As I get near to the end of my time at Bloor Street, I find my mind going back over 32 years of ministry, and before that, several years of being a student minister, and I remembered this song (Angel from Montgomery by John Prine) as a tremendous gift to me.  I came across it when I was about 30.

You have to know that when you’re 30, it’s hard to know what your older parishioners are going through.  When I was 30, I still had a full head of hair!  I still had all my teeth.  I didn’t have to work so damn hard to fit into a 34” waist pair of pants!  I generally, and maybe foolishly, liked what I saw in the morning when I went to shave.  So, it was really hard to understand the pathos of loss, that so many older parishioners are familiar with, when you’re a young minister.

So, this song, written by John Prine; who wasn’t so old when he wrote it, seemed to capture the pathos, even the Thanatos of what so many older parishioners were going through and helped me be more empathetic to them, and now, I am sorry to say, I get it, but, some of these lines:

Make me an angel

that flies from Montgomery.

It resonated with the parishioners I had who said, I’m just ready to go.  I’ve had my good innings.

Just give me one thing

that I can hold on to

to believe in this livin’

is just a hard way to go.

I think the first time I really got that verse – to believe in this livin’ is just a hard way to go – was during my divorce.  The next time I think I felt it to the depth of my soul was the night Donald Trump got elected, and others in-between.

But that was a long time,

and no matter how I tried,

the years just flowed by

like a broken down dam. 

And as I went through my memories of parishioners, I came to realize that not just in terms of empathizing with their suffering, but in terms of encounter with their spirits, all of the parishioners through those years, who had a deep and lasting impact on me, were old.  All of them.  And I started out as a minister when there was lots of young people in churches, and I had fun with a lot of them and some of them are still friends, but all of the ones who made deep and lasting impact, were old, and some have just died.

One was a guy named Lewis.  He was in my settlement charge in outport Newfoundland and Lewis just cast a kind of mischievous light.

My strongest memory of Lewis was the day he had called me and said, “Hey boy, you wanna go huntin’ for moose?”  And I said, “Sure!”  So, we arranged for a day in January – cold day – and he calls me on the day for going hunting and he says, “Look, my truck’s not workin’ well.  Julie’s gotta take it into the dealership.  Can we take your car?”  And we go off, and we shoot a moose and quarter it, and we’re walking back when a helicopter flies above and he grabs me and throws me under a tree and jumps under with me!  And I thought, what the heck is going on?  He points to the sky, and I said, “Lewis, do you have a license for the moose we just shot?”; if there are any police officers watching today, Lewis has passed away, you cannot get him.  And as I’m rising from under the tree, I realize this is what Lewis has done:  if you get caught jacking a moose, you lose everything, including the car that you drove there in.  So, I turn on him and I say, “Lewis!”  And he says, “They’ll never take the pastor’s car boy.”

So, we walked out covered with (moose) blood and the Mounties are sitting there behind my car.  Luckily the Mountie was a young Francophone, whom I had befriended, and he gave me a series of words that I will not repeat, and he drove off and nothing was ever said again.

This had followed on the previous Christmas; Lewis’s daughter, who was off studying theology at a Master’s level, had come home for Christmas, and we’d kind of become chums, and she said, “Why don’t we do something for New Year’s Eve?”  So, we went out and we were out quite late.  So, I get to bed about 3 or 4 am and then I get a call about 7 am from Lewis, and he says, “Can you come over and help me with something?”

So, I go over, and he has me climb a ladder and shovel the snow off the top of his barn, which was quite high, and I got the message.  You could go for a fall buddy.  He didn’t say anything, he didn’t make me lose face, he didn’t get angry at me.  He, in his own gentle way, was saying to me, there are consequences if you don’t treat my daughter well.  He cast a kind of mischievous light.

There was another person in my Halifax pastoral charge who cast a different kind of light.  Her name was Mary.  Actually, I met her husband George first, and the day I met him, he was casting darkness.  George had been a VP of a big bank, and he was one of those tough businessmen, you know, who had developed a kind of crusty strength.  Inside, there was marshmallow, but I didn’t meet the marshmallow that day.  He was my first pastoral visit in Halifax.  He had just had knee surgery that day and he was sitting in the bed, and he had one of those machines that just moves the knee – anybody remember those?  I don’t think they use them anymore.

