13. BLESSING

Numbers 6:22-27
A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham
University Presbyterian Church
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
August 29, 2010

 

            My colleague John Rogers spoke here last Sunday about the 23^rd Psalm as a psalm for transitions in life.  Since then I've been thinking a lot about transitions, particularly the transition many first-year students have made here or will soon be making elsewhere.  And this week, through the haze of years, I was remembering my own transition to college... in 1966. My mother had to work and couldn't get away, so my move-in came as I caught a flight from Tampa to Charlotte and then hitchhiked from there to Davidson College with my one suitcase worth of stuff.  I laugh thinking about how odd that sounds today...and what a contrast it was from drop-off regimens here and elsewhere.

 

            Last Sunday's New York Times carried an article describing the way colleges and universities around the country have been working toward formalizing the moment parents of first-year students have to leave the campus after moving their student into his or her dorm. I've long heard the term "helicopter parents" to describe over-involved parents in all stages of parenting, but the article described some mothers and fathers as "Velcro parents," and outlined the strategies some schools are employing to pry parents away and encourage them to leave. Many schools simply note on their move-in schedule that after a certain time all subsequent orientation events are intended for students only.

 

            But the article said other colleges have devised more formal separation moments. Grinnell College in Iowa is one of them.  Move-in day for the freshmen there was last Saturday. After everything had been carried to dorm rooms, students and their parents gathered in the school gym, students in bleachers on the home side, parents in the opposing bleachers.  The president addressed the class with his back to the parents - a symbolic gesture meant to inspire an "aha!" moment for the parents - before bidding the parents farewell.

 

            Among the separation rituals I think my personal favorite is the way Atlanta's Morehouse College does it: a formalized "parting ceremony" that begins with speeches in the Martin Luther King Chapel. Then the incoming freshmen are invited to say good-bye to their parents, to stand and leave in a recessional. They march out and through the gates of the campus - which then swing shut, literally leaving the parents outside.[1]

 

            It is a tough transition, arguably harder for parents than for students.  But even for students, the parting is at best a bittersweet time.  Such departures have been the focus of so much planning and investment for so long. No doubt during the last weeks of summer that approaching moment, the beginning of one's college experience, has been the spoken or unspoken thought behind so much that has happened.  Phone calls to your roommate to see who's going to bring what... last get-togethers and fond farewells with high school friends... the knot in the pit of your stomach in those moments when you allowed yourself to think about how you might measure up academically, or how you'll fit in socially.  And surely the mixed feelings about leaving home and letting go of all that is familiar.  No matter how far away home is, the thought of leaving the household turf behind is both energizing and unnerving. 

 

            Or maybe not.  Few homes are ideal all the time.  And maybe in the tensions associated with departing there have been some hard times, some uncomfortable times that made coming here seem like a great relief.  Folks here know that one of my favorite tales of college leave-taking is in the opening pages of Ferrol Sams' novel, The Whisper of the River, and its story of Porter Osborne, Jr., who was leaving home for college.  As the moment came to say goodbye, writes Sams,

 

[Porter] approached his mother with an impersonal kiss and conflicting feelings.  Over the summer she had become the focus of his eagerness to leave home.  She found innumerable tasks for him to do around the yard, "before," she said, "you leave for good."  He began to feel that her sole function that summer was to annoy and irritate him.  He felt so nagged and nattered, so constantly suppressed and directed... that he often wanted to scream, "Leave me alone!"  Such rebelliousness, of course, would have produced upheaval in the secure order of things and was unthinkable.  Instead Porter had responded with exasperated sighs, patient and formal answers through gritted teeth, unwitnessed rolling of the eyes, and extreme feelings of guilt.[2]

 

 

On the day when Porter's mother finally left him at his new college, with eyes glistening with tears she said, "Oh my son, I'm going to miss you. Walk with God and grow in grace."  "Goodbye," said Porter impersonally.  But then, says Sams,

 

