Sharon Daloz Parks writes:

“We human beings seem unable to survive, and certainly cannot thrive, unless we make meaning.  We need to be able to make some sort of sense out of things; we seek pattern, order, coherence and relation in the disparate elements of our experience.  If life is perceived as only fragmented and chaotic, we suffer confusion, distress, stagnation, and finally despair.  This capacity and demand for meaning is what I invite [you] to associate with faith … Faith is the activity of seeking and discovering meaning in the most comprehensive dimensions of our experience.”

Gifts from My Son

          A couple of months ago I told my six-year-old daughter, Ellery, that I would be up in front of the church, giving the same talk that that tall guy with the tie usually gives.  She paused for a second or two, looking half puzzled and half amused, and said, “Do you know how to do that?  I think you’d better ask someone.”  I laughed, but inside, I had to wonder.  “Do I know how to do that?”  Please tell me when I’m done, and make sure you tell Ellery, too.

          Aren’t kids amazing?  Just a couple of weeks ago I was helping my three-year-old son, Theron, wash his hands.  He had to stand on a stool to reach the faucet.  When we finished, he turned to step down.  Without even looking, he put his hand up to hold mine as he stepped off of the stool.  I was overjoyed to see that he had so much faith in me.

          One of the most beautiful things about children is that they have no inhibitions.  The other day, my other daughter, Theron’s twin sister Georgia, began to sing a song she had just composed.  “Luke Sky-walker, Luke Sky-walker, Luke, Luke, Luke Sky-walker…”  Her cultural development is well under way.

          If you ask any of my friends in small group ministry, they will certainly tell you that Joan and I can go on and on with stories about our kids.  I would love to do that today, but I am wise enough to realize that my cute kid stories aren’t as cute to you as they are to me.  Besides, I didn’t come here today to talk about Ellery, Theron and Georgia.  Instead, I want to tell you a few stories about our first child.

          To begin this story, I need to take you back to March of 2000.  At that time, Joan was in graduate school at the University of Iowa.  I had completed a degree in education there the summer before, and had been working for several months as an instructor in Kirkwood Community College’s High School Completion Program.  We had decided that with my new income, we were in a good financial position to begin a family.  So by March, Joan was quite pregnant.

          Early that month, Joan called me at work and said, “Let’s go to Ireland over Spring Break.”  She was worried that having kids would make it impossible to travel, so she wanted to go right away.  Her reasoning seemed good enough to me, so we worked quickly to make all of the arrangements, and we soon found ourselves on the Emerald Isle.

          While we were there, we rented a car and spent a lot of time driving in search of stone-age monuments.  We saw everything from the fabulous Newgrange site, an enormous 5000 year-old structure that still precisely marks the rising of the winter solstice sun, to several circles of standing stones and other small stone structures.  We also visited several church ruins that marked the long history of Catholicism in Ireland.  One structure we visited was in danger of falling down.  The local farmers had been scooping away the soil around the foundation, for they believed that the soil had been blessed, and if they sprinkled some of it on their land, they would have a successful harvest.  (St. Patrick would be disappointed to know that paganism is alive and doing fine.)  We had an absolutely wonderful time, and by the time we got home, we were certain that this trip would stand out as one of our happiest times.

          Try to imagine how we felt:  new career for me, new family on the way, new memories of a beautiful place.  We were flying high.  At the next regular visit after the trip, Joan’s midwife even gave her an “A+” on the progress of her pregnancy.  That was March 29^th.

          On March 31^st, Joan went with her mother to visit her sisters in the Twin Cities.  I stayed behind in Iowa City.  The next day, April 1^st, Joan’s mother called me to tell me that Joan was having some unusual drainage, and that she was on her way to the hospital.  She told me not to worry too much.  That night, I got a call from Joan.  I could tell that she was pretending to be calm, so I decided that I should pretend, too.  She told me that things weren’t going well, and that I had better come.

          I arrived at the suburban Catholic hospital at about 2:30 a.m.  Only then did I get the full story.  There was an infection inside of Joan’s uterus, and there was no way to get any antibiotics in there.  The pregnancy was ending, and there was nothing anyone could do.  I will spare you the details of the hell we endured, except to tell you that at 2:00 a.m. on April 3^rd, our son was stillborn.

