A homily on the death of my son

Lynne Lori and I came back just a few days ago from a road trip. We drove down to Utah, and on the way we arranged for the release of our son’s body , from the state examiners’ office, the body of Sarah, Ben and Matthew’s brother, and we arranged his cremation. On Wednesday night we visited with him for a little, we in our travel-worn wrinkled clothes and he in his cardboard box. And then we watched as they slipped him into that great steel vault. Three hours later he was returned to the dust God made all of us from. Then we drove another 5 hours south to settle him into the back seat of his truck and drive him home. We did this ourselves because that’s what we taught our children to do. Do your own work. Don’t make anyone else do it. Pay your bills. Take care of your responsibilities. Take care of your people. So that’s what we did. We took care of him as best we could just like he had taken care of his people in his time.

When Jonathan was in Afghanistan, I wrote to him every week. After a mission outside the wire we would try and meet online for a little while. He wasn’t sure he was doing the right thing. He asked me once what God might think of him when it came his time to explain himself. This is what I wrote to him. I know this because I have read the letter again just the other day after it made its way halfway around the world to Forward Operating Base Warrior and the back again.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you how you’re doing but I can never really find a way to ask. Your life must seem like such a small gear clicking away inside such a big machine. Most people don’t ever get that experience. My job seems to have some connection with what the machine stamps out. People pay their tuition, take the courses, graduate, and go on with life. My job is in step two and I try to do it as best I can. But the outcome is still pretty predictable. What difference does it make if I’m successful at doing what I do or not? Step three and four happen no matter what I do. Even I think, some days, I make a difference but it’s not really true. But the whole world is watching what you’re doing and wondering what’s going to happen because of it. You can’t see what the end is going to be like, if there ever is an end to this. I suppose you wonder, sometimes, if your country really cares what you’re doing and, sad to say, I imagine lots of people don’t. Most don’t disagree. Most just don’t think about it. It’s easy to forget, isn’t it? Sometimes someone will ask what my kids are doing. Going to school or working at the library or living in Duluth are all pretty easy to talk about. Then I get to you and there’s always a bit of a pause where they try to figure out what to say. They simply haven’t considered what that all might mean and the conversation turns cliché. I, for one, care about what you’re doing. And it doesn’t have much to do with this particular war. It has to do with how the world deals with people who, for one reason or another, can’t take care of themselves. I don’t have a good opinion of what most people want to take out of this world because it seems as though, most of the time, everyone wants to take as much as they can, and they have to take it from someone. Some country has to stand up and say that they’ll always have a few people brave enough to stand in the way of the strong beating on the weak. There are always a few people who will do the right thing. It makes the rich think twice about stealing from the poor.

Do you think you did the right thing? I don’t know. But you’re doing a good thing. If not for you, for some poor starving sod who, right now, would be getting the last nickel squeezed out of him if there wasn’t a nation who made a promise to the world to stop that kind of thing from happening. “

I don’t know if I would write that again but I know I would tell Jonathan that he is doing the right thing. That he has more often done the right thing than not. To do his own work and don’t make anyone else do it. To take care of his responsibilities and his people.

He used to wear a keffiyeh around his neck. I asked him once where he got it and he wouldn’t say for a long time. I said I liked it. It looked good on him. He said I could have it when he was dead and he laughed. Lynne and I pieced the story together in the car last week. He was on patrol, I think in Kabul. A bomb went off and he rushed a shop owner near him and knocked he and his children to the ground as the pieces of the bomb and the bomber when flying across the marketplace. The shop owner tried to give him a goat, not something that can be easily carted around and not easily adapted to the lifestyle of the airborne infantry. So he took a keffiyeh from the pieces of the shopkeepers stall all scattered around the on the ground. I have it now because he’s dead and he said I could. And I’m a little ashamed. I have never done such a thing as the thing he did to earn it. I never could. I won’t ever wear it and neither will he. And this world will never know about the thousand things he and others have done to make something good out of what someone else has tried his best to ruin.

This world can be a cruel place – to everyone at least some of the time and to a few poor souls just about all the time. But it’s not the only world. The Algonquin say that, at night in the forest, the souls of men hunt the souls of animals.  The great Tao moves through the universe smoothing what we have made rough and softening what we have hardened so it will become, once again, the world God intended it to be. Jesus says that in his father’s house there are a great many places to live out our eternity and he is going to prepare a place for us. I have been told by people much smarter than me that to believe there is a life after this one is the dream of a child. But could it really be that the terrible and the wonderful things that you can conceive of in your heart and in your mind, and could it be that the powerful and touching things you can do with your hands – could it be that they all simply disappear one day as if we had been nothing more than stones in a field waiting to be worn down by the wind? I can’t believe it. If it’s a child’s dream to think that these things we do and say – if it’s a child’s dream to think that the way we love our people and the way we touch one another goes on someplace forever then it’s little more than a statement of despair to say they don’t.

Ezekiel sees a great field of dry bones – men long dead and long forgotten – and he prophesies to them. And when he does there is a great rattling sound as the bones come together. And then he prophesies to the winds and the winds blow and God breathes life into the dead and they stand up – a great army.  How many of those in this great army do you know. One? A hundred? Half as many as you could and of those you know you know them half as well as you could. Because we no longer have the time. We no longer have the heart. We no longer have the strength to bother with them. We don’t do our own work. We make others do it. And we don’t take care of our people because we are too afraid of what it might cost. We are cowards and we need to stop living like this. Were we still in the garden that God had put us in however long ago it would be different. But we have made of this world a pit in which the rich steal from on the poor and the powerful beat on the weak. You don’t need to be part of this sham of a world. You can think on others. You can be part of the world where my son waits for us – one of a great army with the breath of God breathed into them – He waits there – one eyebrow up with his goofy smile. “What took you so long?” he’ll say. “I wanted to come sooner but they wouldn’t let me. I wanted to come when you left but they wouldn’t let me. Am I too late, Jonathan? Do you still remember me?”  “Yes, I remember you. And, no, you’re not too late.”

Is it the dream of a child? I suppose it is. But up against the wisdom of great men, up against the powerful who, with the stroke of a pen grind the weak to dust… how foolish are we to believe it? How often are the dreams of children wrong? Hardly ever, I think. In my father’s house there are places for us all to have a little peace. If it weren’t true, say’s Jesus, I wouldn’t have told you.