Real Families: Meditations on family life

When we’re young, we do younger-person things and when older we do older-person things. My early writings pondered young marriage, babies, children growing. More recently I’ve written my way through the decline and then death of both my parents. There is more to life than aging and death, and the day will come again to celebrate that. Yet for now I find the death of one more major mentor producing this column’s focus on being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, as Hebrews 12:1 so memorably puts it.

A recent death was of key mentor Paul M. Schrock. Paul taught me publishing. In the 1990s, with heavy heart, he downsized me from a financially distressed Herald Press. But he wrapped my termination in the ongoing support that contributed to my being able to own my own publishing company after leaving Herald Press. Then his support contributed to my becoming a seminary dean. But on April 18, after a fall in a library, working among the books he loved, he was gone.

As I mourned his departure amid gratitude for ways he had blessed me, his moving on intertwined with my parents’ departure. And it dawned on me that without intending to, I was visualizing Paul along with my parents and other departed loved ones in a kind of cloud, a cloud of those who had by faith “run with perseverance the race marked out” for them (Hebrews 12:1), a cloud of those who were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show they are looking for a country of their own, longing for a better country—a heavenly one (Hebrews 11:13-16 NIV).

We may each experience having a famous idea, long known, lock in so personally it seems that only now do we get it. Last week was my time to feel “cloud of witnesses” locking in. I don’t mean that I perfectly grasp Hebrews, whose writer might find my appropriation unrecognizable, but simply that the image has now become for me particularly powerful.

We do, if we feel the longing for that better country, seek to run our race toward it. As Hebrews puts it, we welcome the things promised from a distance, never fully experiencing them here. So there is always sorrow in the race, the sorrow of a destination not fully reached, a yearning not wholly fulfilled. I suspect in addition to the grief of losing physical contact with those we love, our sorrow at funerals comes from awareness that neither the one we memorialize nor we ourselves when our time comes get as far as they and we would wish. Along with the here-were-the-wonderful-achievements parts, there are always the didn’t-get-there parts we wistfully ache for.

But precisely in regret over the country not reached emerges the power of the cloud of witnesses image. These witnesses, though within a mystery we can’t fully know, are now nearer that country. They become the cloud of those who know how impossible it is to get all the way to God’s country in this life yet whose vision of it far off shaped their lives on the way toward it. Then beyond their earthly race they’ve become our cheerleaders, these who have been there but have now handed us the baton with which to race on as faithfully and far as we can amid our own longings, which we also will not entirely satisfy.

A gift of many memorial services is the power to peel back the veil between those who have raced beyond death and those still racing here. At memorial services the barriers between those living and those dead, those past and those present, we as living beings versus the dead ones we will someday at our own funerals be, fade away. For precious minutes we live in God’s time, in God’s way of experiencing, as those by the finish line and those still racing toward it intertwine.

The cloud of witnesses is a way of celebrating that we’re all in this together, we who have run the race and we who run on, as cheerleaders and runners seek to mingle in that most real of families, God’s family—a family larger even than the categories of alive and dead in a country where we welcome the things long promised.

Michael A. King, Telford, Pa., and Harrisonburg, Va., is dean at Eastern Mennonite
Seminary and publisher of Cascadia Publishing House, LLC.