- May 1, 1985
My son was born in the spring of 1977. Immediately upon leaving the hospital after having seen him newborn, a member of the congregation I was serving at the time told me that an old timer in the community had just lost his wife. I went to visit right away to find that she had died far more recently that I had realized. The doctor who had come to pronounce her dead was just leaving as I arrived. Her lifeless body still lay in her bed in the downstairs front room where she had been cared for.
I stayed with the old man until the ambulance came and took the body away, then helped him strip the bed and set the furniture back as it had been before his wife’s illness. It has never been easier for me to be in the presence of death; I felt I had been given a gift.
“What you sow does not come to life unless it dies”, says St. Paul, stretching us toward an understanding of resurrection based on his everyday observations of the wonders of seeds and soil and trusting that if we look closely enough at the ordinary we will glean extraordinary insight.
For me, the most striking thing about being in the woods in the spring and summer is the obvious coexistence of life and death. Old branches, leaf litter and dead falls press into the ground feeding innumerable new green shoots.
It is another metaphor for the way in which life and death, decay and renewal, are bound up with each other in the same eternal rhythm.
Cynicism and despair have no place here.