Category: Memory

21 years ago, somewhere between 1 and 2 a.m. my sister of 42 years died at St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul. Her head cradled in the arms of her good friend, Dr. Bob Conlin, and with all of us gathered around her, Mary died. She died on a Sunday, the day during the week that we celebrated always as the Resurrection (note: in Lent you are NOT to fast ever on Sunday for that precise reason.)

It hardly seems like 21 years, 10 years perhaps, but not 21 years. Ruthie, the kids and I drove back to New Prague in those early hours of Sunday morning. We stopped briefly at the Holiday Station in Burnsville, then made our way home. Ruthie and I were up early to assist mom and dad in making Mary’s funeral arrangements. At first, I thought that Mary’s funeral would be on my birthday, the 12th, but her funeral ended up on the 13th with her wake on the 12th. Not a day passes without me thinking of her.

What is presented here is the bulletin article I wrote on July 3rd, this year, early in the morning, the day of my mother’s funeral.

A couple of years prior to his death, the great spiritual writer Fr Henri Nouwen wrote a book entitled, “Our Greatest Gift.” I was intrigued by the title. What is this greatest gift about which Nouwen devoted a whole book? Was it about Jesus, whom we would all agree is our greatest gift? No, the greatest gift Nouwen wrote about is “death.” Nouwen did ministry in a community of adults who had multiple developmental disabilities. On his birthday, one resident, a 30 year old man named Bill told Nouwen the hard, cold truth. Bill said, “Henri, you are old.” Nouwen acknowledged that the number of years he had before him were far fewer than the number of years behind him.

The subject of the book came to Nouwen during the 6 months he cared for his sister-in-law who was dying from cancer. He wrote about his ministry to another young man who was dying from HIV. Nouwen wrote that human death is the great equalizer in human society. People along the human spectrum, the powerful and powerless, the wealthy and the poor, those with great status and prestige and those with none at all, the lawful and the lawless, each and everyone of them will eventually die. Death claims us all, including Jesus Christ. Jesus was not above death but willingly died to be in solidarity with us whom he had created.

Nouwen noted that human death need not be seen as horrible, but rather a mysterious passage through which we are born into eternal life. As babies must leave the safety and security of the womb to experience greater life, so must we leave the finite security of human life to pass into the fullness of eternal life. This is why the feast days of saints are not celebrated on the anniversary of their birth, but are celebrated on the anniversary of their death. The date of their death is the date of their birthday in heaven. Those of us whose lives have been touched by death receive comfort in knowing that Jesus, the Lord of the living and the dead, has conquered death once and for all, and leads our loved ones into the joy and peace of eternal life.

 

I have related this story a number of times. I have always felt I have never quite capture the essence of what I experienced, and, probably will not at this, my current attempt.

At the end of the Fall semester, the last rehearsal of the Chorale of the College of St. Catherine, was always magical, at least for me. The Christmas concert having been performed, we came into the rehearsal hall relaxed and in good spirits. The rehearsal hall was set up very simply. Along one of the walls was a large coffee urn filled with hot chocolate. Alongside the urn was a basket filled with small candy canes. And, next to the basket were napkins and Styrofoam cups. In the middle of the hall was the wooden stool utilized so often by our director, Dr. Maurice Jones.

We would get our cup full of hot chocolate, a couple of napkins, insert the candy cane into the hot chocolate and sit on the floor around the wooden stool. Maurie sat down, and opened his copy of Dicken’s Christmas Carol.  As we sipped our hot chocolate and ate whatever food we may have brought with us for lunch (many of us were “brown baggers”), he would launch into a dramatic reading of the Christmas Carol.

It should be noted that Maurie Jones was not only an excellent choir director and professor of music, he was an outstanding actor, well known in the Twin City for his acting skills. His face and his voice were animated as he began the story, “MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.”* Because our rehearsal time was only an hour long, Maurie would read up to the part in which the Ghost of Christmas Past visited Scrooge, and then, segue to Scrooge awakening Christmas morning, following his grim visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future, and read to the conclusion of the story.

Many of us would have been happy to sit all afternoon to hear the entirety of the story, but since this occurred at the end of the semester and we all had finals in the rest of our classes, we reluctantly left the rehearsal hall, albeit, far better than we had entered, and filled with anticipation for Christmas.

In that short hour, sitting on the floor sipping hot chocolate and eating cookies, transfixed and enthralled by the storytelling skills of Dr. Jones, all of us “adults” were transported back to the time of our childhood when our parents would similarly read to us from the story books we had in our little libraries. I remembered well my dad reading to me while we sat on the couch in our living room. That short hour with Maurie Jones and Charles Dickens was, for lack of better words, a “magical Christmas moment.” One could say that if the Ghost of Christmas Past came visiting me, this moment in time would be one to which I would be whisked back.

What does this Christmas memory have to do with the Incarnation of Jesus?

Advent is a time, in the parlance of Charles Dickens and his story about Scrooge, in which we get a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past and the Ghost of Christmas Future.

In Advent, we look to the future coming of Jesus, the time when Jesus will come again and all hunger, all poverty, and all the insufferable things that human beings do to one another will cease. This moment we envision will be truly “magical”, when God’s love will be made manifest and true peace, contentment, and love will be experienced by all. As we anticipate the second coming of Jesus, we remember the time in history when God was made manifest in human history, the time in which God put on, crawled into, so to speak, human flesh and bone in the person of Jesus, God incarnate.

What of the Ghost of Christmas Present? In whom or in what do we experience the Incarnation of Jesus? This is where the onus of making Jesus Incarnate falls not upon some past event or future event of Jesus, but upon us. The only one who can make Jesus Incarnate in the present is our own selves.

As an expectant mother, the presence of Jesus has been gestating within us for the past 4 weeks. On Christmas we must give birth, must make Incarnate, the presence of Jesus. As Jesus “put on the skin of humanity” at his Incarnation, we, at Christmas (and, for that matter all other days) must “put on the skin of Jesus” and within ourselves make his presence known to all people. In the imagery of the Gospel, we must enflesh ourselves with Jesus Christ.

After all these many years, 44 years to be exact, following my initial experience of Dr. Jones retelling of Dicken’s Christmas Carol in the rehearsal room of the Chorale at the College of St. Catherine, I finally begin to appreciate the significance of the event. In Maurie’s own person, he embodied Jesus the master storyteller enthralling people with his words, his stories and parables leading people closer to the God who created them. Maurie in the Present of that time, made Christ manifest, not in some elaborate way with all sorts of storytelling pyrotechnics and CGI, but in the simplicity of a bare rehearsal hall, a coffee urn full of hot chocolate, a basket of candy canes, a wooden stool, and, a well worn copy of Dicken’s Christmas Carol.

If the Ghost of Christmas Past would visit all the people who have known us, would they find within their relationship with us at that time, the presence of Jesus Christ? If not, now is the time in which we must, like Scrooge in the story, begin to Incarnate the presence of Jesus Christ to those we know, so that Christ’s presence made be manifest also when the Ghost of Christmas Future comes a-knocking.

* Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol (p. 1). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.