The Promise of Living

The Promise of Living:  15 June 2021 

Mark scheduled a massage for me. Wonderful man, he offered weeks ago, but I delayed until the beginning of our summer schedule: Mark and our children in Montreat, me in Greenville and joining them on weekends. I knew I’d need to come home to a quiet house. My summer house.  It took a few days of coaxing my topsoil loose before the quiet, the stillnesss, could seep down to my parched roots. I didn’t think I could handle the massage until then. 

I needed to wait until I could cry. 

So many things elicit my tears these days. Mostly sweet things.  

For example: having all three kids with us in Montreat this past weekend. Picking out a surprise mystery supper for them while Mark watched Green Arrow with the young ones and Spencer read on the porch. And the joy, two years since, of food from this restaurant. And in the car before driving the surprise home, the joy of the silver skyline limning the curved mountain ridge-lines; the gratitude for sky and mountains and vista. Gratitude for life, mine and my family’s as well as those acrobatic swallows over the lake and that laughing couple in the tended garden of the reopened restaurant and that boy on the back of his father's bike. The summer humidity and the wind ticking those poplar leaves and the lavish, beautiful ordinariness if it all, now deeply, differently, achingly appreciated. 

Or for Daddy’s tangible legacy to my brothers and me: the Montreat house filled up with family over Memorial Day weekend. My family, my brothers and their families, all able to stay together in the newly expanded house. 

That Saturday we gathered in Montreat’s Memorial Garden for a Service of Witness to the Resurrection and Interment of Ashes of my father. We were surrounded by our extended family. Cousins from all sides and many states—most not seen since before the pandemic, some not seen for years. Most had also been with us fourteen Memorial Day weekends ago for a similar service of interment for my mother’s ashes and a dedication of the Garden, which bears her name. Both times we surrounded each other in love. Three weeks ago, I felt a visceral surrounding, a bodily memory, a remembering. 

We remembered my father during the service and at a glorious porch party afterwards—a grand opening of the newly renovated house.  Saturday morning I’d sketched out a big family tree on the back of some Christmas wrapping paper and laid it on the table inside so everyone could track how they were (or weren’t) related to everyone else. We hugged. And laughed. And remembered. 

The word remember comes from classical Latin; the prefix re (‘back’ or ‘again’) attached to the root word memor (‘mindful’). It is to keep in mind or bring to mind again. We remembered Daddy together. Different stories from different times and places, different perspectives, all with great feeling. One great pandemic loss was not being physically surrounded by friends and family during Daddy’s illness and death. I never felt alone or uncared-for. But I missed the shear physicality of presence. And during that lovely porch party I felt our family’s relief in being able to be physically present, to say the things that needed saying, to witness and receive love and grief.  It is how we heal each other. And it is why we crave community. 

The loss of community has been another great pandemic wound. We have been physically cut off from our community. We have been dismembered. Prefix dis (implying removal or reversal) + membrum (‘limb’). 

And that is, I’m sure, why I’ve cried during both of the first two Montreat summer worship services. To be in Anderson Auditorium with hundreds of other masked worshipers is to be re-membered. Pulled back together as the body of Christ. 

It’s the music that does it. I’m fine until the music. In the first service it was the soaring, piercing piano and violin offering of Aaron Copland’s The Promise of Living. This past Sunday it was How Can I Keep From Singing? Turns out, my tears keep me from singing. I’ve remembered how live music stirs me and the music has re-membered me to myself. The promise of living, indeed. 

The promise of living is also the acceptance of this aging and thickening body. It’s taken a beating this year and has been pushed lower and lower on the priority list while I care for other people’s bodies and souls. But the summer schedule offers rest and the opportunity for better habits. I’m able to sleep more and I’ve restarted my morning workouts now that my knee has mostly recovered from the Mother’s Day fall. 

Though Mark has routinely sought care from chiropractors, I had never been to one. But swelling in my hurt knee, and the twinges of pain in the other, bolstered my interest. Dr. Green took spine and knee X-rays and ‘cracked my bones’ (any other Eddie Izzard fans out there?) back into alignment. With the sore knee she was very solicitous, and she used a small adjusting tool to tap on the outside of my knee. Explaining it afterwards while we looked at the X-ray she said the tap encourages the bone to get back to its normal position. I said, “So the tapping kind of reminds it where it’s supposed to be?” and she said, “Yes! That’s a great way to put it.” Remembering. And re-membering. 

The day after that chiropractic appointment I went to get my massage. 90 whole minutes. Melissa put me right at ease, asked about any trouble areas (right knee and always my neck and shoulders are tense), asked whether I would be interested in cupping therapy (sure), made sure the room temperature was okay (perfect). She dimmed the lights and left so that I could get undressed and on to the table. She came back, checked the music, opened some lavender-scented oil, and began. On the few occasions I’ve had massages before I’ve wanted to connect with the masseuse/masseur. This time, after a few cordial sentences, I stopped. I wanted to allow myself to feel. 

I doubt it was six minutes before the first tears came. First just the overwhelming gift of touch—touch given to sooth and heal, with nothing needed in return. But soon enough her knowledgeable masseuse fingers were smoothing out knotted muscles and releasing tension long-since repressed. It’s been hard this year to find time and space to feel my own feelings. The tears came steadily for awhile, so much so that I felt the need to explain. “I like everything you’re doing and it’s perfect…just..there’s a lot of stress. And grief.” She calmly said, “It happens all the time. There are tissues if you want them.” 

Sometimes I knew when the tears would come, sometimes I was surprised at where I was holding tension. Sometimes specific images leapt to mind. An afternoon cross-legged on the bottom of Dad’s bed trying to describe what ‘mansplaining’ is and how often I (and every other woman I know) encounters it. Jack confiding his decision to be friends with Emma instead of pushing her away. Mark fighting down pain and despair and anger over and over again. Sitting with a friend who’d lost his job. Sitting with a black friend who said, “That could have been me” after watching George Floyd’s murder. And sitting with a white friend who just didn’t get what the fuss was all about. Baby owls in our back yard Beech. My hand on Daddy’s forehead while he died, and the moments afterwards, being the only one who knew he was gone. The sound of the creek from the Montreat porch. Emma still wanting to sit in my lap. 

Such grief, and such beauty, this life demands of us. How much we rely on other people’s hands. 

I was grateful to come home to the still, quiet summer house. Both comforted and vulnerable. Remembering and remembered. Ready for sleep and a new day of service. 

We are called to a great and difficult post-pandemic task: to remember. To re-member our bodies.  Our physical families, our bodies of work, the body politic. The body of Christ, broken for us, draws us together around a single table. Binds us together so that, together, we may remember what God calls us—individually and corporately—to be. May we help each other remember what that is.