Why Liberal Religious Arguments Fail | Politics | Religion Dispatches
Good article, and well worth the read...
The Blog of First Congregational UCC of Coloma, Michigan - www.colomaucc.org
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
For Sunday's Sermon: June 12. 2011
I'll be using an portion of this text for my sermon this Sunday, but I thought would give you the larger reading, if you wish to look over it.
“A Theologian’s God” by Sarah Sentille--excerpt from her new book
“Whatever concerns you ultimately becomes god for you,” Paul Tillich writes. Everything is open to consecration.
There are several misconceptions about faith. The most ordinary is to think of faith as knowledge with little evidence, but this is “belief,” not “faith.” Another is to think of faith as believing something that someone with authority tells you. This, too, is a mistake. Faith isn’t about taking someone else’s word for something. Faith is about participating in the subject of your ultimate concern with your whole being.
Having faith in your ultimate concern is the greatest risk you can take. If it proves to be a failure, if you discover you have surrendered yourself to something that was not worth it, then the meaning of your life breaks down. You will find you have given away your center without a chance to regain it.
While I understood “God” to be the most powerful word in the English language—so powerful that using it felt like picking up a weapon, unwieldy, dangerous—people at church used the word casually, seemingly without careful attention, or else they didn’t use it at all. Each week we followed the liturgy set out in the Book of Common Prayer. We preached on the lectionary texts. We chose hymns out of the hymnal. We recited creeds and formulaic prayers. And that was that.
In our weekly staff meetings we barely talked about God. Theology, it seemed, was not the point of running a church. Being an institution was the point. Raising money, obeying the hierarchy, following rules, being right, counting the number of people in the pews, deciding whether or not to expand the building or get a new roof, caring for the community—that was church work. And I’m not sure many people in the congregation came to church to talk about God, either. They came to church because they wanted to be in a community with one another. They came to figure out how to live a life with meaning, how to do good work in the world, how to give back, how to be better people. They came to church to be fed, with bread and wine during Communion. They craved connection, and church seemed like a place where this might happen. God was almost incidental to the whole enterprise—background noise.
Although I focused a lot of energy on those who complained about my sermons, most people liked my sermons and the rest simply ignored them. If you had asked people in the congregation what they believed, I doubt their beliefs would have mapped onto the Nicene Creed any more closely than mine would have. And like me, they probably didn’t completely believe in the version of God described each week in the liturgy or in the prayers. They were very faithful people, but their faith had little to do with theology and much more to do with the other people sitting next to them in the pews and kneeling next to them at the Communion rail week after week. They came to church to be with each other, and they happened to come to that particular church because they’d been raised Episcopalian or their spouse had been raised Episcopalian or they had friends who also attended that church or the church was close to where they lived. I suspect most were willing to overlook sexist language or dangerous theology because they hadn’t expected to hear anything different.
But I couldn’t overlook it.
I was deeply disappointed. The distance between the theology I studied in school and the theology being practiced in the pews and preached from the pulpit by the priests on staff was enormous. Everything I took for granted—the difference between “God” and God, the wide range of theological possibilities, the need to think critically about the effects God-talk can have on the world, the existence of other holy texts besides those collected in the Bible, historical criticism—was absent, even heretical. I felt like I was going crazy. The God I had come to believe in was nowhere to be found—and in that God’s place was a different version of God I struggled to recognize. I felt as if there had been an invasion of the body snatchers, or as if I had traveled backward in time, before feminist or liberation or queer or black theology. The vision of God being worshipped in that place was so narrow. What is going on? I wanted to shout.
I sometimes wonder how doctors, having seen inside the human body, having dissected it, go about their daily lives interacting with the rest of us. When they look at people, do they see what is happening on the inside? The map of veins and arteries? The liver, the spleen, the stomach? Do they think of the skeleton? The skull? Do they think of the limbs they’ve cut off or the cancer they’ve cut out?
Divinity school had been like an autopsy of my faith. I had peeled back the layers of skin, of fat and muscle. I had looked inside to see how it worked, held its heart in my hand, touched its bones, its lungs. And it didn’t look the same anymore. Nothing looked the same.
I heard a story on the radio about a woman who came home from work and sat next to a man who was waiting for her on her front porch. He was wearing her husband’s clothes. “Who are you?” the woman asked.
“Who are you?” he said, laughing. “Come over here and give me a kiss.”