So, I go in, and he says (in a gruff voice), “Who are you?”  And I said, “Oh George, I’m your new minister.”  “Oh yeah, what’s your name?”  Somebody had sent me to see him.  He says, “Well, tell me where you been and what you’re doing.”  So, I started telling him and he just doesn’t listen.  He looks up at me and he says, “You got any puppets?”  I said, “Puppets?  No.  Why?  Did the last guy have a puppet?”  He says, “Yeah, Priscilla the freakin’ pig!  I never wanna see a puppet again!”

So, I was a little intimidated by George until I met him with Mary, his wife.  And all of a sudden, all the marshmallow was coming out of George, and I understood why.  Mary didn’t go to my narrative groups.  She didn’t go to the spiritual practice, or some prayer groups.  She didn’t go on pilgrimages.  She didn’t work that hard at being a good Christian, she just had come into the world, seemingly, with this lovely light and she cast it.  Take a moment and think about people you’ve known who just cast a certain kind of light.  I see some heads nodding.

I had a mentor, who I talk about a lot, when he walked into a room, the room would start to crackle with his presence, like an electric presence.

Chuck and I both befriended a lovely woman named Dr. Pam Brown who cast this soft light, and who has joined the saints, like all the people I’ve talked about so far.  I have to say Chuck, you cast a little bit of that same light.  I see it in you – maybe she rubbed off on you or maybe that’s just why you liked each other.

The most beautiful moment I saw with Mary and George was when Mary was in the palliative care ward dying, and her cancer had spread to her liver and she had that bright, yellow skin colour that you get when you have liver disease.  And I’m sitting there – and I sat there (for) multiple visits for hours – and I’ll be damned but she continued to cast that same blue/green light that she always cast, even though her skin was bright yellow, and that was the best I ever saw George.  The love, the care, the softness that he expressed as he held her through those weeks, George’s light was shining bright and I knew that when Mary died, George was going to be devastated.

I really wanted to do a good job at the funeral, and I was struggling that morning trying to figure out what to say.  It was winter, and it was cold, but I went for a run just trying to get some inspiration.  It was a bright, sunny day with that cold snow that sounds like styrofoam under your feet and the crystals of ice, and there’s one point I just rounded a corner and there was this field of that snow, and the light was reflecting Mary’s blue/green colour in the whole field of snow, and I just stopped and started to smile because I knew that Mary and God were going to be with us and the service was going to be just fine.

I think there’s a reason why all the people who’ve had that really deep effect on me were in the second half of life.

Richard Rohr talks about it in his book, Falling Upward, which should be required reading for everybody in the second half of life and maybe the first, too.  He talks about two halves of life:

The first half of life is to create a proper container for one’s life and answer the first essential questions:  What makes me significant?  How can I support myself?  And who will go with me? 

The task of the second half of life is quite simply to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.  As Mary Oliver puts it, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?  In other words, the container is not an end to itself but exists for the sake of your deeper and fullest life which you largely do not know about yourself.  Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never throw their nets into the deep.

This is why I asked Nenke to read those two passages from Genesis.  Over and over again, the scriptures tell us that God used old people for the great and heroic journeys that would not only transform them, but their whole community.  It wasn’t when they were young and strong, it was when the container of the first half of their life was built solidly enough for them to be able to let it go, and with trust, live into those ephemeral contents within it.

Besides Noah and Abraham and Sarah, we could talk about Moses, who was probably 80 when he ran into the burning bush!  He had established his life.  They had established their lives.  They knew who they were and where they were.  They were settled in, and their egos were strong enough, and their sense of self was strong enough, and their values were strong enough, and they’d been through enough hardships so that the container of their lives were strong enough for them to surrender it and to step into risk and journey and something deeper.

