a Sort of Homecoming

And you hunger for the time,

a time to heal, desire time.

And your Earth moves beneath

Your own dream landscape.

U2, A Sort of Homecoming

So, last week I walked almost 120 KM in four days.

This weekend I spent four days in a hospital with a needle dripping antibiotics and morphine into my arm.

Even though the second one probably sounds like pretty average weekend for Keith Richards circa 1980, both were rather harrowing ordeals for me.

But I'm going to leave them for later, because this also marks the one year anniversary of the single most difficult thing I have EVER had to do.  More difficult than walking 25 miles in a day, more difficult than kidney stones, more difficult than anything.  That thing was the funeral for three young ladies, a mother and her two daughters, who had become the victims of a man they should have been able to trust with their lives.

It was an entirely different sort of challenge, you cannot train for it, you cannot brace yourself against it, there is no drug that will numb it away.  Even now, I can't restrain tears when I think of their faces.  Even now, they are still a part of my dream landscape and my thoughts and prayers.

Unlike blisters and kidney stones though, I never want that pain to fade, I never want to be able to picture Christine, Amanda and Sara in their caskets without feeling the sharp pangs of just how wrong the whole thing was.  Unlike the momentary afflictions that so often bring us to tears, that sort of sorrow is a holy thing, not holy because it's somehow good, or redeemable, but because you cannot avoid the reality that the tears you weep are the very tears of God pouring out of your own tear ducts.

I felt those tears as I stood in the pilgrims mass at the cathedral in Santiago, as a nun sang kyrie and the incense swung to the ceiling, but they were different then, they were happy.

I think I saw something of why God chooses to be involved with us at all...

Because for all the evil and terrible things we can do, we can also be so damn beautiful.

Because for all the ways our brains and our bodies can go wrong, we can also overcome an amazing amount of pain and suffering and stand to face heaven with hope in our hearts.

In the face of evil which has no redeeming quality whatsoever, in the case of a father who betrays his duty to protect his family and becomes it's destroyer, there is a sunny morning where three hundred school kids launch pink and white balloons with all their "good thoughts" for Amanda and Sara.  Does the equation balance? No, but our God is not about equations.

I don't think I really understood grace until that moment.

I don't think I really understood how much God is with me every second until I had to climb into a pulpit and somehow lead a community in worship behind the casket of a five year old girl, her eleven year old sister and their mother.

So, I knew that God was with me on the Camino, and in the Cathedral, and on the plane home, and in the hospital this weekend, because those are small things.  If he would go with me into the pulpit that day to help me say goodbye to those girls, God will go with me ANYWHERE.