A Celebration of Life and a Funeral Are Not the Same Thing

Yesterday we celebrated the life of Ann Deryck.  Sometimes when people say "celebration of life," it's little more than a euphemism for "funeral."  So often these services serve more to mark the end of a life rather than truly to celebrate it, but I felt this one somehow differently.

I know part of it was the way they selected the music.  Leanne played two anthem accompaniments (and masterfully wove in enough of the parts in strategic spots to make it compelling even without a choir).  The Rutter "For the Beauty of the Earth" is one of my favorites anyway, but it was especially powerful in this service.  As I sung along in my mind, I was struck by this line: "For the joy of human love, brother, sister, parent, child, friends on earth and friends above..."

I've always liked that line, but I've always thought of it as identifying people who are dear to us: our brother, our sister, our parent, our child..." Yesterday I thought how one person can fill multiple roles.  Ann may not have been anyone's brother, but she was a sister, parent, and child.  She was a friend on earth, and now she is a friend above.  Somehow identifying the roles she filled throughout her life shined a light on the people around her, which I gather is how she lived her life.

There was also a slideshow during the service, and it was particularly well done.  Like "For the Beauty of the Earth," it highlighted and celebrated her relationships with others by showing delightfully casual moments from the story of her life.  She was in every picture, of course, but few if any pictures were actually about her.  They were most often about the people she had her arms around, or rather about the love shared between her and the people (or dogs, as the case may be) she had her arms around.

In the end, I came away from the service regretful that I didn't start my work here sooner so that I could have met Ann and enjoyed getting to know her.  But in a strange way I feel like even if I didn't have the chance to visit with her or make music with her, nevertheless I experience something of who she was by the wake she left behind--by the marks she left on everyone she met.  Her family, yes, and the choir she loved so much: a love clearly reciprocated as so many from the choir attended we probably could have handed out the anthems and sung them.

Yesterday, Ann reminded me that carefully posed and staged moments aren't really the stuff of life.  It's more the zany, unscripted moments and the spontaneous outpouring of love.  As life has started to ramp back up, it was an important reminder to keep the focus on the important things people.  Now as I'm writing this I'm thinking I have a good bit of work to do in that regard.

I never met Ann, but you can add me to the long list of people she affected positively.  I'm grateful for her life so well lived and celebrated yesterday.

All Clear

A million years ago, when I was in preschool, we had a significant tornado outbreak in Little Rock.  They came in waves.  One minute we were in our classroom, and the next we were in the hall. Then after what seemed like forever we were back in our classroom only to go back to the hall again.  In fact, it was the back-and-forth that made the experience so difficult.  They gave us an “all clear” signal, only to call us back into the hall again.  We believed we were safe only to be told we were in danger all over again.  For an impressionable little tyke like me, this meant I questioned my safety from the weather for years after that.  I don’t remember that day, but I do remember an abiding fear of severe weather. Every Wednesday at noon when they would test the sirens I’d freak out, and mom would have to remind me they were just testing. While I still have a healthy respect for severe weather, these days I’m not scared of it.  In fact, in true southerner fashion my impulse is to head outside when the weather gets rough just to see what I can see.

I don't think the hard stuff will be coming for a while...

It seems ages ago now that life stopped in its tracks.  All of a sudden we weren’t doing any of the things we had been doing...and we were doing many things we had never done before!  I remember thinking it would be weeks or maybe months before things were “back to normal.”  I remember wondering when the “all clear” would sound and we would all take our heads out from under our hands and come out of our houses into the light of day to greet our weather-beaten neighbors with a fist bump or a high five.

It didn’t take too long for me to realize that wasn’t going to happen, even if it took me a good while to admit it.  Now a year and a half on, I don’t think there will never be an “all clear” moment.  There is not a second Thanos snap coming where everything we lost will blink back into existence.  We are where we are.  Life is what it is.

This became clear to me about a month ago when I was trying to figure out how to make Chancel Choir retreat happen.  I had found a place where we could stay, but I realized we weren’t going to be able to make meals covid-safe.  So we adjusted course, and I came up with a plan to have our retreat at the church.  I was skeptical that it would measure up, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised at how productive the time was.  I was even more surprised by the ways I discovered our “replacement retreat” actually worked better than my original plan would have, and it may have changed the way I conceive of these events from here on out.

That weekend changed the way I think about ministry in a time of pandemic.

Prior to retreat, I was thinking about what we had done before and how we could duplicate it safely.  This had the effect of making me sad on a routine basis because it forced me to focus on the things we had lost.  But covid isn’t in control, or it shouldn’t be. It’s just a constraint that has to be accounted for.

