Wednesday, June 22, 2016

Raising the widow's son





Maybe it was because I knew that later this morning I would be preaching in Spanish at the 12 o’clock service here at St. Paul’s, but reading these stories again about widows who lost their only sons, I remembered a woman I met in Guatemala, in the summer of 2009.  I was on my way to Xela, also known as Quetzaltenango, the largest city in the Western Highlands of Guatemala, to study at a Spanish language school, and I stopped over at the popular tourist destination of Lake Atitlán.  I crossed the lake to Santiago, the largest and most traditional of the towns around the shores of that lake, where I would spend the night.  The next morning I left the guesthouse and found that the streets around the central square were lined with venders who’d come in from the countryside, and I went shopping for a souvenir to bring home to my wife.  And that was how I came upon a woman sitting on the ground on a blanket, on which she had spread the things she had for sale.  They included some baskets of tomatoes and other summer vegetables, but also huipiles, the traditional blouses of the indigenous women of southern Mexico and Guatemala. 
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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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.