Four columns and a question

Readers,

I'm trying to plan some speaking opportunities especially for Florida and Tennessee. I will be in the South during the last weekend of April. If you know any places that I might speak, please let me know.

Below are my last four columns,

March 27th: One day, God will dry the tears from our eyes

If you've been following my column, you'll know my family just buried my stepfather as well as my mother-in-law.

During this time, we have shared a lot of tears, and I've heard more than one person ask the common question: "What if I start crying and I can't stop?"

Some people call this the snowball effect of tears. But I have another name for it. I call it the kite string effect of grief.

I coined the phrase out of my childhood experiences in the San Francisco Bay area, where every March, my friends and I would buy or build the best kite we could afford.

Like little engineers, we obsessed about the kite tail length and how many bowtie knots it should contain for proper balance. Others of us were subject matter experts on exactly where the twine was best fastened to the kite's crossbar.

To me, the string was the most critical part of the assembly, because it wasn't simply a kite string. It was a tether precariously fastened to something I wanted to fly and reclaim from the sky.

As the son of a struggling seminary student, however, it was rare that I could afford the monster ball of string needed for the fickle microclimates of the Marin County hills.

Short of a quality and quantity of string, I'd anchor myself on the steep hillside in a weed from the fig-marigold family called ice plant and wait for an inviting gust. Soon, the whimsically wild winds took hold of my kite and sent the string whizzing through my fingertips and the ball dancing at my feet.

I tried desperately to ration the rapidly diminishing roll of string, but with each gust, the string would fling into the wind like so many tangled spider webs.

My younger kite-less friends would yell, "Give it more string!" or "Let it all out!" Yet I knew that if I did let it fly, the string might empty too quickly from the cardboard core, and I'd see the end slip through my fingers, releasing the kite into the forested hills and gone forever.

Simultaneously, my older friends coached me to tease the slack a bit, play with it and finesse it. The problem was that playing with the string too much might cause the kite to go into uncontrollable, low-flying loops and wrap itself around an electrical line.

Flying a kite on the Marin Peninsula always left me with a contradictory fear that my kite would go nowhere or it would go everywhere. In either case, at the end of the day, all that might remain was a wad of string to splice onto my next kite.

Letting loose of your tears may bring with it much the same feeling. You think if you hold the tears back, you'll never be able to launch your life again. And if you let your tears flow freely, you start to feel your life is out of control, like so much endless kite string whizzing through fingers. Where will the string of tears stop?

At the end of my day, I chose to let it fly. I let the tears fall freely like healing balm on my wounds. I chose to lean on the words from Isaiah, who promised God will one day, "banish death forever. And wipe the tears from every face."

Place faith alongside works to help Japan

On March 11, thousands of people died in a 9.0 earthquake followed by a cataclysmic tsunami that enveloped a large part of Japan's eastern coastline.

During the next several weeks, the people of Japan will turn to their religion or philosophy to interpret this disaster.

I've always appreciated the viewpoint of a Zen monk named Sengai, who represented one of the three main schools of Zen Buddhism. Translated in "Zen Flesh, Zen bones: A Collection of Zen & Pre-Zen Writings," by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, the story goes as follows:

"A rich man asked Sengai to write something for the continued prosperity of his family so that it might be treasured from generation to generation.

"Sengai obtained a large sheet of paper and wrote: 'Father dies, son dies, grandson dies.'

"The rich man became angry. 'I asked you to write something for the happiness of my family! Why do you make such a joke as this?'

" 'No joke is intended,' explained Sengai. 'If before you yourself die your son should die, this would grieve you greatly. If your grandson should pass away before your son, both of you would be brokenhearted. If your family, generation after generation, passes away in the order I have named, it will be the natural course of life. I call this real prosperity.' "

On the day before the earthquake, I got a chance to experience the prosperity described in the Zen story when the grandmother to my children, my 75-year-old mother-in-law, died from a catastrophic stroke.
Darla Ann Nuckolls was a woman of great strength and inspiration. Maybe that's why I always kidded my wife that if I ever had a notion to leave her, I would run to her mother's house.

Our family is mourning our loss, but we feel prosperous, as we have not had anyone die out of the order described by the Zen monk. We grieve, but as Christian Scripture suggests, "not as those who have no hope."

In Japan, thousands of people are grieving those who have died out of order. Grandsons died before great-grandfathers, and children died before their mothers. It's as if some kind of malevolent force drained prosperity from the Japanese coast in one giant rinse cycle.

As I watched the earthquake news -- in between planning my mother-in-law's funeral -- I wondered, "How can we help so many people?"

The answer is easy.

To paraphrase an old saying, "This is where the rubber of faith and philosophy hit the road."
Fortunately, the Internet and technology make it quite easy to help. I invite you to place your faith alongside your works today and make a donation.

Each of the following groups has set up fundraising sites specifically for the victims of the earthquake and tsunami. Many of the organizations have ways to simply text a donation.

American Red Cross: Text the word REDCROSS to 90999 and a $10 donation will automatically be charged to your phone bill, or donations can be made at redcross.org.

GlobalGiving: This group works with International Medical Corps, Save the Children and other organizations. Text JAPAN to 50555 to give $10, or got to the GlobalGiving's Web site at globalgiving.org.

Salvation Army: Text JAPAN or QUAKE to 80888 to make a $10 donation. Donations can also be made at salvationarmy.org or by calling 1-800-SAL-ARMY.

