Never Place a Comma...

April, 2006

The story is told that years ago when comedienne Gracie Allen was close to dying, her husband, George Burns, was in such grief and sorrow that he could barely speak or function. They had been together since their 20s and had spent nearly their entire adult lives together. Burns told her that not only did he not want her to die, but that he also did not want to stay here without her. It was the end of everything he had loved and trusted in life.

Gracie was a devout Catholic but George was a doubting Jew. He had lost his faith in his teens when his father, who was a cantor at the synagogue, died in the flu epidemic of 1903. But just before she died, after a long illness culminating in a heart attack, Gracie, the believer, wrote a note of comfort to her theologically suspicious husband. In it she said simply, ''George, never put a period where God has put a comma.'' He would later share those profound little words with numerous friends throughout the rest of his life. Because of that they have traveled around the world and my own church denomination has even recently adopted them as its national vision.

Notice that she didn't say, ''don't worry, George, God will not let me die.'' She didn't say, ''God will do a magic trick and make all of this right again.'' That would have been a lie. What she did say, I think, was that we should not close the book, throw in the towel, and give up living when something awful happens, even if that something is the loss of a spouse or friend or even the pending loss of our own lives. When we are living in the midst of our grief, we tend to believe that life itself is broken and can never be mended. We tend to put a period at the end of those events and say that sorrow and loss are the conclusion of living itself. But they aren't. God sees those events as commas, not periods. Hard times, tough times, but not end times.

I think of her simple words now and then when I see someone who has gone through incredible suffering and loss, yet manages to go forward in life and experience some of the real possibilities for joy that are in life. I think to myself that that person has really ''got it.''

When I was growing up in Oklahoma City, there was an ''old'' woman in my church (probably in her 50s) who was involved in the Civil Rights campaign. She worked to integrate our local church, she lobbied our congressional delegation for the Civil Rights Act, and she participated in ''sit-ins'' and marched in demonstrations. She did more than any other white person who I ever knew to make Oklahoma City a more equal and more humane place.

But at the same time she was someone who had gone through some incredible personal pain. She had lost her husband to lung cancer and two sons to the war in Vietnam. And she also spent a great deal of her time caring for a daughter who had moved home at age 30 with some kind of congenital disease that was slowly draining her life away.

A few years ago I was back home again and someone asked me to participate in the annual ''CROP Walk,'' which is a walk to raise money to alleviate world hunger sponsored by Church World Service.

I said sure.

We seldom have those up in New England, so I was glad to join in. Sure enough, on that bright sunny Saturday afternoon I happened to see my old friend walking along regally in the crowd. She was now looking almost ancient and she had a cane, but I still recognized her. I joined her for a while as she limped and occasionally winced, but still beamed with pride that she was able to be out there at all. It was so good to see her again and I told her so, but I knew that this had to be painful.

''Why are you even out here? What keeps you coming out for things like this?'' I asked her.

I'll never forget what she said.

She first laughed, a big face-crinkling laugh. ''I don't really know,'' she said. ''But maybe when you've been through hell yourself you learn to identify and sympathize with the hell of someone else.''

I don't know if George Burns ever participated in a protest march after the pain he endured from the slow death of his beloved wife. Or if he joined in a crusade to end war and racism and poverty, though I would like to think he did. What I do know is that after Gracie had died he often would tell his friends that her words, that God never gives us periods, only commas, was the one true thing that allowed him to keep his faith - or perhaps rejuvenate his faith - for all of the years after she left.

God doesn't cause the sufferings that we experience in our lives. Just being alive creates most of those. But God does give us the gift of presence and support, of companionship and care. God gives us the ability to know that bumps on the road are not walls, and that on the other side of the bumps are the possibilities of years of love, beauty and peace.

My Mother's Friend

July, 2005

One year ago this July I took an emergency flight back home to Oklahoma for the unexpected death and funeral of my mother. She had grown old and frail and blind, and finally one day she gave up and gave in and moved on to her heavenly home with God.

While I was there I took some time to walk up and down her street to say goodbye to her neighbors for the last time. Many had lived in the old neighborhood for years. Across the street lived two old gay men whom I never knew well, but always appreciated because my mother told me how kind they had been to her when she had an accident and was no longer able to drive. When she eventually became blind they took over mowing her lawn, cleaning her gutters, and raking her leaves. One time when a truck pulled up and people started mysteriously hauling things out of her garage, they ran over to prevent what they thought was theft of their friend's household property. As it happened, the truck was from her church, and the goods were for a rummage sale, but she never forgot their attempt to rescue what she called "the old 'widder' in distress."

