+Time and -- Beyond?


+Time and -- Beyond?

In a recent online article we were told what people wish just before they die. It isn't what we wish for while we're here.

Every day is different, and we plan and think but do not know what comes next. These are my retirement years, from February 1978 to now, and from October 1998 to now, and from April 2009 to now. A lazy wretch, my favorite thing to do is nothing, but nothing is not the way of life, we are called to busy-ness, to serve, to teach, to read and study and learn, to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us. To love. To look reasonably after ourselves. And, we believe, to keep loving those in the Church Triumphant. All of that. 

Just so, Friday early to lab for usual blood tests before routine doctor appointments in August and September. Friday to eye clinic for follow up closure on my April eyelid surgery. Friday to BayMed for hospital call on old parishioner friends. Friday to gas station to fill up for Sunday’s trip. Friday to Greenwood to visit two friends who beat me there, they’re close and convenient and I try to see them every week. Do they know I come?

What do we know, then, there? Though hoping it’s not so, I’ve always been taken with the cemetery scene in Our Town. Buried today, Emily Webb Gibbs is sitting in the chair next to Mother Gibbs and the others. There’s Mrs. Soames, who says “Hello, Emily,” and there's Simon Stimson, who was choir director at the Congregational Church, and others. They chat about -- it looks like rain, and Emily wants to go back, and Mother Gibbs and Mrs. Soames try to dissuade her, advising, “When you’ve been here longer you’ll see that our life here is to forget all that, and think only of what’s ahead, and be ready for what’s ahead. When you’ve been here longer you’ll understand.”

But Emily insists and goes back to the morning of her 12th birthday but it’s so painful that she breaks down sobbing and rushes back to her chair. Late in the evening, George comes and sinks to his knees then falls full length at Emily’s feet. And Emily says, 

Emily: Mother Gibbs?

Mrs. Gibbs: Yes, Emily?

Emily: They don’t understand, do they?

Mrs. Gibbs: No, dear, they don’t understand.

The Stage Manager appears at the right, one hand on a dark curtain, which he slowly draws across the scene. In the distance a clock is heard ...

A quarter century or so ago a friend, an elderly parishioner, afraid of death and the grave and the dark, made her son promise to put an electric light in her casket. What’s it like? Do they know we come to visit and to cry and to be angry with the heavens? Maybe they do know. What do they think of us? If the Stage Manager and Mrs. Gibbs have it right, they think of us less and less. And they know what we don’t know: that we don’t understand. Even already, just by the end of her first day in eternity, Emily understands better than we do.

W+ 

From the Stage Manager in Act Three as he walks around surveying the cemetery and waiting for Emily's funeral party to arrive -- "Yes, an awful lot of sorrow has sort of quieted down up here. ... Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at'm very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars ... everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. ... ." And there's a pause and he goes on, ... "You know as well as I do that the dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they lose hold of the earth ... and the ambitions they had ... and the pleasures they had ... and the things they suffered ... and the people they loved. ... They get weaned away. ... They're waitin'. They're waitin' for something that they feel is comin'. Something important, and great. Aren't they waitin' for the eternal part in them to come out clear?"

Our Town by Thornton Wilder