What moved him of a sudden was a feeling of remorse that he could have ever been ashamed of this lovely person who had done him nothing but good all his life....[Yet he] could not bear to let anyone see how very precious this woman was to him.  Big boys had to outgrow their mothers.[3]

 

 

Goodbyes, even good goodbyes, are hard.  Most of us can remember the big goodbyes we have spoken, can still remember the emotions.  I left for college forty-four years ago next week, but I can still remember the tears as I hugged my mother at the Tampa airport before boarding that plane for Charlotte.  Even more vivid in my memory is that day fourteen Augusts ago when I left my first-born at college.  Over the summer I had practiced the words to myself so many times.  Last words of encouragement and love I wanted to speak.  I wanted to say something like Porter's mother said to him:  "I'm going to miss you.  Walk with God and grow in grace."  But all I could muster at the time was, "Take care, Son."  And a hug.  It wasn't very inspired, but it was the best I could do in the moment...and it was better, I reckon, than the last words a good friend spoke as she left her son at a downtown university: "Be careful crossing the street!" "Be careful crossing the street?" she would say later. "That's what you say to a six-year-old!"

 

            Saying good-bye is hard.  Hard at the college dorm. Hard when a dear friend moves away. Hard when a loved one is dying.  Joyce Rupp is a Catholic theologian who wrote a book about the way we say goodbye...a book prompted, she said, by her own difficulty in dealing with departure and loss:

 

Several years ago I accompanied a friend to the bus depot.  She had been away for three years and was leaving again for a long time.  The moment of separation came, that last little space when an onrush of sadness suddenly wells up and causes a great inadequacy of expression.  Margaret turned and hugged me.  Then she looked at me with tears in her eyes and painfully remarked: "We've said goodbye so often.  Do you think we'll ever learn how?"[4]

 

 

            It is a fair question, for parting words are hard to come by.  Hard, because a goodbye or a farewell is

 

an empty place in us.  It is...a situation in which there is some kind of loss... when a space is created in us that cries out to be filled.  Goodbyes are any of those times when we find ourselves without a someone or a something that has given our life meaning and value, when a dimension of our life seems to be out of place or unfulfilled.  Goodbyes are all of those experiences that leave us with a hollow feeling someplace deep inside.[5]

 

 

            Nothing I can say this morning will relieve any of us of the discomfort of goodbyes.  But I do want to offer you some words - parting words, words of blessing - that I believe are fitting for any departure, whether it the simple goodbye we will speak to one another at the close of the service, or the farewell in the dorm parking lot, or the painful relinquishing of a loved one at the threshold of mystery.  I didn't make these words up; I'm never quite sure how to say goodbye. The words come instead from the book of Numbers and the passage we read a few moments ago... words given by God to Moses to pass on to Aaron and through him to the people of Israel as a blessing and benediction.  The words are these:

           

            The Lord bless you and keep you;

            The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you;

            The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace.

 

            These familiar words of blessing are a gift to God's people, whenever they are spoken, for they bear within them the gift of God's wholeness and power and healing and peace.[6]  Patrick Willson says that we are so used to hearing these words at the conclusion of worship that we may think them unavailable for our daily conversation.  We may think ourselves somehow unqualified or unworthy to pronounce them.  And the truth is, apart from God's grace, none of us is qualified to say them.  But I offer them to you this day as God's gift for any moment of leave-taking, indeed for any moment that is full of or seemingly lacking in grace.  And I offer them to you, a people capable of speaking them to one another.

 

            They are words that can hold us together in the midst of painful anxiety: "The Lord bless you and keep you."

 

            They are words that can provide comfort in times of loneliness or homesickness: "The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you."

 

            They are words that can hold us fast even under the battering experience of tragedy and grief: "The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace."

