Light and Hope down the Boulevard of Broken Dreams…

Two songs with an identical name, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams, from different eras but similar theme.  The road, avenue, boulevard or street down which we wander in aloneness and despair.  It is the slow and uncertain journey when life is contorted and chaotic and turns on a dime.  We are alone, despairing, grieving and lost.  It is the journey we all make at different times in life.

It is in the ringing of the phone that heralds news – good or bad.  I never know unless it is the middle of the night.  Its ring often announces a sacred moment, a space where God will intrude into my consciousness and experience, expected or not.  This ring was the prelude to a request to visit the hospital.  A man lay in a bed distressed and dying and by his side his elderly mother.  She had called for a minister to sit with her through this sacred journey with her and her son.  She had the questions that death, especially an unexpected death, always brings – where is God in this place?  Why did God choose this time?  Why now?  Why him?  Why me?  If God is love…?  If God is powerful and caring…? 

The questions betray the reality that God is in this place, holed up in bed struggling for breath, weeping in the chair for a love that is fading, in the gentle caress of the nurse administering care. In the steady beeps and ticks of the machines helping this man to gently let go into a realm of unknowing, the place beyond all we know… God is in this place but in strange and mysterious, ever-changing, evolving spaces that challenge our thoughts and play havoc with our sure and certain knowing.

In the moment of dying, a peaceful hush and a gentle letting go and then the cool, soft, silent staring of a man now gone into another place.  In the silence, for only silence can hold this moment, there is the presence of gentle, powerful love.  The mother weeps for her son and an image of Easter breaks into my mind – a mother, a son and death – his brutal and horrific but now gentle and peaceable beyond the pain and horror.  Holding a hand and stroking his head, she weeps and remembers.  It gushes out – the little boy she held and nurtured; the man he became and the struggles they shared.  The questions she asked about God and God’s presence, will, activity and so on remain hanging on an intellectual level but they are answered in the experience of the mystery at the heart and depth of life.  We name it God because no other name will do.  Nothing else comes close to the profound encounter with the sacred in this moment.   These questions can be engaged with through philosophical and theological processes, but do they ever get to the essence of the reality?  Where is God?  How do we experience God – especially in the darker moments of life?

The poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, expresses the reality that out of darkness God emerges creatively and truly but with fleeting glimpse and evolving extravagance in mysterious ways.  We can conjure God through our glorified dogma and belief systems, condemning this image of God to a static, ever-settled imagined reality – but is that God?  Can God, will God, ever be tied down to what I can conjure in my imagination?  Can God ever be limited to my experience or my ability to understand and know?  Can I grasp God in a defined manner that is true beyond all else or will God die in my grasp, reduced to something only partly true and real?  This metaphor God fleets in and out of my reality until I begin to perceive God in unexpected places and at times surprising but wondrous.  There is a gentle rippling of the leaves in the garden, reflecting sunlight and greens of all shades.  The bright red chillies shine through.  The clouds float through the sky and the sun warms and enlightens the world.  There is a gentle bird song that echoes through the snoring of dogs and the fish tank filter.  In the thoughts and ponderings of people I know and have engaged with over these last days, in all these things, there is a presence that holds me and all life in mystery, wonder and hope.

Where is God?  In the midst of life and death, where is God?  In the middle, in the space between us, in the midst of the struggle or the laughter and joy – God is there. But don’t try to hold onto God, to reduce or define or materialise God because God will not be stilled, held, or captured.  The Spirit blows where it will, says Jesus. When you try to hold onto life and God and everything, to cling to it, you lose it. When you let it go and experience it, live it, and allow it to be, you will find life – and God.

There is a story we read this week (Luke 24:13-35) about some disciples who asked this same question about what was happening when Jesus died. They were wandering home aimless and lost because of grief and lost hope – a boulevard of broken dreams and lost, and shattered hopes. Their lives were lost in the suddenness of Jesus’ death and the confusion about what should be and what was, in reality. Where was God in this? Why was God doing this this and what next?  Silently a stranger met them on their way and spoke of things that they did not understand, the mystery in their story and the place of God’s grace in their midst always – and always. They felt a lightness in their grief and a hope in their despair. This stranger spoke wonderful words that brought them to life, and they glimpsed a light – God? They went into a home, and he walked on until they beckoned him to share their meal and more stories. They ate together and when he broke bread and shared wine they saw, knew, and believed. The Risen Christ, the presence of God was there in this act of remembering, sharing and community. When they ate and drank together around stories of life and death, hope lost and found and the existential questions of life, God was there in their midst.

When they realised and tried to define, hold, grasp this presence of Christ, he disappeared, and they were left alone but not really alone – the mystery and presence was there with them but beyond them in ways they could not hold or control. This is the way of God, the presence in our midst when we least expect it and in forms that we try to describe but cannot fully comprehend, a presence beyond us but in us and through us and with us. This God we reach out to in desperation or yell at in anger and despair or question in grief and hopelessness, this God is ever-present in profound wonder and mystery absorbing our wondering, questioning, ignorant uncertainty…  Through conscious or unconscious realisation and awareness, God is there, in, around and through. God blows like the wind, and we see a presence but only where it has been on the creative passage through the worlds we glimpse and know but do not know. This is God, also like an ocean holding us in embrace, rich and deep, gentle, and scary, cool and vast.  God is love that flows out of the centre of living to embrace the world in a resurrection hope and life.

God breaks gently into our lonely journey on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.  God’s presence is hope and peace in our chaos and darkness – we are not alone!