Life

Being a minister in the world is a strange thing.  This week, I have written a Baby Blessing for my baby cousin, a Memorial Service for my Uncle, and a Wedding for a wonderful couple I met only a few days ago.  As a minister, the grand events of life get juxtaposed in such a way that it can sometimes leave you speechless.  What can you say to a child newly born, after writing a memorial for a man that died too young? It's hard to honor life as your life's work.  How can there be professional distance when I am so implicated in all of it? There is always a part of a minister that gets married along with every couple, is reborn with every baby blessing, and comes to rest beside every casket. And so, this blog, although it is a professional blog, will also be personal.  I celebrate and mourn with you. I walk with you, by your side.

Today I took my cat, Winter, out for some sun. And I took the baby blessing I was working on and sat with the intention of convincing a little baby that this world was the place to be. I wanted to tell her that this world is endlessly beautiful, and I believe it is, a lot of the time.  And I wanted to tell her she would be surrounded by love all the days of her life. And God, I hope so. And this is how it goes, I write a sentence then pray for it to be true.

Just then I saw my little cat dart out of sight. I run over and find her furiously searching for something. Finally she catches some desperately squeaking thing in her teeth. I come to the center of my being, a kind of deep clarity comes over me, I feel I am witnessing some moment outside of speech and time- the moment that something dies. The moment that God plays out God's plan, or acts out Her own dark nature.  The moment that a dark natural thing forcibly stops you from ignoring or forgetting its presence. And my cat seems to swagger or sashay, expressing her primal instinct to be proud of a freshly bleeding thing between her teeth. And I feel some kind of wisdom in it,  in her so called senseless hunt. A wisdom that doesn't make sense to me but feels unquestionably true and therefore leaves me silent.  There is wisdom in ferocity. I can't always understand, but I know when to be silent. I know when something vast and sacred is seeping out of a little furry thing now lying on the pavement. I know there is nothing to do but witness and wait.  For a moment, I thought myself a hero, I thought myself very noble and considered ending its suffering. Me, the vegetarian, considering offering a lethal blow to what looked like an adorable little pointy nosed mouse. (Google, God(dess)'s manifestation of her all-knowingness, tells me it was a baby mole.) Me, Carri, Carolyn, Rev. Carolyn, the one who just yesterday, for the first time in her life, made an attempt to wack a bug, (a mosquito that has been feeding on her nightly), but intentionally missed, then promptly felt bad about even considering the venture and apologized to the  alive and well bug  intermittently for the succeeding half hour. So it was this courageous huntress who was consider finishing the job. After spinning around in place a few times, it became apparent that I was not the kind of person who "handled things" as the mosquito in my room can attest. And I decided instead, I was the kind of person who witnessed and honored and prayed,which I suspect is why I became a minister, rather than a marine. So I stretched out my hands over the little animal in the place that my cat had laid it. And I started offering it reiki energy. If I could not facilitate its healing, I prayed to facilitate its peaceful passing. Shortly, the little heaves of dying stopped and the sweet little one came to rest, as my cat and I looked on with reverence.   My cat understood the game had ended, and regarded its ending with watchful and gentle silence.  There is something primal about honoring death.  So there laid this little baby animal, at rest. And I took my cat indoors, and I was still confused by how she could hold such gentleness and sweetness beside her senseless violence.

And so, in the middle of writing a Baby Blessing, I paused to create a funeral.  I dug a hole beneath a tree, and laid the body down in it. I directed divine light to it, and cried, and prayed that it felt peace and love, and cried, and recited a poem from memory and cried. There is never a last final perfect thing to say.  There is nothing one could say that would make one ready to cover over a little grave. So I cobbled together some feeble, well-intended words and resigned myself to the smallness of myself in the vastness of the thing that just happened and keeps happening, everywhere. As a minister, sometimes I feel like I am throwing words into vast dark spaces, as if the spaces are listening, as if I can make them brighter with my speaking. The truth is, there isn't anything I could have said that was more true and more loving than the attentive silence I offered at the moment of its passing. Attentive silence means so much. So I covered over the little grave and placed a freshly cut flower on it. I believe in marking the place, I believe in saying, the body of a once living thing rests here, no matter how small it is. I believe in honoring life.

And so I come indoors, and finish writing a baby blessing. Telling a baby about the beauty of the world.  Not about its fairness, or its comprehensibility, but about its beauty, about God(dess) manifesting as the people around her. God(dess) manifesting as her. And I pray silently, in between the lines, that the God that manifests is a gentle one, a loving one, not the one that rummages through dead leaves looking for a living thing, but the one that snuggles beside you at night, and nuzzles you awake at dawn. I pray for softness for her, and for all of us.  I pray for gentleness, and kindness. Beneath it all, I pray for attentive silence. Silence in which we can manifest ourselves, vulnerably, softly. Silence in which we can speak  the best that we know and pray that it is true. Thank you for the silence of this blank space in which I can write. I pray it brings us peace.