the timeless stream
By David Cherwien
On December 28, 2021, Susan took her last breath in our home after being placed in Hospice Care on December 2nd, 2021. Upon discovering a large tumor in her brain in April of 2021, we found it to be caused by Stage 4 Metastasized Uterine Cancer. During those intervening months we had some conversations about what happens at death. She had written about it many times in her Hymn Festival reflections, as well as in her hymn texts. These bodies in which our souls (or energy) live during our life time on earth are a tremendous gift. Through them we experience beauty, pleasure, the wide spectrum of emotions, and yet are vulnerable to pain, suffering, disease, and inevitable death. I asked her if she could remember all that she had written about death during her last month (the Cancer in her brain had continued to spread, having an effect on her memory). Her response was “I think so.” Through these writings we get a glimpse of how we, like Susan, perhaps need not fear this transition. Our energy leaves these beautiful bodies, entering a new realm about which we’ll know much more when we get there ourselves. But the Jesus story says over and over again, we need not fear this. What we can do is understand it as a great mystery.
Two of her reflections are shared here. The first one, “A Harvest of Days” was written for an All Saints program at Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in the 1990’s. The second, “Death” also from a Hymn Festival during the 1990’s, and was one she often returned to in subsequent programs.
a harvest of days
There are the saints.
They have seen the types of things we have seen.
They have lived through the types of things we will live through:
They went to college or worked the docks.
Found a life-partner or remained alone.
Raised children or dedicated their lives to other service.
They were young and vibrant
then, experienced and doubtful
then, old and tolerant.
They delighted in friendships.
Saw their skin become like parchment.
Saw friends die.
And as they grew older
(the same vibrant people,
In bodies smaller now, and slow,)
it seemed they were the congregation for all the funerals.
And we have watched them die.
And now we know that someday we will be the congregation at all the funerals.
And the young will watch us die.
And they will become the congregation at all the funerals.
The cycle of life is relentless,
but precious.
For God is also relentless and flows like a river
through the midst of life.
Every life is nourished by the river of God.
Showered and quenched,
by this great river.
(There is a river that makes glad the city of God.)
It seems that time bears us all away,
But it is the great and gentle river of God
that carries us through life
through death
through the portal
to the shores
of the timeless stream.
(from Crossings, p. 168)
death
Eventually, so soon, too soon, the road through childhood, loss, maturity, brings us to what seems, from a distance, an ending, a dark nothingness.
We learn from physics that nothing disappears without a trace.
The ratio of matter to energy is in constant flux
But the quantity of the total of both remains the same.
What has been matter metamorphoses back into energy.
Energy coalesces into substance.
Nothing disappears without a trace.
Life is changed, not taken away, sings the Sarum liturgy for the dead.
Life is changed, not taken away.
Primary stars explode, and form the stellar gases, secondary stars are formed. Black holes, whose immense gravitational pull is so strong not even light can escape, may be but feeders for white holes pouring forth new creation into another universe.
Leaves grow, color, fade, fall and become part of the soil nourishing the tree, drawn up again into the tree in new form.
All rivers run to the sea.
What is from God returns to God.
Life is changed, not taken away.
Nothing disappears without a trace.
(from Crossings, p91)
