Christina Grimmie Continues to Inspire Us

Two years and eleven months after her death, these words of Christina Grimmie are more important than ever, and the number of people who are being "given to her" continues to grow.💚

How Can I Pray When I Don't Know "What to Say"?

Sometimes it can be very hard to pray while going through difficulties in life. This may seem ironic, but it can happen, especially during long periods of illness, pain, or grief.

In the beginning, we say things like "Dear God, please change this situation!" Sometimes He does change it, but often enough He simply remains with us within the endurance of things that have to play themselves out in time.

This is when praying "gets awkward." It's especially disturbing for those of us who are trying to live our faith. We know that prayer is (or should be) a regular part of every day. Prayer is “conversation with God.”

But we find ourselves in ongoing situations of exhaustion, irascibility, or just feeling "dislocated" from everything. We may be full of questions we don't even know how to ask, or we even feel like we've forgotten the meaning of our own language.

Prayer is conversation with God. But we don't feel like having a conversation with anybody. Ugh!

One problem is that our prayer tends to be mostly a monologue, in which we praise the Lord, thank Him, declare that we love Him, and (here is often the "meat" of our one-sided "conversation") ask Him to take care of us; we "tell God" what we want, and what we hope for. We bring Him our intentions and the intentions of others.

It's normal and appropriate to pray for all these things. God is good, and He loves us. He is our Father. It's natural for us, as children, to turn to Him and ask Him to meet what we perceive to be our many needs in life.

Trials and sufferings, however, can confuse our ordinary discourse. Suddenly things are not what they seemed to be. And we become inarticulate: "God, I don't know what I need. I can't think of anything meaningful to say. I can only wail away in the dark and be powerless. Does that even 'count' as prayer?"

The truth is that the "conversation" of prayer is one that God initiates.

That does not mean that we are suddenly going to hear Him speaking inside our heads. Rather, God is always speaking, calling to us, drawing us to prayer. He speaks to our hearts. We begin to hear Him when we become more aware of our need for Him.

This is where the conversation of prayer begins: when our hearts cry out, “God, help!" Our hearts open up. We might not even be very coherent in our heads at the time, but our hearts are saying, "Lord, have mercy on me!”

We always need mercy. But the awareness of that need arises and intensifies in times of difficulties and brokenness and suffering. In these times, we begin to listen to God in the depths of ourselves. We begin to give Him space, and we permit Him to work on places within us that we usually try to hide from Him (and from ourselves).

The “ear of the heart” that hears God has a very simple shape: “Help. Have mercy on me. I need You.” We may not be able to articulate these words, but that inward groaning that seeks Him is the foundational response to the love He is continually offering to us.

That love has a name, the name of "salvation," Jesus - "God saves." He saves us by coming to dwell with us.

Jesus on the cross has entered forever, and understood comprehensively and unforgettably, each and every one of our cries. Jesus wants to stay with us.

We are precious to God in our weakness. He is so close to us when we are suffering. He carries us even closer to Him if we allow Him to enter inside of that need that groans within us.

He shapes us, in His way, and in His time.

And so our prayer is renewed as a more profound "conversation" with the God who creates us and redeems us. He develops with us an inner, mysterious dialogue that then gives intensity and real value to whatever words we manage to say, or even just the wordless endurance of our own wounds encompassed in His.

Thank You, Jean Vanier

Jean Vanier died early this morning, following a recent illness, at the age of 90.

A great soul. A humble human being. I will be forever grateful for his words, his witness, his life. 

God, grant him eternal rest in your peace.

Sorrow May Take "Mature" People By Surprise

Recently I was discussing how sometimes I still feel like a "kid inside," even though I'm 56 years old. I observed that this was a complex phenomenon for people around this age; one that involves many memories, psychological factors including gaps of immaturity in personality development, as well as the continuation within us of that essential human openness to reality. This openness enables us to see every day as new and full of promise.

We can see how "becoming like little children" corresponds to our humanity and to authentic human maturity (even while transforming it into the freedom of the children of God). In our human experience, however, it's not always so easy to distinguish or disentangle the "childlike" from the "childish."