          The next morning, one of the nurses told us that a local Catholic church had set aside a section of their cemetery for stillborn children.  If we were interested, we would need to talk to the hospital chaplain.  We agreed.

          It is important for you to remember that this is happening on hospital time.  Do they care that you’re miserable and haven’t slept?  Well, maybe, but it’s 6:00 a.m. and time to check your vitals and order breakfast.  The chaplain arrived a little after 7:00, just five hours after our son had died.  She was a petite older woman with dark gray hair.  I don’t remember much of what she wore except for the well-rehearsed sympathetic look behind her glasses.  After the nurse introduced her, she sat on a chair next to Joan’s bed, leaned forward, and took Joan’s hand.  In a her most solemn and earnest voice, she said, “Do you believe your baby’s with Jesus?”

          [pause]

          We just stared at her.  We were right in the middle of the worst thing that had ever happened to either of us.  We were completely shattered and crippled by the overwhelming grief.  On top of that, we’d barely had any sleep.  And here comes a complete stranger who wants to discuss theology.  When we didn’t answer, she repeated the question.  “Do you believe your baby’s with Jesus?”

          “We have our own way of understanding what that means,” I said.  With that, she let go of Joan’s hand and sat up.  Apparently that line was the only bit of spiritual anything that she had to offer.  She suddenly turned all business-like, gave us the information about the Catholic Church and cemetery, and then left.

Over the next few hours, the doctors wanted to continue to monitor Joan’s health.  We were somewhat relieved to see Joan’s antibiotics were working.  Her white blood cell count had come way down from the night before.  While Joan rested, the nurses gave us some pamphlets about coping with loss.  We read them, and they suggested that we name our child.  We liked this idea, and decided to name him “Dolmen” after some of the stone-age monuments we had seen in Ireland.

After more than thirty hours in the hospital, and ready for any distraction, I finally noticed the décor.  The hospital had been painted a cream color with emerald green accents.  I then noticed these little Celtic designs all over the place – on signs, doorways, and columns in the lobby.  It had even been woven into some of the carpet.  I mentioned it to Joan.  She had noticed it, too, but it was hard for either of us to connect to our fading dream of Ireland.

          After being discharged, we walked out of the hospital, past the pregnant smoker, to the minivan that was waiting to take us to Joan’s sister’s house.  Behind the van we saw a round landscaped island in the middle of the parking lot.  We were all too distracted to notice it when we arrived, but there, amid the flowers and shrubs, was a large circle of standing stones, clearly placed to imitate the stone-age monuments we’d visited just three weeks before.  We were in too much of a stupor to do much more than give a “huh, would you look at that.”  Little did we know that that “huh” would not be the last.

          We drove home the next day to make preparations for Dolmen’s funeral.  We spent much of our time searching for appropriate readings.  The one that I chose was the excerpt from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet that you heard earlier this morning.  Joan chose an excerpt from a poem by William Butler Yeats that is based upon an Irish legend.  You can see an excerpt from it at the top of your order of service.  According to the story, little children who appear to die have in fact been taken to live with fairies in the forest.  The fairies leave a creature called a changeling in its place, and that is what actually dies.  After sobbing our way through these words, we buried him with the help of our families in a Catholic cemetery in Little Canada, a suburb of St. Paul.

          A few weeks later, we returned to the Twin Cities for another visit.  It is an annual tradition in Joan’s family that we all go up for Easter.  At the time, Joan and I were not members of any church, so we were expected to follow everyone to Joan’s sister’s Presbyterian Church.  Still miserable and emotionally vulnerable, we sat down to listen to a sermon about death.  Since it was Easter, I suppose there was something in there about resurrection, too.  But I don’t remember that.  About the only thing I can recall out of that service was the minister’s statement that, “Death is caused by our sins and failures.”

That’s just what we needed to hear.  So far, we had no clear and complete medical explanation as to what had happened.  So we were left to wonder:  Had Joan taken too many vitamins?  Not enough vitamins?  Was taking a trip to Ireland too risky?  Or maybe this whole thing was some kind of karmic payback for who knows what.  The message was clear:  “You sinned and you failed, and now your baby is dead.”  Well, that’s what I heard, anyway.

