Jason said it well

Concluding lines to a poem by Jason Shinder "The One Secret That Has Carried", a poet of great insight and a leader who knew what he did not know, appear below:

Later, I leave a note:
Sorry for the difficulties.
Meaning: how come

you don't leave?
I've never told this story.
Even at the moment

of dying,
I would say
it was someone else's.

[from a collection of his poems, Among Women, Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota (2001)]

Jason's poem, by way of a quick summary, tells the tale of "Irene" and her unnamed male partner. "Frigid" is a word that might characterize the fear of touch and torment of intimacy that the first-person voice of the poem's narrator feels. He is as cold as ice, one might say. Quizzical that Irene does not simply pull up stakes and send him packing, the narrator concludes the poem.

Jason Shinder's death was reported by the New York Times on Saturday, the 3rd of May. His passing occurred the 25th of April, which was "Good" or "Great" Friday among us Orthodox Christians. Jason had suffered from cancer for a couple of years. He is "survived" by a sister and a brother, so the obituary says.

"Howling" ahead of Jason was his mentor, of sorts, Allen Ginsberg. But, as everyone knows, the measure of a writer's finesse is not a start but a finish. Where does the poet leave us above? Where did the poet finish except to wonder how come he had a voice that was loved...and loved well?

I ask our merciful God to receive Jason Scott Shinder (19 October 1955-25 April 2008) and all of us as we face mortal moments such as represented by "Irene's" mortal choice. Her choice was to stay, and her staying left enough love for the narrator inside the poem to wonder, and to stay. But, in staying and in wondering, did the narrator own his own story, too? No, not "...even at the moment of dying, I would say it was someone else's."

Irene and the poem's narrator formed a couple--a family, inside the poem, and this couple or family represents a community of faith. Even though it were not a religiously structured community, yet it was a community of faith. Just as in the case of the couple--Irene acted upon faith and the "I" had his doubts, every community of faith will have those who act upon faith and those who shrink at the prospect of failure and feelings of uncertainty. In a community of faith and fainthearted folks, such as mine, where one member might rise to see Jesus as another runs away when troubled and tossed, it is not difficult to imagine that mortality can keep one from owning his own story.

Indeed, strange as it sounds, even Jesus' disciples (his closet confidantes were among those who walked to Emmaus) did not recognize Jesus after the resurrection. As the disciples drew near to their hometown of Emmaus, as I mentioned earlier this week from the Gospel of St. Luke, they asked the "stranger," whom they had met on a long walk from Jerusalem, to stay with them for the night. Not much later, when the resurrected Christ blessed bread at the table, as the story goes, a revelation occurred in the moment of blessing bread. The disciples of the community of faith in Emmaus saw who the "stranger" had been all along.

One cannot fault a young man of Jason's years (52 years old), or an old woman of 100years, for blustery pride as never owning their stories--or, for that matter, the unnamed narrator of Jason's poem for staying with Irene when he was so loved.

Love makes it possible to stick around for the miracle of in-sight to happen. In-sight feels like information or knowledge that was around for a long time. It might have been rehearsed before now. However, insight drops on us as fresh as a Spring's rain. When a moment comes of God breaking bread and that bread is God's own body, even the winds of pride recoil and fresh rain falls. In these moments--call them divine for that is, indeed, what they are--the story builds its nest. I think that one can rest inside the nest that pride could never build. For the bread that was broken was Jason's and our own.

Yes, in a moment of self-revelation, there is no other story but what I can see of God wanting to stick by me, like Irene stuck with her guy, through thick and thin. Maybe you and I will have repeated the story enough times to glean the truth of our "Good" Friday. Maybe Jason had learned what the narrator in the poem did not appreciate, for God's story is our own now, and now we are God's.

Again and again, let us pray to the Lord for Jason and one another. Kyrie eleison.
O holy Theotokos, save us.

Christ is among us. Christ is arisen!