I knocked on their door, but no one answered so I moved on to the next house where I saw the father of a young girl I had known as a teen. I asked him what had happened to the guys next door and he said "well that's an interesting story." Evidently over the years new families had moved into the neighborhood who didn't know the two men and who were not like the older crowd, and they were upset that the neighborhood had allowed "queers" to live so close by. Young parents, inspired by teachings of a variety of TV preachers, were worried that these old men might be a danger to their children. So they began organizing and talking, and finally the two felt the pressure and moved away. I asked the neighbor if they had ever actually done anything wrong and he said no. Actually, he said, "they were pretty good fellas." But "they were queer and all, and they say that's bad, so I guess it is."

All of this came back to me this week because on Monday, Independence Day, I was in Atlanta Georgia, watching three thousand members of my church, the United Church of Christ, vote to affirm "equal marriage rights for all people, regardless of gender." That means, as most of us would have put it, "same sex marriage."

According to the way our church is governed, votes such as this are not binding on local congregations. We say that the national General Synod "speaks to the churches, not for the churches." On the other hand, it was a pretty inclusive crowd, and probably closely represents the opinions of the majority of our members nationwide. I looked around the room while they were debating and saw a huge range of faces. Young people, old people, gay and straight, "red and yellow, black and white" (as the hymn puts it), from across the U.S. and a smattering of nations. They wrestled with the issue for two days, first in committee and then on the floor, with debate, amendments, re-phrasings, and then prayer. They were attempting to discern how God might be still speaking to us in an increasingly complex and brutal world. And what the vast majority finally concluded was that no matter what one could say about the differentness of same gender marriage, they couldn't quite be convinced of the wrongness of it. How could God create human beings and then tell them not to love one another?

I confess that I agree with that. At one level I didn't have a horse in that race. I'm happily and heterosexually married and I wasn't even a delegate to the Synod. But on the other hand I kept thinking of those two nice guys who looked out for my mother. The Bible says very little about homosexuality and some of the references are frankly unclear. Jesus is totally silent on it. What he is not silent on is the need to love, accept and care for all people. Bring in the poor, the hungry, the outcast, the sick, the beggars, the alienated, lonely and marginalized. Jesus condemns wealth and war and divorce and oppression, but never two old men who love each other and mow the lawns for neighboring widows.

When I left the assembly hall that day, I was frankly nervous. I would have to go back to my church and explain this extremely difficult decision to the good people in my congregation who had not been there and who might only know of it through headlines and sound bites. The delegates took a leap of faith that day, hoping and praying that their actions were discerning the will of a still-speaking God. But in the long run, we're all mortal and nobody knows. We all act in faith and pray that we will be forgiven if we fail.

But I was encouraged by the words of a pastor friend of mine from Texas who told me that when he dies and stands before St. Peter at the pearly gates, and he hears a list of his lifetime's sins and mistakes, he expects to hear a long, long list. But when all is said and done, he said he would much rather be judged for being too open minded than too closed. "If I'm going to make a mistake," he said, "I suspect God would rather it be a mistake of letting too many people into the kingdom than too few."

And you know, I think I agree with that too.

Did you see the story in the paper the other day about the skeleton that archaeologists found in a tomb outside of Jerusalem? It had been there for about two thousand years and was now just some bones wrapped in a shroud. What made these bones (who they call "Mr. Shroud") stand out was that they had not been prepared properly. In those days if a person was rich (and he evidently was) the body would be placed in a tomb (somewhat like they did with Jesus, though his tomb was donated) and then they would come back years later and put the bones in a small box for final burial. But nobody came back for the bones of Mr. Shroud.

The archaeologists figured that maybe his friends had been afraid of handling his bones, so they did a few tests on the bones and discovered that Mr. Shroud had leprosy. That explained why nobody came back for his bones, but they also found that the leprosy didn’t kill him. What it did was to make him so weak that he caught tuberculosis—which is actually a fairly hard disease to catch—and that was what killed him. It was kind of like HIV/AIDS, a disease that lowers your immune system until you finally die of a totally unrelated disease.

It reminded me of when I was a teenager. Whenever I had a breakup with a girlfriend I would get a cold. It would take the stuffings out of me, and then any little disease would come along and take me down and I’d be in bed for a week. My mother would peer at my boiling thermometer and shake her head. "You don’t get enough rest," she would say. "You don’t take care of yourself. Drink more orange juice." I would moan and cover my head in grief and mourning. I don’t think she knew that sickness could be caused by a broken heart.