Those of us who are over 55, who are "Young Seniors" (I may have coined a new term there 😉), have begun to sense that we are entering a new phase in life. There are many positive aspects to this, of course, but new challenges also arise, sometimes in difficult, painful, and peculiar ways.

One thing that has struck me in particular over the past year (and especially the past month) is how sorrow can take us by surprise. This is a time of life when - more and more - we lose loved ones, as parents and other elders who have mentored us for our whole lives are called home to God.

It's difficult to be past middle age, to think of yourself as mature, and to find that the "kid inside you" has suddenly become an orphan. One part of you feels embarrassed and foolish that you should be so troubled: "this is not a tragedy, no one lives forever, they are in God's hand, you will see them again, etc. etc." Still, you grieve. You feel wounded. You feel a real sense of loss.

It takes different emotional forms at various times and for various people, but it's something we must endure just as surely as we will have to endure our own death.

It feels strange because it is strange. "God did not make death. Nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living" (Wisdom 1:13). Death came into the world because of sin. This is the tragedy of the human story that touches each of us personally.

Death drives down to our very bones the tragic aspect of life, even for us who firmly believe that this tragedy is not the end of the story.

We believe that Something Has Happened, not to take away physical death nor remove suffering but to transform them from within, to fashion out of them the ultimate ways of love, the path through which what is mortal is clothed in immortality.

God did not make death.

God became our brother and suffered death.

He passed through death and beyond death. He rose to eternal life, and we are called to join him "if only we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him" (Romans 8:17).

We will have much grief and many sorrows. It's human. Hopefully as we grow older we value what is human more, even when we don't understand it.

The Lord didn't say to us, "Do not suffer." He said, "Do not be afraid" (see e.g. Luke 12:7, Rev 1:17, et alia).

In the hard moments, the sorrowful moments, the incomprehensible moments, the desperate moments, the final moments, God is with us.

He is with us in the anguish, the awful solitude, the flesh and blood of all of it.

He is Jesus. He will carry us through.

Stay with him.

Jojo and the Tulips

Speaking of kids...

A long, long time ago, around this point in the year 2011, I took a picture of Josefina inspecting a tulip. It was really cute because the tulip was almost as tall as her (she was 4 years old).

Recently I convinced the now 12 year old Jojo to stand in a similar area near some similar tulips so I could revisit the old picture eight years later. Even though this was another "silly-daddy-idea," she decided to go along with it and be a good sport.😉

I'm glad she did. What a difference! As is clear from the collage below, she is still petite for her age, but she certainly has grown up a lot.

They've all grown so much since this blog began. We thank God for them!❤

The Human Plea for a Life that Endures

The big themes are all here: prosperity and loss, begging God for mercy, the questions we ask in the face of the incomprehensible abyss of death, and then salvation - a mysterious event happens, the Lord himself intervenes and changes everything: "You have turned my mourning into dancing..."

The text from Psalm 30 that I have been pondering a bit today covers the whole ground.

In the light of the Resurrection we can glimpse what a wonderful and definitive transformation has taken place in and through Jesus.

"Will the dust praise you?" We know the agony of these questions and how they touch the center of the drama of being human. Indeed, God calls each one of us and sows a mysterious promise in our hearts even "before" we call upon him. He has made us for himself, and our hearts are restless... our humanity is "already" stirred to seek the Source that draws it beyond itself, even if we have never thought of God.

We cannot make peace with simply turning to dust. Every human gesture is either a demand or a plea for "something more," for a life that endures. But all the graveyards of human history testify to the limits of the power of our demands.

What we seek does not come from our own power or any power we can construct from the elements of this world. "All is Vanity," said the book of Ecclesiastes in 500 b.c. ... and a tattoo on the forearm of a girl from 2014 - 2016 a.d.

There remains the plea. 

We who believe in the Resurrection know the immense goodness - beyond all imagining - of the God who answers that plea.

We know by faith, not by sight; we walk toward it and adhere to it in hope - a hope that holds onto God moment by moment, on every step of the journey, especially the moments and the steps that are the most obscure and the most frightening. And we love this God who has already given us a foretaste of his ineffable goodness, the goodness which God is, the One who is Absolute Love.

