Love and death, death and love.
The two don’t often pair together, nor do they make for the strongest opener to the start of an article. But for some of us, love and death collided in a most obvious way last Wednesday when Valentine’s Day met Ash Wednesday.
Hallmark’s favorite holiday met a day marked by death. As one friend, a Lutheran pastor, wrote on Facebook, “Today I am going to repeatedly call my husband and tell him that I love him, and then remind him that he is going to die.” (To which he replied, “And I will repeatedly send you to voicemail”).1
I sent my boys to school that morning, each with a box full of personalized packaged pretzels to pass out to their classmates. (Am I against heart-shaped candies or handfuls of Hershey’s kisses? Absolutely not. But since I was not in charge of the Target run this year, pretzels became the gift of choice). Around noon that day, I traipsed to a church service marked by the reminder of death. Upon picking up the boys afterschool, my youngest said to me, “Mama, it looks like you have a bit of marker on your face. Or maybe dirt? Were you gardening?”
I guess the ashes on my forehead didn’t mean a whole lot to him. But when I think about last week, I think about the collision of that day — a collision that just feel like it’s limited to that day alone, not when it feels like death is present all around us and the invitation, still, always, is to love.
As I preached at a church in Portland2 this weekend, the whole thing makes me wonder what it means for us to hold both love and death at the same time.
Because, Lent. The Lenten season is often marked by “fasting, both from foods and festivities, and by other acts of penance.”3 We give up chocolate or refrain from alcohol; we stay off social media for 40 days, we refuse to eat meat, we take stairs instead of elevators.4
But as author Debie Thomas5 writes, lent is a time when we realize “our days are limited and that we’ve made a mess of things. The hard truth of lent is thus a blessing because it deconstructs our lies and tells us the truth. Lent helps us live in reality.”6
Is this true? Should we really call it a blessing to deconstruct our lies and be told the truth? What if we don’t want be directed back to reality? What if we want to live in fantasy (or at least in a world of false realities)?
As some readers know, my boys and I spent the long week in Oregon. Although I have not lived there since I left for college, the place is still home to me. A fair amount of Oregonian still pulses through my veins: I don’t use an umbrella when it rains, because, why? I recycle like nobody’s business. I believe boysenberries a far superior berry than any other varietal.
Returning to the state and to her people always comes with a fair amount of warmth, of love, and of feeling like I’m back home in a place that comes without need of explanation.
But it’s also a place that begs me live in reality.
My parents are getting older. I am getting older. The invincibility I once felt as a sixteen-year-old who could do anything and be anything she wanted someday, if she just believed, is now marked by calls to the knee doctor and heating pads for my back. It’s found wondering if I really will make it to the bottom of the tubing hill at Skibowl without so much as a scrape or a concussion.
Perhaps it comes as no mistake that I visit this reality at the start of a season that begs us argue that death should be known — that dares us “remember death,” as Debie writes, in order that we might also affirm life. In order, in other words, to help us live in the present of this life.
Because sometimes, oftentimes, when we’re confronted with our mortality, our desires are reordered. Our focus is narrowed. Whether we like it or not, we’re offered new perspectives …and these perspectives that beg us think about death also offer us new ways to live,7 and consequently, to love.
We say “I love you” more. We drop off a casserole on a doorstep, without so much as being asked. We pick up the phone, without a scheduled invitation to talk. We shift our priorities to “being rather than doing, to giving rather than getting, to friendships rather than accomplishments, to family rather than work.”8
We live, perhaps, as we were supposed to live all along, at the intersection of love and death.
On Sunday morning, before I drove to the little Episcopal church in the Reed neighborhood, I looked over my sermon notes. I grabbed a pen and wrote love > death on my left hand, just like I did in high school when I didn’t want to forget that key thing, that one thing, that main idea.
And I remembered a song I’d sang in middle school:
Set me as a seal upon your heart
As a seal upon your heart
For love is strong as death9
It’s a song straight from Song of Solomon — a song of love, most certainly, but also a song about the tangled nature of love and death.
I sang the chorus from the pulpit that morning, further ushering us into the collision.
Begging us open our eyes to both, now and in the season ahead.
Thanks, Holly and Stephen.
This article comes from part of the sermon preached this last Sunday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent#:~:text=There%20are%20traditionally%2040%20days,are%20enumerated%3B%20see%20above).
I gave up elevators my sophomore year of college, I’ll have you know. I’ll also have you know that I lived on the fourth floor of a dorm, so lugging that heavy, book-filled backpack repeatedly up four flights was somewhat of a big deal to my nineteen year-old self.
Debie’s second book, A Faith of Many Rooms, releases next month. Look forward to getting to know her and her words soon!
Direct quote: https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/3664-the-most-honest-day-of-the-year
Paraphrased paragraph: https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/3664-the-most-honest-day-of-the-year
This is from surgeon Atul Gawande’s book, Being Mortal, which is quoted in the aforementioned essay: https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/3664-the-most-honest-day-of-the-year. Giving credit where credit is due, folks! PS: That book is amazing. Read it if you haven’t already!
Some of you may recall that this is the song I sang to my husband before I walked down the aisle. You can read all about it in The Color of Life!