Falling ... With Style

Woody, the skinny, flop-armed cowboy in Pixar’s Toy Story, is Andy’s favorite toy. As Andy’s toy collection anxiously awaits the big reveal of this year’s birthday present—Mr. Potato Head is always hoping for a Mrs. Potato Head—they are filled with apprehension as Buzz Lightyear enters the scene. Andy bursts through the bedroom door, flings Woody off the coveted spot on the bed, plops the newest toy on the pillow, then exits.

The new toy is Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger. Woody climbs back up and introduces himself explaining that there must be some mistake about his placement on the bed. It becomes apparent that Buzz doesn’t realize that he’s a toy and that he thinks he’s the real Buzz Lightyear, TV star and protector of the universe.

As Woody tries to defend himself and discredit Buzz, Buzz earns the admiration of all of the other toys because he has all kinds of lights and gadgets on his space suit. When asked if he can fly, he pushes a button and out pop his wings.  

“Oooo! Ahhhh…” the toys respond.  

“Impressive wingspan.  Very good.,” says the Piggy Bank.  

“These are plastic!” Woody whines his plea to the others.  

“They’re a trillium, carbonic alloy,” says Buzz, “And I can fly.”  

“You can’t fly,” Woody insists.  

“Can to,” says Buzz.  

“Can’t!”

“Can!”

  

“Can’t!”

“Can!  I can fly around this room with my eyes closed,” Buzz insists as he walks to the edge of the bed, climbs up onto the rounded bed post, closes his eyes, shouts, “To infinity … and beyond,” and dives off the bed.

Buzz plummets head first toward the floor, his helmet bounces him off a huge plastic ball, he does a midair flip, lands on a Hot Wheel car poised at the top of its track, rides it down the track, around the loop, and off the ramp which propels him up to the ceiling where he gets caught in an airplane hanging by a string which spins him around and around and around until finally he is thrown off and glides back down to the bed with a perfect, feet first landing right in front of Woody’s face, opens his eyes and says:

“CAN!”

While the other toys cheer “Whooaa!” and applaud Buzz’s flying, Woody mumbles loud enough for everyone to hear, “That wasn’t flying. It was falling … with style.” 
         

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 Near the end of the 1990s at age 38 I slipped into an emotional black hole that required a two-month sabbatical from my pastoral responsibilities. It was like diving off the end of a bed with my eyes closed to prove that I could fly but finding out that all I could really do was fall … with style.

I left for my renewal time about as deep in depression as I ever want to be. Depression is not new in my life but rather a kind of consistent thread which weaves its way in and out at certain times and in various ways. I have learned to mask it—pretty well I think from the way people respond when they learn. To reveal it publicly at that moment in my life and my career—to people that I loved and trusted so dearly—was not easy. I dove off the bedpost into vulnerability and uncertainty. I had two options—I could crawl up in the corner of my sofa and sleep the days away or I could do something constructive with the time and focus on my life and what it means to fully live it.   

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 6 AM, Thursday morning, the phone woke me. I am not one that usually sees the world in that kind of early dawn haze so I knew I was about to face something unusual.

In September 1988 I was in my last year of seminary and was serving a small church in suburban Philadelphia. A high school friend asked me if I would be interested in performing a wedding—his sister wanted to get married. It would be my first wedding so sure I could do it. After all, I was almost through seminary, I was ordained a deacon by the United Methodist Church, I had my own church. Of course I could do it.

I dragged out my notes from Pastoral Care 101 and reviewed what I should do when I met with Susan and Kevin for a few sessions before the wedding—talk about some family history, find out how much they knew about each other, see if any red flags pop-up, set the date and time. They were mature adults. She had been married before. We were ready.

The Thursday before the wedding my friend was calling me at 6 AM. No one had heard from Kevin for a few days. He had driven here from the West Coast and arrived safely, we knew that, but Susan had no idea where he was now and she was getting worried. We all began calling around to hospitals and the State Police but no one had any information. We waited the day out but heard nothing.

7 PM, Thursday night. I was at the church for choir rehearsal when my office phone rang. Susan. They found Kevin at a nearby State Park but something had happened and he was now at the hospital. I told her I would call to see what I could find out.  

“I heard he was brought in by ambulance.” I was talking to the nurse-in-charge, “Is he all right?”

“Who are you?,” she asked.

  

“I’m the pastor that is marrying Kevin and his fiancé on Saturday,” I replied. “We’ve been searching for him all day.”

There was a pause.

  

“I’m sorry. Kevin has died,” she told me. “He apparently jumped off a cliff at the Park despite police efforts to talk him down.  I’m very sorry,” she said.

I was in shock. I called back to Susan to let her know—she couldn’t believe it, it must have been a mistake, she sobbed, and I could feel through the phone her body slump over into a heap of grief. It took me an hour to get to her house where we talked and cried together. I wasn’t sure what to do—“I wasn’t a real pastor yet, was I?”  My friend and his wife arrived from their day of searching for Kevin and since none of us had cell phones in 1988 they hadn’t heard the news.

I met them on the front lawn with the news. “I’m glad you’re in the ministry, Jim.  This is where you belong,” my friend told me.

Instead of my first wedding on Saturday, I presided over my first funeral on Sunday afternoon. I don’t know how I got through it—I don’t know how anyone got through it—but we did.  At worship on Sunday morning I had preached on a text from the Letter of James: “For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” (James 4:14)  Apparently that’s what Kevin thought, that his life meant nothing, that it was just a mist and then it was gone.  But that’s not true, I told the congregation. God has created each of us and we are each important and valuable and loved. Our lives are more than just a vanishing mist that’s here one day and gone the next. A man at the back of the church sat in his pew and sobbed through the closing hymn.

Kevin didn’t understand the value of life and his suicide was a tragedy that no one understood.

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 What would get me through this personal depression 9 years later? Is my life simply a mist that appears and then vanishes like James says?  Or is what Paul wrote to the church at Corinth more compelling? “We do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal.” (2 Corinthians 4:16-18)

I chose Paul.

I decided at the beginning of my renewal leave that I would spend a lot of time reading and writing and studying—but I didn’t. Instead I spent time sorting through the junk on my workbench in the basement getting my nuts and bolts separated from my screws—important work you know! And I rearranged my study at home so it was more comfortable. I surrounded myself with photos of my grandparents and my parents and my kids so that I could see the faces of those who have always loved me.

But I also started sorting through the emotional nuts and screws. I started therapy, I joined a clergy peer group, I did vocational counseling. I learned from a Myers-Briggs test that I am an EFSJ—Extroverted, Sending, Feeling, Judging—and that that personality type is what makes me do what I do. How’s that for some revelation, huh? I learned that I have trouble expressing my anger. “Oh, you too?,” a friend said, “Along with all of us other white males?”  

But perhaps the most important thing that I discovered was that I needed to learn to be more direct and open and revealing. Vulnerable. I returned to the pulpit and dove full in. I revealed that it was difficult to be public about my depression and to admit that I needed the time away because it connected me so closely to my dad’s reality. My dad whose life I had shared in sermons and stories, who because of a WWII amputation stood on one leg to face the world, who taught me about faith, who was my friend and my hero—my dad took his own life in January of 1983 after a long and painful struggle with PTSD and depression.

I spoke the reality of that life-altering trauma into public existence for the first time. Stigma, shame, conspiracy of silence, guilt and doubt had hidden that piece of me deep down in my ESFJ psyche. It took being shaken by my roots to be public about it but there it was, revealed in a very public way, simply because it was time. The sky didn’t turn blood-red nor did the ground open and swallow me. I found it, in fact, quite freeing and healing. It had been a painful, daily, secret journey through the 14 years between 1983 and 1997 but it is part of who I am. This greatest of all men saw no way out and so his life vanished like a mist.

And I did not want that to happen to me.

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The shame and secrecy and doubt and fear of my dad’s life-end was what was in my head when I had to face that wedding-turned-funeral in 1988. I was terrified because my wound was still so raw and still so secret. My friend who asked me to do the wedding for his sister had known my dad, knew that my dad had died five years before, but he didn’t know, I believe, the circumstances. Or maybe he did and was complicit in my conspiracy.

When I had to face the reality of a soon-to-be groom choosing to plunge to his death rather than land at the altar my anxiety was heightened and my confrontation of my own fears became even more real.

Those feelings flooded back into my life in 1997. 

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I arrived at the end of my renewal time. Healing, but not healed; depressed, but aware of it; looking at the future and counting on it. So Paul it was. I was not simply a “mist that appears and then vanishes.” I was at a place where though my “outer nature” might be wasting away I had not “lost heart” and I came to know my “inner nature was being renewed day by day.” Like Buzz Lightyear, I took a chance at flying and bounced off a few things so that I could finally land on my feet and prove that I could fly.

At the end of that movie, Buzz realizes that he really is only a toy and that he really can’t fly. To catch up with the moving van as it heads for Andy’s new house, Woody lights a fireworks rocket that the nasty neighbor kid had strapped to Buzz’s back. They blast into the air and once the rocket blows out, Buzz spreads his wings and heads for the open sun roof of Andy’s mom’s car.

“You’re flying,” yells Woody as he holds desperately onto Buzz’s back.  

“No,” says Buzz, “I’m falling … with style.”  

That may just be the best metaphor for my life, or maybe for any life actually. There are times when we realize that we are falling rather than flying. But if we stay true to ourselves and can find that there is a way forward, we can do it ... with style. And just maybe we are flying despite it all.

© 2019. James F. McIntire. All rights reserved. 

Seasons of Life

Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes

Five hundred, twenty-five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred, twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?

In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife
In five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes
How do you measure a year in the life?

          ~ Jonathan Larson. Seasons of Love from "Rent." 1996.

January 23. My measured life is now 21,675 days. One day longer than my dad’s.

It was a frigid day in 1983 when he couldn’t find a way to a day past that number, when he could no longer tolerate the pain that brought on his decision to not see another day. He’s been gone now for 36 years. I remember clearly my 46^th birthday and the realization that I had lived without him longer than I had had him with me. But this is another day, a different year, a further milestone if you will, a day longer than he.

What will my life look like now that its days are longer than his? What should it look like? How does an adult man “be” in this season of his life?  Where do I turn to find the path for the days beyond this one? Where is my model of adultness tomorrow and the day after and next year?

Perhaps these are maudlin thoughts too selfish for the now, but then again maybe it’s okay sometimes to wander in the past to be able to wonder of tomorrow.

I’ve been told that when dad discovered himself in the depths of emotional depression in the late 1950s, one of the solutions was to let the joy of a new life uplift his. So, a decade after my siblings arrived on the scene, I came into the world and my dad was happy. And in many ways, it seems, it became my role to keep him happy. Does that sound silly? Or egotistical even? No one has that much control over another’s life. No one can be responsible for someone else’s happiness. Intellectually that resonates; emotionally I struggle.

For 23 years I kept my dad looking forward, looking toward the next day, the next year, the next season of life. For those years he lived successfully with the disordered stress of his post-trauma life. For those years I lived out my role of at least giving him a chance at happiness. For those years of infant tears and terrible twos, the pre-pubescent outbursts and adolescent angst, through the college dilemmas and adult decisions, dad’s happiness was on-track. Until it wasn’t.

The ugliness of depression and anxiety and uncertainty and the feelings of unworthiness and incompleteness resurfaced at the end of his fifth decade and this time it appeared with an insatiable vengeance. The deep morass which was sucking him downward grew stronger and more emboldened than even before and the hole into which he was sliding was closing in on him. Any happiness I could bring was not enough to overcome the season which he was facing so his life came abruptly to an end, and my life without him began just as abruptly.

At times I look at my 59-year-old hands and I see his. Not nearly as scarred or calloused as those of a man who worked so hard to feed his family and to keep himself alive, as determined as anyone I have ever known. But there they are, nonetheless, as old as the day he wrote his last words to us, older now than those same hands he used just a few months earlier when he wrote about his own dad, my grandfather Earl who I knew only for the first few years of my life:

Now to me, Dad was something different. He was Earl McIntire and that name meant something in town and don’t forget it! I realized later that he put his pants on the same as me one leg at a time. But he was still Earl McIntire.

…

How do you suppose I know what sassafras looks like and smells like? Why do I still whistle at Red Birds?  Who had a miniature golf course in their back yard?  Who else had Lady Slippers, Blue Bells and 7 ft. ferns?  How many people know about Blacksnakes, and that Copperheads smell like cucumbers?  When was the last time you tried to eat a green Persimmon?

Indeed, Earl’s youngest son showed me many, many things. How to bring a doodle bug to the surface in a cup of sand. How to make Soupy Potatoes when mom is away. How to cheat at dominoes by blaming your poor eyesight mistaking a 4 for a 6—though grandmom taught him that one! How to live a life of integrity in a world which sometimes cheats at the game. How to kid without demeaning; how to laugh at the seemingly unlaughable; how to know when to laugh and when to cry. How to hold up your Boy Scout knee socks with thumbtacks—you see, my dad put his pants on one leg at a time too, but he had only one to put through.

And, yes, dad passed along what eating a green persimmon is all about. Has anyone shared that experience with you? No? Maybe you should try.   

We learn from those we love, from those we admire, from those we respect. From them we learn how to love and admire and respect and perhaps if we’re paying attention we learn who to love and admire and respect. I count myself among those who were able to have experienced those qualities in their dad and my hope is that I have faithfully lived these moments of my life to this day and will continue to more than one more day than my dad.     

Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred
Five hundred, twenty-five thousand journeys to plan.

Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes
How can you measure

the life of a woman or man?

So measure my life as a man by the measure of his life. And for these extra days that follow allow me to live out that tired cliché of one-day-at-a-time because quite truthfully that’s what life is, one day following another and another, a season of whatever is next.

Yes, a year is five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes and we measure our lives by those minutes and years and seasons, but also we need remember that every day is key to the next. It’s all borrowed time anyway, time measured in love that no one can ever own. And sometimes like my dad’s days beyond his 12,674, life is rent from you like a tear in your universe reminding us that life itself is but rented time for a season. ‘Cause everything is rent … 

We're not gonna pay

We're not gonna pay

We're not gonna pay

Last year's rent

This year's rent

Next year's rent

Rent rent rent rent rent

We're not gonna pay rent

'Cause everything is rent

              ~ Jonathan Larson. Rent from "Rent." 1996.

© 2019. James F. McIntire. All rights reserved. 

© 1996. Jonathan Larson. Lyrics from the musical “Rent.” 

This I Know

I never saw him in pajamas. In 23 years I can’t recall ever seeing my dad wearing pajamas. But he was in them the last time I saw him—the last time I saw him forever—through a slim break in the curtain as I walked past a window on my way to the hospital parking lot. He was walking too, back toward the room where I had visited with him that night before he died. An image now embedded in my being.

"This Is What I Know" by Judy Wise

I couldn’t muster the courage or nerve or confidence or strength or respect—I’m not sure how to name it—to see his lifeless body the next day on the slab in our trusted funeral director friend’s basement. My cousin in “the business” identified the lifeless body for us—for me I suppose. My only regret in all my years is that I never saw my dad after that night in his pajamas.

He was okay when I was with him that night. I say he was “okay” but maybe he was just content. Knowing peace, feeling forgiven, confident in the decision—just a few ways that I’ve reconciled that ease I saw in him that night in January. The doctor had recommended that dad go to an inpatient program at a clinic where he could receive therapy and more attentive attention than was possible in this place where he had deposited himself, the place which required the pajamas for decorum. But he couldn’t last.

I guess he would have to have worn them at the clinic, too, those pajamas. I don’t know where he got them. Mom, I suppose.

Dad slept in his tightey whiteys by the time I was an adult, boxers I remember from when I was a kid. And whenever I happened to see him hop on his one leg to the bathroom next to their bedroom in our tiny modified Cape Cod he was in those shorts and not pajamas. “Modified Cape Cod”—mom chuckled when I named it that so many years later. It was basically just a summer cottage turned year-round-home when they bought it at the end of WWII, that world of violence which had taken away his leg. Had taken away more of him than I ever knew.

I loved him and he loved me—I’m certain of that more than I’m certain of anything. Yet I never knew that this loving and kind and strong and generous man felt hollow and inadequate and partial and burdened deep down in his soul.

You can’t explain away a suicide by rationalizing it. You just can’t. It’s not a split-second decision, I know that. It’s not about cowardice because this was the most courageous man I’ve known. It’s not simply about depression and anxiety because they are temporary, if painful, conditions that so many people cope with day to day. I’ve tried to figure it out for more than 30 years now—the why, primarily—yet there are no acceptable answers any more than there are sufficient questions about that life-changing moment.

“You do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” (James 4:14)

I’ve been wrestling with that these past three decades. Is it true? Did Jesus’ sudden and traumatic death impact his brother James in such a way that he wrestled with the finality of it in the same way? Your beloved ripped away from you without you being able to do anything about it, the ethereality yet finality of it all. But did Jesus’ brother know something that I haven’t been able to figure out? Is life truly only “a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes”?

It’s not, of course. I suppose I knew that, know that. I suppose my dad knew that as well.

But then again James, like so many of us, slips into religiosity in his grief. “You ought to say, if God is willing we will live and do this or that.” As much as I know that life is more than a mist that appears and then vanishes, I also know that my dad’s death was not dependent on God’s willingness.

He was a faithful follower, a man of God, a man who taught me more of faithful living than I can ever put into words or action. He was, is, and always will be my dad, the gold standard by which I measure my own fatherhood and all men I encounter. He was and is more than “a mist that appears for a little while,” more than simply a glimpse through a curtain of a guy in his pajamas.

That morning he sat on his bed twisting the trash bags from the drawer of the nightstand next to him. No one thought twice about it. A nurse thought maybe he was working on the needlepoint project that he had with him, busyness that calmed his anxieties. But this was no craft project, this twisted rope that he set about to use.

He knew what he was doing. It’s not an impulsive move. It was not a whim. He twisted those bags with intentionality and decision. He rolled up the left leg of those pajama pants to slip on his artificial leg, he stood and walked that hall toward the shower room. It was deliberate. It was determined. He had to turn the doorknob and lock it behind him. He had to tie the knot over the shower head.

When did he decide? Did he know when I talked to him that night before? When did he know that he could no longer bear the pain, the pain that surged through his soul like so many others have known in their post trauma days—months—years—decades. Did he know when he checked into that sham of a hospital that lost him?

Did the universe know as he bobbed unconscious in the warm water of WWII's South Pacific 40 years before, sucked through a tear in the seaplane’s hull, his leg ripped beyond repair? Did the fates know as obcw rescued he lay in the bed of the sinking plane as morphine was jabbed into his pained body, morphine withheld just before the third dose would have brought him final sleep? As he lay in a bed in a Navy hospital in Australia hearing his dad’s voice calling to him from just outside the window, a voice that was 10,000 miles away in Appalachia? 

His life didn’t vanish then before it had reached 21 years, it was more than a mist then and more than a mist now.

I’ll never know what he knew, when he knew, the pain that draws away the desire from our living of life. What I’m left with is the doubt, the guilt, the despair, the emptiness in my own soul.

“May God forgive me for what I am about to do.” His final words of release—written, prayed, and granted. He is forgiven. This I know more than anything I know.

© Copyright 2016

James F. McIntire

All rights reserved. 

Just Love Her

A Service of Death and Resurrection for

Grace S. McIntire

February 16, 2016

A meditation offered by The Rev. James F. McIntire

John 14, selected verses

[Jesus said] “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In God’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place

where I am going.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask God, and God will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees nor knows. You know this Spirit, because it abides with you, and will be in you.

 “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. 

 “I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom God will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” 

  

Ð

I sat at mom’s kitchen table one afternoon near the end of April 1988. My daughter Lindsay had been born on the 19^th with some serious medical issues which we were learning would cause physical and intellectual disabilities. She was still at Children’s Hospital though we anticipated bringing her home soon. I remember sitting at that kitchen table feeling a sense of confusion mixed with anxiety. What would this all mean for me, for the family, for Tim who was not yet 4 years old? Was I equipped to be a father of a child with severe disabilities? Is anybody? What were we going to do? I wasn’t panicky or scared – just uncertain and unsettled.

Mom’s eyes, dampened with tears, looked straight at me, “Just take her home and love her.”

Anybody who knew mom knew that that statement was, if anything was, the foundation for her life. “Just take her home and love her.”

I can only recall one time when that statement wasn’t true. I was still living at home, probably during my college years, when one winter day brought lots of snow. By nightfall, dad announced that it looked so beautiful outside that he wanted to take a walk – did we want to go? “No thanks,” I said since I was warm and comfortably stretched out on the floor watching TV. Mom didn’t want to go out in the cold either so dad went for a solo walk. Maybe 30 minutes later, the door opened and dad said, “Look what I found!” and a huge, grey and white shaggy sheep dog covered in icicles and clumps of snow came bounding through the middle of the dining room and living room, smelling like a soaking wet wool rug.

“What the …?” I yelled as laughter blurted out of me and dad at the same time.

“He was just wandering around out there. He’s cold and probably hungry. We should keep him.”

“Johnny … get … that … dog … out of here!”

“But can’t we …?”

“Out!”

Dad lost that battle that night so back out into the tundra that old dog went – probably just ran home to wherever he had escaped from. Mom wasn’t saying, “Just take him home and love him” that night. Nope. And Johnny knew it and made the right decision.

But mostly that’s how she lived. And maybe why she lived so long. She knew how to love and how to offer that gift to everyone around her.

“Love one another,” Jesus told his friends while he was with them for one of the last times before his death. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15) He had just offered them words to calm them, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. … Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” And now he was telling them to love.

Loving one another can most definitely bring about fear and anxiety. It means giving up hatred, it means surrendering those grudges and judgments from deep within us, it means living differently than what the world expects of you. Mom never showed that fear or anxiety. She opened her heart and let all of us in. And if we were paying attention we learned how to do it as well.

I would always ask mom, especially when my brother and sister were around and there were strangers nearby, “Hey Mom, who’s your favorite? C’mon, you know. Tell us, who’s your favorite?” She’d chuckle and then laugh at the reaction of those around us. I asked her again just a few weeks ago. Mitch and I were with her in the physical therapy room and she was in good spirits, trying to do what the therapists wanted from her.

“Mom, who’s your favorite? Tell ‘em. Everybody knows. Tell these ladies.”

Know what she did? She stuck her tongue out at me.

I think she learned that from her little brother, my Uncle Jack. He who called her, “Old Bat,” had a tongue that could reach all the way out to touch his nose. And he would stick out that tongue to his sister whenever they were together. I can’t tell you how many pictures there are of mom sticking out her tongue at someone. I got her to show the nurses one day and another time, when a doctor was looking in her mouth he said, “Stick out your tongue” so she did it like she usually did – not as if you’re saying “ahhhh” but full-on sticking it out at him.

Anyway … “who’s your favorite?” She always got a kick out of it.

It has just recently occurred to me that any child mom met, any child that spent time with this amazing woman, any child in her presence thought that they were the favorite. Mom had the gift of making you feel as if you are the most important person alive. Any child who spent time with Grandmom, Aunt Gracie, Mrs. Mac, or however you knew her, felt like they were getting the best of the time she had available. “You are the favorite,” she would let you think.

Think about it. Recall a moment when you were the focus of this amazing lady. Who here has had that experience? You are her favorite.

Mom had no problem making friends. Even over these past few difficult months, mom pulled into her circle of friends the nurses and therapists, the aides and housekeepers, the doctors and social workers. These people cried when they learned of mom’s death. These are people who deal regularly with the reality of the aging process and with loss and grief yet when I went to see them on Wednesday afternoon just to say thanks, the tears were sincere and the caring words of love and respect were clear.

Wesley Enhanced Living in Doylestown has experienced Grace McIntire – and it will never be the same again.

And I suspect everyone in this room can say the same. Your life was never the same once you connected with this 5’1” giant of a person. Maybe you’ve known her since birth and you’ve never lived life without her – this will be the most difficult part for me going forward from today. Maybe you’ve known her since her school years – like the high school friends who continue to meet for lunch each month, a time mom would enjoy so much. Maybe she helped raise you into adulthood – like so many of the young children she provided childcare for or so many of our friends who we dragged home to the tiny house in Croydon. Or maybe you’ve just known her a few years and had hoped for more time with her. Our lives were shaped and formed by Grace whose life was lived through God’s grace.

Lacey gave me a card that I have framed and look at everyday which holds an African proverb: “I am because you are.” I can say with a grateful heart and with a loving prayer, I know that I am because mom was.

Jesus who gathered his friends around him as he knew they would be at a loss when he left them, knew the importance of being together and the value of shared love. Mom taught me who that Jesus was. Mom taught me the songs of our faith. Mom taught me the lessons of justice that shape me even to this moment. Mom taught me how to love and to live. Mom taught me how to be a parent and grandparent. Mom taught me the importance of living fully and of the abundant life God promises us. 

Of the many sayings mom shared over her years, the one we all probably heard as she grew older and outlived her siblings and my dad’s siblings was, “Well, I guess the good Lord just isn’t ready for me yet.” On Tuesday night when I sat with her for the last time, I whispered those words into her ear. “Mom, you’ve always told us the good Lord isn’t ready for you yet. Mom, God’s ready now.”  

As I was driving home that evening it suddenly occurred to me, “I’m not sure God knows what’s coming!”

Mom left us a few notes to help us through this moment that we all knew was inevitable. The one that will stay with me the most is this that she wrote in 1993:

    To all my family,

  When I leave this good earth and if anything drastic happens to me, I have one request.

  Everyone take whatever they want and dispose of what is left.

  Another request is that I would like all to get together often as a family.

              I love you all.

                          Mom

Not only does this mean that I have to continue to get together with my brother and sister – sheesh – it also leaves me with a reminder that the things we have is not as important as who we have around us. “Take whatever you want and dispose of what is left” but make sure you “all get together often.

Mom leaves us with those words. “Take whatever you want … but all get together often.”

“Peace I leave with you. Do not be afraid. Love one another.” Jesus said it. Mom lived it. We need to carry it forward from this day.

Thanks be to God for this graceful, grace-filled, abundantly graced woman – Grace Southwell Hallman McIntire.

Amen.

© Copyright, James F. McIntire 2016

Grace S. (Hallman) McIntire, died Ash Wednesday, Feb. 10, 2016.

Born Sept. 11, 1924, she was the daughter of George and Miriam (Achuff) Hallman and was raised in the Tacony neighborhood of Philadelphia with her eight siblings, graduating from Frankford High School in 1941.

In 1946, she married the late John F. McIntire who she met while both worked at Henry Disston & Sons Saw Works in Tacony. They settled in Croydon, where she lived for the next 70 years.

Grace was an active Cub Scout and Girl Scout leader for many years in Bucks County and Philadelphia, was involved with parent groups at Mary W. Devine Elementary School and Delhaas High School. She was a committed and active member of Tacony United Methodist Church from birth until 1999 when it closed and she joined Neshamony United Methodist Church in Hulmeville, where she was church secretary for 23 years (1988 to 2011).

Grace is survived by her three children, John Mitchell (Nancy) of Wrightstown, Patricia Ann of Croydon, and Rev. James Fred (Rev. Lydia Muñoz) of Drexel Hill, Pa. She was grandmother of 11 grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, and beloved aunt to numerous nieces and nephews.

A Service of Death and Resurrection will be held at Neshamony United Methodist Church, 325 Main Street, Hulmeville, 11 a.m. Tuesday, Feb. 16, where visitors may call at 10 a.m. Interment will be held at Sunset Memorial Park, Somerton, Pa.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to 'Lindsay's Gift,' a family fund providing accessibility grants to churches, c/o Rev. James F. McIntire, 200 Treaty Rd., Drexel Hill, PA 19026,www.gofundme.com/LindsaysGift 

A Leg to Stand On

Dad’s leg popped off mid-air one day. He laughed so hard I thought we’d never get him up off the floor. He was playing the net in a friendly volleyball game, he jumped to tap the ball back over, and his leg popped off mid-air. He crumpled to the floor cussing and laughing contagiously. He strapped it back on and the game resumed.

As the result of a plane crash in the Pacific during World War II, his left leg had been amputated below the knee. By the time I knew him, he had had some 15 or so years to master the art of using a prosthetic leg – a “wooden leg” we called it, though by then it was mostly plastic.

I grew up being very confused about why other dads had two legs. My dad only had one leg, so that's what all dads should have. Even now when I’m older than the old man was when I was a kid, to see a man at the beach with two legs poking out the bottom of his bathing suit seems unnatural to me. What was normal was walking down the beach with dad, having him lean against the life guard stand to take off his wooden leg, and then stash it there against the stand while he hopped down to the water line and dove in. I now realize that when you have only one leg there is very little hesitation about the temperature of the water, there’s no dipping your toe in to test the frigidity factor. When it's balance versus water temperature, balance invariably loses, and you dive. 

Memories of dad's wooden leg are filled with every imaginable emotion. I remember dropping a little blue plastic Mary Poppins figurine into the ventilation hole in the side of his hollow leg and his anger and hidden laughter in taking it off and shaking it until it came back out that quarter-sized hole. I remember him convincing me during a trip to Florida with my high school marching band that he wanted to come down one of those tall water slides at Water World and that I would have to follow him up all those steps and carry his leg back down while he came down the slide – I remember feeling proud, not embarrassed as one might expect of a teenager, as I made my way down those steps with his leg under my arm. I remember the panicked fear in his voice as he called for me to run and get my mom to take him to the emergency room the night that he felt something in the knee of his good leg tear as he was crawling into the back of our pick-up truck – how incredibly anxious it must have been for him to have his good leg temporarily incapacitated because of surgery. I remember the surprise in his face when he wore an old wooden leg on a whitewater rafting trip and when he was tossed out of the raft he discovered for the first time that his leg floated and that it had a mind of its own when it came to floating in the same direction as the rest of his body.

I could fill pages – stories about ice skating and bike riding both of which he did without any problem, or his determination to try downhill skiing although he never got to, or the rainy, 17-mile Boy Scout hike that he led us along the Lincoln Trail through Washington, DC. My dad's wooden leg never slowed him down. No doubt it was sometimes frustrating and felt like a burden and I am certain that there were times when it caused him both physical and emotional pain, but he rarely let that show. His determination and courage and faithfulness – and his wooden leg – taught me well.

One of the most important lessons was that so long as you can maintain faith in God and believe in what you're doing you will succeed. Maybe that sounds too much like a Mike Brady, TV-dad cliché, but what he taught me was that in my faith I have a leg to stand on. It's not as if he took me aside a la “The Graduate” and gave me unsolicited advice: "Son, if you're gonna succeed in this life here's what you have to do ..." No, I learned it more subtly by watching the example he lived in front of me. 

Dad never complained about the things he couldn't do or couldn't have. He, like Job, refused to curse God or anyone else for the loss of his leg. He always seemed to have time for me and the endless band concerts and plays and Cub Scout projects that filled my schedule. He always had time for church – not just Sunday mornings but weeknights at a Trustees meeting or Saturday morning crawling inside the boiler to patch a crack so we had heat on Sunday or each year cutting down from a donor’s front lawn the biggest Christmas tree you could imagine and standing it up in our huge Sunday School auditorium.

And he always had time for what he thought God wanted him to do – leading us in Sunday morning worship at Boy Scout camping weekends, challenging those that refused to accept the appointment of a female pastor to our local church, fighting for my sister's youth group to be able to hold a Coffee House with rock music in the basement of our church in the 60's, willing to loan money to a Jamaican colleague at work who no one else would treat fairly, inventing ways to raise money for a new roof at church or to meet its struggling budget.

A leg to stand on. There was something so fundamental to my father's faith that it taught me that no matter what happened, I could always count on God to be with me and when that leg didn't seem like enough, I could always "lean on the everlasting arms" whenever I needed. It's taken me quite a few years and some real soul searching to understand what that fundamental piece of his faith was, but I think that I now know. That foundation of his faith was what gave dad a leg to stand on in a world that would just as soon knock him off his feet. 

Rabbi Hillel the Elder was a great Talmudic sage during the early years of Jesus’ life, born in Babylonia in the first century BCE. One famous account of Hillel (Shabbat 31a) tells of a Gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism but only if he could find a rabbi who could teach him the entire Torah while he, the prospective convert, stood on one leg. Hillel accepted the challenge and while the man stood on one leg, he said: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation of this – go and study it!"

A scribe offered Jesus a similar challenge, "Which commandment is the first of all?" "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength" and "love your neighbor as yourself," Jesus answered. (Mark 12:28-34)

Those two commandments are equal in weight and importance, those two are more important than any burnt sacrifice, though they might require some other kind of sacrifice – the offering of one's selfishness and idolatrous attitudes – those two are beyond anything else that you might think God would have of you. Love of God and love of neighbor is so founda­tional to faith, so fundamental, that learning and living those commandments brings you "not far from the kin-dom of God," says Jesus, and that’s not such a bad place to be.

Love of God and love of neighbor was the foundation of my father's faith. That's the leg he had to stand on. And that's now the leg I have to stand on. 

Maybe Jesus and Hillel had a different message about how to best summarize God’s requirements of us, but they each knew it was fundamentally short and sweet, brief enough that it created for us a leg to stand on. “Love God, love neighbor, love self” or “Do as you would have done to you.” A leg to stand on.

In his novel “King Jesus,” Robert Graves tells of an old tradi­tion that claims that Jesus walked with a limp. Imagine the implications of that tradition. Picture in your mind the Jesus that you know and add to that picture a limp. Jesus makes his way around the country­side and cities of first century Israel walking with a limp. In a world where those with physical disability were cast aside, is it possible that this teacher had trouble walking? 

In a world where the powers that be look for ways to knock your legs out from under you, is it possible that the one who answered so that "no one dared to ask him another question" only had one good leg to stand on?

There is something so central to faith in those command­ments that maybe that's the only leg that Jesus needed. “Love God, love neighbor, love self.” Drop mic, walk away. In that simple commandment there is surely a leg to stand on.

That's what my dad was trying to tell me by living his life the way he did. If what I do stands on that leg, on that core princi­ple of faith, then surely my efforts will be close to the kin-dom of God and will be a faithful response to God's call. Not that I can justify every move I make by claiming it is for God and my neighbor, an argument which has been used to try to justify the Nazi death camps and racism, sexism, ableism and every other kind of –ism, but rather that if it is truly a faithful response standing alone on love of God, neighbor, and self, then no one will dare ask another question and no one will be able to knock that leg out from under me.

You only need one leg to stand on to take on the world.

"Man with a wooden leg escapes prison," writes James Tate, "He's caught. They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river to get to the field where he must work all day on one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn't want it. His escape is all planned. It requires only one leg." 

You only need one leg on which to stand to make your escape from the prison bars of the world and to get close to the kin-dom of God.

© Copyright 2015
James F. McIntire
All rights reserved.