dual personalities

I went to the funeral of another Jewish friend yesterday. It was at a very large Reform congregation; the service was minimal. We said the 23rd Psalm and the rabbi read the Mourner’s Kaddish. In between, members of her family gave eulogies for their beloved mother and grandmother, who was an accomplished and much admired lady. Her 96 years by all accounts were happy ones. The message, however, was life is a journey and the journey ends at death.

A funeral like this always leaves me feeling empty and kind of sad. Reading some Frederick Buechner puts things in perspective for me.

When it comes to the mystery of death, like the mystery of life, how can any of us know anything? If there is a realm of being beyond where we now are that has to do somehow with who Jesus is, and is for us, and is for all the world, then how can we know the way that will take us there?

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” is how he answers. He does not say the church is the way. He does not say his teachings are the way, or what people for centuries have taught about him. He does not say religion is the way, not even the religion that bears his name. He says he himself is the way. And he says that the truth is not words, neither his words nor anyone else’s words. It is the truth of being truly human as he was truly human and thus at the same time truly God’s. And the life we are dazzled by in him, haunted by in him, nourished by in him is a life so full of aliveness and light that not even the darkness of death could prevail against it.

How do we go where he is? How do we who have a hard enough time just finding our way home in the night find the way that is his way, the way that is he? Who of us can say, and yet who of us doesn’t search for the answer in our deepest places?

As for me, I think what we are to do is to keep on ringing and ringing and ringing, because that ringing – and the longing, the faith, the intuition that keeps us at it – is the music of the truth trying to come true even in us. I think that what we are to do is to try to draw near to him and to each other any way we can because that is the last thing he asked of us. “Love one another as I have loved you” John 15:12) is the way he said it… By believing against all odds and loving against all odds, that is how we are to let Jesus show in the world and to transform the world.

– from Secrets in the Dark

*Death Cab For Cutie