Being There

I have no idea how many times in the course of my life I have witnessed someone come into the presence of a newborn child. But I can say this with confidence: on every such occasion, the adult has said something to the infant.

It was beside the point that the child had no capacity to understand what was being said. It was beside the point that the encounter did not offer much occasion to say anything at all. It was even beside the point that the child may have been sound asleep--this simply prompted a quieter greeting. It borders on a universal and invariable truth: when we meet infants, we talk to them. Go figure.    

The second chapter of Matthew tells the familiar story of the visit of the wise men to the newborn Jesus. We are told about their travels, their encounter with Herod along the way, and their gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But we are not told whether they said anything to the infant Jesus when they met him. The gospel says that they paid him "homage," but it's not clear whether they did this through words. Maybe the homage-making consisted of a bow or the presentation of the gifts--just as the old creche scenes depict it. Or maybe the Magi did what we all do when we meet infants: say hello; exclaim over the child's specialness; show off the gifts that were hauled along.

In the last few months, we have suffered a number of losses. A dear neighbor and friend who was unexpectedly overtaken by cancer. Two beloved, old dogs. A 100-year-old matriarch whose kitchen was the center of our family's universe. A young man who succumbed to a horrible addiction. A treasured father, finally overcome by long-term illness. Over and over again, we have found ourselves in the presence of someone who was moving from this life to the next, or who was grieving the absence of someone who had done so. And over and over again we have been reminded of another universal and invariable truth: in these circumstances, we do not know what to say.

Then, just two days ago, we sat in horror as we learned about the terrorist attacks in Paris. Over a hundred dead. Hundreds wounded, many critically. A senseless and obscene act of violence. And again: we do not know what to say.

This will no doubt seem curious, given that the story about the visit of the Magi is a narrative of awe and joy, but it occurs to me that there may be embedded in this tale a lesson that we can apply during these trying times. The lesson, of course, does not lie in what the Magi said. Indeed, the scripture does not even bother to report their words, if they said any. The significance clearly lies somewhere else.

Perhaps the significance of the visit of the Magi rests in the simple fact that they paid attention. While everyone else was going about their business, they stopped theirs and tried to figure out what was happening and why it was important. Did they fully understand? We don't know--the gospel doesn't tell us. The gospel doesn't give us a set of verses in which the three wise men debrief on their long trip and what they learned, memorandum of expenses to follow. And what a relief that we don't get such a thing, because it seems to me that it would wholly and conspicuously miss the point.

In the most challenging circumstances of our lives, it is often the case that the best we can do is to pay attention. It is good to be physically present when we can, but that is not always possible. We can, however, always be spiritually and mindfully there with those who need us. And we can send messages to let people know that we are paying attention and that we stand with them--even if the best words, if there are any, do not come to us.
 
I suspect that the fact that we're paying attention is actually what matters most to those for whom we are concerned. In my experience, a bereaved friend almost always remembers that I attended a funeral of their loved one but almost never remembers anything I said. I like to think that they remember a bit more if I'm the eulogist, but that may be self-flattery.

And paying attention may also be what matters most to us. Words aside, the simple act of paying attention takes us out of ourselves, forces us into empathic and sympathetic interactions, broadens our vision, reorients our priorities, deepens our soul. When we pay attention, we change that which we observe and with which we engage. And we ourselves are changed in the process.
 
We do not know much about the wise men. We do not know a word they said in the presence of Jesus. For that matter, we do not know, for certain, that they uttered a single sentence.

But we know they were there. We know they paid attention.

And we know that they went home by another, a different, way.

As do we all, after we show up and pay attention.

As do we all.

Amen.
 

Terrible Freedom

The first seventeen verses of the opening chapter of the Gospel of Matthew seem like a bad way to start a good story. There, Matthew gives us a genealogy of Jesus--dozens of names recited without color or commentary. I have often wondered how many new readers of the gospels we lose before the end of this first chapter.

