The Uneasy Balance

My father died Friday afternoon, March 20.

In the moment of time it takes to hear that sentence, life and death changed forever. The uneasy balances in all human relations, especially those between father and son, shifted suddenly, like the giant jigsaw plates that give shape to this earth.

“He died unexpectedly,” we said; as if any death is truly expected; or even if expected, is ever as casual as an unexpected guest; or as if by somehow anticipating it, we can alleviate the loneliness and abandonment that surrounds us upon hearing those words.

For me and my father, there was no time for either expectation or anticipation. We had only a then and a changed now with no transition. Then just became the reality — the message relayed on cell phones over 1500 miles to a son and a daughter here and a father dying there without a last “I love you.”

“Now what?” my sister and I asked each other as we snapped closed the cell phone.

“Now what?” is the only question that makes any sense to me. Why is answered only by silence. Where and when tell only of place and time. And how? How is too painful, too real to consider at such a distance. “Now what?” is the question best asked at the moment when we are between — between Florida and Minnesota, between then and now, between reason and disbelief. Suspended.

So now, two days later, I am driving somewhere in the center of this broad country without the answers and usual defenses of religion or professional jargon. I am trying to find again that balance point between death and life.

Jesus died on a Friday. And in the moment it takes to hear that sentence, life and death changed forever. The earth shook, the graves were opened, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom, and that always uneasy balance between son and father shifted. Jesus died with the painful question of why and God’s response was silence. But on the third day, God asked the question himself, “Now what?” and raised Jesus from the dead.

There are no simple answers when it comes to questions of death and life, no approved or assured responses that will stop the pain or keep the world from shaking itself apart. But if this ancient tragedy of a father and a son is to create a new balance between death and life, it must be this: That in death, as in sorrow and grief, guilt and shame, abandonment and hopelessness, all of us die first. When the darknesses overtake us, all the answers we thought we had fail, and we are as good as dead, unable to move between here and there, now and then. We are between. Suspended.

The uneasy balance that marks human relationships, human life, is created new when the father asks, “Now what?” and creates a universe or raises his son from the grave. Only from the grave and gate of death does God answer his own question with his affirmative now. It is into God's Now that all of us are pulled — the living and the dead — into the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sin, and life everlasting.