All Souls' Day

Below is the homily I shared at my brother Josh Haddix's Celebration of Life.  He died on February 22, 2019 and his service was held on April 27 at Warren Wilson College, his alma mater.  A few people who attended asked me if they could have a copy of my reflections and there were others who were not able to attend and I wanted to make this available to them as well.  Today is All Souls' Day, a day when we remember those who have gone before, so it seems fitting that I share this today.  I am still grieving for Josh--still trying to get used to this old world without him in it.  Sometimes when I am feeling low, I re-read my own words and they bring me comfort.  I hope that by sharing them here they might bring others comfort as well.  I hope they will shed a small light on how our loved ones can be gone and still right here with us.  ~Holli 11/2/19

I Will Meet You in the Meadow

Before we begin, I would like to ask a favor.  My emotions are running really high, as are most of yours I imagine.  We’ve all made an effort to be here today:  making arrangements, tending to details, traveling by car and plane.  So I would like to take a few moments to gather ourselves and arrive at this place together. 

So, if you will just stand or sit as you are able with your feet firmly planted on the ground.  Now just bounce yourself around a little, shaking your arms and hands, letting your head and neck relax, dancing like a rag doll.  Letting go of tension and stress.  When dogs and other mammals experience pain or trauma, they shake it off like this, rather than store it in their tissues.  Just bouncing and shaking and letting it go. 

Now, with your feet still planted, let’s stand still together.  Make sure your knees are soft and your back is straight but not stiff.  Relax your shoulders.  Let your head float above your shoulders. Imagine there is a silver thread coming out of the top of your head connecting you to heaven, lifting you up ever so slightly.

Now place your hands, one on top of the other, on your lower abdomen.  Become aware of your breath, and if you can, just deepen it a notch and maybe slow it down a little.  As you inhale let your belly expand and as you exhale let it contract.  Just stand here together and breathe. 

Then, using your fingers, tap just beneath your collar bone.  With your fists, beat on your sternum like King Kong.  Humans are the only primates that don’t do this on a regular basis.  It literally helps keep us strong by boosting the immune system.  Now again with the fingers, tap on the ribs, just below the breasts.  And breathe.  Just breathe and tap the inner corners of your eyebrows, working your way around your eye sockets.  Then tap underneath your nose and underneath your mouth.  Then back to your collar bone, sternum, and rib cage.  Now just stand and breathe and notice what you notice.  Just standing and breathing together.  Here in this moment.  Thank you.  You may be seated. 

“I will meet you in the meadow and it shall be as though no time has passed.”  After Josh’s death, some good friends sent me a card containing this sentiment. I love it.  It resonates very deeply with me and I definitely think there is something to this meadow imagery. There is a beautiful meadow here on the campus of Warren Wilson College—a  mountain meadow ringed with trees.  We attended a wedding there several years ago and afterward came to the reception here in Bryson Gym where we are gathered today.

Another meadow.  Our brother Kirk died in 1981 and over the years, whenever I dream of him, I am at a big gathering of friends and family—like a big church picnic—and we are playing games and running around and suddenly, Kirk comes loping toward us across the meadow.  We are all excited because he has been gone so long, but we don’t ask him where he’s been, we just enjoy having him with us in this sweet moment.  (Because maybe in that paradoxical way of dreams we understand that he has been here all along and it is us that come and go.)

And there’s this Rumi poem about a field: 

Out beyond ideas of

wrongdoing and rightdoing

there is a field

I’ll meet you there. 

When the soul lies down

in that grass,

the world is too full

to talk about. 

Ideas, language,

even the phrase “each other”

doesn’t make any sense.

Meadows.  Fields.  And here’s a pasture for us to consider.  “The Lord is my Shepherd.  I shall not want.  He makes me lie down in green pastures.”  In Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s Guide to Psalm 23: Roadside Assistance to the Spiritual Traveler, he points out that God doesn’t ask us to lie down, God makes us lie down.  Shapiro explains, “We want to rush on and reach the goal, but the way is the goal, the journey is the destination, and the reward is the blessing of being free.  And lying down in green pastures is the first step in recovering who you are and living your life from that realization.”

Rabbi Rami points out that sky gazing brings the narrow mind of ego into contact with the spacious mind of God.  At that moment of lying down and looking up you know that everything is being done and you are not doing it.  But as small as we are, we are nonetheless an integral part of the scheme, a part needed to bring blessing and liberation to the world.

