Grief: A sneaky, relentless foe, demands to be heard and felt

Grief is a sneaky, relentless foe. It fades, then suddenly reappears, trumpeting its arrival in emotional cacophony . . . demanding to be recognized, to be felt, to be heard.

I buried my father’s ashes last Friday on a sunny spring day in Spokane, Washington. I blessed his grave, a 2.5-foot deep hole in the dark, damp earth, with holy water from my church, Sts. Peter & Paul. Said prayers of the Trisagion.

Lord have mercy, we Orthodox Christians plead repeatedly. Glory to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, both now and ever and unto ages of ages, amen.

 Dad was not Orthodox, but I am. And so, I prayed for him from my new tradition. Somehow, I know he appreciated it.

Heavenly king. Comforter. Spirit of truth. Everywhere present, filling all things. . . . . Save our souls, O Good One.

We mourners offered our words to Dad, each other. Memories were shared. Tears shed. Hugs given, and received. Farewells. The urn was placed in the ground, freshly turned earth packed over it, leaving a rich, dark brown mound interspersed with grass blades and pine needles.

Goodbye, Dad. But not goodbye to the grief.

Yesterday afternoon the Box arrived. It contained the few mementos, packets of photos, this and that saved from Dad’s nursing home room and shipped to me in Utah from Washington by UPS. I opened it, and with it, once more, opened the grave. Or so it seemed.

Having contemplated it once more, I will try again to close the grave with the soft soil of my heart. Not to forget, but to honor. Grief does not end, I’m learning.

It is, however, transformed. And transforming. Grief will take me where it will, and with prayer serving as my hand touching paradise, I will step ahead through the miles left in my own life.

I will do so with, I pray always, more and more love, and less sadness.

A eulogy for a very good man

*This is the eulogy I gave at my father's graveside memorial on Friday in Spokane, Washington. -- BM


Growing up, one of the things the family of the Rev. Robert Mims did a lot of was pack
up and leave places. We moved from one neighborhood to another, from one state to another. 

 By the time I was 11 years old, I had been in 13 different schools.

In each move, something would get lost. Toys. Pictures. Maybe a dish, and on one move there was a loss than made my mother cry: during the move from Spokane to Wilbur, a tiny central Washington farming town with an even smaller church, my parents’ large framed wedding photo was lost.

In the past year, my son, Rob, and I moved Mom and Dad from Lilac Plaza Assisted Living to the Cheney Care Center as their health, and dementia, grew worse. Like all the moves before, this mean some things got donated to charities, others were put in storage, and a few treasured items were lovingly safeguard by family
 
At home in Utah, recently, I finally opened boxes I’d brought back. There were Dad’s collection of several worn Bibles, his notes in the margins of passages of scriptures he’d used in sermons. A pressed flower in the pages of one Bible, and in others, handwritten notes and reminders of events and people long since passed.

Then, in a box Mom had treasured, there was a bundle of letters. Love letters, it turned out, from Dad, written while he was traveling as a banjo-playing evangelist throughout the post-WWII Pacific Northwest. They were handwritten pages filled with endearments, dreams and love for the future they would soon begin as a married couple.

Memories. Memories Mom and Dad lost, temporarily I believe, as their worlds shrank both physically and mentally over these past couple years.

As I have prayed about their situation, seeking wisdom for each decision came about their care and well-being, I wondered what happens to those memories, when we … forget.

“Nothing is lost in Me,” was the thought impressed on my mind. Love is not lost, nor are our loved ones. The ripples of blessing we start with each act of compassion are eternal; so are those comforting touches or embraces we give or receive, the wisdom we gain and share, and certainly the faith we live  and sacrifice for.

Mom and Dad didn’t need that wedding photo, as treasured as it was, to remind them of their love, nor their bond as man and wife, father and mother, grandfather and grandmother, and co-workers for the Kingdom of God.

You don’t need “stuff” to keep those good things of past. We will always have our yesterdays, even when we forget them in this earthly life.

I know this: even if our memories fade with the weakness of age and loss of cognitive function, on that Last Day, Our Lord will restore those memories to perfection – and that will be a perfection that is no longer distorted by the false concepts of past, present and future we wrestle with now.

In the eternal, uncreated light of our Lord, we will have a God’s eye view. Nothing of love is lost. Nothing committed to Christ is ever gone.

So, I know where Dad is today. And, I believe he knows all about us, here, as we honor his earthly years, and we ourselves glimpse Eternity. I pray for him, and he is praying for us.

And Dad today knows as tangible truth what we believe by faith here: The perfect, infinite love of God includes, sustains and restores His children, as the prayer goes, “both now and ever and unto ages of ages.”