He will give himself to anyone who asks, who seeks, who does not close themselves off in delusions of self-sufficiency, but takes up personally, as their own, the plea of the human heart. He will not withold himself; indeed he has already given himself completely.

God is good. All the time.

I said in my prosperity,
"I shall never be moved."
By your favor, O Lord,
you had established me as a strong mountain;
[but when] you hid your face;
I was dismayed.

To you, O Lord, I cried,
and to the Lord I made supplication:
“What profit is there in my death,
if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it tell of your faithfulness?

"Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me!
O Lord, be my helper!"

You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth
and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever.

~Psalm 30:6-12

The Cranberries New and Final Album

Here's The Cranberries new (and final💧) album, In the End, which was released earlier this week. 

At some point, I may write more about it. For now, suffice it to say that it's a real gift from the boys to all of us, and in honor of their lead singer and friend, the late Dolores O'Riordan. God grant her eternal rest.

I definitely wanted to buy it.💿🎵

I'm glad CDs are still around. When you buy the CD, you have an Actual Thing. It even has a booklet. With pages. 

You can collect CDs, put them in display cases, and contemplate them.😉 They also sound better. And if there's an Apocalyptic Internet Hack some day, you've still got your music.😉💿

The First and the Last

I Still Feel Like a Kid "Inside" - Is That OK?

May is here.

Life is bursting out all over the place. Spring is a natural "festival" of renewal. But the feel and smell of the air is the same as it was twenty, thirty, forty, and - yes, I can now speak from my own experience - fifty years ago.

Often I still feel like a kid inside myself, and I think there's something true about that.

On the one hand, how much time is a half-century, really? Even in human history it seems like a small dot on a long line (not to mention cosmic history). Being 56 years old means I have "self-consciously experienced" life - more or less consistently - for the past half century.

Supposedly I have not only "grown up" over this time; I have even begun to grow old.

But the process of maturity is obscure and uneven for human beings. We grow in some ways, but we can also "revert" (at least in the sense of forgetting what we have learned), and in some aspects of our psychological and emotional development we can just "get stuck" - often a traumatic event inflicts inner wounds that atrophy certain capacities to experience and engage reality.

Or there are ways we don't grow because affluence and ease have allowed us to escape challenges in certain areas of life (or perhaps poverty and marginalization have prevented access to those challenges, or caused us to give up on the possibilities for growth).

Even in our unhindered maturity, however, how can we not recognize our smallness? I am supposedly an educated man, yet the older I get, the more I realize that I actually know very little (and the few things I might reasonably claim to know, I don't know very well).

So there are many aspects to this experience of "still feeling like a kid." Time is a funny thing. It seems to go so fast, and yet we have a vast store of memories that we can "bring to mind" in such a way that they seem vivid and "present." Remembering can be a melancoly or a happy experience. Very often, it's a strange combination of both.

We remember things when we feel the Spring air, the smell of flowers, the warm sun, the long evenings. After 50+ years these memories and their associations are full of life's beauty and tragedy, of many people we have known, of our successes and our failures. Even when we don't call anything particular to mind, it's all there, somewhere - at the edges of our consciousness or submerged under it.

At the same time, every day contains new possibilities. Reality is deeper than we know. If illness or age bring limitations in certain aspects of life, they also provide the opportunity to enter more fully into the richness of what remains at hand, and discover the wonders of so many things we ignored in the haste of our youth.

Here especially is the reason we can still have something of childhood within our hearts: we bring a life full of memory into the freshness of every day, of every moment. There is potentially a large space for the play of inner freedom, for understanding and compassion.

There is also a drama at this time of life: temptations to brood over the past, to "hoard" what we think we have achieved, to nurse grudges, seek vengeance, or be consumed by envy.

Above all, there is the temptation to cynicism. Focusing on our failures or else simply tired of life, we can withdraw into a protective fortress of routines and diversions, or sink into discouragement (something different from being afflicted by depression, a psychological illness that can affect people of all ages).

We must fight against these temptations and continue to nurture that fundamental fascination with reality that most fully expresses our humanity.