I have had one dream about Josh since he died.  In the dream I have a very small child who doesn’t want to go down for a nap.  Josh is about 8 years old in the dream and he brings me a stack of picture books so that the three of us can all climb onto the bed together and read until we become drowsy.  And I have the feeling that as long as Josh is there, everything will be okay. 

For me, lying in bed reading picture books is very similar to lying on my back in the grass watching clouds scud across the sky.  When my boys were little and things would get wild and wooly, I found that I could gather up a stack of books and just sit down and start reading aloud to myself.  Pretty soon, I’d have a boy or two snuggled beside me and we could lay down our struggles and watch together as the story unfolded.  We could leave our narrow minds and enter into a more spacious mind. 

I think that lately my mind has been like a small child crawling around in all directions in danger of falling off the bed.  Having the wisdom of 8 year old Josh come to me in my dream was my deeper mind’s way of calming me down, reminding me that everything is being done and I don’t have to be in charge. 

When Kirk died, Josh was 8 years old.  Every night after the funeral, Josh cried himself to sleep.  He couldn’t imagine a world without his brother Kirk.  Then, suddenly, he stopped crying at night.  When Mom asked him about it, he shared a dream he had about Kirk.  In the dream he goes almost up to heaven and is greeted by St. Peter.  He asks if Kirk is there and St. Peter says, “Stay right here and I’ll go get him.”  Kirk comes and the two of them talk about ordinary things—football, what Kirk’s friends have been doing, etc. 

Then Josh asks him if he has anything fast to ride on and Kirk goes away and comes back riding a motorcycle that can go faster than the speed of sound.  He tells Josh to get on and he’ll take him for a ride.  They go to a wide open place where people are painting (Nineteen year old Kirk was planning on studying art at Western Carolina when he was killed driving back to school after fall break.)  He gives Josh a special pair of glasses to wear because the colors are too bright for his human eyes to look at.

Then Kirk tells him that he has one more thing to show him and he goes and gets a guitar and tells Josh that he’s been taking lessons from Jimi Hendrix.  (“The Wind Whispers Mary” was the song Kirk was listening to when his Jeep hit the concrete divider.) 

After Josh had this dream he found a certain level of peace with Kirk’s death.  In his 8 year old mind, he knew that Kirk was okay and he knew that he was still connected to him.  Kirk died in October and our family spent Christmas in a cabin in the North Carolina mountains that year.  We couldn’t bear the thought of having Christmas at home without him.  On Christmas Eve, Josh and I went on a hike together and I asked him to tell  me about his dream. 

Afterwards, I too found a certain level of peace.  Josh’s matter-of-factness in the telling and his certainty of Kirk’s continued presence with us were contagious.  It was the first inkling I had that even though Kirk was dead and gone, he was still a part of our lives in a very real way.  And when I look back on it now, I realize that as Josh told me the dream, I saw it all taking place in a meadow. 

So what is it with all this meadow imagery?  Why am I seeing fields wherever I look? 

When I asked myself that question, another field popped into my mind.  Field of Dreams.  If you build it, he will come.  The field that Ray Kinsella carves out of his corn field so that  Shoeless Joe Jackson and his White Sox teammates can have another chance to play the game they love after being accused of fixing a game in the Black Sox Scandal.  But the story is not just about Shoeless Joe.  There’s Terence Mann, Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, and Ray’s own father John, who show up to play on this field.  Plowshares into baseball bats—and we enter the Church of Baseball.  The baseball field becomes a field of redemption and reconciliation, where those who were outcast, deferred, and misunderstood are invited back into the game.  Everyone belongs.  And time is no longer linear.  The characters pass fluidly between decades.  Those who were old are young again and those who are dead are alive.  I will meet you in the meadow and it will be as though no time has passed.

Another movie.  Perhaps lesser known.  Places in the Heart starring Sally Field (just sayin’), Danny Glover, and John Malcovich.  Killing, lynching, adultery, and a little corruption—this movie has it all.  A black man, a blind man, and a widow walk into a bar.  No, just kidding, they walk into a cotton field in segregated Texas during the Depression.   And once again, redemption happens.  No kidding.  And everything belongs.  I am not going to breathe a word of the final scene, just please watch it if you haven’t seen it.  It is amazing. 

Both of these movies cause chill bumps to break out on my arms and tears to spring to my eyes, even though I have seen them multiple times.  At some level, my body knows that deep truth is being revealed.  My mind says, “I wish real life could be like this.”  And my deeper self knows that real life is like this—that our life on the surface, the life of paying bills and building parking garages, is a life of illusion.  Our deeper life, the life that rises to the surface when we lie down in green pastures and leave the small mind of the ego to enter into the spacious mind of God—this is our real life. 

