This story is from Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith by Diana Butler Bass (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). In this book, Bass relates several personal stories -- the names of the churches and pastors are accurate, the names of the others in the story are pseudonyms.
One afternoon, a group of us gather for lunch to talk about Saint Mark [a Lutheran congregation in Virginia]. Most of the people in the group are long-term members of twenty years or more. Everyone talks about how much the church has changed in recent years, how "Pastor is growing the church spiritually," as June puts it. "We Lutherans may have spirituality," she says, "but we don't talk about it very well! We are learning to talk about it." They begin to tell me stories of deepened faith, of how much more meaningful being Christians has become to them. When it comes to Barbara and John, the conversation stops, the others waiting in respectful silence, as if not sure what their friends will say. But Barbara and John want to share. They vividly remember when their spiritual lives changed and their church became their family in a new way.
One April day in 2002, the Hickmans received a phone call. Linda, their daughter-in-law, a young mother of a toddler, had died. The police said it appeared to be a suicide. In complete shock, Barbara and John phoned their pastor, Rev. Gary Erdos. Gary told them to wait at home; he would accompany them to their son's house.
Gary later told me that when he arrived at the Hickmans' house, Barbara and John were in the driveway. "Barbara was physically shaking, mumbling that she didn't know how she was going to make it through this." John was talking to a neighbor, and Gary overheard him saying, "God has brought us to our knees before, now our faces are in the dirt." Gary hugged them (Barbara and John warmly remember this kindness) and drove them to their son's house.
When they arrived, Barbara and John worried about how their daughter-in-law's body would be handled. Unable to view the tragedy themselves, they asked Gary to make sure "she was all right." Would he go with the coroner and deputies to tend her body? Although he had never seen a violent death before, Gary agreed. Barbara sighs, "He treated her like a person instead of a crime scene." After Linda's body was removed, John asked, "Do you think she's in heaven?" When Gary answered yes, John said, "Good. Because I don't want to go there if she isn't."
Barbara and John confess that in the midst of their deep sorrow and confusion, they also felt mortified. After all, a member of their family had committed suicide, an act that some think is the unforgivable sin. How would their congregation react? Would anyone care? Could they hold her funeral in the church? Would people understand? Where would she be buried?
Barbara shakes as she tells the story. John puts an arm around the back of her chair, gently supporting his wife. Gary, she tells me, "was amazing," insisting that the family hold the funeral at Saint Mark. To Barbara and John's astonishment, hundreds of people gathered to celebrate Linda's life. There was no gossip, no hints of judgment, and no intimations of blame or shame. Rather, the congregation did everything possible to support and care for the family, especially their son and granddaughter. John said, "I'm ashamed for speaking of how our face was in the dirt, because Saint Mark has picked us up and carried us through all of it in Jesus' name. I believe we have seen Jesus."
At the time, the congregation at Saint Mark had just renovated its building, turning a dilapidated nursery into a chapel. The chapel is airy, marked by a sense of spiritual openness, with glass, white walls, and light-hued wood. Directly opposite the entry is a small pulpit. The wall behind the pulpit is a honeycomb of nooks, a few with elegant pottery, the only decoration in the room.
The first time I saw that chapel, I thought it a creative way to display art--until I looked closer and realized that it is a columbarium. The pottery jars are urns artfully designed to reflect the person whose ashes they hold.
The most beautiful urn is a vibrant sea-blue, encircled by a gold metal sculpture of three swimming dolphins, two adults and a baby. It holds Linda's ashes. "She loved the ocean," John explains. "The dolphins represent their family." Barbara says, "The church president insisted that she be the first person placed in the new columbarium." She continues, "He wouldn't let us pay. He said, 'We know you can afford to pay for it, but if you would like to bury Linda at the church, giving this to you is something we all believe to be a way we can live out Jesus' command to love God and love our neighbor.'" The congregation, she says, "took a tragedy and created redemption."
Across the table, Sarah looks at them with tears in her eyes. "It meant a lot to all of us," she assures them. "If you ever get a notion that you aren't loved around here, someone will correct it." As another woman told me, "Saint Mark has truly become our extended family." (pp. 65-68)
To my mind, there are several amazing parts to this story that bear consideration in our own faith lives. In the first place, it is a sign of wonderful growth and spiritual confidence that this couple shared this story. There are times when we may speak of painful things in our lives because we absolutely need to tell someone; other times we generally shy away from talking about pain (unless we're trying to commiserate with someone else undergoing an ordeal). But this couple openly talks about this painful, and very much spiritually shaping, experience. By sharing this story, this couple not only reminds themselves of the hand of God in their lives, but they tell others.
This is a key reason why I've been focusing on faith stories recently in our church (though, as you'll see below, not the key reason why I share this story with you). The sharing of this stories is transforming for those who tell them and those who hear them. This story is a reminder that sometimes in our dark world, even in the worst times, love can be stronger than fear, and God will embrace us (if only we'll recognize it). But less dramatic (though sometimes no less painful) stories can remind us -- teach us, encourage us -- of the same thing. Which is why we, as people of faith, must learn to speak more openly about our faith. It is essential to our personal growth and the growth of others around us.
But beyond this, I am amazed at the story itself. Suicide is one of the hardest issues for Christians because it challenges us in several ways -- confronting our beliefs about the value of life with our imperative to reach out to others (especially those we know by name) in times of distress and grief; confronting our morality about parental/social responsibility with the needs of those left behind; confronting our need for meaning, or at least rational explanation, of unexpected death with our own ambivalence about the mechanics of someone taking their own life. Some Christians handle this well; but too often, someone -- or lots of someones -- say and do some truly idiotic and almost mean-spirited things.
Instead, we are faced with a congregation that instinctively lives out the commandment to love one another, that understands the responsibilities and the opportunities that being a family of faith entails during the hard times. A pastor that confronts his own fears (being with the body) to support the family; a pastor that insists on having the funeral at the church (without, evidently, a congregational board meeting to discuss the matter -- and if you don't think there are influential people in most churches who would complain about such a thing, you're living in fantasyland). A congregation that supports the family, first by coming to the funeral, but then in other (mostly unnamed) ways, but in one essential named way: "there was no gossip, no hints of judgment, and no intimations of blame or shame."
You can't fake that type of Christian love. In some churches, some people might have faked nice behavior, at least through the funeral, but over time the gossip and the judgement would have come out -- and the family would learn of it, indirectly, unless of course the fellow church member decided to confront them with it directly. (I've heard those stories too, sometimes from people who've left churches after being treated that way.)
Instead, "the congregation took a tragedy and created redemption." They took a destructive situation that could have been made worse if they had acted poorly, and instead acted so well that they made it almost unimaginably better. Two long-time members could have become disenchanted by the church; now they swear by it's power and influence in their lives because they have lived it (and one imagines, continue to live it).
I do not know how Central Christian would react in a similar situation (and, like you, I hope to not find out). I believe we would act nobly and lovingly, that we would be supportive to a fault, as long as we weren't "afraid of intruding" on a "family situation." Though there are always fears that people might act foolishly or poorly -- including the pastor himself.
But putting that aside, I am convinced that we must all have ways that the church has touched our lives powerfully for the better, that we must be, as a congregation, a family of faith -- tethered together in relational bonds. If we're not doing this, or at least working toward this, I'm worried that we're not doing what we should be doing as a congregation to live out the gospel. I believe we are doing this, but it's not just my opinion/belief that counts in this case.
In any case, I pass this story along hoping it will speak to you, causing you to reflect on your faith even as it encourages your faith. As it has spoken to me today.
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