A little background helps with the tedium. Students of the Hebrew Bible will recognize that the list includes kings and commoners, men and women, heroes and minor villains, the famous and the obscure. But, even if you know the players, it does not make for exciting reading for most of us.

And yet something important must be going on here. So commentators have identified a variety of compelling reasons Matthew may have begun his narrative this way.

They point out that through this genealogy Matthew, the most Jewish of the gospel writers, links Jesus to numerous titans of the faith, such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ruth, Solomon, and, of course, David.

They note that the line of descent underscores a mathematical continuity within God's plan: fourteen generations from Abraham to David, and from David to the deportation to Babylon, and from the deportation to the birth of Jesus. Fourteen holds a special meaning because it is the numerical value of David's name in Hebrew and because the number seven is charged with symbolic significance. Still, this continuity is not without its problems since Matthew has to leave a few ancestors out in order to get the math to work.

Commentators also observe that Matthew uses this genealogy to set the stage, to give us a sense of historical momentum, to signal the working out of a grand, unfolding plan--the grandest of all plans throughout all of time.

This is a familiar literary device--beginning a story by using the past to tell us something about where the narrative starts and where it will go.

The great author Gabriel Garcia Marquez commences his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude this way, with one of the most famous sentences in all of literature: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

The device taps into a truth we all know and experience: where we come from matters. It matters to the now. It matters to the next.

We find this truth in William Faulkner's wry statement that "The past is never dead. It's not even past" and in Fitzgerald's closing remark that we are like boats against a current, borne "ceaselessly back into our past." And endless everyday canards and banalities remind us of it. As we all know, objects in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear.

But, in the gospel that follows this introduction, Jesus's lineage ends up playing a puzzling and not always consistent role.

Of course, the narrator continues to allude to Jesus's connection with David. But almost all of the other names fall away. And members of Jesus's community seem to have little interest in any part of his past, except to the extent that they question how the son of a local carpenter could make any credible claim to messianic status. As saviors of humankind go, they muse, it does not seem like much of a resume.

And the words and actions of Jesus himself seem stunningly dismissive of his immediate and distant family connections. When he is told that his mother and brothers are waiting outside to talk to him he asks "Who is my mother and who are my brothers?" He then points to his disciples and declares that his family consists of those who do God's will. And when the Pharisees and Sadducees invoke Abraham as a source of their authority Jesus replies: "Do not presume to say to yourselves 'We have Abraham as our ancestor.' (Something Matthew has told us Jesus could himself say in the most literal sense.) I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham."

Reasonable people can differ about how we should interpret this tension within the text--on one hand, pulling us toward the past and signaling the importance of lineage, on the other hand, severing the connection to the past and stressing the importance of the individual and how he or she lives here, now, at this very moment. We can fairly conclude that the text leaves us room to find truth in both of these messages--as I think it does and as I think we do. But it is the latter message that probably keeps us up at night.

After all, a message that frees us from our past also pulls us in conflicting directions. The message liberates us, allowing us to cast off burdens and baggage that could slow us down or crush us as we journey through the complexities of life. But the message also challenges us, making clear our dreadfully personal responsibility for our own decisions and our own behaviors and our own willingness--or unwillingness--to be a present and palpable manifestation of God's heart and hands. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre did not believe in God, and yet there is an unsettling resonance between what Jesus tells us here and what Sartre meant when he declared that we are "condemned to be free." It is a glorious freedom we have; and it is a terrible freedom as well.

The question of how we use and manage that terrible freedom is among the central questions of our existence. We have to decide what we will allow to limit that freedom. We have to decide whether to view those claims on our freedom as limitations. We have to decide what parts of that freedom we will give to our neighbor. We have to decide whether, in the end, we can justify holding any part of it back. We have to decide whether service to others curtails our freedom--or is the very essence of it.