She gave him a kiss, but it felt wrong. His essence, his soul, isn’t in there, she thought. He’s an impostor.
Capgras syndrome—the feeling that the person you love has been replaced by an impostor.
Some scientists explain Capgras syndrome as a kind of denial—there are parts of the person you love that you don’t like, and when you see those negative parts you say, “He must be a different person.” People can show you fingerprints. They can show you photographs. They can map his genetic code. They can give you all kinds of proof, but you will not believe them. The only way to cope with the recognition that the person you love is not the person you thought he was, is to say, “This is not the person I know. This is an impostor.” The only thing to do is make a break.
Other scientists explain Capgras syndrome by looking at the brain: When you see the person you love, the visual parts of the brain recognize that person and send the message, “That is my husband” to the amygdala, the part of the brain that stores our emotional memories. Your husband is both a face you recognize and a set of feelings that goes with his face. But if you have a head injury, if there is something wrong with your brain, if the wire connecting the visual part of the brain to the emotional part of the brain has been cut, then he will look like your husband, but you won’t have the feelings you associate with your husband. No husband feelings: impostor.
Who are you? I ask God.
Who are you? God says. Come over here and give me a kiss.
“A Theologian’s God” by Sarah Sentille--excerpt from her new book
“Whatever concerns you ultimately becomes god for you,” Paul Tillich writes. Everything is open to consecration.
There are several misconceptions about faith. The most ordinary is to think of faith as knowledge with little evidence, but this is “belief,” not “faith.” Another is to think of faith as believing something that someone with authority tells you. This, too, is a mistake. Faith isn’t about taking someone else’s word for something. Faith is about participating in the subject of your ultimate concern with your whole being.
Having faith in your ultimate concern is the greatest risk you can take. If it proves to be a failure, if you discover you have surrendered yourself to something that was not worth it, then the meaning of your life breaks down. You will find you have given away your center without a chance to regain it.
While I understood “God” to be the most powerful word in the English language—so powerful that using it felt like picking up a weapon, unwieldy, dangerous—people at church used the word casually, seemingly without careful attention, or else they didn’t use it at all. Each week we followed the liturgy set out in the Book of Common Prayer. We preached on the lectionary texts. We chose hymns out of the hymnal. We recited creeds and formulaic prayers. And that was that.
In our weekly staff meetings we barely talked about God. Theology, it seemed, was not the point of running a church. Being an institution was the point. Raising money, obeying the hierarchy, following rules, being right, counting the number of people in the pews, deciding whether or not to expand the building or get a new roof, caring for the community—that was church work. And I’m not sure many people in the congregation came to church to talk about God, either. They came to church because they wanted to be in a community with one another. They came to figure out how to live a life with meaning, how to do good work in the world, how to give back, how to be better people. They came to church to be fed, with bread and wine during Communion. They craved connection, and church seemed like a place where this might happen. God was almost incidental to the whole enterprise—background noise.
Although I focused a lot of energy on those who complained about my sermons, most people liked my sermons and the rest simply ignored them. If you had asked people in the congregation what they believed, I doubt their beliefs would have mapped onto the Nicene Creed any more closely than mine would have. And like me, they probably didn’t completely believe in the version of God described each week in the liturgy or in the prayers. They were very faithful people, but their faith had little to do with theology and much more to do with the other people sitting next to them in the pews and kneeling next to them at the Communion rail week after week. They came to church to be with each other, and they happened to come to that particular church because they’d been raised Episcopalian or their spouse had been raised Episcopalian or they had friends who also attended that church or the church was close to where they lived. I suspect most were willing to overlook sexist language or dangerous theology because they hadn’t expected to hear anything different.
But I couldn’t overlook it.
I was deeply disappointed. The distance between the theology I studied in school and the theology being practiced in the pews and preached from the pulpit by the priests on staff was enormous. Everything I took for granted—the difference between “God” and God, the wide range of theological possibilities, the need to think critically about the effects God-talk can have on the world, the existence of other holy texts besides those collected in the Bible, historical criticism—was absent, even heretical. I felt like I was going crazy. The God I had come to believe in was nowhere to be found—and in that God’s place was a different version of God I struggled to recognize. I felt as if there had been an invasion of the body snatchers, or as if I had traveled backward in time, before feminist or liberation or queer or black theology. The vision of God being worshipped in that place was so narrow. What is going on? I wanted to shout.