This is one aspect of Jesus's insistence that we must "become like little children." Of course this seems complicated on a natural human level; it is above all a matter of grace and the Holy Spirit. Even while grace takes us "beyond" all we can imagine by giving us a share in God's own life, it also validates and fulfills everything that is proper to our humanity. Thus, "spiritual childhood" corresponds to and vivifies the genuine human reality of maturity even for those who have already lived a good stretch of their earthly lives.

As we grow older, I don't think we "outgrow" things but rather we "grow into" new things, deeper things. Our whole lives are "still alive" - all the good we have done or experienced keeps growing, and our failures can heal because we can find forgiveness - if we are willing, also, to forgive.

At my age, the tendency is either to begin to fall (more or less willingly) into bitterness and cynicism, or to begin to find wisdom.

I'm always trying to sort one out from the other, honestly.

I think the challenge is to keep forgiving people - we have enough experience to know their limits, to know that they can't give us everything we feel like we need from them.

We may find that we don't like so many people anymore. But we have to choose to love them. This is not just a matter of blind willpower. It involves a realistic intellectual judgment that leads to appropriate forms of tolerance, acceptance, and affirmation.

People are different. People are all more or less weird - some are better at hiding it from others, and all of us are remarkably good at hiding it from ourselves. People are flawed. People are sinners. (Some) people are jerks. 

Love them anyway.

We don't need to turn into super extroverts, or run around going to parties and joining clubs (unless we want to). The "quiet life" may suit us better. But let's be open to people - it's reasonable to have "boundaries" and privacy out of respect for our own dignity, but let the criteria be drawn from a rational love for ourselves and those who have been entrusted to our responsibility, and not from self-shielding anger and frustration with others, which can so easily degenerate into a hidden contempt.

People will not be perfect, and they will vex us sometimes, but we cannot withdraw into isolation. We should trust in God and welcome people, accept them, accompany them. We might even take the risk of a little vulnerability with some people; we could reach out to befriend them and accept their friendship, and we could "forgive them ahead of time," so to speak, for (inevitably) disappointing us in some ways, for not measuring up, for trespassing against us. 

But really it's not all such a grim business. If we have a mature, realistic openness to people, they will surprise us. They will show us their talents, their ideals, their ardor, and their need for us to affirm them and mentor them. Their strengths, experience, and maturity will help us. We will begin to see them with compassion and understanding, and with a healthy dose of good humor.

Above all, we have to forgive the people who have hurt us in the past, to let go of the often unacknowledged tendency to "nurture" the pain and the anger, to take silent interior vengeance against the other. It will never give us peace.

(I should note that our forgiveness and openness and realistic judgment must not be naive; it should take full account of the need to protect ourselves from physical and mental abuse. Let's keep our eyes open, and if necessary get help to recognize these situations and not allow them to continue.)

We also need to "forgive ourselves" (which is so much harder than it sounds). We have to let go of the frustrations of the past and of our own failures. Most of us have a lot of stuff to let go of. We need to do what's necessary for our own healing and freedom.

All of this can be hard, but it's good. It reawakens our hope and our capacity to be surprised by life - to see all the good there is in reality and in other people.

Life is full of its deep down promise. We need to embrace that "kid inside us," which means we need to keep living, loving, and hoping ... every day.😊

Rose Study Number 9

Presenting the latest digital art experiment with the Rose. Here is "Rose Study Number 9" - VOILA:

And, as a bonus, a digital art rendering of a leaf from one of those transplanted Asian bushes that are very common in Virginia. These are ready for Summer.

Indeed, Summer is not far away!

Love's Definitive Answer to all Violence...

Today marks the Octave of Easter, the special celebration dedicated to Divine Mercy, a day when we renew the joy of Easter and give glory to Jesus our merciful Savior.

The resurrection of Jesus is our hope, His victory is assured, and we hold fast to Him in faith and trust and love.

We trust in Him as we journey through this present life with its promise of fulfillment, its joys, and also with its fragility, with our ongoing struggle with our own weakness, with all the mystery, the strangeness, the obscurity, the sorrows, and the incomprehensible violence that tries in vain to annihilate the unconquerable victory of Love over death.

