Mercy

By the grace, I am listening. You are not alone, can you hear me singing?

I don’t think I ever heard my father talk about his mother, or if he did, I don’t remember. The truth is, it is hard to remember his voice at all sometimes. He couldn't really speak for months before he died (at 42 years old) because of the location of the cancerous tumor in his brain. She was there though, around him, within him. 

His heartbreak about his mother (24 years old) dying in front of him and his brother on the beach when he was 4 1/2 years old made the holy journey through the inner universe of his body. It traveled to every cell, then to the tissues and the organs, bones, muscles, and fascia, and then he used those parts to move his body in the ocean. He made those cells surf the same waves that were crashing when he saw her fall and never get up. But it wasn't enough. He also squirmed, danced, fought, moved moved moved them around all the time. As a child he would have been diagnosed with ADHD, but maybe it was just the heartbreaking, earth-shattering loss of his beloved mother and the way he needed to heal with anger and sadness and movement. He was shaking out the pain, surfing out the pain, catching the pain in the form of a football and throwing it back, tackling it down to the ground, scooping it up in the shortstop position and bulleting it to someone else, and fighting too, fighting it in any bar for any underdog he could find and sometimes fighting himself. And running. He tried to outrun it too.  My mom has said that he was never happier than when he finally had a family of his own. Five miracles of humans. He got to become our father and then he was healing his body by holding us with his strong arms and carrying us when we fell, throwing us in the ocean, laughing while we climbed on his steady back -  finally with love.  

What happens when people die too young and don’t get the chance to realize their wholeness? When they don’t get to fully answer their human calling? When they don’t get to unlearn about what the world expected of them and step into who they really are. What must it have been like when he was dying, no longer able to speak to us, no longer able to tell his stories? To know he was leaving us behind a legacy of hurt he spent his childhood and young adulthood fighting and surfing and dancing with.

There must be glimpses of mercy and grace because those people stay with us and we can have a relationship with them and them with us for an eternity as all-knowing, ageless spirits. We are not alone, ever. We listen for them and they also listen for us and we can sing back and forth to each other.  No one gets out of this physical life without suffering. We don’t get to know why we have to have our heart break and why we suffer. We do know that when there is profound loss and suffering - humans can come together for each other and show profound amounts of love and courage. Those are holy days.

We all need more than a little mercy and grace in this human life. We all are called to something; to be ourselves, to heal ourselves, to love ourselves, to connect to our truth and feel the connectedness of all things. This is a grief song, which is to say, it is a praise song. A praise song for the experience of being alive at all. For moving through form, for knowing that we need each other, we need mercy, and for experiencing the grace of getting it. When I sing “the damage it is done” - I mean both that it has happened and that it completes itself with both mercy and grace - back to being undone and part of everything, always. That in our body’s wisdom, first there is a willfulness that turns into a willingness and then finally a surrender to the beauty and pain of it all which feels like all-encompassing love. Remember who you are, you are more than your scars. You are love. Amen.