May 20, 2007

by The Rev. Constance Jones

This past Thursday was Ascension Day,
marking the 40th day after the Resurrection,
when Jesus’ post-Easter appearances ended and he ascended into heaven.
I was intending to celebrate the Holy Eucharist right here,
but instead, I buried my husband.
He ascended to the Father, as Jesus did, and as we will,
when God raises us from the dead.

I know this, but what I feel right now is an aching emptiness.
I told somebody a couple of days ago that I felt like a human being
with about a square-foot hole cut straight through my body.
I keep wondering that I am standing upright, eating and talking, with this hole.

Some of you may know that I’ve sent out a kind of
email chronicle about Bill’s condition over the past year and a half.
It kept people informed without my having to tell
about his ups and downs over and over on the phone.
So there were hundreds of people keeping track of Bill --
in our neighborhood,
at Virginia Wesleyan College where he taught Political Science and film,
in the NARO theater community where he introduced movies,
then relatives, church members, old friends in other cities,
my worldwide Anglican internet friends, and so on.
All with one keystroke.
I’d write an email letter addressed to Dear Friends,
and I’d always end it, Love, Connie.

Well, beginning a couple of months ago a number of people began to notice
that often there was no final “e” on “Connie.”
A few people out of respect (I suppose) began to write me back, Dear Conni.
OK, so they must have thought, she’s going through an identity crisis
and she’s changing the spelling of her name. We will play along.

But it was unintentional. So I wrote about it.
No, I said, I’m not changing the spelling of my name.
It is an accident – sort of. I’m typing too fast, the “e” key sticks,
I’m racing to end the letter and I rush to finish,
the way some of you might think, but are too polite to say out loud,
the way I rushed away from Yorktown to head home to Bill.
I could claim the “e” was lost in the rush.
But the truth of the matter has a few layers, as any important truth always does.
This typo meant something.
And surely it was that I was progressively losing a part of myself,
my husband of 37 years.
I was losing him, and all the while
I myself was being pared away, letter by letter.

I was with Bill when he died.
I prayed with him, touched him and anointed him,
prayed with him, whispered a few secrets in his ear, and then he was gone.
Nothing so satisfying as the text at the end of Luke
where Jesus gives his peace to the disciples, blesses them,
and then is “carried up into heaven.”
Or in Acts, Jesus promises the Holy Spirit will come soon, then ascends.
The disciples gawk, while two men robed in white
ask a question whose answer seems pretty obvious,
“Why are you all looking up at the sky?”

Yet as our dear Viccellio family will also tell you just now
and as any number of you know personally,
in those first few days after a loved one dies, you can spend a lot of time
along with receiving casseroles and talking with the funeral home,
just staring into space and asking yourself, “Where is he?
He was here, so physical and so full of effect in our lives,
and now he is just gone.”

This is such a universal experience
that the tiny detail in Acts of the disciples looking blankly into the sky
into the hole where Jesus was,
seems terribly compelling and human, and utterly authentic.

There are to be ten days of bereavement for the disciples,
before the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost,
which we will celebrate next Sunday.

One of the most comforting sentences I have ever known outside Holy Scripture
is from St. Augustine, “In God, nothing is ever lost.”
I do believe that, and it gives me heart.
I do not believe that my husband Bill is lost,
nor do I believe that the hole in the middle of me is really empty.

But there is another thought which has given me a great deal of comfort lately,
which is a reflection on another question the disciples were surely asking --
“Why did he have to leave?”
I have borrowed this particular reflection from Rowan Williams.^†

You know how sometimes you set your alarm in the morning to get up before dawn?
When the alarm rings, adrenalin jolts you awake.
You you turn on the lamp beside the bed
and what do you see? You see LIGHT.
Blazing and almost physically painful LIGHT.

But by the time your feet hit the floor,
what you see is the chair, your bathrobe, the path to the bathroom,
and if you are like me, your bifocals.
Soon you are not seeing the light itself,
but you are navigating the room and beginning your day by the light.

Jesus appeared to his disciples for forty days after the Resurrection,
and it isn’t hard to believe that everywhere he went,
everyone’s gaze was completely focused on him,
on the risen Jesus, the Light of the world.
But he had to leave,
because what God really wanted was for people from then on
to see everything in the world by the light of Jesus.
It was still the same very real world,
yet by the light of Jesus everything was transformed and new.
Everywhere, always, for everybody who sees by Jesus’ light.

So he had to leave, you see,
because if he had stayed he’d first of all only been in one place at a time.
But maybe more importantly, people would be focusing only on him,
and not on the world that God loved so much to send Jesus into it,
and the people God loved so much to give Jesus’ life for.
Christians’ job ever after has been to see that world and people in it
by and through Jesus-light.

I have been working on the meaning of this for some years now,
but the fact that I buried my husband on Ascension Day
has given me quite a lot more to consider, to take very seriously.
It will take me a long, long time to make these reflections.

But I tell you that all of it – the loss and the hole in the middle of me,
the missing letter “e” and my future without Bill
is bathed in Jesus-light,
understood by the light of the whole of Scripture, the Gospel,
the sacrifice of Christ at this table,
and my presence in this blessed community where “Grace heals.”

I am grateful to all of you for how much you have loved me in these last few months,
and how kind you have been to me this week.
As life unfolds for my dear family, for the Grace Church family,
and for this sweet world of ours,
we have an invitation by virtue of Jesus’ Ascension into heaven,
to see everything,
and I mean everything including the death of the people we love most,
in Jesus’ light –
all his teachings about what good behavior is,
his rejection of formalism and nit-picking of the Law,
his teachings about discipleship,
all the ways we teach and worship in his name,
and above all God’s promise through Jesus
that God is bringing all things to perfection and wholeness,
that nothing is ever lost,
and that we have eternal life in Christ.

This is how I am centering myself in the hope of the Resurrection these days,
and I am grateful beyond measure
that in this world full of unspeakable sorrows,
I have this hope in your company. Amen.

^† In “Ascension Day,” in A Ray of Darkness (Cambridge MA: Cowley, 1995), 68-71

Back to the index of Connie's Sermons