I sometimes wonder how doctors, having seen inside the human body, having dissected it, go about their daily lives interacting with the rest of us. When they look at people, do they see what is happening on the inside? The map of veins and arteries? The liver, the spleen, the stomach? Do they think of the skeleton? The skull? Do they think of the limbs they’ve cut off or the cancer they’ve cut out?
Divinity school had been like an autopsy of my faith. I had peeled back the layers of skin, of fat and muscle. I had looked inside to see how it worked, held its heart in my hand, touched its bones, its lungs. And it didn’t look the same anymore. Nothing looked the same.
I heard a story on the radio about a woman who came home from work and sat next to a man who was waiting for her on her front porch. He was wearing her husband’s clothes. “Who are you?” the woman asked.
“Who are you?” he said, laughing. “Come over here and give me a kiss.”
She gave him a kiss, but it felt wrong. His essence, his soul, isn’t in there, she thought. He’s an impostor.
Capgras syndrome—the feeling that the person you love has been replaced by an impostor.
Some scientists explain Capgras syndrome as a kind of denial—there are parts of the person you love that you don’t like, and when you see those negative parts you say, “He must be a different person.” People can show you fingerprints. They can show you photographs. They can map his genetic code. They can give you all kinds of proof, but you will not believe them. The only way to cope with the recognition that the person you love is not the person you thought he was, is to say, “This is not the person I know. This is an impostor.” The only thing to do is make a break.
Other scientists explain Capgras syndrome by looking at the brain: When you see the person you love, the visual parts of the brain recognize that person and send the message, “That is my husband” to the amygdala, the part of the brain that stores our emotional memories. Your husband is both a face you recognize and a set of feelings that goes with his face. But if you have a head injury, if there is something wrong with your brain, if the wire connecting the visual part of the brain to the emotional part of the brain has been cut, then he will look like your husband, but you won’t have the feelings you associate with your husband. No husband feelings: impostor.
Who are you? I ask God.
Who are you? God says. Come over here and give me a kiss.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
A Posting For The Tuesday Circle
Per our conversation about living for today, in the here and now, of God's good world.
This is from the musical Rent, near the end of movie, as they remember those of who died....
This is from the musical Rent, near the end of movie, as they remember those of who died....
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
A Great Article on Forgiveness During Lent
from my friend and mentor, The Rev. Ed Middleton, the pastor of First Community UCC of Dallas, and the preacher at my installation at this church.
The days of Lent are passing quickly. Many flowers have bloomed, trees leafed, and the pollen…well, let’s just leave any further discussion of that alone. There are things I still haven’t done during Lent; things I had intended to do, promised myself that I would do, on Ash Wednesday. As the week of passion gets closer and closer, I now have begun to resign myself that I need to shorten the list and prioritize the work.
At the top of my short list will be a simple word, often shunned by the pundits and seldom practiced by the masses—forgiveness. To be able to forgive someone whom you perceive has done you wrong is a difficult thing. It can take decades for some folk and minutes for others. I’ve never quite figured out how that works for me; that is, why some wrongs are so easily forgiven and others require much time and great work. I get that it is about my vulnerabilities and brokenness more than the offender’s intent. Still, I scratch my head at how easily I forgive some big offenses and how reticent I am to forgive minor ones.
We can ponder such questions, discuss them with each other, delay the inevitable charge before us, but sooner or later, as people of faith, we must get to the heart of question. We must be willing to forgive the other for her or his sin against us. This is grace and not a theological option up for discussion. For what it’s worth, this means forgiveness of self, too.
I was recently reminded, while reading Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter, there are times when forgiveness is a process leading up to a revelation that the work is done. In the beginning of this wonderful book, Hannah Steadman is suffering the loss of her mother to the flu. She, her grandmother, and father continued trying to make a life on an old Kentucky farm. A year later he married Ivy Crutchlow, a widow with two sons. Hannah would describe her in the following way: “She was not a good wife to my father, and she lived up to the bad reputation of stepmothers.” Upon graduation from school, her grandmother arranged plans for Hannah to leave the farm and slowly begin to build her own life.
Years later Hannah would run into Ivy in a store. She had grown old; her joints were twisted by arthritis, and she was using two canes. Ivy spoke and raised the question as to whether or not Hannah knew her. It occurred to Hannah that Ivy “had perfectly forgot, or had never known, how much and how justly I had resented her.” Then came some startling revelations to Hannah:
But I knew at the same instant that my resentment was gone, just gone. And the fear of her that was once so big in me, where was it? And who was this poor sufferer who stood there with me? ‘Yes, Ivy, I know you,’ I said, and I sounded kind.
