Words from The Crone

In the past several months there have been a plethora (if that’s a good word to use) of deaths among my friends and colleagues. I have been to some of their funerals, but others not, depending on my closeness to the deceased and the family. Over the years I have conducted many funerals, but lately I’ve been thinking about my first funeral.

I was in seminary and was not yet ordained. However, as a member of the Capital Yacht Club, I was designated their Chaplain and said many prayers and held several yachting related services for them such as at Thanksgiving. So, I guess it was natural that they asked me to conduct a funeral service for one of the members.

The deceased had been missing for perhaps about a week before the body was found floating under one of the docks. The family was quite upset, as one would expect, at such a completely unexpected sort of death. Drowning, that is. No one considered it suicide or homicide, just a very unfortunate accident. Alcohol was not involved it seemed, just a fall into the water off a dock, hitting the head and then the subsequent drowning. The deceased was a live-aboard at the Yacht club.

The burial was to be “at sea,” or at least in the Potomac River. The body was prepared for burial in a proper container. The owner of a boat volunteered to take the grieving family, the body, and myself out on the river for the committal service. It was a gray and misty day. One of those days you see in the movies, very suitable for a funeral.

Being as how this was my first burial, and one at sea at that, I was rather nervous. I put on my surplice and cassock (which I used at my field education church), grabbed my prayer book, and boarded the boat. The Rite for Burial was in the prayer book, so it was really just a matter of reading the service. The family boarded the boat with a large pack of rose petals to scatter as the body was committed to the sea.

We reached an appropriate cove for the service and committal. I opened my prayer book and recited the burial office with appropriate prayers and committed the body to the sea. The captain of the boat ceremoniously and reverently threw the container containing the body overboard and, presumably down into the deep. The family in tears began throwing rose petals into the water. Well, the box floated and did not sink. Oh, my, God, I thought, now what should we do? The captain retrieved the box while I conferred with the family.

It was decided that we should open the box and throw the remains overboard since it was obvious the box, even though weighted with concrete blocks, was not going to sink. And, so that is what we did. We opened the box, took out the remains which were in a plastic bag, and after saying an additional prayer, committed them one more time into the river. The family wept some more and threw the remaining rose petals into the water. I was relieved that the remains sunk immediately!

With the empty box and a weeping family we motored back to the Yacht Club, and I prayed that I would never again have to deal with such as disaster of a burial again. Who knew that the damn container would float? Really. However, as we docked and headed our ways, the family thanked me profusely for giving their beloved cat, Casper, a proper burial at sea.

Messenger. That’s what Apostolous means in Greek and what the later church patriarchs called those first 12 men (no ladies please) Jesus called to follow him. I think we missed the message of the messenger. Our sermons are filled with images of following Jesus. Crowds followed him around the countryside, parables talked of sheep following the shepherd, men and women followed him seeking healing. Following, following.

Messenger however, is not about following. It is about delivering. Here’s a letter, go deliver it to the lady down the street. Here’s my Fedex package, please deliver it to the store in the next town. Amazon.com delivers the goods we purchase. Our President delivers his State of the Union address. People deliver sermons or gifts or help. Jesus delivered his message and those 12 men he called were not asked to follow him around like little puppy dogs or sheep. No, they were asked to listen to him and then deliver his message to others. Jesus said, “Feed my sheep.” Sheep being his peeps. Sheep being those peeps who were out there needing help. Those on the edge, the marginalized, the shunned, the forsaken, you might even know them as “Those people.” And, we all know what that means. Feed my peeps the message. Be my messengers.

The message we are missing, and the messengers we are not, is that there are a lot of peeps out there in a whole lot of hurt. The hurt of homelessness, the hurt of joblessness, the hurt of grief, the hurt of depression, the hurt of poverty, the hurt of hunger, the hurt of torture, the hurt of only God knows what. Jesus’ message is simply this: Help them. Feed them. Visit them. Heal them. Find them justice. Forgive them. Give them mercy. Love them. Bring them peace.

The National Geographic Magazine just featured a story on the Apostle’s journeys. It was a great article and traced the steps of those Apostles as they carried the message to places far flung from Nazareth. They got it, finally. Many of us haven’t. We sit in the pews Sunday after Sunday looking for some elusive spiritual experience and it never comes. Or we meditate in candlelit churches or corners or nooks and wait for that spiritual presence of God to wash over us and bring us into some ethereal experience. Ain’t gonna happen. Oh, sure meditation and silence is good to “Listen” for the message from God. But, most folks aren’t listening, they are just waiting for some mystical physical feeling to take hold. Better to study the scriptures and let those words soak into your psyche until you know how to deliver Jesus message.

