Why Am I Here?

by Wini Moranville
“Face It, People”

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow. Praise him all creatures here below ….”

 The Chapel Choir at Grace sang at the 8 a.m. service – to a full house in the sanctuary – every Sunday during the school year.  I had been attending Grace since I was six years old. I had been confirmed at Grace, been on work trips and choir retreats, and most formatively, on the first John Wesley Heritage Trip to England in 1973, and later to the Chapel Choir Central Europe trip in 1977.

Now, it was 1978, the spring of my senior year in high school, and as we did every Sunday, we were standing in the Chancel singing as the ushers brought to the alter the gold vessels symbolizing the offering.

After the prayer, my friend – I’ll call her Amy – turned to me and whispered, “Don’t you think this is just the biggest bunch of bullshit you’ve ever heard?”

“What?” I asked.

“This. These songs. These prayers. Everything. I don’t believe any of it. It’s all crap.”

I had never heard anyone express doubt so firmly, not at church, anyway. And yet, I can’t say I was a fervent believer myself. Truth be told, I went to church to get out of the house, to be with my friends, and for the boys. The faith part? I hadn’t really given it all that much thought.

But Amy’s comment creaked open a faucet of doubt that started as a trickle and became a rather steady stream. That fall, I was off to the University of Iowa. As with any good liberal arts education, my four years as a French and English major at Iowa led me to question everything I had been led to think. By the time I left college, I was leaning more towards the idea that man invented God than the other way around.

Or, as my thoroughly profane Classical-Biblical Literature professor bellowed at the climax of one of his lectures, “Face it, people! We are all alone!”

Of course, being 21, that didn’t bother me that much. I moved to New York, got a career, married a non-practicing Jew, moved around some more, traveled, and had a fine old time for the next few decades.

When Dave and I moved back to Des Moines in the early 90s, in part to be closer to our widowed mothers, I would occasionally accompany Mom to services at Grace, generally around Easter and Christmas. It always felt good to come back – but not essential enough to come regularly.

In 2014, I moved my mother, who was then in the later stages of Alzheimer’s, from Wesley Acres to a small care facility in her hometown of Jefferson Iowa. Towards the end of the year, for a reason I still cannot explain, I decided to “try” church again and committed myself to attend services throughout Advent.

And then, on Wednesday, December 17, 2014, my mother died, We held the visitation on December 22, and the funeral on December 23 in Jefferson, Iowa – a one-hour drive from Des Moines.

The day of the funeral was slightly drizzly – one of those kind-of-iffy weather days that gave people an understandable-enough excuse for not coming to the service.  Plus, it was two days before Christmas, a busy time for everyone. We have many relatives in the Jefferson area who were able to come; still, I remember feeling sad that the funeral was so scantily attended. Mom deserved more.

At the end of the service, I turned around, and there were four people from Grace whom I didn’t really know that well – at least I would not have called them friends. At the visitation the night before, seven out of the twenty people who signed the guest book were people I had known in my youth at Grace. They were no longer close friends, but they had come.

It hurt me greatly that some of my closest friends in Des Moines did not make the drive to Jefferson for either the visitation or the service. But here – braving the weather and taking precious time out of their holiday week – were people whom I would not consider close friends, but who somehow knew everything that their presence would mean to me.

The acts of kindness – from cards and memorial donations to words of true comfort and great wisdom — that I received from the Grace community during the depths of my grief are too numerous to mention in a short essay. One kindness I recall often is receiving a forwarded Christmas card to Mom, written to her the day before she died. It was from longtime Grace member Gladys Bloodworth, and it was the last personal letter that anyone would ever send to my mother. While many friends had long ago stopped bothering to send Mom cards (likely thinking, “she won’t even know who I sent it”), Gladys continued to send love and good wishes. Even if Mother didn’t grasp these kindnesses, their presence made me feel less lonely for her. 