Today especially we must persevere in the prayer: "Jesus, I trust in You!"

Dear Jesus: Evil has flared up with special rage to persecute You in these recent days. With bombs and guns they come to make war against the joy of Easter, and they cause many tears and much pain and destruction among Your people, and also to others who gather in peace and with sincere hearts to pray and to seek the will of God the Father of us all.

The wicked wish to crucify You again, because they do not understand that Your wounds are already open forever in Your risen body, deeper than any malice could inflict. From those wounds comes the New World of mercy and forgiveness, transforming suffering and death, making even the greatest sorrow a passage to joy, and remaining forever as Love's definitive answer to all hatred and every form of violence.

Silence and New Life All Around Me

I'm pretty quiet these days.

This silence may last for a while, and there may be larger gaps between dates on the blog.

Or maybe I'll write a big post tomorrow. I don't know. I can't say what's going to happen tomorrow, or even five minutes from now.

So much of what goes through the mind is not worthy of attention. It generates too many foolish words, too much wasted energy.

The work of words: it is surely all straw, though I have no vision to compare it to, which means that I still need it. I don't think the time of the Great Silence has come for me yet. There are still many things to say. I just don't have words for them right now.

But there are tulips and dandelions everywhere, and all the wildflowers of the fields of Spring, briefly arrayed in their inimitable splendor.

I watch them, and try to learn from them.

Beautiful Easter Sunday

It has been a beautiful Easter Sunday and beginning of the Easter Season.

Praised be Jesus Christ!

Holy Saturday: We Wait in Hope

Digital art from the "Cross" series

Christ is buried.

The seed of the New Creation is sown in the depths of the earth.

And so, we wait in hope for the fulfillment of that Kingdom which has been inaugurated under the sign of the Cross.

He is the resurrection and the life. The depths of God's love - Absolute Love - are deeper than the darkest of graves, deeper than the whole abyss of death.

Tomorrow we rejoice in the victory of Christ, risen in the flesh. He makes us sons and daughters of His Father in the Spirit, and already in this world we begin to taste the transfigured life that is our destiny, the life of human persons suffused and transformed by Love.

The longer we remain in this world, the clearer it becomes to us that this is not our lasting home. Our loved ones go before us in death, which is still a painful mystery and yet in Christ, in Christ's transforming love, it has become the passage to fulfillment, to eternal life.

He lives. They live in Him. We also live in Him, even in the midst of this world, and so we live in hope. If we groan with sorrow, it is encompassed in the mystery of endurance, of suffering, of solidarity with the whole creation that waits with eager longing to be made new.

Love is breaking the hard ground that holds us, the limits and frustrations of this life that we fear, the sins by which we hold back and refuse to become larger than our own ego with its illusions of control.

Let us go forth without fear. All tombs - the tombs of our loved ones, the tomb where we buried my father recently, our own tombs - are destined to be empty, in the end. This is not our home. We are made for a New Creation.

"I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed for us. For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that sees for itself is not hope. For who hopes for what one sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait with endurance" (Romans 8:19-25).

Good Friday: The "New Commandment" to Love as He Loves

"God is love. In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us, and his love is brought to perfection in us."

~ 1 John 4:8-11

Bread of Life

Holy Thursday. Christ the Living Bread.

"The Day You Slipped Away..."

It's Wednesday of Holy Week.

I have been feeling... unfocused. Dislocated. Like the ground under my feet is not quite the same. I feel the strangeness of death.

I woke up the other day and thought, "Dad is dead? That's not possible! It doesn't make any sense. He can't be dead. He's my Dad!"

Yes, I still have faith. But faith doesn't make suffering go away. It gives the capacity to endure, to go forward - somehow - in the midst of the night. It suffuses every human reality, including death and the gaps and shifts in the human relationships of those who remain behind. It sustains us on the peculiar, unpredictable road of grief.

But why do I have a picture above of two very different people who don't seem to have any obvious connection to each other? What do C. S. Lewis and the 19-year-old, early-aughts version of Avril Lavigne have in common?

Grief.