As I think about it, I realize I’ve always operated within a set of constraints.  We have limited budget, limited time, and limited space.  We have limited personnel resources, and the personnel we do have often have diverse and sometimes opposed views on how and what we can do.  I’ve always asked myself, “What is it I want to accomplish, and given these constraints, what is the best way to accomplish it?”  In planning events, safety has always been a significant consideration.  Now we just have to add covid safety to the list.

Don’t get me wrong.  I miss a lot of things, and I’m looking forward to a time when some of these covid constraints are gone.  It’s just that I am confident we can still create meaningful connection and build durable relationships by making music together if that’s what we want to do. We just have to do it safely is all.

For whatever reason, that has made me feel a lot better about the great unknown ahead of us. Who is coming back? When? What other challenges lie ahead? How can we possibly be Methodists in a time when we can’t eat tuna casserole in the same room?  None of that is clear to me. But have we ever really known any of that? No. This much is all clear to me: whatever exists out there, whatever lies ahead of us, we will face it together.  And that, to me, is what ministry has always been about.

—John

Choir Is On Sale! Act Now!

When I get one of those “special offers” in the mail or email, I always ask myself one question: how is this guy making money? What’s the business model? Ultimately there’s someone, somehow, who’s going to make money from this. How? The answer to that question plays a big part in how much thought I give the special offer (well, that and also whether I really need to have a new job working from home making $2000 or more a week, brand new windows for the whole house, a monthly membership to the local gym, or a screamin’ deal on some red hot leggings).

The thing is, these guys need me to take them up on the offer.  They don’t really care of those leggings make my eyes pop.  They’re just saying that to get me to buy them.  Because if I buy them, they make money.

Like this one time a guy came to our house to sell us a high-end vacuum cleaner.  Mind you, it was obvious from the state of our house that we could use a vacuum at that point in our lives, but this guy didn’t care about that.  He just wanted us to spend $1200 on a vacuum cleaner and was willing to say anything he could to get us to do it.

via GIPHY

We didn’t buy the vacuum. Or the leggings.

Do you know where else this dynamic plays out?  Every. Sunday. Morning.  I go out into the congregation while the Chancel Choir is gathering themselves to head into the loft, and I talk to folks.  I invite them to choir, because that’s what I do.  They run my invitation through the “special offer” filter, and they think I’m asking them to come to choir for my own gain. There’s a real sense in which they’re right, too.  More people in the choirs does make me look like a more successful music director.

That’s not why I’m inviting, though.  I’m inviting because I genuinely believe they will benefit from participating, and I believe (sometimes out loud in these conversations) that if they were to try it and find they weren't benefitting from it they definitely shouldn’t do it.  Life’s too short to spend an hour and a half in rehearsal for choir if it doesn’t do anything for you!  I’m confident, of course, that it will.  Anyway, I usually wind up spending a lot of these conversations trying to convince people I’m not inviting for my benefit; I’m inviting for theirs.

This is why I say an invitation from you means more than an invitation from me. Since it isn’t your job, you have a lot less clear self-benefit in inviting people to be a part of choir.  But make no mistake.  You do have an angle here, and your invitation is run through the same “special offer” filter that mine is.  If your friend (or the person you just met at church, or the person behind you in the line at Kroger) thinks you want them to do this for your own benefit rather than theirs, your invitation is going to get left on the shelf right next to the exclusive pictures of celebrities without makeup. Fortunately there are ways to get through that filter, and it’s way easier for you to do it than it is for me.

1. Be honest with yourself.  Why do you want this person to come to choir?  Is it because we need altos, or is it because they need it?  (It can be both, but don’t lead with the first one!).

2. Be able to articulate the reasons choir is important to you.  Why do you show up?  What do you gain?  Maybe it’s about the music.  Maybe it’s about the fellowship.  Maybe it’s about how comfortable the chairs are or that the twang of the parlor piano reminds you of your grandmother’s piano that you always wanted to learn how to play. Maybe you hope that...one day...I’ll wear leggings.

3. Find the reasons choir may be important to the person you’re inviting.  If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say, “I love music, but I’m not a good singer,” I’d be retired and living in Tahiti (it’s a magical place).  You don’t have to be a good singer to enjoy participating in the choir or to enjoy being in a group of people who know you and care about you and miss you when you don’t show up. It may be some reason you haven’t though of yet.  Just have a conversation about it.

4. Take “no” for an answer, but don’t leave it at that.  Maybe your invitation does get left on the shelf next to the scary celebrity pics.  No problem. Insisting probably won’t change their mind.  But reminding them from time to time of what choir can be for them can’t hurt. Just plant some seeds and water them now and then. Maybe they’ll grow.

In the end, what we are trying to do here is create the kind of community Jesus called us to create—one where people care about each other; one where we walk through life together.  We succeed together or fail together.  We endure together and laugh together. Everyone needs a place like that, especially if they don’t already have it.  And that’s what we’re offering.  For the low, low price of $39.95 plus $4.00 shipping and handling.

via GIPHY

—John