God in the Diner
There’s a diner in my neighbourhood that I enjoy visiting. Red vinyl booths. Formica table tops. A chrome quarter jukebox at every booth. I have breakfast there on Friday mornings with a couple of old codgers like me. We’re like the old guys in the balcony on the Muppets Show - perpetually enamored with our own cleverness. We get sass from the wait staff and love it. For some inexplicable reason we talked - briefly - about funerals last Friday morning. I mentioned a time when I attended four funerals in five weeks. I realized, somewhat sarcastically, that people only ever talk about the good things at a funeral. By the time I had been through five eulogies, however, I thought there might be something else going on. You have to pay attention at funerals, I said to my breakfast buddies. They teach you about what matters most to those who love you. They teach you how to live.
Tonight I stopped in to the same diner, for no particular reason at all. I sipped on a vanilla milkshake, reading a book. The author quoted one of the beatitudes, as interpreted by Eugene Peterson in the Message. “You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you. I put the book down and thought about this for a few minutes. I’ve been trying to understand this little nugget of wisdom for about ten years “Blessed are those who mourn”, Jesus said, “for they will be comforted.” Really? Comforted? How? Tell me again, Jesus? How does that work, exactly? I was stunned by the way Peterson interpreted this Beatitude. It seemed like I was so close to the truth - the huge, infinite, terrifying and beautiful truth but, somehow, I wasn’t quite there. I couldn’t quite break through the darkness and fog into the light.
As I was thinking about this the waitress slid into the booth across from me. The place was almost empty, and we had been having a conversation as she went about her work. She will soon be sharing an apartment with her sister and I wanted to give her a bit of wisdom. I wanted to say that the key to living with someone you love is to figure out what matters and what doesn’t. But I didn’t say it, because it sounded trite, and I didn’t want to intrude, and I really didn’t want to intrude with triteness. But the conversation soon changed tack, so the opportunity was lost, and then she told me about her first love, who tragically died. “I loved him like crazy”, she said. “I’ll never love anyone like that again.”
And the universe went, ‘click’. Suddenly I understood. It may not be the whole story - and it may not be your story - but tonight, while my French fries went cold and my milkshake melted, I saw the fog slip away and the light breaking through the darkness. I finally understood why people only talk about the good things at a funeral. I understood how mourning is a blessing. I understood that comfort might not be felt in the moment of our pain and loss but that it will come, and that maybe until we lose the thing that matters most we’ll never know what it is that matters most, and what doesn’t matter at all, and that there’s really nothing in between. Maybe the comfort that Jesus promises is in the fact that once we lose what matters most we’re finally able to live by what really matters and, in so doing, know the comfort of living a life from the wellsprings of our heart. What Jesus might be promising here is the comfort of knowing that we are living, perhaps for the first time, our real life.
She went back to work and I tried to continue reading but couldn’t. As I was about to leave I wanted to ask if I could share a ‘Jesus thing’ and tell her what I had just learned. But she was already saying good-bye, and it somehow seemed so very important and yet I just couldn’t tell her. A moment later I was outside, in the dark, late autumn night and then it really was too late. So I walked home from the diner, lost in my thoughts, carrying the infinitely dark and heavy weight of a beautiful mystery in my heart, repeating the name of her lost love over and over, like a mantra, like the chorus of a hymn to worship the one who longs to comfort us all.