It would be pretty to say that our intuitions, our cultural norms, our moral philosophy, the advice of friends or family or mentors, or something else will provide us with clear and precise guidance about how to proceed in making those decisions. But it would not be true. Our untidy lives resist tidy directives. And, even when we have the evident good fortune to get one, we still have to decide whether to pay any attention to it. It falls to us to decide what we will believe, what we will do, what we will refuse to do. Period. Full stop.

If I have made this sound like a daunting, sometimes overwhelming, occasionally terrifying, and frequently lonely process, well, then, I guess I got it right. And getting it right matters here because when we delude ourselves about the terribleness of our freedom or the almost impossible nature of our task then we can convince ourselves that we don't need any help working through it. But if we honestly and unblinkingly stare at the momentous nature of our responsibility and our choices, then we will humbly realize that we need all the help we can get.

The good news--the news that follows in all the verses after those first seventeen--is that help is available to us. We can find it by looking backward to that very first parent, the one who made us free, the one who whispers to us and nudges us and sometimes even gives us a bit of a shove. This is no distant ancestor, looming in the past. This is the most imminent presence in our lives, watching how we spend the gift of our terrible freedom, helping us to see and revel in the joy of its sacred surrender.

Amen. And amen. 

In Memoriam Jim Miner

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September 18, 2015

Ann Arbor, Michigan

We gather today to honor and celebrate the life of Dr. Jim Miner.

And what a life it was: a life of accomplishment; a life of dedication; a life of deep intellectual curiosity; a life of commitment to his patients; a life of conversation—and the occasional poker game—with close friends; a life of completely fulfilled partnership with his wife, Deanna; a life of boundless pride in his three children: Kriste, Brett, and Scott.

Sigmund Freud, who Jim revered, said that: “love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” And in Jim Miner this prescription was fully realized.

Jim’s life was uncontestably a life of love. To say that he loved Deanna is a masterpiece of understatement. As for his children, well, he loved them almost as much as he loved bragging about them. He loved his coterie of close friends. He loved to listen—which he did with exquisite care and without judging or condemning. He loved to think. He loved his work.

Ernest Jones, one of Freud’s biographers, observed that, in Vienna, Freud’s life “consisted of little besides work” and casual observers may have had the same impression of Jim. Indeed, his passion for his work was conspicuous. That he was privileged to do so much of it at a desk right next to Deanna’s made that blessing all the greater.

His hard work led him to great heights. Born in a small town in Iowa, Jim became a distinguished psychoanalytic therapist who was widely respected within his profession. Early in his career, he served on the faculty of the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry. Jim’s tireless dedication to his work is evidenced by the fact that, at the time of his passing, he was still seeing patients.

But, like all interesting people, Jim was complicated and he was anything but one-dimensional. Indeed, when you consider the breadth and variety of Jim’s gifts and achievements it seems difficult to believe we are talking about only one man.

He was an athlete: a football player from the fourth grade through high school, where he helped his team win a state championship; then an avid runner; then a competitive tennis player. As I understand it, the only sport at which Jim did not excel was sailing catamarans, at which he was apparently somewhat dangerous.

As was characteristic of Jim, he was not just a participant in sport—he was a student of it. Over the years, he brought under his command vast stores of statistics, particularly about football. Of course, the dazzling memory that he enjoyed throughout most of his life helped him retain all of this information, but the exercise was not about accumulating data—it was about achieving a deep familiarity with and understanding of a subject. That is what Jim did, in every dimension and aspect of his life: he sought to understand.

While we are on this theme of sport, we should of course acknowledge Jim’s zeal for Michigan football. Zeal might seem like a strange word for a man who so often presented as elegant, distinguished, thoughtful, perhaps a bit reserved and removed from the crowd. But make no mistake about it: Jim was maize and blue, through and through.

Who but a died-in-the-wool Wolverine fan would move heaven and earth to buy the house that had once been owned by Fielding Yost, Michigan’s football coach in the early part of the twentieth century? If you do not understand why this meant so much to Jim then let me point out—as I think a disciple of sports statistics like Jim would want me to do—that while at Michigan Yost won six national championships and went 165-29-10 and that his famed “point-a-minute squad” outscored their opponents by 2,821 to 42. Those were the days.