I didn’t understand exactly what had happened until the thought of her woke me up in the middle of the night, and I was saying to myself, ‘You have forgiven her.’ I had. My old hatred and contempt and fear, that I had kept so carefully so long, were gone, and I was free.
There it is, isn’t it? The power of forgiveness is not that the past injustice is made just, the wrong transformed into right, nor those memories of a sin erased. Rather, it is that by forgiving someone else we can be free. Forgiveness is a different kind of liberation theology.
Soon we will hear those words that sound so incongruous to us during the week of passion. Jesus will still be on the cross. The crowds will still be mocking. The Romans will still be doing the control-of-empire thing. Then the words will tumble from Jesus’ mouth, “Forgive them, they don’t know…”
So I’ve got work to do, and soon. I’m not talking about Easter egg hunts, choir rehearsals, or sermons to prepare. I’m talking about doing the work of forgiveness. Those whom I remember as the sinners may not even know how they hurt me or those whom I loved. They may not even care. No matter, it’s long since time for me to relinquish my resentments and let it go. Maybe then I can honestly pray, “And forgive me my sins, as I have forgiven those who have sinned against me.”
The days of Lent are passing quickly. Many flowers have bloomed, trees leafed, and the pollen…well, let’s just leave any further discussion of that alone. There are things I still haven’t done during Lent; things I had intended to do, promised myself that I would do, on Ash Wednesday. As the week of passion gets closer and closer, I now have begun to resign myself that I need to shorten the list and prioritize the work.
At the top of my short list will be a simple word, often shunned by the pundits and seldom practiced by the masses—forgiveness. To be able to forgive someone whom you perceive has done you wrong is a difficult thing. It can take decades for some folk and minutes for others. I’ve never quite figured out how that works for me; that is, why some wrongs are so easily forgiven and others require much time and great work. I get that it is about my vulnerabilities and brokenness more than the offender’s intent. Still, I scratch my head at how easily I forgive some big offenses and how reticent I am to forgive minor ones.
We can ponder such questions, discuss them with each other, delay the inevitable charge before us, but sooner or later, as people of faith, we must get to the heart of question. We must be willing to forgive the other for her or his sin against us. This is grace and not a theological option up for discussion. For what it’s worth, this means forgiveness of self, too.
I was recently reminded, while reading Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter, there are times when forgiveness is a process leading up to a revelation that the work is done. In the beginning of this wonderful book, Hannah Steadman is suffering the loss of her mother to the flu. She, her grandmother, and father continued trying to make a life on an old Kentucky farm. A year later he married Ivy Crutchlow, a widow with two sons. Hannah would describe her in the following way: “She was not a good wife to my father, and she lived up to the bad reputation of stepmothers.” Upon graduation from school, her grandmother arranged plans for Hannah to leave the farm and slowly begin to build her own life.
Years later Hannah would run into Ivy in a store. She had grown old; her joints were twisted by arthritis, and she was using two canes. Ivy spoke and raised the question as to whether or not Hannah knew her. It occurred to Hannah that Ivy “had perfectly forgot, or had never known, how much and how justly I had resented her.” Then came some startling revelations to Hannah:
But I knew at the same instant that my resentment was gone, just gone. And the fear of her that was once so big in me, where was it? And who was this poor sufferer who stood there with me? ‘Yes, Ivy, I know you,’ I said, and I sounded kind.
I didn’t understand exactly what had happened until the thought of her woke me up in the middle of the night, and I was saying to myself, ‘You have forgiven her.’ I had. My old hatred and contempt and fear, that I had kept so carefully so long, were gone, and I was free.
There it is, isn’t it? The power of forgiveness is not that the past injustice is made just, the wrong transformed into right, nor those memories of a sin erased. Rather, it is that by forgiving someone else we can be free. Forgiveness is a different kind of liberation theology.
Soon we will hear those words that sound so incongruous to us during the week of passion. Jesus will still be on the cross. The crowds will still be mocking. The Romans will still be doing the control-of-empire thing. Then the words will tumble from Jesus’ mouth, “Forgive them, they don’t know…”
So I’ve got work to do, and soon. I’m not talking about Easter egg hunts, choir rehearsals, or sermons to prepare. I’m talking about doing the work of forgiveness. Those whom I remember as the sinners may not even know how they hurt me or those whom I loved. They may not even care. No matter, it’s long since time for me to relinquish my resentments and let it go. Maybe then I can honestly pray, “And forgive me my sins, as I have forgiven those who have sinned against me.”
