Family, Friends, and Faith

That’s what came out of the funeral service for Sharon, that sad morning of last March: the three cups of Family, Friends, and Faith. We can be fixated on precise dates, yes, but grief knows no boundaries; so too is happiness best not to be truncated, forgotten, or packed away. Our lives are a stream of consciousness in which the memories come and go, and we easily can re-engage with the old feelings, if we allow their conjure, if we give in to their quick and sudden provocation, or purposefully draw out the memory, or determinedly pull images up from our interior spaces, like yanking up a bucket from our own well. And sometimes the cup overflows. And sometimes, one might aver, it is empty. Yet, since we are always a reservoir of that which was, if the bucket does come up empty, it is because we did not nurture each tug on our emotion, nor did we dip it deep enough. Friends, Family, and Faith are not so much metaphors as living entities by which we perpetually are sustained. We feel all the more deeply for our knowing, and loving, our dear Sharon.

To you though, she may be just a name.

Friends and Family, and Faith too affects the isolate, the lone homeless person, with no connections, no sub-culture, no network of social support systems. Such a person rises into our consciousness like a boil on the pavement, unwanted, even despised by some. But for most of us, care for such an one is not within our usual purvey. We can afford not to have to dwell on their predicament. We can trust that someone else will take care of them. We can hope that they will take care of themselves. We can have faith that somehow, somewhere, in this vast world of inequalities, there will be succour enough unto the needs of such-like others. We cannot identify with real starvation. We cannot identify with absolute drought. We cannot identify with their apparent rejection of societal norms, expectations, values. We cannot identify with their evident mental aberration, the practice of their physical addictions, or even their horrid hygienic habituations. We have faith that God will take care of them. Somehow, down deep, we feel that they made a choice, and that their way has led way to way. (At least, that allows very many of us freely to skirt past the hobo on the pavements.) And thank God for those who are prepared to minister to them, to stand and serve at the soup-kitchens, to distribute blankets and socks and clothing. They are the angels, indeed. But it becomes necessarily sufficient that we make the Salvation Army coinage-donation, the unwanted-clothes drop. Somehow, God is taking care of it all. Besides, there are too many of ‘them.’ City by city. Country by country. After all, how does one retain one’s need for self-sufficiency, first? If one gives too much, then how quickly will all one’s resources not be depleted? No, better to be in the position to be able to continue to give, but from the well-spring of having one’s ‘own’. Such, generally, is our faith.

In this 2020 time of social isolation and physical distancing we still are able to write, to phone, to skype and zoom and tweet and make communication with friends and family. Yet still, we do not necessarily reach out to all our friends, or even to all our family. We trust we shall hear the news should someone be in trouble, should someone need help. And we keep the faith. After all, at the precise moment of typing these words, at noon, 09/04/2020, there are 94,888 deaths from Covid-19, world-wide. And for me, not a single person of those is someone I know, personally. No, with a little faith, with prayer, with God’s grace, no one that I know will be affected. Such is faith. Such are my friends and family. We are sufficiently connected.

But the statics keep creeping upwards. And it seems the roll of the die may eventually touch a person I personally love, (God forbid!) And therein lies the rub. Until we are personally aggrieved, reached, touched, affected, we do but continue to progress along the way. And the wellspring of our empathy can become cauterized by the sheer volume of statistics. Still, our cups are not entirely empty. Yet behind every one of those nameless 95,047 (a mere two hours later, on checking the burgeoning statistics,) there is family, friends, and faith. And so, weep not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee too. It tolls, awfully.