“A Joy Made
Complete”
by Bruce
J. Johnson
Remembrance
She received a 2005 National Book Award for nonfiction, and this
is her story:
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan
Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first
the flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an
induced coma and placed on life support. Days later — the night before New
Year's Eve — the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital
when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second,
this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later,
their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, (
The Year of Magical Thinking is a powerful book and represents Joan
Didion’s attempt to make sense of, in her own words, “the weeks and then months
that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness...about
marriage and children and memory...about the shallowness of sanity, about life
itself."
(Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking,
2005)
None of us,
admittedly, some to greater and others to lesser degrees, are exempt from those
types of experiences. No matter what the death, it still cuts loose any fixed
notions we might have. The lives we know are changed forever and it is never
easy.
Brook
Noel and Pamela D. Blair write the following in their excellent book on
grieving, I Wasn’t Ready to Say Goodbye:
“Each year, about 8 million Americans suffer the death of a
close family member. The list of high visibility disasters, human suffering and
sudden loss is long and will continue to grow. Many include families and
individuals we don’t see in the media. They are suffering behind closed doors
in our neighborhoods, in our homes, in hospital waiting rooms. They are pacing
ICU hallways, watching as life support is discontinued, sitting numb in hard
chairs. They are impatiently waiting in a hotel room for a body to be found.
They are torn apart by an unexpected phone call. They are grappling with sudden
death, a sudden ending, a sudden tragedy. None of them were ready to say
“goodbye.”
Few are
the situations when any of us are ever ready to say goodbye. And in some way,
really, we never do--- fully--- do we?
The
novelist and former New York Times columnist, Anna Quindlen, describes what
surviving a major loss has been like for her:
Grief remains one of the few things that have the power to
silence us. It is a whisper in the world and a clamor within…Maybe we do not
speak of it because death will mark all of us, sooner or later. Or maybe it is
unspoken because grief is only the first part of it. After a time it becomes
something less sharp but larger, too, a more enduring thing called loss.
Perhaps that is why this is the least explored passage:
because it has no end. The world loves closure, loves a thing that can, as they
say, be gotten through. This is why it comes as a great surprise to find that
loss is forever, that two decades after the event there are those occasions
when something in you cries out at the continual presence of an absence.
“An awful leisure,” Emily Dickinson once called what the
living have after death…
The landscape of all our lives become
as full of craters as the surface of the moon… And I write my obituaries
carefully and think about how little the facts suffice, not only to describe
the dead but to tell what they will mean to the living all the rest of their
lives. We are defined by who we have lost.
(A Broken
Heart Still Beats, McCracken
and Semel, p. 276-77)
And
today, we, all of us, gather on this Remembrance Sunday, oh so mindful of our
grief and the loss that will accompany us, an ‘awful leisure,’ for the rest our
lives.
Yet, I
trust that we are here not only to revisit the memories and remember and honor
our loved ones but to hear anew about
the hope that enables us to grieve, not as those who have no faith but as we
who know the power and promise of Christ’s resurrection, the foundation of our
Easter faith. We are here to be in touch with our sadness and sense of loss but
not without also lifting up the blessings of life and the power of love and
what Christ came to accomplish for us—that our joy may be made complete, this
in spite of the sorrow that weighs upon our hearts.
One of
the quotes that is never far from my heart is something said by a popular
Christian author, Lewis Smedes, who writes eloquently about the nexus between
the hurting heart and the purpose for which we have all been created, namely,
joy. Listen to these words:
“You
and I were created for joy, and if we miss it, we miss
the
reason for our existence. If joy is to be honest joy, however, it must be
congruous with human tragedy and human sorrow. This is the test of joy’s
integrity. Is it compatible with pain? Only the heart that hurts has a right to
joy.”
I am so
very much aware this morning of how many of our hearts hurt--- this because of
the profound sense of loss created by the deaths we remember, and the lives and
loves we miss.
But with that hurt we affirm
as well that there is a right joy--- once defined as “a sense of well being and
internal peace—a connection to what really matters.” (Oprah Winfry, 5/2001 p.298)
And while many things may matter, nothing matters more today than to
know and believe that our loved ones are not dead but live anew in the perfect
joy of God’s love.
I did a wedding yesterday
for Sarah Livingston and Christopher DuBois, one of those occasions when,
because I have known her all her life. She was one of kids from the old
neighborhood. I took my turn at the bus stop and supervised play time in the
back yard. That makes for a special feeling on such a day of promise. There was
a special feeling. Well, quoted at her ceremony something that Morgan Redfield,
another neighbor and one of her teachers at Coventry Grammar School, who died
suddenly a few of years ago, used to like to say:
“To
love and be loved is to get the sunshine from both sides.”
Well,
today it is that sunshine we imagine our loved ones are feeling —loving and
being loved by God in that place where are is no sorrow and suffering, no
darkness and evil, no broken hearts and cascading tears—only sunshine from
sides.
Paul must have known this
when he wrote of Jesus himself that “for the joy that was set before him, he
endured the cross”? (Hebrew 12: 2) How
paradoxical and true…. that it is for joy that we bear our sorrow, our
suffering, the pain of loss--- believing and trusting that “ love always wins”
because it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all
things and it never ends. (1 Corinthians 13: 7) That’s the name of this human
journey we are on….life’s deepest meaning, a meaning that we can affirm in the
face of tragedies we cannot fathom, sorrows and sighs too deep for words …
death has no victory in our lives, no final say… that is reserved for God’s
love… whose win is assured because we know that Christ was raised from the
dead.
You know, it has been said
that the highest purpose of the Christian faith is to make people loving-----
by choice.
That is surely what Jesus
meant when earlier in today’s rather lengthy passage which actually begins in
the 15th chapter of John-- It is part of what is called Jesus’
Farewell Discourse.” His saying Goodbye to his disciples. And it can’t be said
any clearer:
“ These things I have spoken to you,
that my joy may be in you
and
that your joy may be full. This is my commandment, that you love one another as
I have loved you.” (John 15: 11-12)
“…I
speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in
themselves.”
(John 17: 13)
That’s what His joy is all
about- what He knew about life with God,
about that place He prepares for us--- so that where He is, so also MAY
WE BE…a place where the pain passes and the heart rejoices.
JOY IS MADE COMPLETE---
FOREVER—
LET THIS BE A FIXED IDEAFOR
ALL OF US ON THIS DAY OF REMEMBRANCE, NEVER TO BE CUT LOOSE BY THE VISIT OF
DEATH, BY THE DEPTH OF OUR GRIEF AND THE AWFUL LEISURE OF OUR LOSS.
AMEN