Witness to the Resurrection.

For years I prayed for my son daily.  I prayed that, like the Lost Son in Jesus’ parable, he would “come to himself.”  Among many other things.  But that was the main thing I prayed for.

A few weeks ago, that happened.  Unfortunately, it did not happen in the way I had fervently hoped.  I wanted him to put his life together, receive the help he needs, get off drugs, keep a good job, maybe go to school.  I wanted him to finally find something that made his heart sing, a calling, a set of goals and achievements, a contribution he could make to the common good.  I wanted him to find a loving partner and maybe raise children.  I cherished this vision of someday sitting with him and his family at a warm and happy Thanksgiving dinner.

That is not to be.  He did finally come to himself… but it was on the other side.  For my son was found dead in his apartment on August 17, 2021.  He was 27.  His name was Daniel.

A long time ago I learned that God always heals us.  When I prayed over a sick person, I did so in this sure knowledge.  God’s will in Jesus is for our healing and wholeness, our integration and communion in creation.  And God’s will never fails, in the end.  It’s just that God heals some of us to a degree on this side; and God heals all of us completely on the other side.  

We all come to ourselves, in the end.  For all of us get liberated from bondage to our ego-centric mortal, temporal existence, infused as it is with the lies we tell ourselves.  All of us are delivered to wholeness and safety, passing through the waters, singing with joy in the unimagined daylight.

In the days that followed, as I struggled to make sense of his death, I read again Miriam’s hymn in Exodus 15:21.  The entire Bible and the faiths based on it are arguably commentary on that single, brief verse. 

Miriam, Moses’ sister, sings in exultation on the shore of the sea, after God had, by means of a series of comprehensive ecological disasters, demolished the Egyptian slave-economy and delivered the people from bondage, finally drowning in the returning waters the pursuing Egyptian cavalry.  “I will sing unto the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and rider he has thrown into the sea!”

That is what it means to come to ourselves.  We find that we are no longer subject to Pharaoh’s chariots, the principalities and powers that dominate our world, the desires and fears that motivate and dominate us so thoroughly in our mortal existence, the habits and addictions that cripple and control us.  We awaken on the other side of that turbulent sea, surprised, safe, new, and free. 

Behind us we see only death and the wreckage of our pursuers, who would drag us back in chains to an existence of pain and servitude.  We emerge on the other side with an experience of freedom unimaginable to us in our former existence.  

My son’s funeral was planned together by his Parental Team, comprising his four birth- and adoptive-parents.  We had the usual discussions about “what Daniel would want.”  Much of the time we would share would focus on our memories of him, as a celebration of his life. 

More important though is the recognition that he has let all that go.  We cherish what he left behind both in artifact and memory.  But he is elsewhere in the sense of having been released to the far shore, having left even time behind and with it the fear, desires, feelings, regrets, plans, and thinking that are the framework of mortality.  

We are still in Egypt; Daniel is not.  He has, as Dumbledore says in the Harry Potter books that Daniel loved, “gone on.”   

Which means that if we overly focus on and extend anything, especially the negative things, that he said, did, thought, or felt in his mortal existence, it is an implicit denial of where he is now.  It disregards the forgiveness and liberation he now knows.  

I have for years added to the funeral liturgy a not-very-Presbyterian piece which is a declaration of forgiveness of the deceased.  It comes from the Orthodox tradition, and is an act of the Church in the name of God’s saving grace.  It consigns to oblivion “all those things which proceeded from his mortal existence,” affirming that Daniel is on the other side of the sea now and none of that stuff matters anymore.

That’s what it means to be a witness to the resurrection, which is the name we Presbyterians give to the funeral service.  The good memories are good; but he is in a better place than even the best memories we can retrieve.  

We are like quadriplegics whose dysfunctional flesh falls away to reveal a shining and able body that had always waited within us.  We emerge from the tight bell of time into the expansive now of everywhere, “the glorious company of the saints in light,” “where there is neither sorrow nor sighing but life everlasting.”       

At the end of the movie, Harold and Maude, Harold, a rich young man distraught with grief, appears to madly drive his Ferrari, modified to look like a hearse, off a cliff where it splats upside-down on the beach.  We might assume he has killed himself….  Then the camera pans back up to the top of the stony cliff where we find him standing on the grass, with his banjo.  In the final scene, he turns away from the precipice and starts dancing and playing as Cat Stevens sings, “If you want to sing out, sing out; if you want to be free, be free….”

Similar to Miriam, Harold on the seashore has abandoned his slavery to death, symbolized by the expensive car, and stepped out into a new life.  We too may let go and emerge into a space where our desires synch with our being.  What we want is who we truly are, rather than who we think we are or want to be or wish we were or regret not being….  

We who remain in the meantime require reminding about this.  We are beings of light imprisoned in shadowy lies of our own invention, the product of fear and desire distorted by ego.  The good news is that we can live now in the glow of the truth we see in resurrection.  We can anticipate the expansiveness and communion of life.  We can approximate the freedom Miriam sang about by living in love, hope, joy, compassion, and thanksgiving now.  We can put the wreckage behind us and dance away from the edge, singing our song into a new land. 

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