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A rainy Friday morning and I am once again led to think of the common blessings of human life, and to praise my Father in heaven for the gifts He gives to us. The hymn For the Beauty of the Earth comes to mind: For the beauty of the earth, For the glory of the skies, For the love which from our birth Over and around us lies: Christ our Lord to thee we raise This our hymn of grateful praise. For the wonder of each hour Of the day and of the night, Hill and vale and tree and flower, Sun and moon and stars and light: Christ our Lord to thee we raise This our hymn of grateful praise. For the joy of human love, Brother, sister, parent, child, Friends on earth and friends above, For all gentle thoughts and mild: Christ our Lord to thee we raise This our hymn of grateful praise. When I think of growing up, my mind quickly attaches itself to those people and things for which I developed a very natural and human affection over the years – special family members, several older neighbors, my dogs, forts dug in the woods, a favorite tree, football games in the front yard. I don’t know how to define the affection that I felt then and still feel for Mr. Dove who worked every week in my grandmother’s yard and who had three fingers on one hand, for Fanny who cleaned our house twice a week, for Mr. Chavis my little league baseball coach, for Grandma my Texas grandmother, for Nanny my Columbia grandmother and close friend, for Mr. Myer across the street who spent hours talking with me about his inventions and about bows and arrows and animals, for Louise and Martha and James who worked in the back of the cleaners, for my dad who despite his foibles was a good and supportive and affectionate dad to me, and for my mom who was always there. Most of these people are gone. I feel their absence more now than ever. It seems that there is a finite number of people and places for whom we develop – mostly as children – this kind of blessed and natural human affection. Is there a synonym for this kind of affection? As children this affection just happens, it just is, without our being so conscious of it perhaps until later, without our choosing it really. As we get older this kind of warm human affection still happens, but it’s harder. Life goes by so quickly now it seems. Being more conscious of the desire we have for close relationships of this type we are in a hurry and impatient with the slow growth required for this kind of affection to bud, and we give up on relationships too quickly. People come and go from our lives before this kind of affection has time to take root. The structure of urban/suburban life fragments and compartmentalizes relationships. We feel disconnected. Loneliness is an increasing reality. Many of us are separated from those special places for which we have and have had special affection, places which may be connected to those special people. When I was in Vancouver in 1980 I had a dream that I had gone home, and though the house was there, my parents had moved, and someone else lived there. I didn’t know where everybody had gone, and I couldn’t walk into the backyard and sit under the old dogwood. I had been locked out of a special place. I woke up crying and cried like a baby off and on for a week. I look back upon that time as a rite of passage, a grieving over growing up. And even now, when I go to Columbia, I can’t help driving by my grandmother’s house, and I just can’t believe I can’t walk in and have a coke with Nanny, or go to the back and cut a few camellia blossoms or smell the tea-olives or pull some ivy from around the azaleas. It is really hard – harder than we might even realize – when these special people and the special places that go with them, depart and leave us. Right now our congregation is of an age range where many of us have recently lost and many likely will soon be losing parents and grandparents, special aunts and uncles, old family friends, people for whom we have that special blessing of affection, people who just can’t be replaced in our lives. We have known many of the blessings spoken about in the hymn above. We grieve the loss of them. I ask you to continue to pray for our brothers and sisters In Christ who have lost special loved ones. I hope that as I get older there will be people – certainly my own children, maybe some nieces and nephews, hopefully some of the young people and children in our congregation – that will have that type of affection for me, for my home, for my family. I don’t say this out of a desire to be loved, but out of a desire to be a channel of human blessing to others, to be used by God as a gift in other’s lives in this way. And so, despite opportunities that may arise, despite this and that, I choose to stay put, to be taken for granted in the good sense, to be dependably there, to be a constant, so that this can happen for others as it did for me. And all of this causes me to struggle with passages in Scripture where we see the issue of Jesus affecting adversely these special and natural – and blessed – human relationships. We see Jesus, who undoubtedly loved and appreciated his own mother even more deeply even than I have my special loved ones, nevertheless speaking of family in different and in radical terms. Who is Jesus’ family really? I feel this tension in my own life. Despite all the affection spoken of above, I have felt and experienced a kind of alienation and separation from some of my loved ones because of profound differences of world view and values and beliefs and hopes. I am called to continue in loving them, to honor my mother, to be a good brother and good son, to bless and pray for and be there for them, but in many ways my life diverges. There is pain and sorrow in this, alongside the joy, of human love. |
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