A Remembrance

My Dad’s Yahrzeit is today. He died on the first day of Passover. The timing would have been richly symbolic and deeply meaningful to him, although he wasn’t Jewish but was, rather, a Methodist minister.

That year was the first Seder I missed in 40 years. While others shared the Feast of Freedom at the first Seder, I was with my Dad, as I had been each evening since his birthday on March 7. Passover was March 26 that year, so the evening of March 25, Rafi and I were with him, Rafi snuggled up on his bed by his feet.

I thought we might spend the night, but hospice said, “Not yet.” They were wrong. My Dad died in the early hours of the morning, March 26. I spent that first day of Passover, after caring for my Dad, and the evening of the second Seder, in my home, thinking about him and absorbing the loss.

Last night at the Seder, I thought of him. He would have enjoyed the fun and the laughter, the wonderful food and our playfulness with the most serious themes of life and death, the necessity and limits of human freedom, and God’s work in history.

His Yahrzeit candle kept me company through the hours at home after the Seder.

Coincidentally yesterday I read about Dietrich Bonhoeffer as part of an online class I’m taking. I was so moved by this man’s thoughts and his life, by his commitment to embodying faith.  His Christianity was completely counter to the prevailing religious winds in his native Germany in the 1930s and 40s.

I remember seeing Bonhoeffer’s books on my Dad’s shelves many years back. This morning I retrieved a book I received about him when I was working at a college of Jewish studies, a book published in 1986 in German, called Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Bilder aus seinem Leben. I read through much of it this morning, moved again by Bonhoeffer’s powerful, humble, activist faith and by this connection to my Dad.

I also picked up a book of Robert Frost’s poetry to read, someone whose books I remember my Dad reading in his very last years. I feel deeply blessed that I can do these things at this time in my life. This volume of Frost’s poetry has been on my shelves for years, but busy with my life, I didn’t pick it up. Today it was just the right thing.

The first page drew me in, the simple language that touches on such depths and heights of meaning. In a few words, this prefacing poem is, perhaps, one of the best windows I have found to understanding what Christianity meant to my Dad, and it is something I can experience as meaningful. Interesting how it captures the idea Bonhoeffer also expressed, of embodied faith. I hope I’m not committing a copyright sin by sharing the poem here:

But God’s own descent
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
That the supreme merit
Lay in risking spirit
In substantiation.
Spirit enters flesh
And for all it’s worth
Charges into earth
In birth after birth
Ever fresh and fresh.
We may take the view
That its derring-do
Thought of in the large
Is one mighty charge
On our human part
Of the soul’s ethereal
Into the material.

And so you’re on my mind today, Dad. You’re with me every day, but the candle, the reading, being outside on this beautiful first day of Passover, the Feast of Freedom…it all connects me to you in such an intimate way.

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