Blog - Grief

Here’s the two-fold gist of this Ash Wednesday/Gearing-Up-For-Lent blog:

I was already late and well on my way to my late husband’s memorial service before I realized that the urn with his ashes still sat on the kitchen table.

This past Sunday, November 19th, I had the pleasure of preaching at Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Grand Marais, MN.

Adjectives are the unsung heros of nouns.

We don’t have many Dust Bunnies at our home.

My two children, my father, and I, we really lived it up for our New Year’s Eve last night, I tell you what.

“Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”
So, tells Matthew in 2:7-8, said King Herod to the wise men after learning from them that the king of the Jews had been born.

I think it was in the early winter of 1996 when I won a gaudy set of dishes, flatware, and stemware simply by chucking my name in a box at the Watertown SD Target.

“Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. No commandment figures so frequently, so insistently, in the Bible. It is incumbent upon us to remember the good we have received, and the evil we have suffered.”  Elie Wiesel, Nobel Lecture, Hope, Despair and Memory

“And Lincoln says to the woman, ‘Madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?’”

This year’s Advent launches us into the “Year of Mark,” the period when the primary gospel readings come from, well, Mark, obviously.

Ten years ago yesterday, all was mostly well in my world.

Tuesday, post Holy Week.

Wally Taylor teaches New Testament at (the truly outstanding) Trinity Lutheran Seminary, in the fair city of Columbus, Ohio.

So tomorrow, on Ash Wednesday, many–not all, but many–people in the Christian Church mark the beginning of Lent.

Appropriately, I think, I tend to keep personal updates off of my OMG Facebook page.

Google yields only one pop song, and an iffy one at that, with the word “finitude” in its lyrics.

Within days, our eyes and ears and minds and hearts have drawn in far too much smoke and fire and blood and weeping.

Twice in the last several months I’ve had occasion to tell the tale of the time I stood in front of my late husband’s closet, charged with choosing the clothes in which he’d be buried.

We have been waiting for weeks now to sing that very first verse: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!”