I didn’t believe the minister, of course, but I was furious that she seemed to be making a play for our emotional vulnerability.  Also, I resented being forced to go to a church that I did not believe in.  I was tired of being treated like I didn’t believe in anything just because I wasn’t attached to a church.  Fleeing from pain and searching for comfort, Joan and I began the search that led us to the UU church in Iowa City.  After an hour of talking to the Reverend Nancy Haley, I knew I’d found my spiritual home.

Of course, joining the church did not cure us of our grief.  We had so much love, but the object of our love was not there.  Later that spring, we decided to construct a garden in our back yard.  Using limestone that we found in the bushes behind our duplex, we built a terraced garden with stone retaining walls.  In the middle of the garden, we recreated a miniature dolmen, similar to those stone monuments we saw in Ireland.  We poured all of our grief into that little plot, and by the end of summer, we had beautiful flowers and a respectable bounty of fruits and vegetables.

By this time, Joan was also pregnant again.  Joan is certain that this pregnancy began on what would have been Dolmen’s due date, August 25^th.  Joan’s sister was pregnant, too.  Joan’s sister’s pregnancy is, in itself, a remarkable story.  Joan is the third of four sisters.  All of them are now married, and they had married according to birth order.  It also happened that the oldest, Ann, had children first.  Unfortunately, Joan’s second sister, Sue, had been struggling with infertility for years, so when Joan had first become pregnant, it wasn’t Joan’s turn.  Sue had been sad before, but Joan’s pregnancy had upset her further.  When Dolmen died, all of Sue’s grief came to the surface.  In the intense climate of love and sympathy generated in response to Dolmen’s death, Ann offered to serve as a surrogate for Sue’s baby.  So by September, it was Ann who was pregnant along with Joan.  I am overwhelmed when I reflect that my six-year-old nephew partially owes his existence to my stillborn son.  If Dolmen’s existence has no other meaning than this, I would call his little life a blessing.

As the days shortened and the nights cooled that fall, Joan’s pregnancy progressed, but our garden began to fade.  Some tomatoes that we’d missed had dropped to the ground and broken open, spilling their seed in hope of growing a new plant next year.  Then, as the frost came, the tomato leaves turned black and wilted, eventually killing the plants.  The flowers wilted and dried, also leaving a casting of seed that would lie waiting for spring.

As I watched this transformation, something struck me.  The parent plants dropped their seeds as they died.  The fruit was intended to fall to the ground and rot, providing nourishment for the seed in the next spring.  This was basic botany, I know, but it struck me as profound to consider that seeds mark both the death of one plant and the birth of another.  Death and birth in one symbol.  I became obsessed with seeds.  I kept thinking about them and talking about them, feeling that I was really on to something – at least something for me to hang on to as a way of making sense of what happened.  I still wouldn’t say that I had much of a coherent spiritual philosophy at that point, but I had seeds, and that seemed like a good start.  Right before Christmas, we visited Dolmen’s grave again.  I bought a 20 pound bad of birdseed and dumped it on the stone marker.  I told everyone that I wanted to attract other visitors after I was gone, but Joan understood that it was much more than that.

Seeds weren’t the only things occupying our imagination.  Thanks to the Yeats poem, we had also kept an eye out for anything to do with fairies.  One evening, also right before Christmas, Joan and I went into Vortex, a fancy new-age gift store in Iowa City.  We both got excited when we saw that they had a whole bunch of little statues for sale based upon the Flower Fairy paintings by Mary Cicely Barker.  There must have been twenty different fairies, but we immediately agreed that one looked like Dolmen.  Because our parents had been so supportive, we decided that we wanted to buy one for each of them, too.  Unfortunately, they only had two of them, so we asked the clerk if we could order another one.  She said that they probably wouldn’t be ordering from that vendor again since Christmas was just a few days away.  She took down our information just in case, but made no promises.

 Christmas came and went without any word on the fairy statue.  I tried looking on the Internet for a place to buy them.  I found other fairies from the series, but not the right one.  In March, my mom called to say that an art show was coming to Boise, and an advertisement mentioned the very statues we were looking for.  She knew about our quest and thought she could find it there.  A couple of weeks later she called again.  Something had come up, and she couldn’t go.  We were starting to give up on the idea.