 

            Over the years few novels have stirred me as deeply as Peter DeVries' The Blood of the Lamb.  Many of you have heard me speak of it before.  It is not an easy book to read, for it recounts the story of a person who experiences more tragedy and grief than any one person ought to bear.  The fitting name DeVries gives his narrator/protagonist is Don Wanderhope.  The product of a strict Dutch Calvinist upbringing, Don finds himself moving farther and farther from his faith with every experience of grief, and he encounters an abundance of grief: his older brother dies of pneumonia; Don develops tuberculosis; his girlfriend at the sanitarium dies of tuberculosis; and, later, his wife commits suicide, leaving him to raise their child by himself. Despite it all, however, the one shining ray of hope and love in Don's life is his daughter, Carole. By the time she turns eleven, father and daughter are more than father-daughter; they are inseparable friends. In Carole Don finds a reason to live, and a cause for hope.  She becomes the blessing he had been missing in his life.  Then, in her twelfth year, she, too, falls ill; and the eventual diagnosis is leukemia; the prognosis becomes increasingly grim.  This final blow is more than Don can stand.  He begins a long and painful lament - more an angry complaint - raging against God for such innocent suffering.  All through Carole's illness Wanderhope grieves and rages, until finally, at the edge of hopelessness, he asks God's permission simply to despair. 

 

            Finally, as the illness reaches its final stage and Carole is slipping away, Wanderhope visits her hospital room one last time.  As she lies there fully intubated, surrounded by countless monitors, he touches her arm, bruised from all the IVs.  He bends over and kisses her cheek, and says, "Oh, my Lamb."          

 

Her lips curled in another smile, [Wanderhope says,] one whose secret I thought I knew... It was the expression of her face when her homework was going well... It was the smile of satisfaction worn at the piano when some new composition had been memorized, on her bicycle when... she had ridden past me on her first successful solo around the yard.  Sometimes, as on that...morning, she would turn shyly toward me, taking added pleasure in my approval...  But this time the experience was not to be shared.  She was going alone... there was a glow of the most intense concentration on her face... She had never seemed more alive than now, when she was gathering all the life within her for the proper discharge of whatever this last assignment might have been.[7]

 

 

Wanderhope walks to the foot of the hospital bed, and out of his despair finds himself speaking words which would be his last words to Carole:  "The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace."

 

            My word! Such a blessing in such a time!  The words come from a place deep in his memory, from a place deeper than his doubts and his skepticism.  The Spirit of God whispers for him, in the deep caverns of his life, until the words form on his lips and he pronounces blessing:  The Lord bless you and keep you.

 

            Are those whispers not also deep within us, us who have heard these words over the years?  The priestly benediction that God gave to Moses, and to Aaron, and to the children of Israel is given also to the church.  And in the name of the Lord of the church I offer its words this day to you.  Take them with you.  Say them over and over until they become a part of you, so that in some yet-unknown moment of parting, you may pronounce them, too.

 

            Says Willson, they are sturdy words for any moment of leave-taking, for any moment of great sadness or even great joy.  Indeed, these are very versatile words, and there really is no moment, no occasion when they are not appropriate.  When you are at your happiest, celebrating with friends, and the moment seems filled with grace, say, "God bless you."  The words will confirm the experience.  Or in a moment of profound darkness, when the silence is numbing and the loneliness threatens to crush you, these words - "the Lord bless you and keep you," may light a small candle just bright enough to see by, and split the silence just enough for hope to slip in.[8]  Indeed, they may just transform pangs of homesickness into an encounter with home.

 

            Simple, parting words of blessing, these... but blessedly fortifying for this August morning... and a gracious, empowering gift for our every goodbye.

---

[1] Trip Gabriel, "Students, Welcome to College; Parents, Go Home," New York Times, August 22, 2010.

[2] Ferrol Sams, The Whisper of the River, New York, Penguin Books, 1986, 13. 

[3] Sams, 14.

[4] Joyce Rupp, Praying Our Goodbyes, New York, Ave Maria Press, 1988, 17.

[5] Rupp, 26.

[6] Patrick Willson, from a farewell sermon he preached in Midland, Texas on November 9, 1992.

[7] Peter DeVries, The Blood of the Lamb, Boston, Little Brown, 1961, 241. Patrick Willson first wrote of this section of the novel, and I have borrowed much of what follows from him. Cf. Note 6.

[8] Willson.