In our sentimental memories -- those photos, videos, letters, old Bibles, the contents of cedar chests and dusty boxes -- we have our yesterdays. But in Christ, we also have our tomorrows.

A winter of discontent, a spring of hope and new life

When my wife, children, aunts and uncles and cousins gather Friday in Spokane, Washington to remember and bury my father, lilacs and other spring flowers should be in early bloom under a partly cloudy sky pierced by the rays of a freshening sun.

Saying goodbye to Robert Mims Sr., who died January 17 at age 96, while holding the hand of his wife, 91-year-old Katherine, will seem so much more appropriate as springtime unfolds rather than in the depths of winter, when his sojourn here ended.

It has been a tough year. Lost a job I loved, at the Salt Lake Tribune, after a mass layoff ended 20 years at the newspaper last May. Depression, a frantic search for meaning and purpose, followed. But gradually, buoyed by faith, family and friends, I once more began to move forward.

Then, Dad died. Not unexpectedly, but . . . still. 

This farewell comes after 40 days of the Akathist to Jesus Christ for the Departed prayer, as is the practice of my new Orthodox Christian faith. Dozens of candles have been lit for him, joining other remembrances of beeswax, wick and flame in the narthex shrine of Sts. Peter and Paul Church, adding their light to those lit for other beloved and mourned. . . their light flickering off the shiny surfaces of that "great cloud of witnesses" Paul wrote about, the saints, or at least their icons adorning the walls and ceilings of the temple.

Mom won't be at the memorial. In a wheelchair, on oxygen, unable attend to the most basic physical functions, her memories, ability to speak or understand have long since been robbed as late-stage Alzheimer's disease ushers her toward an end in increasing unconsciousness.

Neither will my "big sister," barely able to walk due to her age, cerebral palsy, and unable to comprehend Daddy's death so directly, given cognitive abilities of a 3-4 year old child. Dad is "with Jesus," my sister Carolyn knows, and that is enough.

I will see them both, my mother and sister, before I fly back to Utah. Likely it will be a final goodbye to the shell of what my once-vibrant, sharp-witted and quick-to-laugh mother was, yearning for a second of recognition. Regardless, she will get my love, a caress, a kiss and a prayer.

In college, I briefly wrote poetry. A professor liked it enough to give me an "A." A collection of those poems, scribbled on white lined paper and stuffed into a three-hole punch binder, have long since been lost, likely tossed during one of many moves over the past decades.

And while I have no delusions about reprising any abilities in that form, here, however flawed, is an attempt, for Dad's sake:

We live, we die
We give, we fly
Leaving in winter
Returning in spring
Flowers and resurrection
We bring

Grief in short
Mourning long
Death comes in ice and snow
Life rides equinoctial song
Memories precious, bitter, sweet
gathered in time short, and long

Father has passed
Buried in soil
Dad is immortal
In dreams nocturnal
A being of love and light
Memories eternal

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History: Are we doomed to repeat it, after all?

Philosopher/writer George Santayana is famously (infamously, on a deeper level) credited with the quote, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”

Well, he sort of said that. Like so many popular aphorisms, the “doomed to repeat” statement is more of a paraphrase/variant. To quibble, the genesis quotation actually is this:

“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I like to know from whence things came, and how they came to be. I also like to occasionally show off the results of inquiry. Forgive me.

All a tortured, too-long means of saying that however the more pithy version of Santayana’s observations developed, it remains true, nearly 67 years after his death.

We have a new generation, “informed” by the predominantly “progressive” worldviews of their public school teachers and university professors, that can weep for endangered whales and desert tortoise (good causes, don’t get me wrong), yet cheer abortion, and most recently even extending it to infanticide in cases of unwanted or genetically/intellectually “imperfect” babies who survive birth.

Various forms of socialism, some as potentially extreme in usurping individual freedoms as anything the failed USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba or the chaotic disaster of modern Venezuela wrought, are being pushed by the extreme left (and currently loudest) wing of the Democratic Party.

Rational discussion about sexual identity, gender and all that goes with that has gone by the wayside. It’s not how you are born physically, but what you imagine. Put on a blindfold, it seems, and genitalia disappear. Question any aspect of that “self identity,” and you become a bigot, someone guilty of “hate speech” for stating the obvious:

You may be gay, but you are still male. You may be lesbian, but you are still a female. If you are transsexual, you can undergo operations to physically change to what you believe, perhaps, should have been born to be. Beyond that, it gets rather complicated;  a few years ago, for example, Facebook added no less than 50 “gender options” for its users.

The popular saying goes, “Sex is a matter of the body, while gender occurs in the mind.”

Well, OK. Let’s just say I question that. I think my skepticism about this, informed by both my faith and reason, is solid. That said, I will not condone treating anyone as less of a human being (after all, we all are created to bear the image of God) because their struggle for meaning takes them on, to me, are bizarre journeys.