I still don’t know why I decided to start coming to Grace that Advent; Karen and Kathy Erickson have told me that perhaps it was “The Big Hand” pushing me to do so. Whether or not that’s true, I do know this: My Classical-Biblical Literature professor was simply wrong. People. We are not alone.

Hoping It Might Be So

A poem by Thomas Hardy:

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock
‘Now they are all on their knees,’
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
‘Come; see the oxen kneel,

‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,’
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

                        — 1915

(Note: A “barton” is a barnyard; a “coomb” is a deep valley.)

This poem begins with a bit of folklore of years gone by: It was said that at midnight on Christmas Eve, farm animals would kneel in deference to the birth of the Christ child. This fanciful story must have taken on other forms; in fact, I can remember my own grandmother, who was born in 1890, telling us that the animals on the farm (where were always spent Christmas) would miraculously talk to each other at midnight on Christmas Eve. And I remember, as a child, believing it.

“So fair a fancy few would weave in these days.” Indeed. These days, I’ve met absolutely not one person in the generation behind me who has ever heard of such lore. I teach this poem often to college-level students. I’ve asked.

Read the poem again with that myth in mind. While you do so, think about how the words have a sing-song rhythm … until they don’t. The first two stanzas feel like an easygoing nursery rhyme. Suddenly, the lullaby-like cadence is broken in the third stanza; the tone and meter become less sure-footed, but more sophisticated, just as we do in our own lives as we move from childhood to adulthood. The rhyme scheme remains – just as certain touchstones may remain as we grow older.

*****

It’s significant that this poem was written in 1915s England. Great Britain led their sons into a war unlike any that had ever come before it; with machine guns and chemical and trench warfare, warfare had become even more ghastly and industrialized. The industrial revolution had swept people from the country – where they had a deep, first-hand knowledge of how most things worked – to the factories, where, focusing on one task, they had less chances to see the world whole.

A few years later, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats would write, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Life has become random, chaotic, and fragmented. Indeed, by 1915, the usual systems of belief—church, folklore, folk wisdom, patriarchy, patriotism—had weakened.

Consider again the last stanza:

‘In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,’
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

The faiths of days gone by feel beyond reach to the speaker in Hardy’s poem. Indeed, the barton – the barnyard, that is – of his childhood has become “lonely.” The coomb (the deep valley) is “yonder” – lying as it is so far away from the present. And, in fact, the entire pastoral setting is so abandoned as to be shrouded in darkness, or “gloom.” Belief in the wisdom of elders and the divinity of Christ’s birth is as distant and unseeable as Hardy’s childhood (he’s 75 when he writes this).

And yet, far from being smugly certain or proud that he has left belief and folklore behind, he misses them.

I recite this poem every Christmas Eve; indeed, I think of it often throughout the season. Like the speaker in Hardy’s poem, I, too, sometimes wish we’d get an unmistakable vision of Christ’s divinity. And wouldn’t it be especially poignant if it came through meek, mild creatures of the natural world?

I know I am not alone in this desire. In our Call to Worship just last week, we recited the lines:

We’ve looked for burning bushes and listened for whirlwinds and asked for a

sign.

But we’ve seen just our ordinary world and heard only daily noise.

*****

And yet …

There are times in my faith journey where I have seen and felt “a sign.” Usually, it’s in nature, such as when I’ve been struck by magnificent cloud-scape, or I’m mesmerized by the intricate pattern on a fish’s belly. The words “awesome wonder” come to mind, and I think, “this could not have all come about by chance.” Other times, it has been when I’ve felt a huge and meaningful connection to another person, and I’ve felt a sense of holiness between us.

I have also had moments, in worship, when the minister has said something that was so intensely relevant to my life at that moment, that I could only believe that a kind of divinity was working through him or her to reach me.

Last Sunday, in our Unison Opening Prayer, we prayed:

God, may we be surprised by wonder.

