The altogether given

Friday, August 14, 2020         Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Priest and Martyr

(today’s lectionary)

The altogether given

Marytown in Libertyville, Illinois is the National Shrine of Maximilian Kolbe. Always during the nineteen weekends I spent at Marytown, his spirit rested on or near me. I walked through the towering pines or around the lake, sat for hours in a profoundly beautiful, peaceful church, listened to Ruth Haley Barton talk softly about silence and solitude, and took time to pray in all ways.

Father Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz in 1941. A prisoner escaped and the commandant selected ten men to die as a punishment. His choices were random. “You, and you. And you.”

As the ten were about to be marched away, Number 16670 stepped out of the waiting line. He pointed at one of the ten.

“I would like to take that man’s place. He has a wife and children.”

“Who are you?”

“A priest.”

No matter that Kolbe was a very famous Polish priest. No one cared on that cold day. Two weeks later the priest died. But Franciszek Gajowniczek lived on. He survived the camps for five years, as did his wife, but not his children. He lived until he was 93. “I want to express my thanks for the gift of life,” he told Pope Paul VI in 1971.

As my own priceless Marytown decade comes to a close, my life and death merge more intimately into one. Decisions to prolong my life aren’t so obvious as they were when I was forty, or fifty, or sixty. Of course I’m not facing a fatal illness or a debilitating injury or COVID-19 (at the moment). But I have more respect for death as it approaches and waits, not exactly at the table, but not far from it, either. I appreciate the confidence and peace in Father Kolbe’s words.

Two years ago I wrote about another man coming to peace with his impending death. In Isaiah 40, God speaks tenderly of Jerusalem, “Her service is at an end. Your guilt is covered.” This is what I wrote:

There are many ways to say, “I’ve got your back.” Probably the best of them are wordless, anchored by touch and service. I hold your hand, rub your feet, make you coffee in the morning, and you know I am not going anywhere. I am on your team.

God’s always got our backs. This is more clear to me as I get older. He speaks tenderly and gently to us: “Your service is at an end. Your guilt is covered.” Perhaps Margaret and I are not quite ready to hear these words, but I know they will be there for us.

I think about Hannah Coulter’s words in Wendell Berry’s novel: “The room of love is the love that holds us all, and it is not ours. It goes back before we were born. It goes all the way back. It is Heaven’s.”

Now Hannah’s husband Nathan is sick. He refuses treatment. And Hannah is beside herself.

I was beating the hell out of a dozen egg whites in a bowl. My tears were falling into the bowl and then my nose dripped into it. I flung the whole frothy mess into the sink. I said, “Well, what are you planning to do? Just die? Or what?”

“Dear Hannah. I’m going to live right on. Dying is none of my business. Dying will have to take care of itself.” He came to me then. He held me a long time as if under a passing storm, and then the quiet came. I fixed some supper, and we ate. (p. 158-161)

Hannah went back with her daughters to the doctor. “Nathan doesn’t want to die of a cure,” she told him.

And then the two of them, they lived right on. “Living right on called for nothing out of the ordinary. We made no changes. We only accepted the changes as they came.”

There is never a reason to shut off the singing. No appropriate description of life excludes the fact of death, and so we live right on. Grass withers, flowers wilt, the word of our Lord stands forever.

Hannah finishes the story of her life standing at the gate. Nathan “looks at me with a look I know. The shiver of the altogether given passes over me from head to foot.” (from chapters 20 and 24)

(Ezekiel 16, Isaiah 12, 1 Thessalonians 2, Matthew 19)

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