Six Hours

"Thorn and Sparrows" by Brian Kershisnik

A boy who usually comes late and almost never says anything stood up at the front of the classroom and looked at the other students in the class and said, “I want to tell you a story.” The story was about his great uncle. “I wasn’t really close to him,” he said, “but I really loved him. He lived on this big field, this farm. He always laughed. He made everyone laugh. He was my grandfather’s brother. He was very old. He was out walking, and something happened to him and he fell down, he like collapsed. He could not stand, and his wife did not know where he was. He lay on the ground in his field for a very long time and it was cold and then his wife finally found him and took him to the hospital. My family went to sit with him at the hospital, and we were all, you know, crying and stuff, because the doctors said that he was going to die. He was very old.” The boy looked in the eyes of the other students and then looked away and continued his story. “He was telling jokes and we were laughing and crying. I mean, he was dying and he was making people laugh. He was such a nice person. And then he said, ‘Why are you all crying? Isn’t it time for General Conference? Somebody find a TV.’ So we found a TV and set it up in his bedroom. And he was dying and he just wanted to listen to the prophet, and he was so happy all the time, and I thought, ‘I maybe should want to watch Conference.’ So next time I am going to watch it more. And now I know he’s up there with God. And, well, that’s really all I wanted to say.” He sat down and no one said anything. But they didn’t really need to. He had pretty much said it all.

And then this big old football player boy said, “Well, I was going to play a song on the piano, but since my, you know, my concussion, I don’t remember some things too well. And I can’t really read music, but I have played since I was three just by ear, and I, well, I’ll just play what I can remember.” And he sat and played something that sounded like grace. Why does it always surprise me when boys like that have magical fingers?

And a girl said, “You know, the scriptures don’t really say what the angel did in the Garden of Gethsemane to comfort Christ, just that an angel came and comforted Him. And I kind of wish it said how he did it because I have a lot of friends and some in my family who struggle with depression, and I sometimes wonder what I can do. But I think I might know some of what the angel did. My dad has this sign by his bed that says, ‘Don’t just do something, stand there.’ And I think sometimes people just need us to stand there, by them. You know? They just need to know straight up that we are going to love them no matter what. And then we need to actually do it. To make good on our word.”

And a boy who grew up in Samoa and has more cousins than I have days on my calendar said, “When I was ten my mother died, and ten days later my best friend died. And it was in the tenth month. And so now people ask me why I always choose the number ten for my football jersey, and I tell them about my mom and my friend. And some people think that’s weird, but it’s like, I don’t want to forget them, and the number ten reminds me of them and makes me want to play better and to be better because, like, I know they are looking down on me, and, well, I want to, you know, make them proud and live to see them again. And I know I will. So ten is a hopeful number to me. I don’t know if you get it, but it is.”

And a big, strong, silent boy said more words than I’d ever heard, and I had never noticed that he sort of has a lisp, and it made me wonder if that’s why he’s so strong and so silent. And it made me wish I had known he had a lisp before today. Man, have I never heard him say enough words to know that? You know?

And another quiet boy—the younger brother of two boisterous, gregarious boys I have taught before, a boy who one day told me, “I am not my brothers”—this boy said, “Everybody gets sad. And if the great sorrow has not descended on you yet, you are not off the hook, because it might one day. You never know, you know? So you kind of have to be patient with people. And you have to know that God always loves you, you know?”

And a girl told about her friend who doesn’t believe in God and this girl in my class “sort of tricked her,” as she said, to come to her grandma’s house and listen to the apostles speak at Conference. And in the first talk this atheist girl heard, someone shared that scripture from Matthew 22: “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” And this girl in my class looked over and her friend was crying. “And she’s sort of a tough girl, and she never cries. And I asked her why she was crying. And she just said, ‘That scripture was the most beautiful thing I have ever heard.’” And that girl in my class sat down, and we all sat there thinking about that. The most beautiful thing she had ever heard. Love. Love was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. And I sat there thinking that it was probably the most beautiful thing I had ever heard, too. You know?

Lacrimosa et risum

"Festival," by Brian Kershisnik

Ah, this world is so broken, and my heart is broken, and I don’t see how God’s heart is not broken, except that He is God and even when His heart is broken, He knows it will not always be broken, because He heals all things and wipes away all tears from off all eyes, personally and one by one, and yes, I believe that. There’s that heartbreakingly lovely passage in Gilead: “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child, and that has to be true. ‘He will wipe the tears from all faces.’ It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required.” The promise points to the reality of the need. To allow God to come to my face and wipe away tears requires a vulnerability and a humility seldom encountered in adults. But I think that is what it will take, to acknowledge him as Father. And sometimes perhaps our brokenness brings us to that point where we say, “Yes, now, please come and wipe them away. I have tried and tried, but my hands don’t work, and I need your gentle fingers to dry my face.” Perhaps that is the point. Children know they need someone to take away their tears.

I was reading this poem by Rilke called “Christ and the Children” (“And like the flowers that shoot up galore / on early days in spring, / the children flock to him, / while adults rarely mention his name. / For children have been friends with him for long / and they hurry to the gate of his embrace. / A pale one says, ‘You surely are the grace / for which my mother daily lifts her hands.’”) and then I looked up to see my children playing with the neighbor children in a sprinkler—their eyes were all bright and shining and good, and I saw Christ in the children. I saw, too, the other day while I was driving in my car a young girl—maybe ten years old—summer-sunbrowned and riding her bicycle, making wild gestures with her hands and sort of swinging her hair back and forth to make her friend behind her laugh on her bicycle. I wished her future husband could see that youthfulness, that exuberance. He will know her as a lovely young woman, but not as a girl. I feel privileged to know my daughter as a girl.

But here’s the thing, I was thinking the other day of this time a friend of mine called me to tell me that his daughter had been raped. I went over to his house, and he cried into my arms, and said he had a fifty cent solution, he had a fifty cent solution, and he shook in rage and grief, and I laid my hands on his head to give him a blessing. What do you say at such a time? Why do daughters get raped? Why do friends shake in my arms? How does such darkness exist in a world that has shown itself to me so often in so much splendor? How does one offer any real comfort, any real hope when you can’t fix it, can’t take it back, can’t change the world? Well, God pours out love, which is not always the same thing as healing. But it’s something, and it’s real.

My wife is downstairs right now, playing gently on the piano: Pachelbel’s Canon. A song she learned because I love it and she loves me. And I am reminded that one day the air will begin to shimmer and shake and hum with a music that is not of this world. And a light will come from the east, growing in intensity and brightness, causing the air to shake, to undulate and roll, to swell and to sing. Causing the grass to reach and to sing and the trees to shiver with music. And I will feel myself becoming lighter, sorrow and heaviness melting away like snow in spring, will feel the joy I have always known myself capable of, will look around to see others, to find ourselves soaring through the air. To meet the Lord in the clouds, the scripture says. A new song. We will come singing a new song. A song beyond words but created with human voices. And the voices of others, of angels and gods. I will know the words or the non-words, the motions of the mouth and the movement of lungs even though I have never heard it, yet I know I have heard it. I was born from this song, brought forth from this light. And the Lord will wipe away all tears from off all eyes. There will be no more sorrow and no more death. I will know as I am known. I will rise. The earth will become new. All things will be new. All things. All things.