To be surprised by wonder, you must be open to wonder. I do not need to tell this group, the Open Table, to stay open to wonder, because I sense that we all are. But during this next week of advent, I would like to challenge each of us to mindfully take note of times when a sense of “wonder” finds us. Next week, let’s share these finds together, whether they be as huge as a sense of heaven opening unto us through the clouds, or as small as the speckles on a fish’s belly.

What Am I Doing Here?

While my mother was living in the nursing care unit of Wesley Acres, I started to befriend some of the other residents who sat at her dinner table. After my mother moved to another facility and later died, I continued to visit these friends – I had become part of their lives, and they had become part of mine. It didn’t feel right to drop that connection.

I was particularly fond of a woman named Betty. She had never married; she was a bit of a curmudgeon – feisty and cranky and sharp-tongued when she wasn’t pleased (I tend to like those kind of people). When we’d play trivia at the dinner table, if everyone was stumped and struggling a tough question, like “What does the B stand for in Rutherford B. Hayes,” she’d shout out the same answer: “Who cares?” It always cracked everyone up.

One day, I came in for my weekly visit, and Betty was not in the dining room. The staff told me she had pretty much stopped eating, and that she was on hospice care.

I went to visit her in her room about every other day during this slow, difficult process. I didn’t have much to say to her, as she was one of the least talkative people during my dinner visits. But each time when I would come, I would ask if she wanted me to come visit her again. She always nodded yes.

Soon, she was hardly talking at all, so I would simply sit by her bed and hopefully let her know someone was there. The Jesus on the cross over her bed told me she was Catholic. Sometimes, I would recite the Lord’s Prayer with her; she mumbled along until she couldn’t. Once, when a volunteer (whom I knew to be Catholic) was visiting other residents, I asked her to recite the rosary with Betty. It seemed to comfort the dying woman.

At times my visits felt profound; at other times, they felt boring. Still, I went.

Far from seeming at peace, Betty seemed to be deeply troubled during this time. She softly moaned; sometimes she’d wince. I’d ask her if she was in pain, and she would say no, but her expression was one of a quiet, inner distress.

My visits were not warm and fuzzy; I constantly wondered what I was doing there, trying to comfort a woman whose last name I didn’t even know. The staff told me that a niece and nephew dropped in for a little while each day. Now and then I crossed paths with the hospice worker and volunteers who regularly comforted her with prayers, music, lotions, and gentle touches. She was not abandoned; still I felt I needed to come.

On one of my final visits, I sat with her while she slept, listening to her short difficult breaths and feeling a deep sadness in the room. I noticed that her window shades were closed, and I wondered if she might want them open to the dusk so she could take in just a little bit more of the world in her last days. I went over to her and looked at her face to gage whether or not this might comfort her. Suddenly, her eyes opened and she looked straight at me; as I looked into her eyes I saw something there, something that shook me with a kind of fear and wonder that I’d never had before or since. Just as suddenly, a certain recognition settled in; the fear passed, and I was left simply with an awesome wonder: My God. There He is. That’s Him.

He gazed at me with a look of gratitude and sorrow that was so strong I could not hold back my tears. I kneeled down beside the bed and continued to look at Betty —or Jesus or God or something at once mysterious and miraculous and frightening—and simply let the astonishment take over. In all my life, I can’t say Jesus had ever truly talked to me, personally. But there he was, and I felt him saying, “You do this for me.”

So. Did I really see Jesus? Did he really speak to me through the eyes of a dying woman? Could I not simply have been powerfully moved by the infinite mystery of death? Or, could these moments have been brought on by my lingering grief over my own mother’s death (just a few months prior) and my everlasting sadness that I had not been at her side as she passed?

An overwhelming part of me says, “I know what I saw.” A smaller part of me says, “I simply don’t and cannot know.” And then sometimes, when I’m going back and forth between these two thoughts, I think, as Betty would so eloquently put it, “Who cares?”

Because really, who does care? Pastor Nate reminds us that God is not afraid of our doubt. So does it really matter whether or not I steadfastly believe a kind of divinity led me to this woman’s side? The important thing is, I was there.