A few years ago I sat with a man named Henry who was dying and who had, by his own reckoning, not been to church in forty years. His daughter had asked me to come. Henry had not asked me to come. He made this clear.
We sat for a while without talking, which I have learned is often the right thing. Finally he said: “I suppose you’re going to tell me it’s not too late.” I told him I hadn’t planned to tell him anything. He looked at me for a moment. Then he said: “Good. I’m tired of being managed.”
We talked for two hours. He told me about his wife, who had died fourteen years before. About his son, with whom he had not spoken in six years over something he could not now fully reconstruct. About what he thought he had been for, and whether it had been enough. These are the questions that come in the last rooms, and they are not small questions, and almost nobody is helping people prepare for them.
That is what I write about.
I am a retired Presbyterian pastor. Forty years. Small churches in Kentucky and North Carolina, the kind where I knew every family by name and by trouble. I have officiated more funerals than I can count and I stopped using most of the standard platitudes before I turned fifty, because I had sat with too many dying people to keep offering comfort food dressed in scripture.
I came to faith not through a dramatic conversion but through a question I could not stop asking. I came to writing through a blog my daughter Rachel made me start, which I still do not fully understand. Eleven thousand people subscribe, which continues to surprise me.
I believe in doubt. I believe faith that costs nothing is not yet faith. I believe the questions that arrive in your sixties and seventies are not signs of spiritual failure. They are signs that you are finally taking the whole thing seriously.
I live in Weaverville, North Carolina, with my wife Linda, who is more organized than I am and has never stopped being right about that. I write on legal pads. I read scripture and then poetry, in that order, every morning before I write a word. I quote poets as readily as I quote the apostles. This has occasionally alarmed my deacons.
Henry and I talked until visiting hours were over. His daughter told me later that he asked for me again, twice. I went both times. The last time, he was not awake. I sat with him anyway. That is still the whole job, as best I can tell.