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Reflections: Nothing wasted, even in heartbreak

Martha Hoverson

Dear Lucy,

We are sitting on the floor in our sunroom, waiting with our sweet dog Sam for the end, and my visiting friend, a Lutheran pastor, begins to pray.

I think how grateful I am, that someone else in the room can form a thought other than "good dog." Her words form a cloud of witness around us, an assurance that we are all in the embrace of our loving God, and that we hold a hope of being together again.

Later you say, "Her faith must be really strong, because she believes that!"

You are 15 years old, and I wonder, not for the first time, if growing up in an open-minded family has been a loss for you instead of a gain.

I grew up in a mixed Protestant household. My mother was Baptist and my father was Methodist, and those denominations went back many generations in their families. Both grandmothers had married Episcopalians, and I attended an Episcopal school. For six formative years, I went to a Presbyterian Sunday school. So by the time I arrived in Maine and landed in the United Church of Christ, there had been a lot of input.

But all of those traditions pointed in the same direction, to a powerful Creator and a loving Jesus, one who made us and forgives us, the other who taught us how to be loved and how to show it to others.

My faith still represents those basic principles, although I learned fancy seminary words along the way and then tried to unlearn their use again so that people, you included, could understand me better.

I didn't think much when I was your age about whether or not Jesus was human or divine or both. It's something we talk about with kids in confirmation in the United Church of Christ, but when I was a young teenager, all I had to do was accept Jesus as my savior in order to be baptized.

I'm sure my pastor asked me important, examining questions after I came forward during the last hymn one Sunday morning. He must have! But I have only the vaguest memory of meeting with him, and I'm sure I did not understand the finer points of Baptist theology.

I only knew I loved Jesus and felt drawn to him and wanted to be identified as one of his followers, one of the people allowed to eat the little cubes of bread and to drink from the little cups.

You've already been doing that. I've raised you in a different tradition. You were a little baby in a long gown when our beloved pastor, Bill Gregory, put his big hand full of water on your head and named you as one of God's children. Communion has been open to you wherever we have worshipped.

You're living it all in a different order, and being asked to know things and articulate things no one ever asked me to put into words. I simply said yes to Jesus, an uncomplicated and emotional yes.

Your experience has included a lot of deconstruction, simply because of the nature of your mother's work.

Here's what I want you to know: That faith our Lutheran friend has, a faith in our eventual reunion? I have it, too.

I don't doubt that God will find a useful purpose for our life experiences, the gains we have made and the losses we have suffered. I don't know what that will look like, but I do sometimes enjoy imagining it, even if I don't let myself get attached to any one particular version of heaven. Even when we take things apart to examine them, it's possible to believe in them, those things for which we have no proof.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

We've said goodbye to two sweet dogs in less than two years, and we're grieving, and we wish we could know what happens to them, and what will happen to us. Bill, who baptized you, used to assure the congregation of forgiveness by saying, "In the ecology of God's grace, nothing is wasted."

I want you to know I believe that, wholeheartedly, even when my heart is broken.

Thank you for being there at the end, so bravely, both times. 

Love,

Mom

Martha Hoverson is the pastor at North Yarmouth Congregational Church, United Church of Christ. Her e-mail address is:

revhover@maine.rr.com