I’m much too busy, as I should be, fighting to subdue and root out from my own mind and life the frailties and sins of my fallen, broken humanity.

So, back to history. I grew up in the Cold War period, the ashes of Nazi Germany’s crematoria and destruction of multiple millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma and others deemed undeserving of existence by Hitler. Millions more innocents died in the decades following WWII, among them many condemned for holding to their Christian faith in the purported Soviet socialist paradises of the USSR and China.

Yet here we are, well into the 21st century, and antisemitism, religious persecution, and philosophies and political movements dedicated to eradicating freedom of thought, belief and action all are on the rise.

Truly, we do not seem to learn from history, because we ignore it. Intellectual sloth and intentional concessions to political correctness gone mad, the kind of thing warned about (predicted?) by George Orwell – “Newspeak,” “thoughtcrime,” “Doublethink” all come to mind as hauntingly familiar today, in intent and application if not precise terminology.

In light of all this, let's return to Santayana, where we started – and some of his other thoughts seemingly applicable today?

“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”

“The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”

And, this: “All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.”

---

*Santayana defined himself as atheist, but he was no hater of God nor faith; a benign skeptic, he sometimes saw religion as poetry. Indeed, he spent his last decade of life in the care of nuns, He was a flawed human being, as are we all; for example, he held views about racial superiority and toying with eugenics.

A Lenten prayer: 'Grant me to see my own errors and not to judge my brother'

Lent is upon us. 

My first experience of this season of simplifying life, recommitting to spiritual growth, prayer, fasting (both from certain foods and from negative attitudes expressed internally and externally alike) was this time last year as a new Orthodox Christian.

Looking to go deeper this time around. People say, "I'm giving this or that up for Lent," etc. But really, its not what we "give up," but what we open up to receive in terms of love for others, focus on what's really important, and resting from the chaos around us.

I fell in love with this prayer of the season, attributed to St. Ephrem the Syrian, last year.

This year, it is more than mere recitation. It has become a prayer of my heart.

For me, and other seekers of Christ, what could better sum up what we should hope for from Lent, and the life of a believer?

An Akathist for Dad: How an ancient prayer erased the barrier between my life and his death

 For forty days after my father's death, I believe we communicated on a level not just more precious and succinct than we had for many years, but deeper and more meaningfully than ever before.

 I'm not talking about spiritualist seances, ghostly apparitions or any other "new age" self-delusions so popular, or even the "near death experience" crowd and its money-making exaggerations of, or fabrications about the hereafter.

 No. But Orthodox Christians do pray for the dead -- their own, and ultimately ALL those who have passed from this life, believers or not. We do that at every liturgy, and at length during specially designated services throughout the year like the most recent "Souls Saturday."

 We especially pray for our loved ones, following a practice as ancient as our 2,000-year-old faith. So, offering me solace after my father, Robert Mims Sr. died at 96 in mid-January, my "spiritual father" -- Fr. Justin Havens, who ironically is a couple years younger than my own son -- suggested I pray the "Akathist for a Loved One who has Fallen Asleep" during my 40-day period of mourning.

 There's a lot of theology, tradition and pure poetry within this prayer. And certainly, it is first a prayer of intercession on behalf of the departed.

 Intercession, in that it seeks to support and bless a loved one who has passed in much the same way we do when they are physically present with us -- and for with Orthodox Christians, there is no separation between the living and those who have died.

 We pray for them, they pray for us; the circle is NOT broken; in the Eucharist and liturgy we enter heaven in worship, the church corporeal and the church spiritual becoming one in time and space.

 But it is more than this intercessory act of love for the dead. It is also meant as a spiritual balm and therapy for those who mourn. And THAT is what I meant by my opening comment.

 During those forty days of prayer, there was a photograph of my father on a shelf below icons of Christ, His Mother, several saints, and the cross, I communed with the Holy Mystery, and my dad, too. Often tears halted me, and at those times it seemed the piercing eyes of my father and his knowing smile literally shown with love. . . and encouragement.

 The last of the forty days of the akathist came on a Sunday, so I had arrived a bit early to have time in a small chapel off the narthex of Sts. Peter & Paul in downtown Salt Lake City. It was the toughest of the prayers for me, as if I was finally saying goodbye.

 I sobbed through much of the prayer, but as I neared its end there was peace; the bittersweet was somehow, well, sweeter.

 One of many of the prayer's kontakions that echo in my mind still was this one:

 "When earthly sojourning is ended, how grace-filled in the passing to the world of the Spirit; what contemplation of new things, unknown to the earthly world, and of heavenly beauties.

 "The soul returns to its fatherland, where the bright sun, the righteousness of God, enlightens those who sing: Alleluia!"