House of Mourning/House of Feasting

I haven't written in a long time - mostly because I haven't needed to. Life has been good, in it's own odd little way & I haven't had the compelling need to wrestle words from my head/heart, to face the risk, the challenge, the terror of the stark, blank page.

I'm not sure why life's been so good. It has not been without struggle & frustration. I'm in a season of question, where nothing is certain, where everything in my life remains a possibility, an unknown, an enigma. I've struggled with this; the problem solver in me is frustrated because a puzzle remains unsolved, but the mystic is more contented, more comfortable living in question. Mostly I think what's made life good is that I've been able to slow the pace down, I've left myself time to rest, to create, to debrief with friends & share in the richness of their lives... and so all in all, this has left me feeling content amidst the questions, given me a security in the unknown & a safety to wait for answers.... but as a result, I haven't had to write...

Sure there's been lots that I could be writing, but it just hasn't been essential to write. I haven't felt the choking need to spue something out on paper in order to free my heart & thoughts from whatever's been weighing on it. And this is sort of a good feeling. It's nice to write out of 'want to' instead of 'have to'.

Lately though, my thoughts have been more of an ebb & flow that doesn't feel entirely like something I've been driving/in full control of. In busier moments I've been complaining about being 'unsynchronized', 'unbounded' to the world around me. In Bermuda, I felt a centering, a connection to something greater in simply being by the ocean. There I could feel the ocean, the world, the universe, God (?) breathing - the in & out, ebb & flow of something much greater than me; something deep, primal, universal - and this brought my heart & thoughts to peace. It felt so good to be synchronized, to be connected to something greater than my own internal clock & internal rhythms. Here in North America, I lament that I don't have that connection to the greater & find myself sometimes ticking - my tongue clicking away like a runaway stopwatch, counting down the seconds of my life, rushing from appointment to appointment, task to next task.... and it feels like the sands of time go sliding through this great hourglass & I'm watching the moments slip away into nothingness...

...but lately, in the slowing of my life, in the ebb & flow of thoughts, I've felt that grounding - that connection again. It's not a conscious realization.... part of it is that I feel like I'm not getting full clarity. Normally I'd be processing a million things in my head trying to figure stuff out frantically, but lately I've had room for other voices to interrupt my thoughts & bring up their own random insights....

For instance, over the last few weeks, I've had two phrases popping up regularly in my thought life. They come somewhat at random, but seem to be fitting the themes that my days follow.

The first phrase is "sitting shiva". I honestly didn't know all of what that meant. I've likely heard it mentioned in articles about Jewish faith & there's an episode on Babylon 5 where Susan Ivanova is encouraged to 'sit shiva' to mourn the loss of her father. I think I instinctively knew some things about it, but I didn't really know what 'sitting shiva' was until looking it up on the 'net tonight.

Shiva is the seven day mourning period in the Jewish faith. Shiva comes from a root word meaning seven and it's a seven day period that is set to occur just after the burial of a close relative (parent, spouse, sibling, child). They start shiva just after the burial because after the death, there is not time to really grieve; there are so many preparations to be done to prepare for the burial that there is no time to properly come to terms with the loss. And so this is why shiva happens after the burial. The funeral & burial are for the deceased, Shiva is for the mourners.

It's called sitting shiva because that's basically what the mourners do is 'sit'. In the shiva tradition, the mourners go to the house of the deceased & stay there for seven days. They are encouraged not to leave the house; no errands to run, no jobs to be done. The point of sitting shiva is to put yourself in a place where the grief can take it's course, where you don't need to go out & put on a public face. Shiva is to allow the mourners to be in a place of safety where their grief can be unleashed, released, washed away with the tears that flow.

In the place of 'sitting shiva', all the needs of the mourners are to be looked after by the community of people around them. The community are to be there to provide for the needs of the mourners, both in bringing food & ministering to physical needs and in paying 'shiva calls' to minister to their emotional, spiritual needs. Visitors to shiva come for the sake of the mourners, they are to enter quietly & to sit there with the mourners. There purpose there is not to entertain, or distract, but to join the mourners in their grief, to share the pain with them. Visitors are encouraged to sit in silence, to wait for the mourners to speak. They're meant to speak words that cherish the memory of the deceased & to show that they share in the grief of the mourners.

