John Sr., Going Home

There's a feeling I can't capture

it's always just a prayer away

I want to know the ending of things hoped for and not seen

but I guess that's the point of hoping anyway

I have felt you with my spirit

I have felt you fill this room

and this is just an invitation,

just a sample on the whole

and I can't wait to be going home



Going home, I'll meet you at the table

Going home, I'll meet you in the air

and you are never to young to think about it

I can not wait to be home.

Face to face how can it be?


from "Conversations" by Sara Groves

Remembering John Sr.

My former husband, the father of my children went home to God on July 5th. I had some blessed times with him in the days before. Both funerals were occasions for his families to pull together and for all of us to appreciate the man that he was and to grow in our appreciation of the great variety of people his life had embraced. The first funeral was Masonic. I must confess I have never been to a Masonic function before but I had grown to be favorably impressed with the "Village" where he lived for the last couple of years of his life. I really liked the gracious staff and I thought his care although not perfect was good and administered with respect and kindness. I found myself looking forward to holidays and dinner with him. The residents appreciated him so much there. As one woman told me, he brought cheer to everyone. He laughed about his popularity and told a friend that being African American and male in this mostly white female group was a great advantage. I'd worried that he would have trouble adjusting to a group that had no other men of his race in it but that was not the case. While he was there he integrated the "open" Masonic group that met there and five of the brothers from that group came to the service given by the African American brothers from the Prince Hall lodge. I thought the service was good and the singing they led and the prayers were definitely Christian. "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine". The next day there was an Orthodox service at his beautiful Russian Orthodox church so beautifully painted with pictures of Jesus. Johnny,our son had a part in the service and talked about his father's unwillingness to see the world in terms of "black and white". I was so proud of them both. His cousin sang very beautifully and his Godly but so down to earth priest, Father Vincent, and his Orthodox friend conducted the liturgical service, much of which is scripture.

Nothing I could say would even begin to be complete without telling about the part that Sunday our daughter and her husband Dr. Keith played in this story because they were the people that God used to orchestrate so much of it. Their unwavering love and attention over two and a half years got John into Temple hospital where he had an unsurpassed lung specialist and received an experimental procedure that gave him two good years. What a blessing that child and her supportive Dr. husband were to her father. Also it was Sunday's persistence that got her father into rehab and Masonic Village where he wanted to be. In addition we were supported by the prayers of so many people from our churches and our friends. John, Jude and I handled finding this support. As Big John would sometimes say when I visited him, "There she is, the 'Mother". Thinking of my children, I consider this a wonderful compliment.

Coming and going through Time

I live a very simple life and for the most part, as my four year old grandson say's, " I 'm OK with that." I have food and clothing, a roof over my head, family I love, big old shade trees, a small garden and a Chinese Cherry in my side yard. In addition I have a some work to do and I'm a Christian, God has made himself known to me. I have experienced forgiveness and I'm learning to forgive. Today I had a friend to talk to. What more could I want?

I was brought up by a Christian mother and a questioning father who was a self proclaimed "activist". His parents placed him in a school of Theosophy when he was three. There had been a divorce and his mother was a writer. She didn't think she could care for him herself and write at the same time. They stayed in touch but he grew up without much family experience. My father always had a concern for the underdog and the outsider and when my brother and I were children we learned to think about injustice in the world, primarily to American Indians and Africans who were brought here as slaves. When dad was a child he had thought of himself as an "Indian", perhaps as a way of establishing an identity, and when we were children we played cowboys and cowgirls with our neighbors but when we played together, we were Indians. This sense of being a member of two worlds has had strong repercussions in our lives. My brother makes stone tools- axes, arrowheads and knives and demonstrates Indian flint napping and other crafts in nature centers and is very concerned about ecology and these things were part of his life long before it they were popular. I had an inner drive to try to get involved in the Civil Right's movement in the city of Philadelphia when I was in college even though I had no prior experience with minority community and not much with the city. Most of the Jewish kids at my school were also involved. Their history dictated it and so did mine.

My former husband who I met during this time is dark skinned and an interesting mixture of Irish, Blackfoot Indian and African American. He has COPD and is in the hospital again after coming home to Masonic Village a very nice nursing and assisted living facility for just a few days.. We have been so grateful for advances in caring for this disease, especially at Temple Hospital in Philadelphia where he has had extraordinary care. I always find myself mulling over our complicated lives when a crisis comes along. He has had two wives and has two sets of adult children, one in the city and one in the country, nothing unusual in our time. Our son is practically a pacifist and is a missionary. His second son is in the Marine Corps and recently was sent overseas.

I married once. I was not yet a Christian then but came to faith about ten years later. In my generation Christian woman who were divorced were expected to follow the current understanding of I Cor. 7 which was to remain single. Today many people understand these verses differently but whenever I prayed about these matters or even sought counsel about them, it always seemed to me that in my case anyway, singleness was the best thing for my family. My former husband remarried and then he became Russian Orthodox about 10 years later and then was divorced again about 10 years after that.

I am an artist and my living room reflects my musings. Pictures go up come down all the time. I have seasonal hangings, flowers and landscapes and pictures that reflect my thoughts of the world's ethnos, my continuing concerns for the tribal people of this earth. But that's not whats moving me now. This hanging is about me, my life, my providence. So right in the middle right now is an Indian chieftan and a cowgirl, it is Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley but it could as well be Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow, could be me and Dad in his headdress that he made when he was a child or my former husband's relatives or most likely me and my husband. There are many other pictures in the room, an Ethiopian mother and her child and a bunch of Siberian Iris that bloom in May. Tucked into a corner of the Indian print which my former husband had made for me from my computer Art program is a recent post card of "Dead Horse Point" in Utah, huge canyons in the evening sun which blend into the colors of the cowgirl's shirt which has a pattern of ocean waves with ships in similar colors, one thing blending into another, one time blending into another, one eon blending into another, life coming and going through time.