Of course, this concern didn’t dominate our thinking.  Joan’s pregnancy had made it past the point that we had reached with Dolmen.  We counted every day that Joan remained pregnant as a victory, and worried endlessly that every new sensation foretold doom.  It was a challenge for us to grow love for our developing child when we lived every day in terror.

While struggling to manage our emotions and Joan’s health, winter gave way to spring.  Spring meant Easter, and Easter meant church in the Twin Cities.  Before anyone started thinking otherwise, I made it clear that I would not be attending the same church again.  I belonged to a different church, and I would be finding a UU church to attend on Easter morning.  Joan agreed, and after some research, we settled on a UU church in the suburb of White Bear.

We arrived a few minutes late (as is our usual McAlister style), and slipped into two of the few remaining seats.  It did not take long for us to notice that the church had been decorated with beautiful batiks. When it was time for the minister to speak, she shared a few thoughts then yielded the podium to a member of the congregation.  My mind pulsed with amazement and joy as she explained that she had written a story  called “The Everything Seed,” and her friend had created the batiks to illustrate her story.  You may recall that Mark used this story during his Easter service this year.  But when we heard it, it had not been published. 

Seeds!  I have to be honest.  I went there as much to get away from the Easter experience of the year before as I was to be there for anything positive.  I expected a nice sermon, perhaps something mildly pagan, maybe with some stuff about spring and rebirth.  But seeds!  The whole thing was about seeds.  Now I suppose that some of you are thinking that a sermon about seeds at Easter is not that big of a coincidence.  But let me tell you, I have never been so jazzed by a church experience in my life.

At the end of the service, we were told that we could order prints of the batiks and they would mail them to us.  Joan and I liked the idea, especially since I felt so good about what had happened.  We studied about thirty images, and without discussing or debating, we both chose the same one.  We placed our order and went directly to the cemetery where we dumped more seeds.  We then went back to Joan’s sister’s house feeling exactly the opposite of what we felt the year before.  Instead of being spiritually assaulted, we had been spiritually vaulted to a height I had never experienced.

As spring continued, Joan’s pregnancy progressed very well.  By Memorial Day weekend, Joan was overdue.  She had heard once that the last month of pregnancy is so miserable so the mother is willing to endure anything, even labor, to get it over with.  She was ready.  We went to the UU Memorial Day picnic on Sunday, and everyone was amazed that Joan hadn’t given birth yet.  Finally, that night, around midnight, Joan went into labor.  Eleven hours later, on Memorial Day, Joan gave birth to our beautiful 9 pound, 15 1/2 ounce baby Ellery Jude.

I don’t suppose I need to tell you how happy we felt.  We had worked so hard – physically, emotionally, and spiritually – to bring Ellery into the world.  We had her, but we were still haunted by fear.  That night, in spite of our exhaustion, Joan and I agreed to take turns staying awake with her so we could protect her from whatever lurked in the shadows.  After a few hours, a nurse realized what we were attempting, and took Ellery to the nursery so we could have a bit of sleep.

The next morning, we agreed that I should go home, take a shower and have a proper nap.  Joan’s mom was there, so they figured they could do without me for a while.  When I got home, I saw the little light on the answering machine was blinking.  I pushed the “play” button, and this is what I heard:  “Hi, this is so and so from Vortex.  I’m just calling to let you know that the fairy statue that you ordered has arrived, and you’re welcome to pick it up any time.”  After more than 150 other days and ways the Dolmen fairy statue could have come, it somehow arrived on the day Ellery was born.  The Dolmen fairy statue, and Ellery (9 days late), had arrived on Memorial Day, the day we remember the dead. This was too amazing to be mere coincidence.

I can accept that there’s nothing magical about the hospital that had Celtic designs and landscaping.  It was a Catholic hospital, and some Catholics like Ireland and Irish stuff.  Okay.  I can also accept that it’s no big deal that I noticed the seeds and the UU church had a sermon about seeds.  Seed symbolism has been around for a long time.  So we both picked up on it.  “So what?”

But I can’t let go of that statue and how I felt at that moment.  Was I getting a message from beyond the grave?  I don’t think so.  My mom would tell you that we had witnessed the work of an angel.  I don’t believe that either.  I heard it once said that, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”  I really like that expression, except I kind of get hung up on the word “God” because I always associate it with the grandpa-in-the-sky concept, and that just doesn’t work for me.  Maybe I could rework it to say something like “Coincidence is the Universe’s way of reminding us that everything is connected.”  “Synchronicity,” some people call it.

