Today I returned to the pulpit after being off last Sunday for a week of Continuing Education in Minneapolis. I vaguely remember preparing the bulletin on Wednesday of this week, noting that Matthew 7:21-29 was the Gospel Reading from the Lectionary. The story of the wise man who built his house on a rock and the foolish man who built his house on sand, and then both were hit by storms. The foolish man's house fell-- "and great was its fall!" When I came back to the Scripture on Friday, I was a little unnerved at the prospect of preaching this passage after Kearney and the Gibbon area was hit by F1 and F2 tornadoes the very day before. Hmmm.
This afternoon, my family and I went to a matinee to see the latest installment of the Indiana Jones series of movies. We all love Indy. I was in high school when Indy made his debut on the big screen and I learned about the Ark of the Covenant. Of course, Indy hadn't sported that nifty hat and whip in all of my daughter's 14 years on this earth, and yet she has come to appreciate his adventures with pure delight. And so we shared the adventure again, delighting at the ridiculous stunts and scrapes with death that Indy faced, now in his 60s, but with no less style and confidence. Halfway through the movie, I remembered that today was the 24th anniversary of Sandie's death, a woman who was like a mother to me, whom I absolutely adored, who died within four months of being diagnosed with melanoma at the age of 39. Wow.
Five days before her death, my family and I visited Sandie and her family at her home in the Hudson River Valley of New York. Sandie herself was not feeling well at the time, but was able to move around the house and communicate with brief snippets of conversation here and there. For the most part, however, she didn't speak much, and being only 18 myself and very afraid for her, I agonized over the lack of communication.
To give us all a respite from the house and talk of illness, we all went out that weekend to see the then-newly released film, "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." (Whose idea was THAT??) During the scene where the blond love-interest of Indy's was set up to be sacrificed in a pit of fire, I think I stopped breathing. She dangled in a cage, strapped in, being dropped toward the fire, then pulled back up, dropped again, pulled back up-- as Indy fought the bad guys up top and kept trying to get back to save her. Of course we knew he would, but.... I watched that woman dangle above death, be snatched away, only to be dropped again, I found myself begging the Powers That Be or Whomever, to spare her life. Please let her live, I kept silently pleading, only occasionally remembering to breathe. I was sure that Sandie, who sat two seats away from me, was getting the references to death, and I was sure she, too, must be suffering through this agonizing ordeal. Finally, of course, Indy beats up all the bad guys and saves the girl once again from the fires of death. Whew. Thank God.
On leaving the theatre, I took a deep breath and tried to act calm as I put my shaking hand on Sandie's shoulder and joked lightly, "Some movie, eh?"
Sandie's face lit up with pure joy. "I LOVED it! That was great!!" and she actually laughed for the first time all weekend.
I didn't know that when I said goodbye to Sandie that weekend, when we hugged and exchanged "I love you"s that it would be our last. I was in complete denial that she was in that much danger, or maybe I really didn't know. I can't remember. I just know that four days later, when I learned of her death, I was devastated as if I'd lost my own parent.
Today, watching Indy kick and punch and survive going over three waterfalls, among other impossible things, and once again come out the hero in the end, I felt teary. But it was bittersweet. I remembered the first three adventures I had with Indy, the second one being much too intense and dramatic and therefore memorable, forever etched in my heart. I was grateful for that memory of Snake Surprise, Eyeball Soup and Monkey Brains-- the dinner fare before the human sacrifice, that gave Sandie, at least, a respite from Reality and Illness and Suffering for a good two hours. I don't care if the movie company is playing on my nostalgia to get me to buy a ticket to see a Senior Citizen whip-snapping, fedora-bearing Indiana defy death a thousand times in an hour. It worked. It was a gift, to remember, to give thanks, and to re-live the gift of being taken to exotic, impossible places with him to forget about Life for awhile. Thanks, Indy.
You would like this one, Sandie. See ya later.
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