Thursday, September 24, 2020 (today’s lectionary)
The sun also rises
In his earlier years (by now he is 78) Garrison Keillor called himself an outlaw poet. Myself, I was caught up in the spells of Ernest Hemingway and “realism,” and when I read The Sun Also Rises, I knew I had died and gone to heaven. The sparse and spare nouns and verbs, complicated by just such a few adjectives, these were sentences that cut my soul like a knife to butter, and besides that, oh the stories Hemingway could tell.
What has been will be again,
What has been done will be done again,
There is nothing new under the sun.
In my postured, privileged existential way I was an outlaw poet too, but one, like Garrison, who knew the Bible. Besides Hemingway, no one could describe life better than the author of Ecclesiastes.
O vanity of vanities! Everything is meaningless.
What does it profit a man to toil and toil beneath the sun?
One generation passes, and another comes.
The sun also rises
And then the sun goes down
And hastens to the place from which it rose.
Later, one evening as the sun was setting, my mother took me aside in the kitchen and offered Philippians 4:8 to me on a platter. Like Daniel Siegel, I remember best via anagram. She gave me true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent and praiseworthy, which I forever remember with TNRPLAEP. Say it out loud, and it’s equally meaningless. (Just like the teacher says in the Book, Ecclesiastes Chapter One.)
All streams flow into the sea,
Yet the sea is never full.
Still later my father invited me to Kogudus, a weekend of renewal for Lutherans (mostly), and after leaving the Moonies I said yes. Many friends and family secretly wrote letters, and on Saturday afternoon, snowed into a northern Illinois state park, the retreat master gave us each our letters. I cried and cried. Turns out my friends and family also knew Paul’s words to the Philippians, and they loved me.
After that there were many Saturdays when my dad and I drove to an early morning gathering of local Kogudistas. The liturgy ended, “Come Holy Spirit, revive your church. Begin with me!” And then Dad was mostly unable to go, hunched over and weak with ALS. He wanted to live to the age of 80, and break the Sandel family record. In his 70’s Dad yearned for 80, and of course he loved Psalm 90.
You turn us back to dust
And a thousand years in your sight
As just as yesterday so soon gone,
Or perhaps a watch in the night.
Our days may come to seventy years
Or eighty, if our strength endures.
Dad chose chores I would not have chosen, at least not as often. He mowed all the time. He oiled the disk and harrow before winter came. He scoured every milk bucket every early morning, and swept out grain bins above the crib. He cut off his finger one morning grinding corn for the cows. Looking, I found it, covered with dust.His finger got to the hospital just a little too late, and so Dad learned to use his adding machine with one less finger.
May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us,
And establish the work of our hands for us,
Yes, establish the work of our hands.
Later he read books. He read the Bible. He trusted God and gave up ambition and discontent. His hands, always busy, always full, grew still. As he grew weaker, Dad gave John and I (mostly John) instructions about what needed doing. And he really did, honest to God, remind us of some of those incredibly sad verses in Psalm 90.
You sweep us away in the sleep of death
We are like the new grass of the morning
In the morning it springs up new
But by evening it is dry and withered.
Relent, O Lord! How long? How long?
Dad died on Thanksgiving, 2002. Margaret and I played guitar and sang his favorite song at the funeral. I’ll Fly Away.
He had turned 80 that year on August 15. We had a grand old party.
(Ecclesiastes 1, Psalm 90, John 14, Luke 9)
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