It doesn’t bother me if you don’t accept this connection.  I told Ellery this whole story a few months ago, and she said, “I think it’s just a big coincidence.”  She is not sure whether My Little Pony is real, but she’s certain there’s no magic in Dolmen’s story.  Also, I spent many years as a militant atheist, picking apart other people’s beliefs just for sport.  Honestly, when that part of me turned on, I became a real jerk, and if I turned that against myself today, I could probably come up with some nasty zingers.  But that’s not who I am any more.  One day, near the end of this phase in my life, a friend and I were talking over lunch.  I told her that I thought that, “Religion is just bunch of stuff people tell themselves because they are afraid to die.”  She shot back, “Jon, maybe that’s something that you tell yourself just because you’re afraid to live.”  I knew she had nailed me, but I didn’t really understand it until ten years later, after I had lost my son.

People always say that, “Death is a part of life.”  I guess they’re trying to help us prepare for what we all have to face some time.  But my son taught me that it is equally true that life is a part of death.  I understand that living is the hardest part of death.  But it is also the most important part.  I also understand that beyond death we can find wisdom, beauty, and joy.  As Sharon Daloz Parks writes, “[Beyond tremendous grief and loss], there is, eventually, gladness … We discover a new reality beyond the loss … Though this new knowing sometimes comes at the price of a real tragedy (which even the new knowing does not necessarily justify), we typically would not wish to return to the ignorance that preceded ...  We do not want to live in a less-adequate truth, a less viable sense of reality, an insufficient wisdom.  There is a deeply felt gladness in an enlarged knowing and being, and in a new capacity to act.”   My son’s death brought me a faith in seeds, a rambunctious and joy-filled nephew, and a reminder that I should pay attention to the universe, because it may be sending me a signal.

There’s one more piece to this story.  Do you remember that print that we’d ordered at the UU church in Minnesota?  Well, it arrived a few months after we’d ordered it, and we framed it and put it on the wall.  We were very busy with Ellery and later with Joan’s next pregnancy.  This time she carried our twins.  When the twins were 16 months old, we packed up everything, including the picture, and moved to Indianola.  After we’d lived there a few months, Joan found the picture and put it up in the kids’ bathroom.  Soon after, I looked at it carefully for the first time in a few years.  You can see it on the cover of your order of service bulletin.  It shows a tree with a bird’s nest. Inside the nest, there are three eggs – one on the bottom, and two next to each other above that one.  A single, and then two together.  I see in that painting my oldest daughter and the twins.

Perhaps I’m a bit loopy now.  Maybe it’s just me looking for meaning where there is none.  Maybe I can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.  Maybe I’ve started telling myself stories because I just can’t cope with death.  Maybe.  But for now, I don’t think so.

[pause]

Please open your hymnal and turn to responsive reading #664, titled “Give Us the Spirit of the Child.”

Give us the spirit of the child.

Give us the child that lives within:

The child who trusts, the child who imagines, the child who sings.

The child who receives without reservation, the child who gives without judgment.

Give us the child’s eyes, that we may receive the beauty and freshness of this day like a sunrise;

Give us a child’s ears, that we may hear the music of mythical times;

Give us the child’s heart, that we may be filled with wonder and delight;

Give us a child’s faith, that we may be cured of our cynicism;

Give us the spirit of the child, who is not afraid to need; who is not afraid to love.

Gordon Wells writes:

“[Storying] very quickly becomes the means whereby we enter into a shared world, which is continually broadened and enriched by the exchange of stories with others.  In this sense, the reality each one of us inhabits is to a very great extent a distillation of the stories that we have shared.”  This morning, I shared with you the most profound story of my life.  I have also shared how I have tried to make meaning from this story.  If we accept Sharon Daloz Parks’ definition, I have shared my faith.  I urge you to share your stories so that you and your loved ones can discover the meaning – the faith – in your lives.

Leader: I extinguish now the visible flame of

       this community so that we may carry its

       light into the world.

People: Let us go from this place open to life,

       expecting to love, and prepared to serve

Hymn of Valor - Please stand as you are able and join in the singing of the hymn found in the back inside cover of your hymnal.

End: “Go in Peace, Go Making Peace.”