter has passed, and the rain is over and gone.
Amen.
Recent Comments