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Bear W. Qolezcua
March 15, 2020
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
Life would be so much easier if it came with a manual that told us all the rules for survival but, of course, nothing so simple exists. Let’s look at lessons gleaned through grief and find the common threads that bind us all together in this very human experience.
Chalice Lighting
We seek our place in the world and the answers to our hearts’ deep questions. As we seek, may our hearts be open to unexpected answers. May the light of our chalice remind us that this is a community of warmth, of wisdom, and welcoming of multiple truths.
Call to Worship
Robert T Weston
from “Seasons of the Soul”
I will lift up my voice and sing;
Whatever may befall me,
I will still follow the light which kindles song.
I will listen to the music
Arising out of grief and joy alike,
I will not deny my voice to the song.
For in the depth of winter, song,
Like a bud peeping through the dry crust of earth,
Brings back memory,
And creates anew the hope and anticipation of spring;
Out of a world that seems barren of hope,
Song decries beauty in the shapes of leafless trees,
Lifts our eyes to distant mountain peaks which,
Even if we see them not,
Remind us that they are there, waiting,
And still calling to us to come up higher.
Out of the destruction of dear hopes,
Out of the agony of heartbreak,
Song rises once more to whisper to us
That even this is but the stage setting for a new beginning,
And that we shall yet take the pieces of our hearts
And put them together in a pattern
Of deeper, truer lights and shades.
I will lift up my voice in song,
For in singing I myself am renewed,
And the darkness of night is touched
By the promise of a new dawn,
For light shall come again.
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
Meditation Reading
Jodi Picoult
from “My Sister’s Keeper”
“There should be a statute of limitation on grief. A rulebook that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after 42 days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk; take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass – if only because it cuts you fresh again to see it. That it’s okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.”
Sermon
I’ve brought my fair share of sorrows to this altar and left them here for you all to bear with me. Just like the fire bowl, we bring our worries and fears and pains to the candles, to the meditations, to our prayers in whatever form they manifest so that they are no longer only ours to carry. For that grace, I’m grateful. An old Swedish proverb that is dear to me reads “Sorrow shared is sorrow halved. Joy shared is joy doubled.”
It sometimes really bugs me that there is no handbook when it comes to grieving. However, just because there is no brochure out there with “The Perfect Grief Guide” splashed cheerily across the front leaf doesn’t mean we are bereft of any sort of guidance.
In each one of us there is an intangible well of wisdom that hastens to help us when we need it most. Some pages are scattered with frantic broken thoughts and doodles in the margins that speak of emotional highs and lows… and other pages are neatly set and well thought out, processed and made into a clear message of centered calm. Combined, much of that experience creates what I like to refer to as a “Grief Bible”, a place where we can look to find answers to our questions based off of our own learning.
My grief bible begins with “In grace, in heartache, in joy, in sorrow… I am not alone.”
Grief, of course, is not solely fashioned from the experience of death. Much in our life teaches us lessons of sorrow and those lessons have their own books within our personal bibles. Some of mine would be titled “Boy Troubles”, “What the heck do I want to do with my life?”, and “Student Loan Interest Rates.” That last one… that’s a real tear jerker.
These bibles of our own making are filled with a few short books, with only a passage or two, and others that span hundreds of pages with sayings and life experiences. Some are not yet written and others are in the infancy of them being penned.
Because I know my grief best and what I have carried away from a lot of these experiences, I would like to highlight a few takeaways. Like, Book 19. Kevin. My first love.
This book taught me that the heart never heals completely… not with time, not with distance, not with age or wisdom or any other method or measure. Though the pieces may be swept back into a pile lovingly reshaped into a semblance of its original form, a shattered heart will never be without its cracks. Kevin’s book taught me that no matter how much we think we actually want our heart to heal completely, it won’t and perhaps the most beautiful first lesson comes from that fact.
