GLEANINGS from the Daily Office – All Things New!

GLEANINGS (from the Daily Office) – All Things New! – Year One, Proper 28, Tuesday, November 17, 2015, Revelation 21:1-8

“and death shall be no more,”

Tonight and tomorrow I will gather in two different settings with faculty and students of Oglethorpe University. And the topic is? Paris!  And Madrid, Mumbai, Boston, Garissa (Kenya) and the Sinai Peninsula! The great distance between us in the cloistered university setting and these places that have suffered mightily at the hands of terrorists does not prevent sadness and fear. Terror leaves its mark across the street and across the ocean.

The agent is loss, loss of loved ones, loss of freedom, loss of seeming security. And it is just as real in places less dramatic and void of notoriety.  I see it in the eyes and hear it in the voice of my friend Miller who lost a son not yet 20, a son who by all accounts touched innumerable lives in profound ways. I read of it on Facebook and see it in related videos regarding the loss to damnable cancer of a sixteen year old named Sid.

Loss is real. Loss is painful. It produces heartache in the burliest of us. Only an impenetrable denial holds the pain at bay.

But a day is coming when there will be no mourning and crying, a day when death shall be no more, a day when all things shall be made new. Loss and death do not have the last word. This is our hope that does not disappoint and this hope animates our lives.

–Frodo: “I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”–