Dr. Pam Brown, whom I talked about, did this.  She was an anesthesiologist and one day she was standing at the head of a patient, and she said to herself, I’m finished with standing at the head of unconscious people, taking instructions from men, surgeons, who are not unknown to exhibit arrogance on occasion.  She walked away, she re-trained, she opened the first sexual health clinic in Halifax for women and then was there, ready, when the AIDS epidemic hit, and she was selected to be the lead medical person that worked with the United Church on the examination of the question of the ordination of gays and lesbians, on which we voted in 1988.  Now, if I travel the country from coast to coast to coast, I meet people who say Dr. Pam Brown changed my life.

She had the container!  Her husband was a doctor, she was a doctor, they’re both well established, it was all there and then she got the call, and she walked away and risked everything vocationally, and literally thousands of lives were changed because of it.

Friends, in our culture and in our churches, it is a doubly difficult task to accept this truth.  For one reason, we live in the first culture in the history of the world that values youth way over elderhood.  The messaging over and over and over and over again is be young, don’t age, don’t die, stay young as long as you possibly can.  As those messages have advanced, the attention to and the wisdom that attends to the second half of life’s tasks, has started to be ignored or even scorned at.   When people step out of their containers to just explore what’s inside them, we think that’s foolish in our culture.

The second reason it’s really hard in this time is that our churches are filled with people in the second half of their lives whose churchwork is being dominated by first half tasks!  Keeping the money sorted out is a first half of life task.  Redeveloping your property and designing it and building it is a first half of life task.  And if you don’t do it, and you don’t do it well, then everything falls apart.  The problem is, we’re old, most of us!  Our inner depths want to be focused on second half of life tasks, and when we get pulled into always attending the first half of life tasks, then the pathos, the Thanatos that we hear about in Angel from Montgomery starts to advance and we either become depressed or cranky or bitter, and this expresses itself in endless church meetings, and endless encounters.  It’s a dilemma but I also think that one of the reasons why we don’t attend to second half of life tasks is because we stop believing that something follows the second half of life.

The passage that Nenke read from Mark is all about that.  This woman sees Jesus.  She sees his light:  I don’t know if it was blue/green like Mary’s, or if it was mischievous like Lewis’s or if it was soft and gentle like Pam’s and Chuck’s but she sees his light and she knows it’s about to be poured out in his death.  So, she anoints him for his death because she knows his death is not the end of the story!  He’s about to be poured out into something, just like Mary’s light was poured out into that field of snow.

The disciples want to stay on first half of life tasks.  Hold on, you’re spending all your money on this?  We should be out there taking care of poverty.

I’m not saying it’s a bad task, I’m not saying missions to reduce poverty or building buildings or doing stewardship in the church are bad tasks – you can’t do second half of life till you do first half well, but they don’t get it, but she does.  And she knows he’s going to go through a passage and he’s going to be emptied out and that he will live.

We finish with one more reference to a parishioner.  I did a funeral for a theoretical particle physicist named Don, and when I was preparing for his funeral – Don had been cremated – and it struck me that Don spent his whole adulthood studying particles and he was particles and they were off floating in the air around the whole planet, entering into chemical reactions with the places where they landed and being part of the renewal of life.  And I realized what happens to Don physically, happens to us psychically as well.

Not only was Don, who had a long battle with Alzheimer’s, released physically from his body, he was released from being encapsulated in one body, in one place and one time with a lot of plaque in his brain.  Don was now the young man falling in love, and the young, intelligent man doing his PhD in physics, and the broken man going through a divorce, and the middle-aged man falling in love for the second time, and then the elder who was drawn out of doing research into being a Dean.  And all of those Dons are alive all of the time  because it’s just as (William) Faulkner said, THE PAST ISN’T DEAD, IT ISN’T EVEN PAST!

As we end this church year, the invitation is to step into the second half of our lives and into the truth of the resurrection, the crucifixion and resurrection, which is that the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past, none of us is ever lost – it’s just lost for a time, if we’re not willing to surrender the containers.

God bless you on your journeys through the first half of life, through the second half of life, and into the life beyond.  Amen.