I have been reading Lewis's A Grief Observed. I saw it on the shelf. So I pulled it out and started reading it. It's his journal of his struggles following the death of his wife. His is a very different kind of loss, and many of its particular details don't resonate with anything in my own experience (though I can empathize). But Lewis, the great Christian apologist, does not hide the raw emotion or the darkness and strangeness of what he's going through.

I recognize the odd spectrum of feelings, which resemble in certain respects the symptoms of Major Depression. Lewis says that sometimes his grieving "feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting."

That's insightful. He also spends many paragraphs reasoning about the ways of God, acknowledging his incapacity to understand, and allowing for the fact of the anguish that human beings of flesh and blood, of time and history, must simply endure.

Lewis expresses in erudite terms his own experience of sorrow, without shrinking from its forcefulness.

Meanwhile, a song keeps coming into my head from 2004.

Here too is a genuine grieving, an experience of sorrow and loss. Avril Lavigne wrote "Slipped Away" after the death of her grandfather. She loved him very much.

The popular music song is a completely different form of expression, not one that ordinarily lends itself to long discursive insights. As for erudition, I have noted elsewhere that Avril's lyrics "read" very simply. They are not "stand-alone" poetry.

The song is a visceral, intuitive tonal painting of grief in its diverse hues. Vocal inflection above all gives the song its weight as a cry of bewilderment and pain, along with rhythmic structure and instrumentation. The emotions are universally accessible even while they maintain their raw and distinctly adolescent form.

Personally, I'm much affected by the almost echoing repetitions of the bridge leading into the final refrain. This section hits hard:

I had my wake up
Won't you wake up
I keep asking why
And I can't take it
It wasn't fake
It happened you passed by

Now you're gone, now you're gone
There you go, there you go
Somewhere I can't bring you back
Now you're gone, now you're gone
There you go, there you go
Somewhere you're not coming back

The day you slipped away
Was the day I found it won't be the same, no
The day you slipped away
Was the day that I found it won't be the same, oh

Nah nah, nah nah nah, nah nah
I miss you.

Once again, the way to appreciate this is to listen to her sing it (click below). I think I may find it cathartic, eventually, once the "invisible blanket between the world and me" removes itself.

Our King is Coming...

Palm Sunday. 

The GREAT WEEK has begun, during which we walk with Jesus from Jerusalem to the Cross to the silence of the tomb, and then ... the beginning of something totally new! 
⭐ # JourneyTowardsEaster2019

Dad Was "Always Holding Me Up, With Love"

Today marks two years and ten months since Christina Grimmie's young life was taken from her and from this world. Now, as I mourn my own father's death, Christina's musical legacy gives me words that help me to be grateful for his love.

Here is what I would like to say to him:

"Dear Dad, you certainly 'held me up' all these many years - with your strength, quiet dedication, guidance, and help - whenever I was 'down' and 'done' and 'coming unplugged' (which happened a lot). You were there for me 'with love,' as you were for all of the family and for all of those entrusted to you.

"Since you were a faithful reader of my blog while you were still able, you knew about Christina Grimmie and read articles or saw memes/graphics I would post every month. Today, I use these words of hers to express in a clear and simple way my gratitude to you. 

"Christina wrote this song to Jesus, but she also realized that it applied to all the people who had been given to her in her life: her family, friends, and her supporters all over the world. She understood that Jesus was present in the humanity of others, and that He was also 'holding her up' through their love. 

"Of course you now understand these things far better than me, and you see in clear daylight the mysteries of this life that remain obscure and enigmatic for those of us who still journey through it. You have been drawn up by the Love that really does overcome all the violence and evil of this world. For you, fear has finally been banished. 

"May the Lord grant you eternal rest, and let perpetual light shine upon you. May He embrace you forever in His mercy. May Jesus reward you for being an instrument of His love in this world. And please, keep helping me, according to the new ways that God's wisdom and love make available to you.

"I love you Dad."

Among the Rolling Hills

We buried Dad today, in the Catholic cemetery in nearby Winchester, here in the Shenandoah Valley among the rolling hills. My parents wanted their final resting places to be near where their children and grandchildren live.

Nature herself provided some flowers on the trees in front of the church. Rest in Peace, Dad.