We want so desperately to not hurt anymore, to not feel that sting. When we lose someone we feel we can’t go on without, and our whole life is in an infinite number of pieces, the worst news we want to hear is that we will never really get over the loss.
There is good news there, though… and that is – we will never really get over the loss.
The reason it is good news, however, is that because you will never really get over the loss you will never really get over their memory. Eventually it might not hurt as bad when you do recall them, that itself is a gift, but the wound will still be there.
My mom told me, in one of her many personal parables, that grieving is like a robin that has broken a wing. There is hope that with time the wing will heal and the robin will fly again but the flight might be less sure than before. It will take to the skies once more but not before going through pain, healing, and growth to be strong enough for the task.
Kevin’s book ends as a lesson on the transience of life and the mortal beauty of death. And yes, as morbid as it makes me sound right now, there is very real beauty in surviving the death of someone you love. It just takes a long time to see it, if you ever do.
27: Trella, my last grandmother. This book taught me that sometimes we must rescue ourselves by whatever means necessary long enough to carry on until we can fall apart safely.
One of my favourite movies of all time, Steel Magnolias, puts Trella’s book into words perfectly… “Laughter through tears is my favourite emotion.”
My grandmother died surrounded by her descendents on a Saturday afternoon. One of her calling cards in life was a fastidiously maintained manicure done in cherry bomb red, almond shaped tips. It was her luxury that she indulged each week, on a Friday, usually with her friend Maxine. After she breathed her last we all kind of panicked and started to fall apart. We still had so much to do that we needed to be a bit more together in our heads, and I tried to find something… ANYTHING… to break me out of that all too real moment and maybe be able to help my family. Then I noticed her manicure and quipped “At least her nails look good.” We all stopped, looked at them and then the chuckling began. We were still crying but that moment of absurdity, the lifelong ritual my grandmother held sacred since coming to Austin in the 60s… it rescued us enough to keep moving forward a bit longer.
Book 31. Mom. This book taught me my most valuable lesson so far. I learned that I am not the person that so many other people told me I was, that I wasn’t just a steady rock and I didn’t have to be. Over the years I learned that I am quite tender, that I genuinely love the emotions in this life, and that the message I was told for all my years before was keeping me back from being able to call on my greatest source of true strength – my community of love and support.
I was the only one of my mom’s children she told about the final cancer diagnosis, Christmas day of 2011. When I asked her why she only told me, she said “Because you’re the strong one.”
I bore that “strong” label with me as if it were all I was. I pushed others away so that they wouldn’t have to bear this thing that I, the rock of strength, told myself I must carry alone. But her death, when it came three years later, proved I was anything but strong… or simply strong. And when I realized that fact, I was unsure as to who then I was. I wanted to hold up the box of puzzle pieces depicting my life and shake them out onto the table for them to fall perfectly in place, making sense of my grief and everything I was feeling and not feeling because I feared I was going to disappear if it went on much longer.
The last few sentences of this book read – you are never ready, even when you are ready. You are never strong enough even when you are strong enough. And you are never too old to feel like a child at the loss of a parent.
After my mom died I returned to seminary almost immediately, mistake number one. Rev. Dr. Blair Monie, one of my professors, sat with me for hours while I fell apart, crying onto the shoulder of his perfectly tailored suits. I’m sure I owed him a ton of dry cleaning money. He was the only Presbyterian minister I loved more than Mr. Rogers and y’all… I LOVE Mr. Rogers. He once told me “you will survive this. No matter what, you have survived and you will continue to survive even this.” Simple words, maybe a bit overused and even pithy but in the moment he said them, just two days after her death, they became bread to me.
In a lot of ways, he became a surrogate father and chaplaincy mentor. Blair was a gift I never had thought I would receive. A year and a half ago I added book 35. Blair Monie.
Adding this particular part of my bible felt like losing a parent all over again. His story in my life ends with the line – “We will say goodbye to our mothers and fathers many times in our lives, but only once can we say goodbye to the many mothers and fathers we have had.”
