on life and death (or moving from "as" to "is")
Monday morning a good friend called me to see if I had heard the news. The brother of one of our best friends from college had died suddenly. He was born with "the severest" of heart defects and after undergoing his second heart transplant a little over a year ago, the body had ultimately rejected the transplant. The visitation with the family is in a couple of hours and services will be held tomorrow. Many of you who read this know the family and the situation.
I'm supposed to be a minister, but honestly, situations like this one stump me. It's hard to know what to say, feel, or be for people you care about when someone they cared passionately about is suddenly taken from them. There is a certain violence inherent to losing someone so quickly. I haven't even made it to the services or to face the family yet, and already I'm steeling myself for it, feeling that somehow if I can hold it together than that will rub off in some sort of grief-defying osmosis, but I know it won't work.
When I was at McAfee School of Theology I was fortunate enough to know John Claypool a little bit. The man was a saint--not in any self-serving way, but in a way that made you constantly aware of his presence, whether passing you in the hall or watching him wash his hands in the bathroom. It was eerie--you couldn't help watching every move the man made. And when he spoke, everyone fell silent, waiting to hear the winsome Kentucky drawl and gravelly baritone that could just as easily be the voice of God we always heard in our heads growing up.
He was honest to a fault, constantly self-deprecating, but never in any attention-seeking way. There was a quiescent humility that begged respect but never commanded it. Perhaps the strangest thing is that Claypool was known best for what was easily the most tragic situation in his life--the death of his daughter at a young age. More than that, it was his decision to continue to preach through the grief, baring his own heart in his sermons before his congregation at the time, that set off a revolution in preaching. The gulf between pulpit and pew was suddenly bridged by a pastor who chose to speak from his own brokenness, assuming, in his own words, that "it was his best gift to a broken world."
There are certainly those who decry such techniques as inappropriate or self-indulgent, but no one I know who ever met John Claypool held those beliefs. When he passed away a few years ago, we caravaned to the funeral with a rag-tag bunch of denominational staff, former students, friends and colleagues. The conversations centered on what his life had meant to countless others.
His most famous sermon was simply titled "Life is gift." This is funny to me, because every time I think about it, I have to pull a book off the shelf or Google it to get it right. My brain always wants to make it "Life as gift."
"Life as gift" is comparative--analogical in nature. It's taking one thing and saying that it metaphorically is something else. "Is" is a statement of being--a delightfully active verb that's really passive--to say something "is" is to say (as Claypool would himself) that it is in it's very nature or being, inasmuch as God in God's self is the Ground of all Being.
To put it quite simply, life is gift. Birth is windfall. None of us earned our way into this world by what we did or did not do. It was given to us out of pure generosity and out of everlasting mercy. This truth in the depth of all being is the secret of all secrets in the Christian vision of reality.
Despite my brains best efforts, my forgetfulness belies any genuine belief in such a thought. I would much rather think of it comparitively--as one of a great many opinions, analogies and metaphors, to retain the complexities and intricacies of all that I think life holds. Simply put, I'd much rather think of life AS gift because it allows me to say "but it's more than that as well." to say "life IS gift" is to speak definitively, to the essence of the life we have been given.
I spend most days forgetting that life is gift. I spend most days thinking life is a right--and one that I ought to cherish and value. Most often this "cherishing" means cramming it as full as I can, and, on good days, stopping to take a deep breath and suck all the marrow out of it.
But that is to think of life AS gift--life plus something. It is to mistake the spirit of gratitude with which we are to meet the most sacred gift we have been given--life--even life in God's name.
Yesterday as I caught up with a good old friend we wandered into conversation about faith and practice, the "New Atheism" and the "Christian" efforts to find equal intellectual footing. I found myself blithely saying "The problem is we (as Christians) can never win the debate. Faith is faith, not certainty, so to claim that we are objectively sure that there is something is disingenuous--we have our fingers crossed behind our back. There is always the chance that this is all there is. The difference is I'm prepared to say I'm okay with that--that it's still worth it--that this life--living this life in this way, the way of Jesus, is still far better than living without it."
Though he could have said it much better than that, I soon realized that's what it means to know that life is gift. It's to know that "birth is windfall." Pure, divine, unmerited generosity has been lavished upon us.
I am still tempted to rage against the heavens. Twenty-one years for my friend's brother--someone who knew that life is gift and lived and loved broadly and openly, sucking the marrow out of every moment--it seems like far too short a span. He deserved more gift than that.
And so I'm left (as are those that know him and the family) with two options--to curse God for the size of the gift or to celebrate the worth of the life. He may well have squeezed more joy out of 21 years than most do out of 70. He may have lived 50 more years the same way, who knows. But for the gift of life he was--and for that matter, the gift of all those I have loved and lost over the last several years--I can have nothing but gratitude. Resentment fades over time, but genuine gratitude abides and soothes, laughs and cries. It celebrates in joy and rejoices in memory.
It speaks only love and knows only mercy, because it knows above all that all life--not just some--is gift.
