I gained an image of redemption from my Son Lane. When he was in school in Philadelphia, he decided not to live on campus in the safe confines of the University of Pennsylvania in East Philly across the Schuylkill River from city center, but rather in a dangerous part of North Philly in an old warehouse that he rented for a deal from a landlord who wanted someone onsite to protect his property and was happy to have a bunch of preppies from Penn living on his premises.
Lane and his buddy Aidan took this huge warehouse and built rooms and studios within it. In addition to living in the warehouse, they created this as a community space in the city for young artists like themselves to do their studio work. They called their place the Hobby Shop.
To stock their shop, they scrounged for building materials and art equipment throughout the city and around the Northeast. One device they found was in a junk heap on a small island off the coast of Maine. It was an old Lithopress. Lane and Aidan drove from Philadelphia, up past New York City and beyond Boston to the coast of Maine, taking extraordinary measures to redeem the old lithopress.
One of Lane’s student admirers described it to me this way: This press is an enormous piece of equipment. It’s made with an immensely heavy stone --like ten pool table slates pressed together. It’s heavier than most cars." In order to rescue the lithopress from the junk heap, Aidan and Lane rented a truck and caught a small ferry to its junk yard home on a tiny island. With ingenuity involving pulleys, ropes, chains, straps, clamps, and lifts--together with major geometric calculations and minor truck modification--the two of them were able to load it up and get it to Philly in one piece. And they only had a few bloody cuts and bruises on their own.
As I thought of the way my son’s great accomplishment was described by his friend, it was as if he was comparing him to General Henry Knox, back during the revolutionary war, who was able to capture 60 tons of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain and travel 300 hundred miles across the wild wilderness to Bunker Hill to overcome the British threat. (cf 1776 David McCullough)
My boy was the hero of the Hobby Shop! What they had done to save that Litho press from rotting on a New England junk heap, and tenderly bring it back to life, was considered a redemptive act of miraculous proportion.
My good friend, Bruce, died last month. He was my age, and I’m not that old. It was sudden and unexpected—a trauma that knocked us off the rails and left us in disorienting grief.
Bruce was the father of my son’s wife. We vacationed together, swapped favorite books, and told stories until late at night. We even golfed together, and I’m not a golfer. I miss him and am devastated by his passing My sorrow is incomparable to the great grief of my daughter-in-law.
Weeks before Bruce dropped dead of a massive heart attack, we were all giddy with the joyous announcement that the young married couple we share as children are expecting a child of their own. Our massive joy, at the news of the coming of the first grandchild for both families, was suddenly muted by our sudden tragedy.
We heard well-meaning comments at the funeral about the “circle of life,” and the “coming of a new generation with the passing of an old one.” These words rang hollow. There is no way to make bad-news good. The grief we feel cannot be mitigated by shallow platitudes.
Some describe life as a series of ups and downs. We ride a roller coaster up to mountaintop moments then plummet into dark valleys. Experience has revealed that life’s highs and lows are not always sequential; they often come at the same time.
My wife, who also doubles as one of my spiritual advisors, recently gave me an image for understanding the concurrent nature of hardships and blessings. “Sorrows and blessings,” she said, “can be seen as dual rails of a track that we are on. Our emotional experience does not have to be an either/or proposition.”
Just as no person should be expected to deny the reality of a significant loss, I am also convinced that nothing can diminish the delight of emerging new life that God gives. We can look for joy and truly experience it, even in sorrow. God has created us with the capacity for this simultaneous experience. Even during times of despair, we can lean on hope.
