She
had made them from cloth woven in the violet and lavender striped pattern that
is distinctive of that region, and there was one in particular that caught my
eye. It was lavishly embroidered with
roses around the collar, and down both the front and back were embroidered
birds. The colorful markings and
different beaks of various species were detailed precisely, like illustrations
from a birdwatcher’s field guide, and I recognized several whose range extends
north. And I looked over this amazing
garment with admiration and smiled at her and complimented her work, but I was
sure it would cost more than the maximum I’d decided to allow myself to spend,
and moved on down the street. But, while
I saw some other nice things here and there, including some other beautiful huipiles, I kept thinking about that one with the birds, and eventually I went
back to look at it again. The woman
named me a price, and while it was more than fair, it was, as I’d feared it
would be, more than I could afford. So I
made a counter-offer and we haggled a bit until she finally agreed.
It
was an amount that we both knew was far too low for an object of such singular
beauty. As I handed her the money, and
folded my prize away in my backpack I felt glad at having been able to get what
I’d really wanted, but I also guilty at having pressed the advantage of my
abundant choices over her lack of them.
And the look on her face when I named my answering price has never left
me; it spoke of her desperation to make a sale and, at the same time, of the
pain of parting with something she’d made with so much love and labor for so
little money. But the thing that really
affected me about that pain, even more than having a part in causing it, was
that I could see that it was only a ripple across the face of a sorrow that was
unfathomably deep. Grief and loss streamed
out toward me from her eyes, and had overflowed from them so much, and for so
long, that they had carved deep furrows in her cheeks.
Of
course I never heard that woman’s story.
I never learned of the afflictions that filled her life with so much pain
that no one with a heart of flesh could fail to see it. But I do know that Santiago de Atitlán was
home to a base of the Guatemalan Army during the height of that country’s dirty
war of the 1980s. From there the
soldiers carried out a genocidal campaign of terror in the Mayan villages of
the surrounding countryside. This culminated
in a notorious massacre in the streets of Santiago itself in December 1990, when
the army opened fire on a peaceful protest for human rights. So I have always wondered whom that woman might
have lost to that violence, or if not to the violence, then to the grinding
poverty the violence was meant to hold in place—a father? A husband? A son, or
daughter, or more than one? Maybe all of
the above.
And
the pain of parting with a beautiful handcrafted object at a price far too
cheap is nothing compared to the pain of losing a child. My wife and I have only one, a beautiful,
talented daughter who just completed the sixth grade on Friday. As all of you who are parents know, your
children are your life’s most important creation. They are the works of priceless value into
which you pour countless hours of costly, painstaking, often thankless toil. But as we parents also know, we have to give
them away to the world. We hope it will
be slowly, and by degrees, and the payment we receive will be the rich one of
seeing them happy, and doing good work, surrounded by a loving family of their
own, maturing into the fullness of their powers as our own begin to falter in
the advent of old age. But we have to
live with the knowledge that the world may buy them from us cheaply, sometimes
as if their lives were worth next to nothing at all.
It is
in response to such a loss that Elijah cried out to God, on behalf of the widow
with whom he had been staying, demanding to know if the Lord would really
deprive of her of her only son. He
prayed that God would let the child’s life come into him again, and the Lord
answered, and the boy lived. The Gospel
story from Luke is very similar, of course, but there are some differences that
are worth noting. The first is that
Elijah prays in secret, in the privacy of his own upper room, while Jesus’ is
travelling at the head of a large crowd when he meets another crowd, the
funeral procession following the body out to the burial, and it is there, in
public, at the city gates, that he raises the widow’s son of Nain. And while Elijah acts on behalf of someone he
knows well, in repayment for her kindness, Jesus meets the widow of Nain as a
stranger on the road. He is moved to act
on her behalf by nothing more than compassion for the suffering of another
human being.
These
stories tell us that the heart of the message of the great prophets is God’s
desire that his people should have a full share in of life. That is why there is no difference between
the prophets demand for religious faithfulness and their outcry out against
violence and poverty and social injustice—because depriving the creatures of
God of the full flourishing of their lives is a blasphemous offense to their
creator. For the prophets, this message has
to be more than simply empty words—it must be demonstrated and made effective
through actions. And what more powerful demonstration
could anyone make of God’s desire to give us the fullness of life than raising
the dead? Jesus takes that prophetic action
out into public, and does it for a stranger, to show how far the life-giving
compassion of God extends. It is but a
short journey from there to his own death and resurrection, the eternal and
universal sign that nothing in heaven or earth can deprive us of the love of
God.
It
is our faith in Christ’s resurrection that gives us the authority to try our
own demonstrations of God’s life-giving compassion. We may not be able to raise the dead, but
there are actions we can take to show people who have lost what is most
beautiful and precious that death does not have the last word. There are things we can do to show those who
are trapped in the darkness of powerlessness and despair that they can still
rise. When it actually works it’s a
miracle, so needless to say we don’t even dare attempt it without asking for God’s
help. But one of the things that has
consistently impressed me about what I’ve been able to observe over the years of
this church of St. Paul in Healdsburg, and now I’m speaking as the Dean of the
Russian River Deanery, is how, despite many false steps and wrong turns, you are
a congregation that keeps trying. You keep trying to do the things that say to
your neighbors that miracles are possible, and God can even raise the
dead.
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