A
Reflection for II Lent All
Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N C
February 25, 2018 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Question: How were the
stories about your heritage told?
Bedtime
Stories
When I was a child, my Father would tuck us into bed
and sing songs and tell stories as a way to calm us down and help us to go to
sleep. Sometimes the songs were not all that helpful as my Father had a
lifelong fascination with trains and he would sing The Wreck of Ol’ 97: “Oh that brave engineer that run ol’ 97, Is lyin in old
Danville dead. Cos he was going down a grade making 90 miles an hour, The
whistle broke into a scream. He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle, Scalded to death by the steam.”
Going to sleep with
images of scalding to death was not always guaranteed to put us to rest, but
the images of Steve, “that brave engineer getting his orders in Monroe Virginia,
way behind time, and had to get ol’ 97 to Spenser on time” as the hero who gave
his life to follow a code of being faithful was the point of the song. The song
was a way of passing on his values to the next generation.
The stories he told
were also of passing on the values of the “who” we were, in the line of the
people who had come before us. He told stories of how his father had gone to
far-away nations to build projects helping peoples of those lands, of his
leaving school early to stow away on a troop ship to Puerto Rico to string
telegraph wires, and about he went back and put himself through Johns Hopkins
for an engineering degree. When he would talk of his father, whom he idolized,
his face would beam with pride of being the son of such a man. My Father wanted
to live his life so that his children would have no cause for shame in being a
Wilson.
The legends were passed
on from back in history with reminders that we were descended from Robert the
Bruce of Scotland, who suffered defeat after defeat against the invading
English, until he finally triumphed. How we were really genetically related to
Robert the Bruce was left in the mists of legend, but the facts were not the
point; the deeper truth was what was important. The stories always seemed to
hold on to a theme that being a Wilson meant that life had meaning; it could be
rough but no one promised it being easy.
He would tell stories
of when he met my mother and how he treated her with respect and awe as he had
been taught to do by his mother and sister and how we should always treat women
with respect. He told us stories of working hard and keeping his word. He told
us stories of when we were born and how thankful he was to have us to pass on
what it meant to be a Wilson in this new world that we were experiencing. We
always wanted to have him tell stories of his wartime experiences, but he
pointed out that only those who were safe stateside and politicians talked
about the glories of war. For him, he was only fulfilling his obligation to the
country he loved, and he expected us to follow his example.
Stories and songs about
lives lived are the way we pass on our values. Today we started off the service
with a listing of the law of the Ten Commandments. The problem is that legal
documents have a habit of containing lots of regulations to explain, terms to
parse, and loopholes to find. We are fond of laws we do not so much break but
rather bend. For instance, the sign says “50 miles an hour speed limit”, but on
the Outer Banks, woe to the cars on 158 or 64 who only do 50 when there are no
police around because we expect a certain amount of grace above the speed
limits and we are annoyed when that grace is overlooked. Stories and songs go
deeper into our identity than laws so that we can live into being true to
ourselves. The Bible is not a law book but a collection of stories and songs
about our ancestors who passed on these stories and songs in the hopes that we
would be reminded of the purpose of life.
The Genesis story ties in
the purpose of life with names. Abram, which means “Father who is exalted” and
Abraham is “Father who is really exalted”. The names tell you that we are
entering into mythic territory where the purpose of the story is not about
reciting facts but telling the deeper truth of what it means to pass on
heritage.
The Song of the Psalm for
today is a song of remembering how God is always with each of us even when we
forget from time to time. God remembers the poor; as we should. God keeps the
divine promises, as we should keep the vows we make.
Paul writes the letter
to the Romans to remind the people of the church in Rome to be faithful so he
tells them the story of Abraham who remained faithful over the decades,
following God without getting the payoff.
In the Gospel portion
for today, Mark has Jesus telling his disciples that following him will not be
easy; faithful life is tough for it is about getting rid of our own selfish
agendas. This story was kept because the reality of life for Jesus and his
followers was to enter into the brokenness of the world by giving self away.
The point of a deeper life of meaning is not about an existence of getting but
a life of giving.
When I read the Bible or
hear stories that people tell or watch movies, I am interested in what the
deeper truth is that formed the story to begin with. Why was this story told
and in this way? There are a lot of ways to waste time, and meaningless
chatter sucks the energy out of living the much-too-short lives we have.
Every day before I go to sleep, I go through
remembrances of the stories that I have heard and seen that day which inform my
prayers of thanksgiving or intercession. The world is full of bedtime stories
all being told. This last week a friend in this church sent me the story of a
man sharing how he was the legal owner of an assault rifle who made a decision
to destroy that weapon so at least this gun could never be used to kill a child
by accident of design. This last week, parents in Florida had to tell the
surviving students bedtime stories to pass on wisdom for the days to come.
There are refugee parents in Bangladesh tucking their hungry children under the
covers and telling them stories of home and hope. Closer to home, there are grown
children telling their older parents bedtime stories to remind them of who they
were when they told stories. There are spouses who share bedtime stories to
remind themselves that each of them is not alone, and if they do end up alone,
they remember the stories. There are homeless friends here on the Outer Banks
who tell themselves the stories they wished they could hear again or share with
others.
There are stories that use so many different
languages and many that are said without words. I think of an abandoned dog on
the Indiana Turnpike that my father brought home sixty-five years ago when we
were children and named him Rex. I wonder what kind of stories he told himself
before and after he lived with us, for we did tell him stories and he looked as
if he was understanding them. Decades later, at my daughter’s bedside, I would
tell her about Rex and the love he shared and gave.
Right now there is a pod of dolphins off this beach telling
a story of what it means to have life as they share the poems of the currents
of their lives. Right now there is probably a three-toed sloth hanging upside
down in a tree in the Amazon River Basin who is remembering the song of the
planet. Right now there is a three-celled bacterial organism on the surface of
an asteroid, close to the third moon of the fifteenth planet of a dwarf star's
solar system in a cluster so many billions of miles away that the light has yet
to show up in our sky who is hearing the song of the universe.
There is really only one core story, one song, one
poet, and we are telling or hearing variations of that loving story told by the
one we call names like Our Father, the Womb from which we came, the Word spoken,
or whatever name we use, reminding us of who we are.
What story do you hear? What story is your life
telling?
Bedtime Stories
Now
in bed, before we pray, tell us a story
of
men who say “honestly” before they lie.
then
warn “Don’t do that before you die!”,
But
tell us the story with plenty of glory
of
times when our ancestors did up stood
against
tyrants of many breeds and types
with
or without uniform, insignia stripes,
that
we should do this whenere we could.
Tell
us the story of your father’s derring-do.
Tell
us a story of when you fell at the dance
in
love with our mother at that first glance,
or
when we’re born, you shed a tear or two.
Blankets
comes up after all the blessing prayer,
to
grow into new stories for our kids to share.
No comments:
Post a Comment