Setting a place for death

The invitation of winter solstice

Ode to Joy by Mirolslav Holub, translated by Ian Milner

You only love

when you love in vain.

Try another radio probe

when ten have failed,

take two hundred rabbits

when a hundred have died:

only this is science.

You ask a secret.

It has just one name:

again.

In the end

a dog carries in his jaws

his image in the water,

people rivet the new moon,

I love you.

Like caryatids

our lifted arms

hold up time’s granite load

and defeated

we shall always win.

Everything we will ever love on this earth and everything that has ever loved us will die. Friend, there ain’t no escaping this. For some it’s a weight just too bleak and crushing to accept. I get that. I’ve run scared from death, not necessarily my own, although at times I have definitely done that, but the more the death of those I love; people and dogs, music and places (Joe Ely died just two days ago and El Farol shut its doors just weeks prior).

I’ve been reading Christian Wiman’s Zero at the Bone this Advent, where I found the above poem. He writes “Sometimes the best gift can be the starkest depiction of an intractable reality, that head-clearing unsquinting astringent allover intake of truth.” That’s what spurred the above comment.

Y’all, we need to set a place for our grief and fear because there’s no escaping it. We can, and will, and maybe even must, for a time at least, pretend its yet far away. But eventually and more and more as we get older, or brokener, or beatener, or soberer we must make a place of welcome for it, give it the same warm and generous welcome we would want someone to give to us. Then listen to what it has to teach us, to invite it to the very same table with our hopes and joys and questions and lean into the conversation they have with each other.

December 21th this year marks the Winter Solstice in the Northern hemisphere. Our little church marks it with a Blue Christmas observation. It’s also the feast day of St. Thomas which I wrote about here. Maybe this is the quiet after party of All Saints or Dia de la Muerte, a time when all the noise has quieted down, most of the party has moved on and we can sit by the fire in the calm and calamity and remember together, the warm hand holding the cold one without recoiling, sitting with the piercing heartache of loving people and dogs and music and places that are gone and yet still with, us until we too go with them.

Christmas and Easter will come, but not just yet.

Grace and peace y’all,

John