15/50: George, pt 2

Both of us grew up in fundamentalist religious systems that deeply hurt us. Both of us believed faith was more about mystery than answers. Both of us had deep suspicion of the church even as we maintained a deep affection for it. Both of us were looking for communities and expressions of faith that are fresh and alive.

While we landed in different places of practice and profession of faith, both George and I were in the conversation of faith. In fact, I take great joy and comfort from the conversation of George’s life. He never left the conversation, even if he was sometimes a frustrating and antagonistic conversation partner.

I believe this conversation is held in the grace of a God who isn’t threatened by our questions. This conversation is held in the unending compassion of a God who remembers we are dust and knows the struggle of humanity. This conversation is big enough to hold all our pain and doubt, even as it holds our attempts to pin down a mystery too big to ever be contained. 

George’s part in the conversation led him to an extraordinary life – a remarkable career, his tender and fierce love of Anne, a deep concern for family and friends, a relentless thirst to learn more about the world, and a passionate affair with the beauty of nature. On our last visit, he was laying in bed making videos of the hawks flying outside his window with his son, Rob, trying to capture and share a bit of that beauty with others. 

George loved relentlessly and in that love, he manifested the words of the Apostle Paul that love never fails. Love always takes us farther than we thought we could go. Love is the grace that holds us in our questions and our certainties and carries us beyond this live into greater mystery and deeper love.

George and I shared a love of poetry. He even began a poetry group in the last year at the adult daycare center where he went weekly. I’d like to read a poem by one of his favorites and mine, a poet who also passed away in the last year, Mary Oliver:

When it's over, I want to say all my life 

I was a bride married to amazement. 

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder 

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, 

or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

George was that bride married to amazement. That bridegroom taking the world into his arms. He was in the conversation and God was and is with him there. He did not simply visit the world, and in that we rejoice today!