It was good to take the “shady side” on the way back from LaCrosse this past Sunday.

Let me explain.

There are three major ways back to St. Paul from LaCrosse. The first is the open road on the open prairie, interestate 90 and highway 52. It’s fast but in the late afternoon the sun beats down mercilessly on the left side of your face and rolling down your window only makes a small difference. On the Wisconsin side there is highway 35 which snakes along the Mississippi river and is astoundingly scenic, a road with twists and turns and small towns clinging to the sides of the bluffs. Between them is highway 61. It, too follows the river on the Minnesota side but it doesn’t have as many twists and turns. Best of all, on a hot fall day it offers the cool mottled sunshine of a mountain valley as it meanders under the bluffs on its way north.

Sometimes people think all the driving bothers me but, in truth, I enjoy the time in my car. There is a peace there, the sense that the world can only come in as far as I let it. I often turn my XM radio on to channel 14, “Bluegrass Junction”, and spend a few hours drifting with the music through the valleys and small towns.
Once in a while I listen to baseball, the one game that just can’t be rushed yet remains full of poetry and drama.

I suspect that refuge is in short supply these days. We’ve created a world where words and images are being constantly dropped on us, a never ending blitz of pandering chasing exhibition that at its best leaves us exhausted. We’ve become caught somewhere between our inability to live without it all and our deep yearning for a moment of peace and quiet. Even when we go on vacation we bring a laptop along.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if everyone in the world would simply take a day off from it all. Turn off the TV, unplug the computer, leave the cell phone at home and the car in the garage. Listen only to beautiful music, or better yet just the sounds that nature provides. Perhaps read a book, not a stupid trashy one but something classic, something that makes you think.

Either we would probably all go nuts or a revolution of the best kind would break out in a planetary scale.

There was an enormous visitation and funeral for my brother Paul.

The ironic thing is the younger you are the more folks there are who know you, remember you, or simply are alive to attend your funeral. Whole high school gymnasiums are full for victims of tragic teenage car crashes and grand old people who lived long and done much are sometimes attended by only those who’ve been hired to carry the pall.

My brother was somewhere in between.

We’re grateful for it all, that wave of care and support and kind words and fond memories that washed over us again and again. Even though standing under it exhausted us it left an indelible imprint on us, an image that we can draw on again and again when the harder times, the questioning times, come.

And they will.

I suspect that one day it will hit me, the randomness of it all, how unfair it seemed, the struggle of what lies ahead for his wife and children. And God and I will talk. Actually we’ll argue, or rather I will. I will shout and cry and pound my feet on the floor because I am finite in the face of infinity. I will lose the battle, I certainly hope to, but I will make my stand anyway.

Until that time I will rest and try to get my soul untangled from it all. People are counting on me and that gives me a framework from which I can hang the threads of my life. I plan to take the weekend after next off and a quiet lake, a mandolin, and the cool fall winds will be restorative.

I suspect, too, that my own life will change in all of this. Not simply the obvious loss but rather the trajectory of things will be different. I want to write more. I have new responsibilities. Old ideas about what I wanted to be when I grew up have an increased urgency. What it means to be part of my family has changed.

Death takes away and adds in a curious arithmetic.

The thing about time is when you’re in any moment time appears to be moving at a variety of speeds rooted in a host of variables. But when you look back time always seems to be going fast.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for You are with me…

My brother Paul is coming home today.

In the next few hours a plane will land and the trip that started out so routinely and ended so unexpectedly will be complete. The usual hugs and unpacking and catching up that mark the end of a business trip have been replaced by baggage handlers taking his body to a quiet hearse, but more than ever we are glad, in our tears, that our Paul is home.

Some decades ago our parents took a leap of faith and moved the family to Minnesota in pursuit of a better job and a better life. And over the years it has become home, first because our parents were there, and now because it is where we bury our dead. We are fixed to this place by life and death and Wisconsin seems so very distant although the border is an easy day’s walk away.

Paul will be buried in the same cemetery as my father on the edge of Mahtomedi. It is a remarkably quiet place that had once been the country cemetery for the city of North St. Paul. Now its a remnant of an earlier time, a place surrounded right to the edges by suburbia yet remarkably calling to mind how this area was once a deep woods and a resort town on the edge of the Twin Cities. The old country road is now a busy four laner but there is still a peace there and a sense of the sacred in the middle of cookie cutter townhomes and conformity.

Our name now joins the list of the familiar Mahtomedi family names who have been gathered in this place. If we were not part of this town in life we are, now, in death part and parcel of its life. Whatever the years bring this small piece of land, more than any houses we buy, will mark us as belonging here.

In my mind as I write this I envision the passage of the years to come, the gentle movement of seasons over the resting places of those we love. I imagine standing by the graves of my father and brother in my old age if God so allows thinking of all that has gone before, all that could have been, and how close and how far away are those I love in a place made holy by thier rest.

The sense of loss will be pronounced, but so will the sense of peace. We spend a few short days wandering this earth in temporary shelter and then, and only, in death do we come to a permanent place, and end to the travels, and where heaven and earth will one day meet we find our home.

Just a gentle note to all those who seek to be comforters in a time of mourning.

Two things you should always avoid saying.

First never say “It was God’s will…” because we simply don’t know that with any specificity.

Second avoid saying “It’s a blessing…” because it never is. Death is grotesque even at its best and all those who experience it would much rather trade thier “blessing” for whatever your “blessing” is any time.

Now, that being said all of us are grateful for the prayers and letters and calls and emails that have come to us in this time. We literally feel a certain peace and strength in this time because of it. We are humbled, as well, by the outpouring of love and affection for Paul. Our loss is terrible but these things are a sweet balm of healing and we thank you.