But subjects other than work and sports piqued Jim’s interest as well. He was fascinated by ancient history and when he and Deanna traveled to Rome he spent hours wandering in the Forum and the ruins. When I met with Deanna to talk about our service today she brought with her Jim’s latest excursion into the topic: a thick, intimidating looking treatise on ancient history, marked where he had finished his reading the previous day.

We can imagine Jim working his way through that book, asking the questions that intrigued him throughout his life. How do people behave? Why do they do it? What is to be learned from it? In his eighty-first year, Jim’s curiosity about these issues was no less keen than it had been in every prior year.

Jim also had the spirit of a naturalist, perhaps instilled in him during his childhood years attending a summer camp in Minnesota. He knew a great deal about trees and wildflowers and the natural world. But he was particularly fascinated by birds and could identify countless species by their calls and songs. And, of course, because Jim did not just care about everything that interested him, but also cared for everything (and everyone) that interested him, he and Deanna set up twelve feeding stations in their backyard. It is safe to say that no bird that was ever observed and studied by Jim Miner went away from the experience hungry.

I do not mean to suggest by all of this celebration that Jim’s life was without its challenges. His eighty-one years brought him many battles and he came perilously close to losing some of them. He was revived after drowning while swimming; Scott saved him during a critical cardiac incident; the list goes on and on. On a remarkable multitude of occasions, death took Jim by the arm and started to lead him away. And, yet, over and over again Jim managed to slip from its grasp and to stay with us, to have another morning to hear the birds sing, to have another afternoon to watch football, to have another evening to read, and think, and wonder.

Indeed, Jim evaded death so many times that we could not be blamed if we had come to think of him as indestructible. Resilient people do this to us—they persuade us though their tenacity that they will be with us forever. And here’s the thing: it turns out that it’s true.

Jim remains with us in the lessons that his life conveys. Love what you do. Work hard. Think deeply. Set high standards. Be professional in your endeavors. Take time to play. When you become interested in something, learn as much as you can about it. Listen closely. Try to understand people—even those people, especially those people, who no one else understands. Be one with your partner. Help your children achieve—and then tell everyone about it whenever and wherever you can. Do not forget to pay attention to the wildflowers and the birds.

Today we celebrate the remarkable life that Jim Miner made out of his time on earth. But, of course, we also grieve. We do not grieve for him: he passed from this life peacefully, he is at rest, his worries are behind him, his anxieties are extinguished, he fulfilled so much of what he sought to do. Rather, we grieve for ourselves and for those times when we will feel his absence.

But I suspect that in the days, and weeks, and months, and years that come we will more frequently feel his presence. We will continue to experience his influence. We will continue to hear his voice. We will continue to talk to him—not just as if he were beside us, but as if he were inside us, because, of course, he is. He is in our hearts and our minds and our memories, where he had already lived for so long, and where he will stay.

When I met with Deanna on Wednesday I asked her: “Where do you think you will feel Jim’s presence most?” And she said: “Wherever the birds are.” Yes, that’s it, exactly—because the birds are all around us, now, and forever more.

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I would like to close our service by reading to you from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous definition of success. In the last few days, as I have pondered Jim’s life, it has struck me that this fits perfectly with how he lived, and why everyone here loved and admired him:

“[T]o win the respect of intelligent people
and [the] affection of children;
to appreciate beauty, to find the best
in others; to leave the world a bit
better, whether by a healthy child
a garden patch or a redeemed
social condition; to know even
one life has breathed easier because
you have lived. This is to have
succeeded.”

Thank you, Jim, for the respect you earned from your colleagues and friends; for the deep affection you inspired in your wonderful wife and children; for finding the beauty in wildflowers and birds and ancient ruins and the complexities of human behavior; for helping your patients breathe easier; for leaving our world better.  

Your memory is a blessing to us all.