Lunch with G., part two

This has gone really long, and I hope I’m not just grasping at something ephemeral and impossible to relate.

It was the end of the 3-hour conversation (the sort that ends, like a long pleasant date, with standing at the door in your coat, still talking.) Georgette was speaking openly about death, after hours of touching lightly on the subject from many angles.

She is preparing to begin an artistic meditation on the Kaddish – not simply the mourner’s Kaddish, but as a central prayer of Jewish liturgy. She said “I don’t like to talk about a baby before it’s born…” and she repeatedly looked down and away while she explained some of the roots of the idea. I understood the hesitancy – an idea evolves before a mark is ever made, like a child in the womb, and you can’t make it ready before its time. Speaking of it prematurely might cause it to deviate somehow from its best course. And certainly we all feel some fear of death itself -- So I won’t expose what she has confided. But death was a thread that had woven itself into the conversation from its first lines, subtly but so much so that I felt I had to tread carefully for a short time at the beginning – she referred to a period when her spouse had been ill and I feared the worst. But the sources for that undercurrent didn’t appear until hours later.

Standing by the door in my coat, I responded by talking about Lent. Last year’s Lenten season still makes me fearful of the coming months in an irrational way – between my family and the church there were eight deaths in as many weeks. Not all of the church people were acquaintances, but the repetition and the timing of the onslaught (immediately pre-consolidation) was numbingly harsh. The suffering before the blessing. Georgette and I talked about the artwork I’d started this time last year that was derailed by that experience, and the lingering need to process this somehow. I mentioned that in a significant sense I was more of a witness to mourning than the person immediately affected by most of these losses; and she pointed out that it is the artist’s role to serve as witness. I recall thinking that it must also be the pastor’s role, to some degree.

Days have passed now since I wrote my initial post on this subject, but I still remember the odd and eerie feelings that passed through me during much of my conversation that day. Confluences of people and circumstance recurred as we spoke, resonant experiences that echoed back and forth across our two lives (through years of disconnect) to coincide along similar paths of thought. I remember wondering if its possible to be a lens, as a person – for me to temporarily assume the role of lens in gathering together many people from the corners of my life to combine their energy in one direction, towards one distinct purpose only God would fully know. In some ways I feel I’m doing it now, at this point in my life, but can only wonder if that is my gift – to be a lens, a producer, or as Dean would put it, a caretaker. A facilitator. Someone who tends to people and ideas and helps things happen. Is that a role? Is it just the artist’s job, as Georgette seemed to say? Is it where I’m headed professionally? Or is that not yet revealed to me at all? To be a lens, and a witness.

What does that mean?