“I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you.” (John 14.18)
In Forrest Carter’s book, “The Education of Little Tree,” he begins his beautiful, but haunting story of a small boy who is orphaned with this heartbreaking line, “Ma lasted a year after Pa was gone. That’s how I came to live with Granpa and Granma when I was five years old.” After the funeral, as the adults are “thrashing it out proper as to where [he] was to go,” he grabbed hold of his Granpa’s leg and wouldn’t let go. “Leave him be,” the old man told the crowd.
The three of them then boarded a bus and headed back to their Appalachian mountaintop where his Granpa and Granma lived. It was dark and late at night as they made their way up the mountain, the sounds of the forest encircling them. As they entered the cabin and Granma placed the small boy on a hammock made of deer hide, she sang to him in a low and soft voice, “They now have sensed him coming/ The forest and the wood-wind/ Father mountain makes him welcome with his song./ They have no fear of Little Tree/ They know his heart is kindness/ And they sing, ‘Little Tree is not alone.’”
Little Tree is not alone. That beautiful promise made by his granma to a grieving five year old boy becomes the theme of this book, as the boy grows strong and wise under the loving care of his two aged grandparents, until the day comes when they also die and he is again left to find his way through the world on his own, although this time he carries with him the strength and the knowledge shared with him by his loving grandparents.
The sacred text for this Sixth Sunday of Easter shows us the Galilean Rabbi sharing very similar words with his followers just a short while before his death, as he says to them, “I will not leave you orphans. I will come to you.” It is that promise that they will not be orphaned that sustains and strengthens them during the dark and daunting days that lay ahead for them.
As we surely know, deep down, there is nothing more frightening to a child than to be all alone, to find him or herself without parents, an orphan left alone and lost in the big world, uncared for and unloved by anyone. When that primary bond is broken, the pain reaches deep into the heart, cracking it open, distress and dread bleeding from it.
A young boy barely remembers his dad, losing him at an early age. Then, if life were not difficult enough, he loses his mother in a car accident. On the way back from the cemetery, the boy turns to his aunt, tears in his eyes, voice breaking, and he says to her, “Am I an orphan now?” Almost too young to know what the word means, he is old enough to know what it feels like. He is an orphan now.
Even adults, long after being all grown-up, when experiencing the death of both parents, speak sadly of that moment of deep loss with these painful words, “I am an orphan now.” For them, as for anyone orphaned, it is a time of uncertainty and insecurity, fear and fright. They reach out for the arms of their missing parents, only to find empty space, they yearn to hear their voices, only to find empty sounds.
That frightful experience of utter aloneness is endemic to the human condition, rooted already at the start, when the first man and the first woman became the first orphans in the human story, separated from the Most High God who had made them from the dirt of the earth and who had walked in the Garden with them in the cool of the afternoon, but now alienated from them by their desire to disobey and by their decision for self-sufficiency.
The Book of Genesis describes that painful alienation in this way, “The Lord God therefore banished him from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he had been taken. He expelled the man, stationing the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword east of the garden of Eden, to guard the way to the tree of life.” (Gen 3.23-24)
And that was the condition of apartness, aloneness, and awayness that was the sad human condition until the same Lord God sent his Son to “stand in the breach,” bridging the gap between the holiness of God and the unholiness of humans, reconciling heaven and earth, or as Paul of Tarsus would later write, “You who once were alienated and hostile in mind because of evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body.” (Col 1.22)
That reconciliation or repair of the breach between the divine and the human is now unalterable and unchanging, as the sacred writing makes clear, with Jesus, the divine love in flesh and blood, promising his followers–and humanity as a whole–that there is no longer any separation, no more enmity, no going it alone. His promise to the twelve is this, “I will remain with you and will be in you.”
With that promise, the return to Eden has begun, with the Spirit of the Most High God walking with us in this world, as he walked with the man and the woman in the Garden, guiding our footsteps lest we fall, strengthening us when we are weak in limb, and carrying us safely in his arms when we have fallen into the eternal sleep, bringing us back to the gates of Paradise, closed no more, but open wide for us to enter.
St. Joseph Orphanage sat atop a summit overlooking the Arkansas River. Built in 1910, the 56,000 square foot brick and stone building contained eighty rooms for children, a chapel, classrooms, a kitchen, a dining room, a bakery, and a laundry. When it first opened its doors, sixty-six orphaned children moved in to live in the three-story building. In later years, the number would rise to several hundred.
Benedictine Sisters of Fort Smith were asked to take charge of the campus and the small children, which they did for almost a century, caring not only for the orphans, but also for the 720 acre farm that surrounded the place, where the nuns drove tractors, planted gardens, raised hogs and cows, grew an orchard, and nurtured a rose garden. This was the only home that hundreds of children ever knew, with the nuns rocking the smallest ones to sleep each evening, cradling them in their arms.
Former orphans still return to that building, now empty, the nuns now gone, but these visitors hold on to the good memories. As one man, now grown old, said as he looked down the empty hallway, “I am grateful for my eight years here.” Another man, with moist eyes, looked into one room, and, with a soft voice, said, “This used to be a little nap room.”
Each of them remembers the love that the Sisters gave them, as if they were their own children. “I could have gone down a different path had I not come here,” a man spoke solemnly, remembering those women in flowing black dresses who gave him a place to call home, gave him their heart full of love, always there for him as a small boy, during the day hours, during the dark hours, living out the promise of the Galilean Teacher when he said, “I will not leave you orphans. You will see me, because I live and you will live.”
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 