A short while ago a devout Christian with whom I worked came to comfort me at the loss of my brother.

She’s the genuine article, a real person of faith who tries to make it matter in a very confusing world, but something she said took me back. “It’s going to be alright” she said “It was God’s will”. Now I know she meant well but…

No, it was not God’s will!

It was not the desire of God’s heart that my brother die in a hotel room in Los Angeles. Or that anyone for that matter suffers and dies. If anything it is Satan’s desire, with each death and each pain being a way to stick a diabolical finger, as it were, in God’s eye.

Yes, but God could have prevented it!

And the answer is yes, God could have, and I don’t understand why providence chose this time and place and way for my brother’s earthly life to end. I may never. And right now its everything I can do to hold on to the idea of a plan and a guidance to all of this, a meaning that’s real but just escapes me at the moment. I trust it all makes sense to my brother already yet it’s only honest to say if any belief or faith is present in this time its not rooted in what I see or feel.

Remarkably, in all of this I know in a place beyond my emotions and my logic that God is still working to make all things new and somehow this dreadful thing, this epitome of all that is broken and wrong with humanity, has a place in it all. That is God’s will, and somehow my brother leaving this life is part of it.

It makes no sense at all but at the same time it seems very true.

At 2:40 PM today I have an appointment with my doctor.

I will ask, no even demand, that my heart be checked out and not just with the once over via stethescope.

You see after he died they discovered that my brother had advanced arteriosclerosis, an enlarged heart, and possible evidence of a prior heart attack. He was a non smoker, moderate drinker, golfer, bicycle rider, and not anyone you would have looked at and said “There’s a heart attack waiting to happen…” The only symptom that something was wrong was the heart attack that robbed us of his life and made the world poorer by one decent man.

So off to the doctor I go and if you have a history of heart disease in your family (and mine does) or you have those tell tales signs of heart distress don’t wait and don’t let the doctors use their conventional wisdom and tell you you’re too young or its all in your head. Go, get it dealt with, even if you have to cancel that meeting or miss that appointment.

There is so much at stake.

Yesterday, in the early morning, in Los Angeles, my brother Paul died.

Even as I write this it seems unreal and so out of order for the way things should be. And so unfair.

Apparently he, and we, and all of us did not know that his poor heart was fading away even as he seemed to remain so very strong and alive. And while he was talking to his wife on the phone before going off to work it just stopped. Now its our hearts that are broken.

I make no sense of this because in my mind I see none. Nothing about this fits any logic I know and part of me is angry and frustrated in a primal way. I should not be crying with a widow in her early 40’s. I should not be trying to help a 12 year old kid make sense of it all. But it is what it is and all hope that this is a bad dream was shattered when I woke up this morning and came to realize that I have been denied the terrible comfort of this all being a nightmare.

Yet I do not fear for his soul as I know he loved the Lord. And even as he will miss in an earthly way all the joys of this life, the graduations, the weddings, the grandchildren, all the things he deserved he will also never grow old, never grow broken and sad and tired as is the lot of all us who remain. Time and its pains have no hold on him anymore, only glory remains and the incredible life of heaven in which we all are what we should be, where we should be, and in the presence of Love in its purest form.

I would be selfish to deny him this.

Yet my pain is so deep that I am nearly unable to function and I cannot imagine that of his wife and children and our mother who now has to face the indescribable task of burying her own child. Faith rises like an instinct and there is a very calm place in the center of things in myself and in all of us despite the intense bitterness of these days but I still hurt in ways I never imagined.

God, the river is deep and cold, the current is swift, and I fear for the crossing. Yet stay with me and I will walk on.

The temperature outside is beginning to feel more like autumn although officially its still summer.

Around here we call it “good sleeping weather” when the evening air is cool and the humidity of the summer has passed. You can keep your windows open as the temperature drops in to the 60’s (farenheit) and just a light blanket is all you need for a good night’s rest.

September is Minnesota’s way of apologizing for weather that always seems to be wrong somehow. Too hot, too cold, too rainy, too snowy, too much of something nearly always and its unpredictability has made TV meteorologists stars and the rest of us gripers. But somehow September is different. Everything is basically steady and pleasant as if nature herself has taken a rest from making war on us and we celebrate the truce.

The colors will appear as well. At first they will be just touches of orange and red in the leaves but by the end of the month and the early part of October the hills will seem to be on fire with the glory of fall. The drive to LaCrosse, through the Mississippi River valleys through the bluff country, is particularly remarkable. Tourists come from literally all over the country to see nature’s last show before winter. The locals call them “leaf watchers” and they descend on the area with the whirring sounds of cameras and fill the local registers with cash.

There are tangible benefits to being a traveling Priest and this season reminds me of them. Whether I was on the road through the woods to the prairies of North Dakota or along the river to LaCrosse there are moments of beauty in the quiet of the car that are real but cannot be perfectly explained. You just know. I cherish them and look forward to the drive south even now as I am typing this as part of the last details of work before I head out.

This change in the weather also brings out the best in me. I like it cool and wish that September’s weather was the standard for the whole year. With all due respect to the Floridians I do like to visit but would probably turn into a maniacal killer if forced to live there all year round. I even like Fargo, high and wide on the North Dakota plains and driven by winds that come unchecked from the steppes of Canada.

With the change in the weather my pace quickens, the sleepy days of summer pass, and the preparations for the winter come in earnest. The church, diminished by the vacations of summer, returns to life again and the horizon expands even as the daylight shrinks away. All in all it is a good time of the year.

And I must be on my way.