It is good to wait quietly for the
salvation of the Lord.
Lamentations
3: 26
It is good to wait quietly for the
salvation of the Lord.
What we
believe about death
and what comes after death
makes all the difference for what we
believe about life.
It’s a kind
of vantage point from which we look at life.
Buddhism and
Christianity take starkly different views on this.
Most of you
know, I respect Buddhism and believe
we could learn a thing or two from our
Buddhist friends.
But there is
this basic difference.
Buddhism
doesn’t believe in the soul,
but it does teach reincarnation.
This was
confusing to one young American student.
So, he asked
his teacher, “If there is no soul, what is reincarnated?”
The teacher
answered, “It is your bad habits.”
The idea of
reincarnation is that we need to scrub away all our faults
and that takes more than one lifetime.
But
eventually, once we have scrubbed away our faults,
there is nothing of us left; so, we
just cease to be.
Non-existence
is as good as it gets
because there is nothing in us worth saving.
Christianity
takes the opposite view.
We say God
is a vast immensity of love,
that we are created by God’s love
sustained by God’s love,
and that makes us good.
God says we
are good.
We may get
twisted a bit, we may go off course,
but our soul, the core of who we are
is fundamentally good.
we return to the heart of God,
and we are never cut off from the heart
of God.
God does not
forget the goodness he has made.
Nothing good
dies forever.
It all lives
on in the heart of God and will manifest again
in God’s time and in God’s way.
That is a
general truth for all humanity.
But God’s
love for us isn’t just a general attitude.
God doesn’t
just love all of us in general.
God loves
each of us particularly
for being the unique person that each
of us is.
Theologian
Karl Rahner said,
Each
of us is a unique irreplaceable word of God
That means
there are not just four gospels.
Every human
life is a gospel.
Irv Cousin’s
life was a gospel, so what does it say?
It is good to wait quietly for the
salvation of the Lord.
Irv was a
quiet man, a private man.
As an only
child, he spent a lot of time alone reading
and he kept that practice up all his
life.
Growing up
in a military family,
he didn’t have a chance to be part of
the school cliques.
He learned
to keep his own counsel
and enjoy his own company.
John Milton
said,
Solitude
is sometimes the best society.
Thoreau
said,
I
love to be alone.
I
never found the companion that was so companionable
as
solitude.
Lord Byron
wrote,
Then
stirs the feeling infinite so felt
In
solitude where we are least alone.
Or in the
language of our day, punk singer Henry Rollins said,
Loneliness
adds beauty to life.
It
puts a special burn on sunsets
and
makes night air smell better.
In Irv’s
privacy, something precious grew.
It was a
profound dignity.
Our collect
for the 2nd Sunday in Christmas says that,
God
. . . wonderfully created
and
yet more wonderfully restored the dignity
of
human nature . . ..
In our
Baptismal Covenant, we vow
to
respect the dignity of every human being.
In our time,
dignity is hard to find.
In an era of
reality television sapheads
and buffoons posing as political
pundits,
we long for someone we can respect.
Irv Cousins
was easy to respect.
He showed us
what human dignity looks like.
He showed us
what graciousness looked like.
These are
not just manners and style.
Dignity is
something good that God created
and reveals to us thorugh people like
Irv
to show us a piece of what we are
called to become.
Human
dignity is part and parcel of the gospel.
Irv was a
private man,
but he was not an island.
He connected
with others by serving them.
He served
his church in Maryland as their Treasurer.
Then he
served our diocese as Treasurer and Finance Officer
for 18 years, across the tenures of
three bishops.
While the
rest of us did Church in all too visible and audible ways,
Irv was quietly keeping the ship
afloat.
Irv had the vital spiritual gift of
listening.
When he
listened to you, his attention was undivided.
James 1: 19
says,
Let
every man be swift to hear, slow to speak.
That was Irv
Cousins.
He could
listen to you in a way that said, “you matter.”
He took
people seriously.
Irv had
human dignity because he respected the dignity of others.
He showed that
respect by the way he listened.
Christina
Rossetti said,
Silence
is the most beautiful music
Benjamin
Disraeli echoed
Silence
is the mother of truth.
Irv had the
dignity, the wisdom, and the compassion
to keep still and listen others into
life.
This is not
just an individual character trait.
It is not an
accident of nature and nurture.
Irv’s way of
being in this world
was a virtue created by God.
It was, as
Rahner said,
a
unique, irreplaceable word of God.
Irv’s family
will not be the only ones to miss him.
We all will.
The world
needs Irv’s way of being now more than ever.
Maybe some
of the rest of us will have to take up
some of the slack by becoming a bit
more like him.
I know I
want to be more like him.
But no one
can take his place.
We will miss
him dearly.
Our
consolation is
that Irv Cousins came from the heart of
God,
he returns to the heart of God,
he was never cut off from the heart of
God.
He was a
good man if ever there was one,
and nothing good dies forever.
