On the memory of friend who has died

Lately I've been taking note of how much effect my wife's pregnancy has had on me. I've gained a lot of weight myself, going up two waist sizes in the past few months. My sleeping habits have also changed and my dreams have become very strange.

Several years ago Tom, my best friend from high school, died in a car accident. It was unexpected as deaths go, the most personal encounter with it that I have had. I had never experienced a friend dying before. It hit me in its own way and to be honest I am still dealing with it, carrying the memory of my good friend and the knowledge that he no longer exists.

I didn't cry at his funeral. I couldn't cry. I even tried to make myself cry, thinking that it was appropriate and necessary, and in the attempt I ran through my mind every sad thought possible. No tears came though.

I mention all of this because the only time I see Tom now is in my dreams. He'll pop up in them every now and then and he has been making appearances more frequently now than ever. I think it is because my wife and I are getting closer and closer to the birth of our first child and there is that knowledge in the back of my mind that he will never share in that experience.

Tom was the most self-assured person I have ever known. To a lot of people that trait came off as a cockiness yet it was an endearing cockiness. While he had his own inner demons, as we all do, he possessed a strength that rubbed off onto others.

I miss him greatly.

We hadn't seen each other in a few years before he died. That's a hard thing...to never have that final goodbye, to wonder if the dead can ever know the impact that they had upon us, if they ever knew the love we felt for them. There are so many wishes left behind, never able to be fulfilled. And it is strange...our lives had parted since our last get together as I am sure is so common a thing. Not a parting out of hate or argument, but just the separation that comes with time, with people going about their different paths, having so many different experiences that they grow away from each other. It is the lack of shared experiences and it causes persons to move away from each other like flotsam being carried apart on tiny ripples and waves in a vast sea.

I dreamed about Tom again last night. I dreamt that I could go back in time and see him again, to try and prevent his death or to at least say goodbye. The dream hit me hard, harder than other have lately. Afterwards, I thought of how silly our lives are. How the important things and the scary things are really not that important or scary at all. I thought of how we are as children and about how my own child will soon enough experience going to school for the first time, make her own friends and enemies, and how those things will become so ultimate in importance for her.

John 11:1-6, 17-23,28b-37
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, "Lord, he whom you love is ill." But when Jesus heard it, he said, "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the son of God may be glorified through it." Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. When Jesus arrived (in Bethany), he found that Lazarus was dead and had already been in the tomb four days. When Martha
heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give to you whatever you ask of him." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, "The Teacher is here and is calling for you." And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. The people who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and went to him. They followed her because they thought that she was going to Lazarus' tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the people who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep. So the people said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"

I don't like Jesus very much in this story from St. John's gospel. Lazarus dies because Jesus doesn't come soon enough to heal him. True, a few verses later he raises Lazarus from the dead, but I can't help but focus more on the emotional impact that his death had upon his sisters and other followers of Jesus. What sticks out most is the recorded interaction between Mary and Jesus. One can sense the anger she feels towards Jesus for not coming sooner. I think about that and I hope that the cries of Mary cut Jesus hard. I hope he felt guilty. The words of Martha and Jesus in this chapter remind me of a very traditional Christian response to illness, calamity, and death. This tragic thing has happened according to the greater will and glory of God. This thing has occurred for a reason and purpose known only to God. We cannot understand why it has happened but we must trust in God that there is some justifiable reason and purpose behind it all. I hate this response. I hate the blind trust of the sheep led to the slaughter.

I slip off to Tom's grave every now and then. I go because I am drawn to it by feelings I don't quite understand. When I arrive and stand in front of his tombstone I don't know exactly what to say or think and I fumble around trying to find something that feels appropriate. I'm not sure there is anything appropriate. The stones of the dead, mute and cold, are only there for us the living.

This is the puzzle of life and death.

By the rivers of Babylon-
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there
we hung our harps.
Psalm 137:1-2

On the Limits of Christianity and Prayer

I had lunch this week with a friend from seminary during which we commiserated over the usual suspects that trouble our personal theologies. I left our meeting that day feeling re-invigorated enough to struggle with them some more. Here are some of the results, although they are incomplete in that I feel I will need to return to them again and again.

1 Corinthians 15:12-14; 19

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from
the dead, how can some of you say there is no
resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain…If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

I have been thinking about this verse lately, precisely because I find myself doubting the “resurrection of the dead,” whatever that may ultimately mean. Those last words symbolize my disposition. And that is the last thread I hang onto…the uncertainty of what resurrection of the dead may ultimately mean. But how does one base a faith upon pure uncertainty? Oh, how so many of my past tenets of faith have become vestigial organs now. And I don’t mean it to sound as if I am glorying in that, either. I mourn for them…I am to some extent lost without them.

I am struck by the centrality, the necessity of St. Paul’s words. If we do not have this belief, then everything is in vain, of no purpose, pointless. If there is no resurrection, then we are all just wasting our time. Was it easier for St. Paul to believe in miracles than it is for us today? Was there less cynicism? Was there still room enough in the minds of people for the miraculous to occur?

I cannot change that today there appears to be no room for miracles. I take it for certain that the violation of the laws of nature by any deity is impossible. Instead, these days I find my miracles in things visible. And this, I think, is neither good nor bad. It is simply where we are. Some Christians find themselves still waging war against this loss of the supernatural God. I wish them luck, and I pity them for theirs is a faith that is under assault on all sides. As for me, I am tired of trying to rescue this God. I am tired of performing mental acrobatics to try and find some escape clause, some loophole, and some syllogism to keep this God on continued life support. I have decided to pull the plug.

