On the Death of a Colleague
By Stephen Dunn

She taught theater, so we gathered
in the theater.
We praised her voice, her knowledge,
how good she was
with Godot and just four months later
with Gigi.
She was fifty. The problem in the liver.
Each of us recalled
an incident in which she'd been kind
or witty.
I told about being unable to speak
from my diaphragm
and how she made me lie down, placed her hand
where the failure was
and showed me how to breathe.
But afterwards
I only could do it when I lay down
and that became a joke
between us, and I told it as my offering
to the audience.
I was on stage and I heard myself
wishing to be impressive.
Someone else spoke of her cats
and no one spoke
of her face or the last few parties.
The fact was
I had avoided her for months.

It was a student's turn to speak, a sophomore,
one of her actors.
She was a drunk, he said, often came to class
reeking.
Sometimes he couldn't look at her, the blotches,
the awful puffiness.
And yet she was a great teacher,
he loved her,
but thought someone should say
what everyone knew
because she didn't die by accident.

Everyone was crying. Everyone was crying and it
was almost over now.
The remaining speaker, an historian, said he'd cut
his speech short.
And the Chairman stood up as if by habit,
said something about loss
and thanked us for coming. None of us moved
except some students
to the student who'd spoken, and then others
moved to him, across dividers,
down aisles, to his side of the stage

In this urban community we live in close proximity to creative potential and human brokenness.

I was acutely aware of this last night at our Agape dinner downstairs. Gathered only a few steps from where the opera, the theatre and the ballet perform, we once again experienced how close we are to those who live on the street, some of whom are alcoholics, some of whom are mentally ill and off their drugs, some of whom are down on their luck and desperate to find what they need to live.

Here at St. Paul’s we live in close proximity to creative potential and human brokenness.

But what Stephen Dunn’s poem wakes us up to is that we live closer to creative potential and human brokenness than just that. The two, creative potential and human broknenness, live together in the beloved teacher we once had, the colleague we so admired, the parent we so loved, the child we always we wanted, the friend or the spouse that was and is as close to us as we are to ourselves. And, what is more, the two, creative potential and human brokenness, are closer still, for both live within us.

Yes, we live in very close proximity to creative potential and human broknness.

About each of these I want to say this:

Somewhere within each of us there is a gift, the thing we are wired to do and to be, the gift that when we let it loose, that when we give it voice in our lives, it sings. For some here this gift expresses itself in music or writing or acting or the arts; for some here this gift expresses itself in medicine or politics or education. For some here this gift expresses itself in accomplishing most anything; for others, it expresses itself in the exploration and creation of possibilities. Many gifts, many forms.

Secondly, there is a place in each of us that is not only broken but is our particular path of destruction, the place that if we were to go off the tracks, would be the way we would do it. For some here, it’s addiction to alcohol or sex or power; for some here, it’s the spiraling down of self pity and low self esteem that leads to grasping at other people or things. For some here, it’s aggression; for some it’s a self-defeating passivity. Many ways to be broken and many potential paths to destruction.

And as in Dunn’s poem it’s always a shock and an embarrassment to acknowledge that these two things—creative potential and brokenness that leads to a path of self destruction—can live in the same person. In fact, if Dunn’s poem is right, it sometimes takes a kind of an unstudied voice, a brave, naïve, vulnerable student mentality to acknowledge the two together in ourselves and in others.

Today is Good Friday and so we are all about the Cross today. It is a cross that many of us rarely think of touching or clinging to when we are in the energy and flow of our own creative potential.

But when we start going down our own particular path of self destruction and begin to feel its effects, when we notice that the farther we go, the more lifeless the landscape becomes, it’s then that we reach for the cross in our pocket or touch the one that hangs around our neck, or we look for the cross that someone has put beside the road to mark where another has lost his or her life down this path.

We want, we need to touch or see the cross, not because the cross is a good luck talisman like a rabbit’s foot, something that will ward off evil. Rather, it’s the expression of something important that we know about our God and that makes all the difference to us:

There is no path we can go down that God has not traveled down before. There is no situation so humiliating and embarrassing that God has not endured it. There is no catastrophe so dire that God has not suffered it. There is no rupture, no ending, no death so horrific we can face, that God has not also faced.

And this, of course, is true whether we are in the throes of the consequences of our own self-destructive behavior, in the throes of the consequences of others’ self-destructive behavior or in the throes of a human life that requires us all to go down difficult paths and to endure catastrophes and ruptures and endings and deaths.

I believe that there is no path we can go down that God has not traveled down before. I trust that there is no situation so humiliating and embarrassing that God has not endured it. I am sure that there is no catastrophe so dire that God has not suffered it. I live my life believing that there is no rupture, no ending, no death so horrific we can face, that God has not also faced.

And God has done this for a reason—a very good reason.

Theologian Douglas John Hall puts it this way:

“The theology of the cross is…first of all a statement about God, and what it says about God is not that God thinks humankind so wretched that it deserves death and hell, but that God thinks humankind and the whole creation so good, so beautiful, so precious in its intention and potentiality, that its actualization, its fulfillment, its redemption is worth dying for.”

But perhaps popular Catholic scholar, Gary Wills, says it better with a single, personal anecdote he tells about the night his young son woke up on account of a nightmare. When Wills asked him what the nightmare was about, the boy told him that a nun at his school had told the children that they would end up in hell if they sinned.

“Am I going to hell?” the little boy asked his father.

Wills writes: “This is not an ounce of heroism in my nature, but I instantly announced what any father, any parent would: “All I can say is that if you’re going there, I’m going with you.”

Wills concludes that the cross is “God’s way of saying that, no matter what horrors we face or hells we descent to, God is coming with us.”

Works Cited or Consulted

"On the Death of a Colleague" by Stephen Dunn from Landscape at the Edge of the Century.

Douglas John Hall The Cross in Context: Jesus and the Suffering World

Gary Wills’ What Jesus Meant

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