Monday, January 24, 2011
A Lesson In Grace
From the New York Times: January 24, 2011
Against All Odds, a Beautiful Life By PETER APPLEBOME
MONTCLAIR, N.J.
Some things we know for sure — a little boy dealt a seemingly impossible hand, the two gay men who decided to give him a home and a life, the unlikely spell cast by the only horse in Montclair.
Beyond that, well, it was what you could never quite know as much as what you could that drew 500 people, friends and strangers, to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Saturday to ponder the lesson in grace and resilience, the parable of good lives and deeds outside the prescribed lines, in the remarkably long and way-too-short life of Maurice Mannion-Vanover, dead at the age of 20 on Jan. 14.
Few people begin life with so many strikes against them as Maurice had when he was born with AIDS on Sept. 11, 1990, to a crack-addicted mother in a hospital in Washington. There were physical and developmental issues severe enough that his twin sister, Michelle Reed, lived only 20 months. Deserted by his parents, he got his first break in 1993 when two men, intent on caring for a baby with serious physical needs, agreed to take him in.
The two, who came to be known as the Tims, Tim Mannion and Tim Vanover, were told he would probably live six months. But, to everyone’s amazement, he began to thrive. He gained weight. His T-cell count steadily increased. In 1996, they adopted him, becoming the first gay couple in Washington to adopt a child. A year later, they adopted a second son, Kindoo, eight years older. When Tim Vanover got a new job in New York, they moved to Montclair in 1998.
Eventually, the family of two white gay men and two black children became two men, two children and one horse, Rocky, short for Rockefeller. The Tims bought Rocky, a 4-year-old cross between a Morgan and a quarter horse, for $3,500 in 2002 and gave him to Maurice on Christmas Eve.
Montclair, a densely populated suburb, isn’t exactly horse country, but they had a double lot with an old carriage house near downtown. And Maurice had fallen in love with horses, almost transformed by their presence. Atop a horse, seemingly glued to the saddle, the slender child seemed to blossom, his back straighter, his eyes brighter, as if on top not of a horse, but of the world.
To say this was a blessing for Maurice is an understatement. But it wasn’t just for Maurice. Before long, everyone in Montclair, certainly every kid, knew about the house with the horse and the incredibly lucky kid who owned him. And before long, the intersection of Union and Harrison was a mecca for children and a magnet for passers-by, invariably greeted with a wave from Maurice and often a greeting from Rocky, who trotted up to view neighbors each day on their way to work.
It’s not as if everything went smoothly. Far from it. Maurice’s health could be precarious, like the heart condition that almost killed him in 1998.
Rocky sometimes got free, galloping down busy Harrison Avenue, where the New Jersey Transit buses go, then eating some of the neighbors’ flowers. And the Tims — stout, outgoing Tim Vanover and thin, more reserved Tim Mannion — broke up, but only as a couple, not as Maurice’s fathers, choosing to live together and continue to raise him.
None of that affected Maurice, who became a fixture in his neighborhood and church, a Buddha smile always on his face, the iPod — full of Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf, “The Lion King” — seemingly permanently attached. He graduated from a special-education high school, traveled to Central America, Europe and Africa with his fathers, volunteered at the church food ministry. On Dec. 12, he became a black belt in tae kwon do. He wanted to live on his own and become an elementary school teacher’s aide.
And then on a trip to Toronto in January with Mr. Vanover, he got sick. Then he got sicker. There was pneumonia, sepsis, acute renal failure. “It’s time,” he said several times, seemingly in his normal, slightly Delphic voice. No one knew quite what he meant, but it didn’t occur to anyone it meant that this was all the time he had. But it was.
Making sense of it all goes far beyond the known facts of Maurice, the Tims and Rocky the Horse: the way his beloved dog, Hunter, keeled over and died a few hours after Maurice passed on; the way Rocky took Mr. Vanover’s head with his own and drew it close to him, as if sharing grief in a hug. Before the funeral service, Rocky, the Tims and Kindoo walked to the church in front of the hearse. Maurice’s priest and friend, the Rev. John A. Mennell, recalled his incandescent smile, his cut-to-the-chase greetings, his unerring instinct for doing the right thing, if not always the proper one.
He recalled the day Maurice was helping with the collection plate.
