As We Journey Through These Days: My Life With Ed & Lent
This week is full of the tension of death and life for me, as February 22nd marks both my dad’s birthday as well as the beginning of the liturgical season known as Lent.
And I guess it’s fitting that those two events are linked by a day, as both of them have and continue to form me.
I first met Ed Bryeans in 1978 when I was five years old. He was big and had a voice and laugh to match, wore a leather jacket, had lamb chop burns that I still envy and drove a car that made me sure he was one of Starsky and Hutch’s friends. At the same time I was small, awkward, and nervous around this new friend of my mom’s.
I first met Lent, in a meaningful way, sometime around 2005. It’s ashes, color, prayers, and scripture readings were both enormous, beyond anything I had experienced, and yet somehow appealing.
Ed married my mom in 1979 and our little family of three, my mom, sister and I, burgeoned to the size of a small sports team overnight. I gained a brother, an older brother, as a result of this merger. And through him I entered into a world I had never known. A world of 8 track rock ‘n roll and country, of old trucks and off roading excursions, and of wrestling, or more accurately, of being pummeled mercilessly. I also gained a sister. And she introduced me to the finer things during those early years as she and my other sister would dress me up, play dolls with me, and other similar things that we all know only happened because I was their hostage.
Lent also led me into a whole new arena of discovery and experience. It was probably my first active encounter with praying prayers that others had written throughout the centuries, and also my first experience of encountering holy-days, holidays, as a formational process instead of hurrying past them or merely consuming them. Both of these practices opened my eyes, mind, body and soul to a perspective, a reality, larger than any I had ever known. It wasn’t just me and the folks I was connected to following Jesus together, then. We truly were surrounded, throughout time and space, by a great cloud of witnesses – brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers. And Easter wasn’t just a destination to arrive at and rush off from into summer vacation planning or whatever else happened to catch my attention. No, there was a reflective and tangible rhythm to these days of identifying with Jesus in his temptation and suffering, so as to be prepared and ready to identify with him in his resurrection.
Throughout my middle school and high school years my relationship with Ed, my dad, was marked by conflict and trouble. It wasn’t all bad, but there were too many nights when I would disappear without telling anyone, too many events like the time I burned down a barn, too many lies, too much stealing, too much… Yet in the midst of deep pain, obvious through tears and visible through his posture, my dad repeatedly offered his presence, his help, and his love – even though it was quite costly to him, emotionally, physically and financially.
One of the most challenging and yet compelling aspects of the lenten season to me is that of walking with Jesus through his temptation, suffering and death. Who does that? Who openly confronts and spends time with their skeletons? Do we even have a language, or the time for that matter, to express and share in one another’s suffering? And death? Willingly? Without complaint? Everything I’ve grown up with, every cultural message I’ve been exposed to, compels me to run from all of this. To keep my mouth shut. To do everything possible to create my own life, to be my own resurrection. But I know I can’t be, and you know it too.
A few years ago, 2007 to be exact, my dad’s life ended due to pulmonary fibrosis. Just hours before he died I received a call from my mom. She said that my dad, who was in a great deal of pain and was being cared for at a hospice house, wanted to speak to me and wanted to know if I would be alright if he was sedated, if he could simply rest and pass in peace. I’ll never forget his final words to me, which were raspy and filled with suffering. ”Son, I love you.” As I hung up the phone, filled with grief, I was also filled with a sense of awe. Who in the midst of their pain and suffering asks someone else if it’s alright if they be allowed to rest? Who in their darkest hour actively seeks out others and cares for their well being?
Lent has become more and more a gift to me. Identifying with Jesus’ days in the wilderness, with his suffering and death, has awakened me to the tangible reality of his presence in the midst of my own brokeness, loneliness, temptation, sin and suffering. As a result, not only have I found a resource beyond my own making of peace and hope, but also the ability to enter into the pain and distortion of those I’m among, and the world we’re planted in. But it’s not just a gathering of sorrowful sinners that result. No, as the scriptures say, and as Lent provides a metaphor and pathway of reminding us and forming us in, if we identify with Christ in his suffering and death the we will surely also identify with him in his resurrection. The 40 days of fasting give way to feasting. The reality of sin and death are swallowed up by Jesus’ resurrection! Easter is on its way. And our future resurrection, bodily, is also on its way.
My dad and I grew quite close following a very earthy yet mystical experience that I had with Jesus in downtown Memphis in the spring of 1993. In fact, both of us were captivated during that season by the person, life, death and resurrection of the fully human, fully divine One. And this spring, as my dad’s birthday and the season of Lent overlap, I am filled with both sorrow and hope. Sorrow as I miss my dad. Sorrow as I consider the suffering and ridicule that Jesus endured on the behalf of us all. And also hope. Hope as I experience Christ himself, present with me as I confess, wrestle, pray, wait and fast. Hope as I know that Lent gives way to Easter, that death the final enemy will be laid to rest. Hope, as I remember and look forward to the day when we shall all have new bodies – free from pulmonary fibrosis, cancer, the flu, AIDS, fear, anxiety, and sin.
*The photo above is a wall in the gathering space of the church I serve, Kaleo. Throughout Lent, it will serve as a station for reflection and response, along with a large cross that confessions can be nailed to, and the communion table which is part of our weekly rhythm of worship.