Save the Children: To make a donation, call 1-800-728-3843 or text JAPAN to 20222 to donate $10 or go to savethechildren.org.

Burkes is a former civilian hospital chaplain and an Air National Guard chaplain. Write norris@thechaplain.net or visit thechaplain.net. You can also follow him at facebook.com/norrisburkes.

When we hurt, God hurts, too

March 13 2011

Amid a week of dealing with the death of my stepfather, the pending death of my mother-in-law, school deadlines and wayward adult children, I tried to answer an e-mail from a divorced man whose teenage son objected to him dating new people.

The son, who was driving through life under the influence of fundamentalism, interpreted Scriptures to teach that a divorced person who dates other people is committing adultery.

I acknowledged by saying: "That's a common interpretation for fundamentalists. There's no answer for this. Just love him back and thank him for his concern."
Short of time, that was my best answer, a desperate buzzer shot for the game-winning three points. Nevertheless, the reader found my response to be abrupt and a bit cliché. Instead of thanking me for my reply, he wrote back: "I was disappointed with your answer."

Ouch.

On the one hand, I wanted to justify myself by telling him I don't always have time to give detailed advice and he should seek the advice of a community clergy who knows his life. Still, that answer comes across a bit pompous, and it frustrates me, too.

On the other hand, he was right. My answer was disappointing. I can do better.
Frankly, I get a lot of questions on that issue, and I must confess I'm tired of encounters with interpreters who read Jesus' words with such legalistic fervor.
Jesus described these interpreters when he said, "Instead of giving you God's law as food and drink by which you can banquet on God, they package it in bundles of rules, loading you down like pack animals. They seem to take pleasure in watching you stagger under these loads, and wouldn't think of lifting a finger to help."

Jesus' words also offer a clue of how tired Moses must have grown over such legalism: "Moses provided for divorce as a concession to your hard heartedness, but it is not part of God's original plan."

The key words here: "as a concession to your hardheartedness."

Hardheartedness is a way of describing resentments. Maybe these resentments took place during the marriage, or long before, but because we all experience a hardening of our hearts, divorce can happen.

If I had a do-over with my reader, I'd probably remind him it pays to remember two things:

First, God feels the hurts from all broken relationships. God hurts with our strained relationships at work as well as our strained relationships with countries like Iran. God hurts when he sees broken relationships with children as well as weakening relationships in our places of worship.

Seeing God as one who hurts with us gives us more perspective, because instead of seeing divorce as all about our hurts, we also realize we are hurting the one who has created us to live in loving relationships.
I think this perspective gives me energy to do my best to heal those relationships, whether they are at work, home or in world politics.
Second, and most important: God works with us to heal relationships. The healing may take place in our current relationship or it may take place while we are inside a new relationship, but healing always will be God's business.
These two points aren't just my best shot at do-over, but they are ones I am trying to practice this week as I, too, struggle with life, death and all the relationships in between.


Once you find Jesus, you never will lose him

Last month, my distraught daughter entered her grandmother's ICU room in a Catholic hospital searching for a place to hang a sentimental picture of sunflowers.

When my wife suggested she use the lone nail protruding from the wall above my mother-in-law's bed, the nurse blurted out a surprising question: "Where's Jesus?" She meant the crucifix commonly found in Catholic institutions.

In answer to her perplexing question, my wife tactfully suggested that she search for Jesus in one of the dresser drawers where my father-in-law would likely place any Catholic symbol that offended his very Baptist sensibilities.

The nurse found strength in that crucifix, and she did not take solace in the fact that someone -- especially a Protestant -- had shelved her Jesus. So, she launched a frantic search and recovery effort, shuffling dresser drawers, and lacing her questions with possessive pronouns, "Where's my Jesus? Where's my Jesus?"

Her actions seemed a bit funny at the time, but given a few days' hindsight, the whole question of "Where's my Jesus?" makes sense to me now.

It started making sense during the first hour of my current 60-day deployment to a local Air Force base when, in three separate incidents, I misplaced my wallet, my military ID and my laptop. My consecutive search for each loss pushed my blood pressure higher and pegged my anxiety level to the max.

My successive losses left me feeling discombobulated and wondering, along with the nurse, if I was beginning to lose my Jesus.

But the truth is, my consternation came from much more than the misplacement of worldly possessions. In addition to my mother-in-law's catastrophic stroke and my deployment, I'd just sent two adult children packing under the ultimatum given by nearly every parent to nonworking adult children: work or school or out.

With all of this, I felt myself falling behind in my deadlines for my creative writing degree when suddenly my elderly, but very active stepfather died.
It's no wonder that halfway though writing this column, I buried my face into my forearms praying that somehow I'd not lose "my Jesus" in all of this. My prayer brought to mind what my mother used to say whenever I'd lose something: "Go back to where you last remembered seeing it and maybe you'll find it."
Where did I last see Jesus?

Fortunately, I can report he's not missing. I saw Jesus in the eyes of the newly baptized family in my church last week. I also felt him jogging beside me last month down a rainy stretch of an Oregon beach. And in the hospital, I saw Jesus in the eyes of my father-in-law as he wiped the brow of his wife of 56 years.
My Jesus had been with me all the time. I hadn't lost him. He wasn't stowed away in a drawer. He was with me.

I don't know what you call the strength that sustains you in your moment of greatest need, but I call that strength Jesus.

You might have another word for it. Perhaps you call it love or family or Spirit Guide. But whatever you call it, I think we can borrow a page from my Baptist theology, which tells me that once you get your Jesus, you can't lose him.