I think this latter part has been where I've been 'sitting shiva' lately. I, luckily, have not been in the place of mourning lately. I've had moments of starting to fall into my own whiney-ness, wingeing about this or that & feeling that life is too mundane, too much the same thing over & over again. I've had a number of times where this entering on the verge of pity parties has been mixed in with a severe discontent, a sense of something being off, wrong & then I've had these moments interrupted by phone calls or e-mails. A dear friend loses her grandmother unexpectedly, another dear friend's plans for the future are seeming to go up in smoke... and in those moments, I'm suddenly snapped back into a clarity of thought & emotion. I realize that the gnawing emptiness from before has somehow been part of something 'other' preparing me in some way for joining in these friend's grief. And in the moment of clarity, I end up switching instantly into a mode of 'sitting shiva' in my own weird way; e-mails, phone calls, feeble attempts to offer to be there as a listening ear or to look after random things they might need. Mostly my 'shiva calls' have been in the hidden form; silent groaning of prayer, deep, heart wrestling with God, petitioning him to minister to these friends & to shelter them with love, protection, comfort, wisdom....mostly it's been me sitting in the "house of mourning" (Ecclesiastes 7:2-4), waiting for my friends to walk through their grief as it takes whatever expression it takes....

The other phrase running through my head/life has been 'in vino veritas' - 'in wine truth'. I'd heard this phrase many times before. Mostly I always assumed that it meant that people tended to spill the beans when they were liquored; to lose their inhibitions & speak more 'truth' of the things they keep locked in their hearts behind the barriers of 'acceptable conduct.' I recently watched with a good friend a movie called "A Good Year" (talking about vintages as opposed to a 12 month cycle) starring Russell Crowe. In the movie, Russell Crowe plays Max, a high powered player in the British stock exchange. His life of power, money & 'winning' is interrupted as he finds his uncle Henry has died & left him his vineyard in France. As a child, Max spent his summers with his Uncle Henry, learning from his uncle Henry about life and wine.

His uncle Henry interprets 'in vino veritas' differently than my original interpretation. "Wine making," he tells Max, "is my passion for one reason, the sublime nectar is, quite simply incapable of lying." "Every vintage is bottled truth. Heat, rain, picked too early, picked too late. it matters not. The wine will always whisper into your mouth with complete unabashed honesty."

This is an idea completely new to me - 'bottled truth'. Life feels to me some days like a long pursuit of truth. Asking the questions, trying to figure out what we're here for as humanity, what I'm here for specifically. Who am I? Does it matter? Does anything matter? Who are the people around me? The strange collection of present, past & future, the mixture of same & yet so intriguingly other that I call my friends (or not friends). So much of my life is seeing the unknowns that few things feel answered, feel real, feel perhaps, 'true'.... and so, in an odd sense, the promise of 'bottled truth' sounds too good to be true. But it's more than the wine. As with most great truths, the wine is metaphor, it paints a picture of something & the truth comes in understanding the metaphor.

This movie inspired me. I laughed, I enjoyed the romantic parts of it, the funny parts, the beauty of the French countryside, but mostly, it helped me feel 'alive'.... both restful & exhilarating. The metaphor of the movie is finding what matters, what makes life worth living. In the movie Max finds that his crazy uncle Henry knew a lot about 'truth' - a lot about the richness of really living. Of enjoying the very best that life has to offer. Of not trading the important - love, life, joy - for the illusions of money, power, fame.

And so it's inspired me to try to live more. To taste 'richness' in a great sense. Part of that has been having more wine. I grew up without alcohol of any kind & it's hard for me to develop a taste for it. I mostly haven't really enjoyed my wine tasting experiences, though I've found a couple of moments where I've enjoyed the taste of a red wine. Mostly it is finding what 'fits' my taste buds, looking for that 'truth' that resonates with me...