Is there a resurrection of the dead? I have no idea.

Does this mean there is no afterlife? I have no idea.

Perhaps there is hope, and I will allow for that. I will allow that God, the great whatever in the sky, the mysterious force driving the universe, has thus far provided enough evidence of the miraculous in and through the cosmos and nature to provide room for hope. And, yes, it is a scary place to find oneself. And yes, sometimes, I can find comfort in plain old hope…sometimes.

Yet I am still at odds with St. Paul’s declaration. I have heard the explanations of the historical context surrounding the passage. Still, I can’t help feel that what St. Paul is writing is not simply a response to a problem in Corinth. I have to permit that this is precisely what the saint says it is…a central tenet of the faith, without which there is no faith. And that is something that no historical critique of the passage can erase.

Luke 11:1-2a

(Jesus) was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John (the Baptist) taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say…”

What follows from verse 2b to verse 4 is St. Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. Another version is given to us by St. Matthew in chapter 6:9b-13 in his community’s gospel. There is no version given by St. John’s gospel and some scholars offer that a proto version of the prayer can be found in the gospel of St. Mark, 11:24-25. I will not attempt to expound at all on the differences between the versions as other persons with far greater academic pedigrees have done so on many other occasions and with better insight than I can offer. Instead, what I am proposing here is something completely different, going back to the question given in St. Luke’s account – “teach us to pray.” I hope to speak as honestly as I can in this little exercise.

Prayer is something that I struggle with, mainly because I find myself not knowing how to pray. While God is still a mystery to me (and always will be), at this point in my life I find myself trying to think of God in non-personal, non-agential, and non-theistic ways. Thus prayer, at least the concepts and traditions of prayer that I have grown up with, has been blasted to pieces and rendered utterly useless in this new spiritual country in which I roam.

Before I go any further, let me offer a little bit of a negative credo concerning God.

- I do not believe God is a separate being who exists somewhere “out there” beyond time and space.


- I do not believe that God hears our prayers of supplication and requests and then grants or denies them, depending on God’s will.


- I do not believe we can persuade God to do certain things through prayer.


- I do not believe that God can or does intervene in our affairs. God is not a cosmic superman, stepping in to deliver us from harm or evil.


- I am not certain that God can act as an agent in any way, moving or leading the universe towards any certain goal. It may be that God can do this, but I am unwilling to place any bets upon it, at least if in doing so one is required to allow that God has a prior vision of what the universe will or should look like and then, as an agent, works towards the fulfillment of this prior aim. The crux here is prior aim or goal. If I allow this, then I fear that I slip too easily back into the rut of viewing God as a person, going about, working toward a vision, just as you or I would go about working toward a goal or plan. When I consider the world and the cosmos, I am amazed at the struggle towards life, and towards complexity. At the same time, however, I wish to preserve the freedom of the cosmos and all its inhabitants and matter in its quest towards this complexity.

Is this complexification, expressed freely within and by the cosmos, precisely the cosmos’ response to a God that lures it towards something unexpected? Perhaps, but again, I am afraid of even granting this much to God as it again points toward a greater goal or aim of God. Gordon Kaufman has suggested that it is only the creative serendipitous movement of the universe that can be termed rightly as “God.” While I agree with Kaufman on this, still I am driven further from any traditional understanding by the work of persons such as Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute who suggest that this ability to move towards complexity and life is an essential feature of the universe, existent from the moment of creation.

If this is so, then where does one draw a line of distinction between God and the world? Thus I find myself becoming more and more a pantheist rather than a panentheist, unless I remain firm in the idea that no one individual can claim to be the ultimate expression of God. God, rather, can only be glimpsed (and I would like to stress that this is a peripheral glimpse, remaining always out of focus) in the entirety of the creative serendipitous movement of the cosmos. Is this enough to base a God/world distinction upon? Perhaps it is.

But let me get back to the original question: How are we to pray? Here is my offering. Several years ago, I ran across a Buddhist blessing to be used before meals. I and others have since adopted it, feeling that if prayer is to be an intentional, conscious act of opening oneself up to understanding and living within the world in a spiritual manner, then any prayer must become an expression of this orientation. Likewise, for me a prayer must avoid becoming a laundry list of requests, pleading for God to do what God is incapable of doing. Prayer is to be in part a remembrance, calling to mind to needs of others in such a way that those needs become our needs. In our prayer we must become the other so that we share in their pain, suffering, joy, and pleasure. So, after all these caveats, here is the prayer that I try to use, adjusting it when necessary (as I mentioned, it is a blessing for use before meals) to reflect the situation at hand. When you pray, say:

“This food is the gift of the whole universe,
the earth, the sky, and much hard work.
May I live in a way that makes me worthy to receive it.
Many beings will struggle for food today.
May they all have enough to eat.”

What I appreciate about this simple blessing is that it avoids pleading with a God that I believe cannot hear. Rather, it serves to focus one's attention on the present moment, realizing both that nothing should be taken for granted, and that one should, as much as possible, become completely empathetic toward the complex web of actions, misfortunes, struggles, and successes that comprise the universe.