The Consolations of Sorrow
Reflections on the closing of a congregation
The congregation I served as pastor for 14 years is closing. It is closing to merge with another. Some members will join a nearby congregation. For now, the members are saying goodbye to their pastor, their building, their pews, the beautiful blue abstract stained glass windows that represent the artist’s vision of the resurrection.
On this week before the last service, there is chatter about the time capsule that will be opened after worship, during coffee hour. These friends are experiencing grief in unison with the wonder of what physical items will be recovered from the time capsule. What part of the past is still with us? Will there be a roster of members from 1965? Or, a worship bulletin from the 1950s? Maybe Geneva’s red hat will be there (a beloved long-time member who despite an impoverished income always wore splendid outfits with bright hats to church as if she was attending the Kentucky Derby).
This Sunday before the last service, the congregation’s creative, caring and wise pastor reads the story of grey-haired Simeon meeting infant Jesus in the Temple. The Gospel writer observes that Simeon had spent his life looking forward to the consolation of God’s people.
That word, consolation (the preacher gracefully lingers with the word for a while), represents one option we have when experiencing loss. Consolation is comfort received in the midst of desolation. Yet, to receive consolation one has to first feel sad about something. Consolation requires sorrow or grief; a defeat that is real and hurts. It does not rise from happiness.
I’m placing sadness in the time capsule of my experience. The place I gave 14 years of my life is coming to an end.
Brain scientists assert that sorrow is linked with increased activity in many parts of the brain including the right occipital lobe, the left insula, the left thalamus, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. These locations sound like places named by obscure explorers, geography for what a psychologist might diagnosis as complicated grief.
Many neurologists suggest that memory, as well as the emotional landscape of sorrow, is located in the hippocampus; and there memory meets sadness because, for many of us, our strongest memories are linked to loss.
I’m not sure if it is sadness or consolation at work inside me as neurons light up in the landscape of the hippocampus and I remember. Am I needing to feel the loss or am I ready for consolation?
Regardless of which it is, it is consoling to remember experiences with these people, this particular congregation. My brain is creating a highlight video.
In non-chronological order (does consolation bend time beyond the linear ?):
Most of the congregation was Caucasian but they had the wisdom to hire the best choir director ever, an African-American (Grammy-nominated) music professor from a nearby college. Because of his presence, and the church building’s location near a historic African-American town, the congregation was modestly integrated. Surely, the first to be so in town and the result was much beauty and learning.
Yes, this feels like consolation so more memories:
I was thirty-one when I preached my first sermon at this church. Someone saw me walk in the front door. The person didn’t know who I was. He asked a friend, “Who is that?” The answer, “Our new preacher.”
The response, “Why he’s a kid.”
So, for some people, for some time, I was known, not as the pastor, or as the reverend, but as “the kid.”
At an early board meeting, I was challenged on something non-essential. For some reason, I started crying (he really is a kid!). One of the elders from the African-American town took my hand and said, “I’m sure there are many memories tied to the tears you are crying right now.” What a brave and beautiful soul, this woman.
For many years, the Sunday School teachers wrote their own curriculum. The whole Sunday School experience for children was creative, crazy fun, quirky, sometimes extravagant. No child was left behind. The children carried around small homemade Arks of the Covenant like they were stuffed animals and they played ten commandment hopscotch in the hallway.
Every Christmas Eve our talented, graceful organist played a prelude to the old French Carol, Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella. Light, lilting, quiet (don’t wake the baby).
When the congregation built a new building years ago (was it 1965?) the leaders arranged for the settlement of the steeple on the roof to be a media event. The crowd gathered. They looked up to the sky. If you had been there (and if you lived in this town you would have been there), you could see against the blue sky a helicopter approaching. The steeple was suspended in the air by cables beneath the helicopter.
This is a delicate procedure you are observing. You hear the helicopter. You are rubbing shoulders with the person next to you. You turn to your left and you see the photographer from the newspaper. You look back to the helicopter. It is near the roof. The steeple is almost ready to be placed on its new home.
Then the wind blows. No, you feel the wind not just blow, it howls. The steeple sways. The helicopter tips to one side.
You begin to quietly laugh until you notice, with a shiver, that people are in danger.
You watch as the helicopter reverses course and subsequently the steeple swings like a thin tree in a hurricane, and then falls to the ground. You see the steeple in pieces. It is the broken heart of the congregation.
Yet, something about this event humbled these parishioners. No longer was it important to be on the front page of the newspaper.
Instead, they fell in love all over again with the Gospel story, with the lovable eccentricity of people, and the deep meaning of belonging to a community.
The church without a steeple opened its door to a Headstart preschool, to the Boy Scouts, to the Grandmother’s Club. The church opened its door three (or was it four?) times a week to Alcoholic Anonymous back in the day when doing so meant that long after the people left for an evening there lingered a smokey haze in the fellowship hall (in contrast to the church a half-mile away that had signs at every entrance that stated “This is God’s House. There will be no smoking.”
When our middle son was hospitalized at birth, the congregation greeted us the next Sunday with a dollar tree. There was an abundance of funds to support all the medical costs just as there was an annual Christmas gift to my family that was extravagant like the prodigal’s father was extravagant.
No other congregation loved its pastor like this congregation did (right now, yes this moment as I type, the wise elder would remind me that there are many memories behind these tears).
We once had an area-wide youth gathering in the back lot, some 60 teenagers attended. The gathering was stopped early by the Sheriff who said he received a complaint that we were too loud. A few days later a church member who worked for the city brought me a tape recording of the phoned-in complaint. On the tape, I heard our next-door neighbor, wondering what all that damn ruckus was at the Presbyterian Church and could the authorities do something to stop it.
