a reflection on the river home

A Homily for the 11^th Annual Dare Hospice Memorial Service         Roanoke Island Festival Park December 9, 2012                                                                                    Thomas E. Wilson, Chaplain

We come together to re-member those whom we have loved and known. To remember does not just mean to go through a mental exercise like remembering the capital of South Dakota; but to call to our present moment a loved and important member of our lives. To re-member is to have time and space collapse on each other and to connect the member again with us one more time.

There is a book of stories by Ray Bradbury called Dandelion Wine about a summer in 1928.  In one chapter the young boys in this small town go to an old man’s house where he is a human time machine and he tells stories of his youth in the Civil War and the Old West, and as he tells the stories they hear the yelps of the coyotes, they smell the buffalo, they see the Indians and taste the dust from their ponies. When the old man dies, the buffalo start to disappear.  To remember means to place within the present stream of continuing memory of those we love as they live within us.

 My metaphor for life and death has been influenced by living close to water. When I was growing up in upstate New York, I lived on the banks of the Chenango River. Friends and I would swim and paddle around in it. The big adventures would be to canoe up river six miles and come to where the Tioughnioga River emptied into it, or canoe downstream about six miles where the combined rivers would empty into the Susquehanna. My dream, which I never found time to do, was to one day canoe down the Susquehanna, through Pennsylvania into Maryland where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, and then follow that Bay to the Atlantic.  I took the easy way out and have driven those roads by the rivers often. I am no longer young, but I have ended up close to my destination at the intersection of waters returning to the sea.

I see life and death as part of a continuous stream of energy, the water of life that begins in the heart of God. My experience helps me resonate with the visions of the Prophet Ezekiel and the writer of the New Testament Book of Revelation of the River of the Waters of Life flowing from the Throne of God. 

We begin in the overflowing heart of God which allows our ancestors to be carried by love, and from their love we flow into the waters of the womb of a fellow swimmer in the waters of life. When the time comes for waters of the swimmer’s womb to break, we flow with all others and, as the old Gospel song states, “gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river”. This River of Love flows to the sea and returns to the heart of God. We are moistened by the one current in different streams of experience. On our journey, we are helped by other swimmers as they teach us to love and to read and have awe for the River. Others may hinder us. Relationships are formed but the river continues to flow, and as the ancient Greek Philosopher, Heraclites, reminds, we “cannot step in the same river twice.” The River changes and we change; we do not have the power to not remain static in one place as everything changes. If we are lucky, we will thankfully hold on to memories of our time together. If we are lucky, we will allow the river’s forgiving cleansing to wash away all the debris from our memories that gets in the way of thankfulness. For the River changes and we change. Others will reach the great sea before we do, and we may want to hold on to them, but the river moves us and them, and we all empty into the sea where we flow back to the heart of God.

Today at the Intersection of the waters, I think of the people I knew who I carry still in my soul. I carry my father, the one who taught me how to canoe, and who entered the great sea 47 years ago. I carry my brother, with whom I paddled many miles before he returned to the place of the beginning.  I remember and treasure friends. I carry and continue to work on forgiving those I need to set free and turn them over to the power greater than myself, to give myself the strength to treasure and forgive so I may swim graciously uninhibited.

Courtney read a poem by Brandy Gregory, Our Homes, about how our homes are both far away and in our hearts at the same time. I am reminded of another poem by T. S. Eliot, at the end of East Coker, from Four Quartets.

St Michael and All Angels’ Church in East Coker, where the ashes of poet TS Eliot are buried.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

There is a time for the evening under starlight,

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

May we honor. May we remember.