If we are truly messengers, we won’t simply go around mouthing those words, we will BE those words. We will walk the walk of Jesus. We won’t just sit in church or go to a potluck supper or chair a fundraiser thinking we are following Jesus. We will BE Jesus in the world, we will deliver his message in person, face-to-face, get our hands dirty, speak up, speak out, be an advocate, be a voice for those who have no voice, and really BE the messenger who IS the message. Then we can truly call ourselves, Apostolous!

I have a very blessed life, but the one thing I am missing is a fireplace. I love fireplaces and I haven’t had one in seven years and, well, I just can’t stand it any longer. So, God help me, we are getting quotes to install a fireplace in our little townhome.

My darling daughter number two, K, decided that before we put in a big boxy fireplace, we needed a mock-up of one made out of cardboard boxes. That way we could see how much bulk our great room could handle, and if, in fact, we wanted to go forth into the realm of fireplacehood.

We gathered a big box and a couple of little boxes and set off to make our mock fireplace. Working with those boxes got me to pondering. Pondering about the boxes women have been put into, and suffered through, for years. No, not just years, forever of years going back to our beginnings. And, boxes that many of us have dragged ourselves out of into some semblance of sanity.

There are numerous notable women who either grew up and crawled out of her box, or were never in a box to begin with. Those women are the ones we hear about in the media, in books, and on TV talk shows. But in comparison to the vast number of women in boxes over the eons of time humans have walked this earth, those notable women are but a drop of water on the outside corner of a box. Millions upon millions of young, young girls, up through women gray of hair, long of tooth, and full of wisdom are still in a box. Some boxes we make for ourselves out of our fears or insecurities. Other folks often put us in boxes we’d rather not inhabit, like when women couldn’t vote, or women could only be nurses or teachers. But more often than we wish to imagine in our wildest dreams, it is a box of longing and suffering. Longing to be out of the box, and suffering within the box without hope of ever getting out. And, in my humble opinion, the worst box for any woman is the box of domestic or partner abuse.

Some may say the box of rape is worse, or the box of discrimination in the workplace, or the box of lower salaries. I say it is the box of domestic or partner abuse because it is a box we can’t easily walk away from into some utopian world in our mind. Often we can’t walk away because our partner is stronger and bigger than we and intimidates us at every turn. They beat us when we displease them. They sexually rape us sometimes daily, surely several times weekly. Saying no to these partners only seems to fuel the fire of abuse in their belly. They verbally abuse us, denigrating us with terms such as “Bitch,” “Whore,” “Stupid,” “Idiot,” and a litany of other such abusive names. They take away our dignity and self-esteem until we often believe all of it is true and worse yet, we are to blame. It is a big box we are in with steep sides and no ladders to climb out on.

The statistics are staggering. Did you know that every day four women die as a result of physical abuse? In real numbers that is 1,460 women a year. In 2008 the Bureau of Justice statistics report that females aged 12 or older experienced about 552,000 non-fatal violent victimization? On average, according to the Center for Disease Control survey on domestic and sexual violence, “24 people per minute are the victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States.” That’s 12.6 million people a year! Furthermore, over 1 million women are raped in a year and 6 million women and men are the victims of stalking. Staggering numbers by anyone’s count.

This is one helluva big box and those are only the ones we know about and the ones in the United States. Those are only the ones reported. I know my abuse was never reported nor was the abuse my mother-in-law suffered for almost 50 years. How many millions more women are in this box of domestic or partner abuse, screaming on the inside, bearing it on the outside, longing for the fresh freedom of sanity and safety. A world where there is no more pain or suffering. Remember, those numbers are only our United States statistics and only for partner violence. There is a much larger world of violence and abuse against women out there.

What about the rest of the world? A world where we know that women are devalued to a greater extent than here in America and suffer unbelievable pain at the hands of men and their laws. A world in which women are stoned to death for adultery or suffer genital mutilation where girls, babies actually, often die from the procedure. A place like Kabul where a young woman who was serving a sentence for adultery after being raped by a relative was forced to marry her rapist in order to get out of jail. Shameful. I imagine those broader geographic numbers and crimes against women would be so overwhelmingly unimaginable that they would turn our stomachs inside out until we vomited blood.

There is a glimmer of hope, however, here in the states. The Bureau of Justice statistics states that the rate of intimate partner victimization against females declined 53 percent between 1993 and 2008. That is a significant decline. What this says to me is that either less women are reporting abuse, which I doubt, or there is a real decline due to education and outlets/programs for women to turn to when they finally crawl over the edge of that box and seek help. We need more of these avenues of help because 47 percent is still too high a number and too high a price for a woman to pay just for being born female.

Boxes are not all cardboard in which to make fake fireplaces, but intangible walls around women strangling and killing them. They need to be torn down, broken up, and thrown away so that women never have to fear for their life or lose themselves in the sewage of a raging partner ever again.