When Geneva died, the Geneva who always sat near the front of the church with various (from week to week) beautiful, unconventional hats; twelve people spoke at her funeral testifying to her belief, her hospitality, her endearing, idiosyncratic deeds. On the communion table rested her favorite red hat.
The church was a polling place. It was impossible to set the tables to the satisfaction of the election workers. One November I was tired and my back was hurting as I moved the tables just how they wanted them. Purposely, I moved the tables as noisily as I could; smash, bam, boom. From downstairs it must have sounded like an earthquake. That’s why or when Dale (the man who served admirably during the Korean War and tragically lost his son who was about my age; this man who had called me “the kid), came upstairs. He leaned down next to me, and whispered, “It’s okay Tim, let me help.”
One day I came home for supper and Gretchen (my spouse)said that Nelson had called and he wanted me to visit tonight. Nelson was a farmer losing his battle with cancer. I wondered to myself, do people must still make deathbed confessions (or affirmations)?
I drove to the nursing home. I walked in. I went down the hallway to Nelson’s room.
“Stop,” said the lady with the mop bucket.
“You can’t go any further, we are mopping the floor.”
I went no further. Why I didn’t resist I have no idea.
I said, “Okay,” and turned around and left.
When I returned early the next morning the floor was dry and Nelson had died.
Where is the consolation in that?
Some years later I received a phone call from Eugene. Eugene was also losing his battle with cancer. He was in the hospital. Could I visit?
I made it to Eugene’s bedside in minutes. He talked. I listened (I thought I was blessing him but he was blessing me). We prayed.
Ten minutes after I left, Eugene died.
Being a pastor is such a rare vocation. As a pastor, you are privileged to experience the deepest part of a person’s life. There are so many tender stories to hold. There are so many people’s testimonies to carry. You are asked to release God from God’s mystery and absence into a world of the unadorned.
On Ash Wednesday I place ashes on these people’s forehead in the shape of a cross and I say to each and every one of them, From dust you came to dust you will return.
This refrain goes to everyone. The schoolteacher who just told me she loves her students so much she can’t sleep some nights. The ashes go on a baby’s forehead as she sleeps in her mother’s arm, this mother who holds this life after four miscarriages, the chemist who in a year will be dead from a lung disease, the teenager who comes to worship because he is in love with his friend who also comes to worship because she is too polite to tell him she is not in love though she feels guilty that she likes the feeling of being adored (our insides are really that complicated).
The retired firefighter who tells everyone he greets, “I’m so glad you got to see me today,” bows his head and I see the tear on his cheek.
You don’t do this ash ritual for 14 years with the same people without becoming deeply in love.
During every Bible Study, they asked astute, questions wrapped in life and the brilliance of God.
Can we ever get back to Eden?
How is it possible that Ecclesiastes knows our current predicament when he lived so long ago?
What did Jesus mean when he said the poor will be with us always?
Do I have to believe in heaven to be a Christian?
Is there anyone or anything beyond redemption?
When I left the church the parishioners threw a big party. As the party came to an end, people started — spontaneously — giving me things from the church building: the “reserved pastor” parking sign, the bell in the fellowship hall, a Sunday School chair with the signatures of all the children, a piece of the sanctuary carpet, a favorite book from the church library and more; holy relics that I still have.
Jesus once passed the Temple in Jerusalem and said that if the Temple was destroyed the stones would still speak. When a congregation experiences this kind of transition the soul of its past still exists. Yes, the cloud of witnesses are still present: Geneva, Hannah, Ev, Florence, Clyde, Clare, and so many more even if the building is no more and worship exists only in the past tense.
On this next to last Sunday, I look down at the worship bulletin. On the cover is the same drawing of the church building, sketched in blue, that has been on the front of the worship bulletin for at least 35 years. I notice, maybe for the first time, that in the drawing of the building a steeple is clearly apparent above the pitch of the roof and below the clouds. If the steeple isn’t there for real it can be imagined in a sketch; a sign of both loss and consolation.
One of the best novels about congregational life is Gail Godwin’s Father Melancholy’s Daughter. In the book, the daughter experiences the loss of both parents. The narrator, the daughter, observes that the ache of sorrow is what she treasures:
And the ache that you treasure, that unique, wrenching ache that you hoard, you go looking for it…You don’t want the ache to go away, because as it’s there, so are they. They make a place for themselves in the center of the ache and you go on living together that way for quite a while. They can go on living physically in you, as long as the ache is physically present.
Time bends back to the present. It is now the next to last Sunday. This remnant of the church, these people, are standing in the Fellowship Hall, seeking a good look as the pastor opens the time capsule.
A copy of the local newspaper
A document on the meaning of being a Presbyterian
A worship bulletin for the dedication of what was then a new building (without the absent steeple mentioned).
A roster of church members
“Hmm,” someone said, “I wonder where Geneva’s red hat is.”
Hmm, indeed. I don’t have it in me to tell them. I can’t do it. I can’t remind them that on my last Sunday as their pastor some 17 years ago, they not only gave me a bell, a sign, a favorite book, a piece of carpet but something else, too. They surrounded me, adults and children, and handed me Geneva’s red hat.
I know there are people of faith that believe all the truth that is needed is found in the special revelation of the Bible. And oh are their wild and wooly and grace-filled stories therein. Without this special revelation, God is above and beyond, absent — not even an ache physically present.
But let me tell you that the consolation of sorrow is found among people that experience the presence of God in the space between one another. Yes God is there saying hello in a phone call that beckons, please come to visit; in extravagant gifts, in the failed glory of a broken steeple, in children playing hopscotch, in the conversation taking place in the smokey haze of a twelve-step meeting, and in the consolation signified by a single, ordinary, physically present red hat.