Later on I noticed the same thing with my prayer life and my relationship with God. It seemed that during those periods when I felt very close to God, when my relationship was deep and secure, I could withstand all sorts of horrible events and tragedies and still feel relatively good about myself and the world around me. But during those times when, for whatever reason, I felt distant and estranged from God, I could get a hangnail and break down in tears.

I had a young man come to me one time saying he didn’t believe in God anymore. "What happened?" I asked.

"My pet ferret is ill," he said. "He got hold of some spoiled food and he’s sick. Why would a good God make my ferret sick?"

I tried not to laugh. "How’s your prayer life?" I asked. "I’m going to guess that it’s pretty bad." "None existent," he said. "Why do you ask?"

That told me a lot. His spiritual immune system was down and so he’d caught himself a theological cold.

On the other hand, I visited a parishioner of mine in the hospital recently who is old and dying. She’s had an awful life—torrents of suffering and grief. "I’m going to miss my family," she said. "But I have no regrets. Things have been hard, but I wouldn’t trade a moment of it."

"How’s your prayer life?" I asked her.

"Good," she said with a smile. "In fact, God and I have been talking a lot recently."

The archaeologists had been delighted by all the discoveries they made digging around in the bones of old Mr. Shroud. They learned how some diseases can overpower others in the same body, and how one illness can drag you down and make you more susceptible to another one that can finally break you and kill you. My dear parishioner in the hospital could have told them that. She could have told them that when your relationship with God is healthy and your prayer life steady, then all of the horrors of solitude, death, and destruction can beat against your door, but you will not be threatened. But when you feel cut off, estranged, and separated from the love and care of God, the slightest whiff of fear can engulf you in pain.

Rev. Stan

That wisdom probably wouldn’t have done much for Mr. Shroud, because he was pretty sick anyway. But it might do something for people like the young man who lost his faith in God. I can only hope that someday he manages to discover the real reasons why he allowed himself to lose his faith, and does something to get it back. And I especially hope that he learns to keep the spoiled food out of the way of his ferret.

Christmas Letter

December 15, 2004

Dear Church Family:

I remember a time, many, many years ago, when I was counseling a middle aged couple who were having marital problems. I was young and green and remember thinking (stupidly) that these people were too old to be having these kinds of problems. Why were they coming to see me?

During one of our sessions the wife was going through a litany of issues she had with her husband, which included the story of a disastrous affair that her husband had had with her best friend. The affair ended up destroying her friendship, damaging their marriage and hurting all of their family members on both sides. He stopped her at that point and said,  Whoa, wait a minute. That was an awful thing, and I m sorry about it, but it happened over twenty years ago.  To which she replied something like,  yes, that s true, but it doesn t matter how long ago it was, I m still hurt over it. 

When she said that I realized that sin can stick to you forever. It s easy to get, but hard to get rid of. It s like the great Boston Molasses explosion back in 1919. Do you remember it? They were working the distilleries overtime because Prohibition was about to come in and they wanted to stock up as much rum as they could before it became illegal. Up in the North End there was a storage tank that stood fifty feet tall, and held 2.5 million gallons of molasses. That is, it should have. They stuffed it too full, and the day was hot, and the wooden walls were too old, and the thing exploded. Molasses shot out from the sides at twenty-five miles an hour and covered the entire north end of Boston and into the bay. It melted the streets, and seeped into the ground and they say you could smell old molasses on the buildings and the air and the water for over fifteen years after that. No matter where you went, or what you did, or how much you cleaned your house or your lawn or your windows. For years after that everybody and every thing still smelled like molasses.

Some of our sins stick to us like old, explosive, stale, deadly molasses. We can try to make amends, we can try to do better, we can try to act right, but ultimately there are some things we ve done in our pasts that are so toxic that they smell for generations.

Around Christmas time each year we celebrate a baby born in Bethlehem who can take away the toxic smells our lives have created. No matter who we are or where we are on life s journey, the Son of God welcomes us in with an extravagant welcome, and washes us clean. We have to want to come, we have to decide it s finally time, but the offer from the manger never changes. It never falters, it never says no, it never quits asking.

This year, make a special effort to strengthen your faith and renew your commitment to the God who created you. The church needs your support, of course, both in your financial gifts during this difficult time, and with your presence by volunteering for some of the hundreds of important tasks necessary to keep this fine old church going. But in addition to the church needing you, I suspect that you also need the church. All of us have pasts that we would prefer to put behind us, but for one reason or another still travel with us. Our past sticks to us like lethal, burnt molasses and it damages us and pulls us down.  

So, this year, come to the manger and be washed. It s time for a rededication. It s time for a renewal. It s time to come clean.

Blessings,

Rev. Stan Duncan