Josh didn’t identify himself as a Christian, and that’s okay—neither did Jesus.  Josh told me once that he doesn’t believe in God.  I told him that if he is talking about the traditional God found in religion, then I don’t necessarily believe in that god either.  I consider myself a Wisdom Tracker—that stream of wisdom that runs through all religions but is largely ignored.  I am constantly on the lookout for this wisdom and I find it in nature, music, art, poetry, literature, and good movies.  Occasionally I do find it in church.  I always find it on the dance floor.

And I know that Josh also tapped into this wisdom.  He had a direct line to it at age eight.  Many of you have experienced his calmness and his deep intelligence. He may not have believed in the god of the church, but he most certainly believed in the god of the trout stream; the god of the ocean wave; and the god of the silence between the notes in a song. 

Most of us, if we are from the South, have been to a funeral where the preacher used the person’s death as an opportunity to make sure that the rest of us are right with God, to sort of scare us into salvation.  But this is what I am discovering from this wisdom tradition:  we are already right with God. 

As Richard Rohr says, “Separation from God, self, and others is a deep and tragic illusion . . . At the more mature stages of life, we are able to allow the painful and the formerly excluded parts, [the Shoeless Joe parts of ourselves] to belong to a slowly growing and unified field. . . As we grow in wisdom, we see that life and death are not opposites. They do not cancel one another out. There is now room for everything to belong.”

Rohr goes on to say, “A radical, almost nonsensical ‘okayness’ characterizes the mature believer, which is why they are often called ‘holy fools.’ What is, is gradually okay. What is, is the greatest of teachers. At the bottom of all reality is always a deep goodness, or what Thomas Merton called “a hidden wholeness.”  https://cac.org/a-hidden-wholeness-2019-03-27/

This hidden wholeness makes itself known in the meadow.  In the meadow, Josh’s death and his life are not opposites.  His death doesn’t cancel out his life.  I don’t have to tell you this.  You know it already.  You know it, but you may not believe it yet.  This is why we grieve and this is where I have struggled lately.

I know that Kirk’s story didn’t stop with his death.  He has continued to shape my life in profound ways.  And I have come to a certain “okayness” with his death.  I know that Josh’s story will go on as well.   I know it, but I don’t quite believe it yet.  In the long run, Josh’s death too will be okay.  Just as my death will be okay.  It’s the nature of being human.  It’s what makes life so precious. 

But I’m not quite there yet.  I still can’t quite believe that he’s gone.  I still cry at inopportune times.  And everything feels a little scary and uncertain right now.  So, I am looking for ways to take myself out of my small, anxious, worried mind.  My various practices of Qigong and haiku help.  When I can’t sleep at night, Kevin reads picture books to me or I recite Mary Oliver’s poetry to myself.  Especially “Wild Geese.”  Talking to other people who love Josh also helps.  And talking to people who know about the meadow, who can remind me of it when I forget—that’s probably what helps the most.  So that’s why I’m telling all of you about it, in case you don’t know, or reminding you in case you have simply forgotten.

Richard Rohr tells us that prayer isn’t the words we say or the thoughts we think, it’s a place, an attitude, a stance.  https://cac.org/becoming-pure-heart-2016-05-11/  I would like to invite you to pray with me now.  The place is the meadow.  The attitude is open-hearted curiosity.  And I already taught you the stance earlier. 

So if you will stand or sit as you are able.  Feet on the floor, spine erect but not stiff, shoulders relaxed, silver thread coming out of the top of your head.  You’ve been here before and the more you come back to this posture, the more it will feel like coming home.  Place your hands on your lower belly.  Let your belly expand on the in breath and contract on the out breath.  In and out. . . And here we all are together.  Just standing and breathing.   That’s all we have to do right now. 

Standing together in the meadow.  The red wing blackbird and the goldfinch are here.  Queen Anne’s lace and black eyed Susan are here.  Monarchs and swallowtails are here.  The red tailed hawk and the white tailed deer are here.  Stand still and listen.  The meadow itself is breathing.  The meadow is always here.  And we are always in the meadow.  It’s just that sometimes our awareness lags behind our reality.  Stand still.  Just breathe. 

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?  (from “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver)

Stand still.  Just breathe.  That’s all we have to do.  I’m here.  You’re here.  Shoeless Joe Jackson is here.  Jimi Hendrix is here.  Clarence White is here.  Kirk is here.  Josh is here.                           

Stand still and let them find you.