Grief comes at times we wouldn’t expect. Of course, we often see death attended by grief, that is a part of the human condition, but it so often follows closely on the heels of lost relationships, broken trust, or feeling that there is more to do and we are too small or unempowered to do the tasks needed. Right now, as a nation, many of us are experiencing the grief that stems from trauma and the uncertainty in which we all find ourselves. There is a human made food shortage because of the uncertain nature of our situation and a culture imbued with a strong “what if” mentality.
We keep watching reports of more cases of Covid-19 being confirmed in our communities and we are being told to hold steady and remain calm when our brain is screaming at us to do anything but that.
This viral disease comes with a toll for each one of us. We will all add a book to our grief bibles as we move through the waves of illness as well as the unknown recovery period. Our daily lives have been thrown out of balance and upset greatly. Not only has our comfort been shaken from our grip but also our security.
We see videos and hear stories of people fighting over basic staples of life. Folks hoard more than they will possibly need or use, much of it may be wasted in the end, all in some desperate attempt to reclaim that comfort, security, and feeling of being in control of their lives.
Many will experience the grief of feeling responsible to care for their family, however that is defined, and yet helpless to do so in the current situation. Some will experience the grief that comes from the presence of anxiety, being inflated by the media and a seemingly uncaring, inept government, the unknowns and those what ifs will build up further until that is all they can see in their lives. And still, others will, in the end, experience the grief at surviving the death of a loved one.
When humans feel that their sure footing is threatened, they lash out for whatever they can hold onto. Be that money, food, toilet paper, or other humans and now – because of actions and circumstances wildly beyond any of our control – we stand raw to the fear, exposed to the chill of these many forms of loss.
I can’t say to how this book will end, I can’t predict the final line and I dare not speak what is not yet to be into the world. I will, however, say this. In this time it is best to remember our community and keep each other in our minds and hearts. Check in with one another. Help others remain steady as they do the same for you. Draw from our collective grief bibles, if only to be reassured that, as with all things, this is temporary and it too shall pass.
A lesson from my long book of proverbs comes with a warning to remember that in ways, our society often shares the lesson that grief should be peripheral, that it is almost rude to grieve. People ask how you are but some really only want to hear “I’m doing well/alright/ok, thank you” not… I am still shattered, I haven’t showered in four days, I can’t remember if I ate or not, and I can’t find the willpower to pay my electric bill. They want absolution from the responsibility to care for another human being in a moment of pain because, for many, they’ve no idea how to help or what to do.
In conversation, the complications that come from grieving tend to be avoided. People feel embarrassed for you when you talk about your grief; you let them off the hook so that the awkwardness surrounding our fear of this part of life can be moved past. However… Here’s the deal.
Sometimes you must talk about it because talking about it is like opening the pressure valve, letting out all the steam and perhaps being able to take a breath once more.
When I talk about my grief, in times that are very heavy and loud in my head, I feel like I become more visible again. It feels like I am more able to live and move along in my life because I no longer bear it all. Just because I was told I was strong enough to do it on my own doesn’t mean that I have to be. One of the gifts that comes from talking about your grief and what you are grieving is that it can provide profound clarity and remove the gauze that hides things you never thought you knew.
Though it is growing alongside yours, I hope my grief bible is as complete as I can make it right now. This chain of stories and feelings that I have scraped together through my own faulty memory all culminates with this final lesson. – Our grief bibles have nothing to do with our actual grief. Yes, the pain and loss are there in those pages, bound and sealed for our entire lives, but they are not the end result of the book itself. Ed Sheeran sang once that a heart that’s broken is a heart that’s been loved. This grief bible… our gathered mass of stories and memories and hopes and proverbs, it is our testament to the fact that there is, somewhere within us, something more. Not every story of sorrow leads to a positive outcome, some have no greater lesson than survival, but many do come back to being a source of knowledge and guidance for finding that final page to our otherwise heartbreaking book and being able to draw on it when we, once again, need.
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