Doesn't everything die?

Those words are from a poem by Mary Oliver called "The Summer Day."  The line is: "Doesn't everything die at last and too soon?"

Yes, of course.  And it is hard when it does.  In yesterday's New York Times Maureen Dowd wrote an article called "Requiem for the Newsroom."  She writes that back in the 70's newsrooms were a "crackling gaggle of gossip, jokes anxiety oddball hilarious characters.  Now we sit at home alone staring at our computers.  What a drag. " I know my dear friend Susan knows exactly what she was talking about.  

I was looking at facebook today and saw that yet another church from my denomination was closing and becoming "a legacy church."  It just made me sad.  I keep seeing once vibrant churches shrink and often die.  Our camping program that had every week of camp filled with campers seems to have fewer young people every years.  And I remember what it once was - a place where lives were literally changed and people connected on a deep level.  For many of us it was truly the best week of the summer.

I was a camp counselor, an assistant director, and a faculty member at various camps for decades.  With Mary Wood, I helped to create our still successful Grandparents Camp.  This is the first summer in forty years that I will not be going to camp at all.  I am 74 years old now and I think it really is time.  It is bittersweet.  I will miss going and engaging with the kids as well as the other volunteers.  And it is just now the same camp experience.  

All of this is life, of course.  Everything dies -  institutions, churches, news gathering organizations, and people.  Death brings sadness and some regret.  At the same time, I believe that God is a creating  and recreating source of life and new life and there is always something more and something new happening.  As I look at the changes in churches over the years I really do wonder what is happening.  What is the something new?  

I guess as I write this - that is the definition of faith.  The belief that while I do not see it right now, God is at work and creating a new way of leading people to a relationship with God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. When I think of myself as  a Christian, the language is use now is that I am a follower of Jesus.  Christianity is about a way of life.   What that includes is: humility, wonder, service, grace, gratitude, compassion, simplicity, unity  and love.  This is a stance that is very different from many of the messages of our culture which encourage competitiveness, divisiveness, consumerism, materialism and individualism. How do my grandchildren learn about this other way of being in the world?

I don't know.  But I trust that under the surface and more than I know - there are books, music, people, movies, gatherings  and other ways that they can experience what we had a Camp and in Youth group in our day. I also  know that even though I am old and retired, God is not done with me - or any of us - in doing whatever we are called to do  to show and live out our faith in the abiding love of God.

Here is the poem by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver