My friend Brian Boerman wrote this shortly after the loss of his amazing mother, who graced this world for 96-years. It’s a blend of tribute, journal entry, and reflection. Most importantly, it is brilliant.
You might already be tuning out — who wants to read writings about loss? But that’s not what this is about. Brian can teach us all about grieving and loss of course, but even more about perseverance, faith, and renewal. He sees beauty in life where others see darkness.
This is inspired writing. Take the time to read this post …. you will not be disappointed.
Life as a Hymn
A great life is like a great hymn. It’s not sung to us, it’s not sung about us, but if we’re around for the singing, and paying attention, it’s a great gift in our lives. In that sense it’s sung for us. Here are a few thoughts about what makes for a great hymn, what makes for a great life, and how to receive the hymns of others and intentionally sing your own.
If your upbringing was similar to mine, you grew up singing hymns in church. Quite a few of them are still with you. You might not have heard them or sung them out loud for many years, but they’ve stuck with you, and their words and meanings still find a way to encourage, guide, inspire you.
A great hymn tells a great story.
A great hymn has a melody and a tempo that suit the story it tells – it is an integrated whole.
A great hymn is memorable from the first hearing; we want to hear it again. We want to remember it.
There were a few hymns that were great and really long. You know, like seven verses and a chorus sung all seven times. As a kid, I was really glad to get away with 2 or 3 of them and call it good. Some were so long I got tired of standing up the whole time. But as an adult, maybe even paying attention some of the time, I couldn’t decide which verses could be cut without the hymn losing something precious. One of my favorite hymns is “How Great Thou Art” and as much as I love that hymn, I cringe when so many recordings of it include only two verses. It’s not the same great hymn when you skip verse three – the one about the cross. Take a deep breath and keep singing; this hymn is worth it.
That was Mom’s life. 96 years long. Lots of different verses, lots of rich melody. Mom’s life sings of the natural beauties of California, which she loved to explore from childhood through old age (picture a brother and sister in a plywood camper shell on the back of a Model T pick-up, driving over Tioga Pass when it was a dirt track). Her life sings of the beauties of good music which she played and enjoyed all her life. Piano and violin from girlhood on, then classical guitar beginning at age 80. Mom’s life sings of covenant faithfulness in a 50-year marriage, of home-making, working outside the home, volunteering at church and elsewhere. It sings of a love of great literature. Mom and I were a two-person book club right up to the end. Two weeks before she passed, she had to admit that she wasn’t going to finish the last few pages of “A Gentleman in Moscow.” So she asked me to tell her how it ended. Mom’s life sings of a beautiful evolution of relationship from mother-son to friend-friend. It sings of daughters-in-law and grandchildren and great-grandchildren who genuinely enjoyed being around her.
And some hymns are like the praise choruses we started singing in the 70s and 80s – up-tempo, short and punchy, sometimes a little in-your-face, but really good.
My son John’s life was like that. John was only with us for 29 years. He was outrageous and brilliant and loving and kind. He had the snarkiest sense of humor and the biggest heart for the less-privileged. One day during chemo, John got out of bed, in his hospital gown, rolling his I-V tree along, and went out onto the sidewalks of mid-town Sacramento. When Carla caught up to him, he was asking a homeless man when he’d eaten last, and he asked Carla to buy this man a sandwich. John’s life sang about living full-throttle, loving and giving full-throttle, of full-throttle owning his faith in Christ while giving you complete freedom to believe differently. He had an insatiable curiosity and lived with the kind of exuberance that most of us envy, but are a little afraid to emulate. He faced his terminal illness and the end of his life just like he lived the rest of it. He took every good day and lived it as fully and well as he could. When cancer had reduced his mobility and he had just two months left with us, he did a night scuba dive off Maui. The smile on his face when he came up out of the ocean is a chorus I will never forget. A few days before he left us, he was in his wheelchair shooting off model rockets in the park with his friend Ned, and inviting a timid little neighborhood boy to join in. What a powerful hymn of courage and love and joy. John Boerman sang loud and proud up to the very end. How I wish he was still here and still singing. The world needs John’s song.
A truly great hymn is so good we’re taken by it during the singing. We want it to linger. We keep the hymnal open and keep mulling over the words. It’s just too good. Before we sit down and get on with the sermon, can we maybe sing it one more time? We want to etch the words and melody into our memories before we close the hymnal.
That’s Carla. Of all the biggest big-spin lottery pay-offs in the world, I got the best. I got to do life with Carla for 40 years, 39 of them as her husband. (So yes, her hymn sings of tenacity – I get that.) I promise you’ve never met a person who left such a deep imprint on so many hearts, and did it so unpretentiously and so genuinely. The high school kids she discipled in Young Life in 1977 are still in touch with me, and still deeply grateful for Carla’s impact on their hearts and lives. A couple years after Carla’s passing, her middle school students were still choking back tears while they tried to tell me all that Carla had meant to them. I can’t count how many more stories could be told about Carla’s unique touch on people’s hearts in all those intervening years. Really, without hyperbole, Carla’s hymn is the song of the Gospel; just as God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world to himself, somehow similarly, Christ was in Carla, loving people home to himself. It is the most joyful hymn possible to sing. She sang it so well.
November 1 is All Saints Day as I write this. That’s what got me started thinking about this. Frederick Buechner says this (condensed):
On All Saints’ Day, it is not just the saints of the church that we remember, but all of them; the foolish ones and wise ones, the broken ones and whole ones of our lives, who, one way or another, have been our saints, and whom we loved and by whom we were helped to whatever we may have of some kind of sainthood of our own.
These saints make up the hymnals of our hearts.
What lives have been meaningful hymns for you? What have they sung to you about? What is it about the way they’ve sung that sticks with you and sings to you still?
And this life you’re singing now – what is it about? What story does it tell? How do you want to sing it? It has a tempo and a key and a rhythm of your own making. It’s yours to sing. Sing it out loud.