Kingsview

Will You Hold Me As I Held You?

Michael A. King

Scattered throughout Scripture are variations on the saying that “all flesh is grass” or, as Psalm 103:15-16 puts it, “As for mortals, their days are like grass; they flourish like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, its place knows it no more.” The image has come to me often these days. It came as I helped my father join my mother in assisted living. It came as the aching of an old knee injury was joined by a twisting of the other knee and the deepening awareness that I too am fading grass. It came as a loved congregational co-worker received word of cancer.

We are grass. The wind passes over us. We are gone. And our place knows us no more. Sorrow lurks here or maybe more accurately, sorrow overwhelms here. We are born falling into death. The flesh as grass image forces us to see, feel, mourn this.

Interestingly, however, Scripture rarely touches on people as grass without then underscoring that something is not grass: God. As Psalm 103:17 promises, “But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting. . . .”

Bummer. Because the hope travels with and doesn’t simply overcome the sorrow. Psalm 103 gives us sorrow and hope inextricably mingled, inviting awareness that the grass withers even as we pray there is more.

I also suspect that for many of us it’s in family life that we experience this mingling in its most primal form. We’re born into family as children and experience in family the shock of becoming, in turn, the parent. We start out seeing parents as giants in the land. I doubt we ever quite get over our disbelief that the teenage bagger at the grocery store is suddenly younger than we are. Wait, now it’s our teacher. Whoa, now it’s our boss. Hey, now it’s the president of the United States!

And the wind keeps blowing. Until one day we find ourselves holding the parents who first held us. Then how could sorrow not swamp us? Something seems so backward about this. How did we get from dependent to depended on? How can it be that we now seek to offer a haven to the ones who first offered it to us?

And how can it be that we are to do this even as our own bodies are starting to wear out, promising our own time of being no longer even symbolically to be our children’s haven of rest? How can it be that we who held our children, mentored them, provided for them (as best grass can), will now be held by them?

Will I one day be napping in the golden (but also fading) sun of late afternoon because I no longer sleep well nights and my time as grass is nearly gone? And will my daughter come in to wake me up just enough to say good-bye while trying not to ruin my nap? Will I wake up just enough from the fog of sleep to see her dear face, and try to touch her, with a faint smile on my own face, before sleep takes me back? Will she leave my room trying not to cry, as she now lives her time of disbelief that it has come to this even as I am likewise dreaming the same, there in that darkening room?

Yes. Yes, unless some earlier tragedy strikes first, yes. Yes, I will someday need to be held by her as once I held her. I don’t believe it. That’s why I keep saying yes. But yes.

Where in such sorrow is the steadfast love of the Lord? I have enough faith some of the time (but only some of the time, grass that I am) to trust that if it’s everlasting, then it’s there when the grass dies. Then it gathers the grass in its arms once even daughters can no longer hold it.

But God’s steadfast love is also made flesh in family life. All families are grass, all are mortal, so all families manage this only fleetingly. Yet at our best, learning from the one who once pitched his tent among us (as the Gospel of John 1:14 so memorably puts it), we become God’s body to each other. Our parents’ hands holding our fragile baby selves are God’s hands. Our own hands holding our parents’ fragile aging selves are God’s hands. And our commitment to span each other’s needs and phases and stages across life’s journey from cradle to grave—until you hold me as I once held you—is one way we begin to teach each other that the love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC; editor, DreamSeeker Magazine;and a pastor and speaker. This reflection was first published in The Mennonite February 3, 2009), as a "Real Families" column.