“You can do better,” Maurice said amiably to one congregant. It was the story of his life. You can do better, he said, and without quite knowing it, everyone did.
Against All Odds, a Beautiful Life By PETER APPLEBOME
MONTCLAIR, N.J.
Some things we know for sure — a little boy dealt a seemingly impossible hand, the two gay men who decided to give him a home and a life, the unlikely spell cast by the only horse in Montclair.
Beyond that, well, it was what you could never quite know as much as what you could that drew 500 people, friends and strangers, to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church on Saturday to ponder the lesson in grace and resilience, the parable of good lives and deeds outside the prescribed lines, in the remarkably long and way-too-short life of Maurice Mannion-Vanover, dead at the age of 20 on Jan. 14.
Few people begin life with so many strikes against them as Maurice had when he was born with AIDS on Sept. 11, 1990, to a crack-addicted mother in a hospital in Washington. There were physical and developmental issues severe enough that his twin sister, Michelle Reed, lived only 20 months. Deserted by his parents, he got his first break in 1993 when two men, intent on caring for a baby with serious physical needs, agreed to take him in.
The two, who came to be known as the Tims, Tim Mannion and Tim Vanover, were told he would probably live six months. But, to everyone’s amazement, he began to thrive. He gained weight. His T-cell count steadily increased. In 1996, they adopted him, becoming the first gay couple in Washington to adopt a child. A year later, they adopted a second son, Kindoo, eight years older. When Tim Vanover got a new job in New York, they moved to Montclair in 1998.
Eventually, the family of two white gay men and two black children became two men, two children and one horse, Rocky, short for Rockefeller. The Tims bought Rocky, a 4-year-old cross between a Morgan and a quarter horse, for $3,500 in 2002 and gave him to Maurice on Christmas Eve.
Montclair, a densely populated suburb, isn’t exactly horse country, but they had a double lot with an old carriage house near downtown. And Maurice had fallen in love with horses, almost transformed by their presence. Atop a horse, seemingly glued to the saddle, the slender child seemed to blossom, his back straighter, his eyes brighter, as if on top not of a horse, but of the world.
To say this was a blessing for Maurice is an understatement. But it wasn’t just for Maurice. Before long, everyone in Montclair, certainly every kid, knew about the house with the horse and the incredibly lucky kid who owned him. And before long, the intersection of Union and Harrison was a mecca for children and a magnet for passers-by, invariably greeted with a wave from Maurice and often a greeting from Rocky, who trotted up to view neighbors each day on their way to work.
It’s not as if everything went smoothly. Far from it. Maurice’s health could be precarious, like the heart condition that almost killed him in 1998.
Rocky sometimes got free, galloping down busy Harrison Avenue, where the New Jersey Transit buses go, then eating some of the neighbors’ flowers. And the Tims — stout, outgoing Tim Vanover and thin, more reserved Tim Mannion — broke up, but only as a couple, not as Maurice’s fathers, choosing to live together and continue to raise him.
None of that affected Maurice, who became a fixture in his neighborhood and church, a Buddha smile always on his face, the iPod — full of Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf, “The Lion King” — seemingly permanently attached. He graduated from a special-education high school, traveled to Central America, Europe and Africa with his fathers, volunteered at the church food ministry. On Dec. 12, he became a black belt in tae kwon do. He wanted to live on his own and become an elementary school teacher’s aide.
And then on a trip to Toronto in January with Mr. Vanover, he got sick. Then he got sicker. There was pneumonia, sepsis, acute renal failure. “It’s time,” he said several times, seemingly in his normal, slightly Delphic voice. No one knew quite what he meant, but it didn’t occur to anyone it meant that this was all the time he had. But it was.
Making sense of it all goes far beyond the known facts of Maurice, the Tims and Rocky the Horse: the way his beloved dog, Hunter, keeled over and died a few hours after Maurice passed on; the way Rocky took Mr. Vanover’s head with his own and drew it close to him, as if sharing grief in a hug. Before the funeral service, Rocky, the Tims and Kindoo walked to the church in front of the hearse. Maurice’s priest and friend, the Rev. John A. Mennell, recalled his incandescent smile, his cut-to-the-chase greetings, his unerring instinct for doing the right thing, if not always the proper one.
He recalled the day Maurice was helping with the collection plate.
“You can do better,” Maurice said amiably to one congregant. It was the story of his life. You can do better, he said, and without quite knowing it, everyone did.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
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