Matthew 18:14
"It is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should
be lost."
After sharing some extrordinary thoughts and feelings about his years in Albuquerque
serving as the jail chaplain, Fr. Richard leads to questions of lostness and
leastness. He says, "These women and men must scratch their way back to
faith, and when they get there, it is often the real thing."
"The real thing" .... I could envy that I thought, but surely there are
other ways to get there.
Almost as if he anticipated what I (or we) might be thinking, he continues, "We
nice guys don't usually have to scratch our way back to faith. We're comfortable
with external religion and polite morality for a long time. God will lead each
of us, I am sure, but by a different path, so that all religion one day has to
be faith, love, humility and surrender __ or it is not true religion! None of
God's 'little ones' will be lost.' And we are 'one of the little ones' too, just
in a different way."
And then ........
The Question: When have you been so lost that you've had to go back to the very foundation
of your faith?
I thought for a while and realized that, true to my Enneagram number, my lostness
would surely be connected to relationship and immediately I had an answer for
the question. Exploring the answer would not be so easy.
The first great loss in my life was the death of my Dad. He was eighty-six when he
died and I was days away from being thirty-nine. We knew he was dying and my
mom gifted us all with the reseources to fly in and out of a nearby airport so
we could be with him as much as possible during his last days. He was very quiet,
aware of all that was taking place, and I guess coming to terms with the events
of his own life and loss. When I had a chance to be with him, I talked some and
I cried some but mostly I sat near his bed and remembered the years we had shared
together.
My dad was a doctor and through unusual circumstances he delivered me and then he
and my mom adopted me as well. I was breech, he told me on many occasions, and
he would smile and say "You weren't breathing but I took care of that and
breathed your first breath into you." He would smile and look me in the
eye and say, "we've been connected ever since kid."
During those days of facing the loss and loneliness of losing this great man I kept
imagining that I could just wait for his last natural breath and then breathe
another into him, like he had done for me, and we could start all over again.
Imagination is a wonderful gift until it lets you down. I believed I would be
lost without him. And for a time, I was.
I didn't feel that feeling again for nearly twelve years. My mom died. I loved her
deeply and always, but until my Dad died I had no idea how smart she was and
how much wisdom she carried. That great woman was my mother, the grandmother
of my children, and one of the finest human beings I will ever have the priviledge
of knowing. Without her I was lost. absolutely lost, for more than a year. I
would forget that she was gone and habitually dial her phone number when I was
curious, or hurt, or proud or feeling alone. And many times it surprised me when
she didn't answer.
Fr. Richard, in the quote above, talks about faith, love, humility and surrender. I learned about all of them again and again when I lost my parents. My mom's favorite
quote from all of Joe's sermons, and she had years of his taped sermons to draw
quotes from. As an aside, she used to mark the ones she really liked with a dot
of red fingernail polish and the ones she didn't much care for with a black Sharpie
pen. Her favorite quote was, "faith and control cannot peacefully co-exist."
I could not control anything surrounding their deaths, so I had to rely on my
faith.
According to M. Scott Peck, "Love is how far you are willing to extend yourself for the spiritual
well-being of another." My parents lived their lives well and they died
well. By that I mean, during the time surrounding their deaths they neither one
held on to us, to unmet expectations or to life. Their work was done, their time
had come and they were spiritually ready for whatever awaited them. My only choice
in love was to let go of them as gracefully as possible.
Humility is, I think, about being honest about who you are and allowing the space for others
to safely do the same. We had loved one another well, my mom and my dad and me.
Not perfectly, but honestly, and that truth was the underpinning of my faith
in their continued life after this one.
It is what it is. I have that sentence hand sewn and framed on our altar at home. It is best as a
reminder to me that I really do have to surrender to what is. The ability to allow what is, and let go of my need to have it be other
than it is, continues to be one measure of my spiritual growth. Those who cannot
stay in the moment, accept it as it is and learn from it without having to change
it are the ones who understand surrender. My parents were spiritually quite mature.
I am discovering in this journaling experience that my parents taught me much of
what I need to know about faith, love, humility and surrender. And that explains
why I was so lost when each of them died. I didn't know who I was without them,
and yet because of them I was able to know who I am in God. And that knowing
is the very foundation of my faith and it's the real thing.