“My shards are showing.” A homily for All Souls

A short homily for a choral evensong for All Souls. The readings were Lamentations 3:22-33 and John 11:32-44, and the poem I talk about is The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón, who you should read or listen to if you haven’t

Jesus wept.

It is one of the shortest lines in the Bible. One of the most famous. And one of the most profound. A tiny fragment that contains within it the great reality of Jesus’ humanity: his tears the manifestation of God’s abundant love.

One of my favourite poets is Ada Limón, the most recent US Poet Laureate. And her poem, The Hurting Kind, is a remembering of her grandparents; full of fragmentary images of their lives and of the death of her grandfather.

 “My shards are showing,” she writes of her grief, “But I do not know what I mean, so I fix my face in the rearview, a face with thousands of headstones behind it.” 

The images of the poem are shards of lives poking up in the poet’s memory, prompting joy and grief, often together. They are the remnants of real lives, just as headstones are. Tiny portions that speak of a much greater whole.

“You can’t sum it up, a life,” says Limón’s mother,

Running through the poem, the threads of these memories, is love, “a tenderness that rubs the bones in [the poet’s] ribs all wrong.

“I have always been too sensitive,” she says. “A weeper.”

Well, to weep is to wear the image of God in the most visible way.

“There’s a tree over his grave now,” she concludes, “I see the tree above the grave and think, I’m wearing / my heart on my leaves. My heart on my leaves. / Love ends. But what if it doesn’t?”

 Our scriptures insists that it doesn’t.

The book of Lamentations is five chapters of grief and destruction, screaming and crying, making plain the brutal realities of violence and death in the ruins of a city and the fear of God’s abandonment. And yet, right at its heart is this chapter insisting on God’s faithfulness. “He will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone.”

And as Jesus weeps he makes this compassion and love manifest. He knows that death is real, a consequence of the reality of sin in the world as a force that fights love and hope, and compassion. Lazarus’s death is as real as the one that it prefigures in this gospel: Jesus’ own. It leaves a hole in the lives of his friends and his sisters. It is physically real: there is a smell at the tomb.

Jesus weeps, as his mother Mary and his disciples will weep. As we weep when we mourn. 

But Lazarus’ resurrection also prefigures Jesus’ resurrection. It is a promise of the power of God and of God’s love to overcome sin and death in the end. The taking away of the stone is an advance echo of the rolling away of the stone of Jesus’ tomb. Stones mark graves—and have done for centuries. Jewish traditions of mourning include the placing of stones as an act of remembrance. In Christian burials, headstones are often placed at graves or at places where ashes are scattered as markers of remembrance. The moving away of the stone from Lazarus’ tomb and of the stone from Jesus’ tomb are a promise to us that our own headstones or grave markers will not be the end.

Headstones are a heavy marker of the physical reality of death. Of the absence of someone we love. But their weight cannot withstand God’s steadfast love. Tombs will break open, and the dead will rise: the Bible is not afraid to talk about the physicality of resurrection. Eternal life may not be eternally disembodied. 

Our shards show in our grief.

“My shards are showing, I don’t know what I mean,” writes Ada Limón, and yet I think we know what she means. 

But one day, Jesus promises us, it will be the shards of the stones that mark our graves and the graves of those we love that will be left, a marker of the inability of death to withstand the glory of the God who gives us life.