But yeah, it's been an odd mix of having the two phrases, the two callings, float in & out of my out of my mind & live. The one is a call to embrace grief, to embrace suffering. The other is a call to embrace life & to embrace joy. The house of mourning & house of feasting. Perhaps this is the simplicity of the message. That I have picked one or the other instead of both. Most of my life I've chosen to live in the house of mourning. It's part of who I am. I am a 'Holloway" after all. The name means "from the valley road" & I've found that, for whatever reason, I'm built to be able to live & thrive in the 'valley' places, the low spots in life. I'm made to meet people as their road takes them through the valley & to help keep them from building a house in the valley - to join with them in 'sitting shiva' & to share their grief, but also to keep them moving (when they're ready) to the lands of joy again. I'm comfortable with this role & identity, but there's definitely places where I've taken it too far & removed myself from the places of joy, from the house of feasting. I've forgotten perhaps that, like my experience with wine, there is both bitter & sweet, bite & yet explosion of flavour - that life must have both, both times for valleys & mountain peaks & everywhere in between.....

And so maybe that's it, though I get the sneaking suspicion that there is more to it than that. In the midst of 'sitting shiva' for my friend whose grandmother passed away, I woke up one morning preparing to head for work & dreading the monotony of the day. With those thoughts of the mundane, I began a dirge, complaining to God that the only interruptions to the monotony are things like death - that unwelcome visitor that shakes everything from us & turns our world upside down.

In the midst of these thoughts I was interrupted by an unexpected phone call to announce the birth of my nephew, Garrison Stuart Prisk Holloway; named after my sister-in-law's dad who passed away earlier in the year. This in it's own way broke something & I had to go back to the shaving mirror, apologize to God & add 'birth' to the list of things that broke the monotony of the mundane.

And this is so much what life is about; there is so much more to the moments that I am unaware of. In the middle of my self focus, I see only the microcosm of my solitary life & forget the richness of the world around me - a world bursting with flavour, colour, experience, joy, sorrow, emotion of every kind, a wealth of moments - and I think this is perhaps part of the lesson, part of the 'truth' - to be aware, to have eyes open & heart open, to wait for that next breath that might suddenly catch you off guard & make it feel like your lungs & heart are going to pop from just too much wonder, too much joy & awe at the gift of life & the Giver of it.....

Tonight ended a weekend of ebb & flow. Of moments of true richness - great conversations with dear friends, hearing of grief & joy, listening to legacy being handed down & new legacy being created; savouring great & flavourful teas, enjoying moments of peace; enjoying witnessing the energy, wonder & joy of little kids - and moments of seeming desolation - the let down feelings of aloneness & isolation, the questions without answers, the frustration of the 'task list' that keeps growing but life interrupted to move me in a different direction than crossing things off the list..... I spent the latter part of the evening in the mixture of this. Seeing good friends & enjoying their richness; being stuck with questions, confronted with uncertainties coupled with past hurts & fears, confusion, fears of living in the lesser than...

On the way home, thoughts of this dichotomy bouncing back & forth in my head, I decided to buy a bottle of wine. It wasn't a simple decision for me, none of my decisions ever are it seems. Buying wine meant choosing something that I know nothing about. I have no data to feed into the problem solving machine. Buying a whole bottle means a lot to work through if i don't like it. That & there's all this stuff you need. I don't own wine glasses, or a corkscrew, or corks, or any of the wine paraphernalia that normal people have. All of this adds up to 'risk' in my head. Risking loss of money, time, most of all just another chance to 'make a mistake' - all the stuff that the 'responsible' voices (really the voices of fear & condemnation) say that I should avoid.

But I got my wine - a bottle of Chilean red - and the wine glasses. I figured I'd skip the corkscrew 'cause I had a swiss army knife at home & figured I could 'Macgyver' the cork. But it turns out I have no idea where my knife is & so had to improvise a makeshift corkscrew with a 3 1/2" wood screw & a pair of pliers (yes, you all would've laughed at me & had every right to).

How was the wine? Well, let's just say I'm still developing a taste for it. But I'm learning & growing in the freedom to experiment. Learning to simply 'try'; to 'risk'; to live....