This past week, I had to go home to Ohio. I went, primarily, with the purpose of continuing the process of settlement of my parents' estate. This has meant continuing to deal with issues of property, paying bills and making legal arrangements, but that has been the easy part. The harder part has been dealing with their home, a house full of possessions, not only theirs, but their parents and grandparents. These were not just possessions bought at malls but things that they made and created, objects that they saved as memories of their parents and their own lives. It has been and continues to be a painful process that continues what happened in their deaths– the dissolution of the evidence of their lives. Each envelope opened, every clamp in my father's workshop loosened, every tablecloth unfolded releases and dissipates more of the energy and evidence of their lives. Their physical deaths made this necessary, but that was not primarily by my hand. This was by my hand, my complicity and active surrender to the finitude of theirs, and ultimately, my existence. Here, I am not just the victim of entropy but the agent of it as well.
On top of the "planned" tasks and events, I was greeted only hours after my arrival by news of the death of my Aunt Sally, my father's sister. Although my father has still one half sister living, we were never very close, and this felt to me like "the end," the passing of the last person of my father's and mother's generation. It was not just the end of the life of one person, a precious one to be sure, but the end of an "era." It brought home again to me the "truths" of what the Buddhists call the "Five remembrances:" We will grow old; We will grow ill; We will die; We will lose what is precious to us; We will leave behind only the consequences of our actions.
Sally's funeral was presided over by both a Baptist and a Mennonite minister. It was full of scripture verses. It was full of assurances that the "parting is only for a time" and "we will be together again" that characterizes the "hope" of supernatural theism and heaven--we will die, but that is only a physical body. We will be together in the next world in paradise. At the end of the funeral, we engaged in the "country" funeral practice where each of the persons attending filed by the open casket for "one last look," one last glimpse of the features of the dead one before the casket is closed and we see them no more forever in this life. My uncle Delmer, Aunt Sally's 90-year-old and physically unwell husband, collapsed as he was standing at his wife's casket. A wheelchair was needed to allow him to leave and get to the car to go to the cemetery for the graveside service. Their children did little better and were clearly overcome with tears and grief, and why should they not be? As the ministers were helping my Uncle into the wheelchair, one of them, the younger one, kept repeating that it was "only for a little while," "only a little while." I do not know if it comforted my uncle. Perhaps it did. I am pretty sure that it did not comfort me.
Before and after the funeral, a pianist played many of the "old hymns," primarily evangelical, American hymns, the kind of ones that are heard in Methodist, Baptist and other conservative Christian churches still (but fading in the face of growing "praise music"). One of them has continued to run through my mind this last week: "I need thee every hour."
I need Thee every hour, most gracious Lord;
No tender voice like Thine can peace afford.
I need Thee, O I need Thee;
Every hour I need Thee;
O bless me now, my Savior,
I come to Thee.
I need Thee every hour, in joy or in pain;
Come quickly and abide, or life is in vain.
I need Thee every hour; teach me Thy will;
And Thy rich promises in me fulfill
I need Thee every hour, most Holy One;
O make me thine indeed, Thou blessed son.
I need Thee, O I need Thee;
Every hour I need Thee;
O bless me now, my Savoir,
I come to Thee.
Thanks to the internet and the "cyberhymnal" (www.cyberhymnal.org), I was able to retrieve the whole text as well as a bit of the story behind it. Apparently, it was written in 1872 by a woman, Annie S. Hawks, who had, at the age of 37 years, a "numinous" experience. She wrote," Suddenly, I became so filled with the sense of nearness to the Master that, wondering how one could live without Him, either in joy or pain, these words, 'I Need Thee Every Hour,' were ushered into my mind, the thought at once taking full possession of me.' Many years later, after the death of her husband, she wrote again, "I did not understand at first why this hymn had touched the great throbbing heart of humanity. It was not until long after, when the shadow fell over my way, the shadow of a great loss, that I understood something of the comforting power in the words which I had been permitted to give out to others in my hour of sweet serenity and peace."
It brought home to me, perhaps, more clearly than before, that what I need, we need, we all need, is presence. It is not so important what we say to the person in pain, but that we be present to them. It is what we want of our community and especially our church or sangha. We want them to be present to us. It is this desire for "presence" I think, that makes us want God to be a "person" – the most focused kind of "presence" that we know. This is the "great throbbing heart of humanity." If our religious practice and experience cannot "answer" this in some way (not necessarily confirming it in the way we are immediately inclined to want it), then it can do little for our real needs. The lack of "presence" is what turned me away from supernatural theism. I simply could not find such a "presence" anymore in that context and way of thought.
In many ways, my "rebirth" in a religious sense has been a "turning the page." What I found, however, on turning the page, was not a new "answer" but page after page of blank paper. I have taken only some tiny steps to write a few shaky lines on these new pages, like the first-grader starting to practice the basic shapes of the letters of the alphabet. I can feel the "need" however, in myself for "presence" but how, or if, or in what form it may come, I really do not know. Will it come in gently recognizing the "need" but understanding that the "need" has no answer: We will grow old; We will grow ill; We will die; We will lose what is precious to us....there is no escape? Will it come in a flash of light and a heavenly voice.? Will it come at all? I really and honestly do not know. I know, at least, a bit more clearly what is the reality of this "great throbbing heart of humanity." It is a tender place, and one that at least "softens" my own "hardness" as I encounter this need in everyone else that I meet: "I need Thee, O I need Thee; Every hour I need Thee...."
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