No Matter What

March 26, 2024

Beloved:

          Inside Holy Week means services to finish, including a funeral for a precious congregant who died gently in her bed last week.  Her death was a long time coming and she was more than ready.  She was 96.  Also in our congregation, we have a new baby boy named Leo.  Leo will be 96 in the year 2120.  I like thinking Dorothy and Leo waved to one another in their passage through eternity’s veil.  No time is quite as right as Holy Week for a funeral or a birth, crushing our deepest grief and greatest joy together inside time and space.  One does not exist without the other, grief and joy that is.  We grieve in the same measure as we love, which is why it’s love that breaks our hearts.*

          Going deep into our own experience of love and loss, joy and grief can be scary, but deeply comforting as well, when below all that pain and fear, we discover the faith we claim is not just words to be recited, but something substantial, something dependable, like a solid floor in a shaky house on a really windy day, or a really windy year.  The bottom will hold, as someone I know says, the bottom will hold.  Even when everything else is falling apart around me, this faith which holds us close does not tremble or move.  Our task is to keep close to it no matter what, no matter how tempted we are to reach for what can no longer keep their promises to us.  Stay close to the faith that made us, saved us and sustains us, no matter what.  May you stay close this Holy Week and always. 

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette
    
          *Movie recommendation:  Finestkind is streaming on AmazonPrime.  It’s beautiful.  Tommy Lee Jones should win an Oscar.  The movie is about fathers and sons, hard work, and fishing.  It is visually beautiful.  I loved it, especially a scene in the donut shop in which TLJ’s character explains what a son means to a father.  If you are looking for a movie with a Holy Week theme – this is one.

---