BR AVING THE WILDERNESS

A M I N I STRY OF PR E S E NCE
Only holiness will call people to listen now. And the work of
holiness is not about perfection or niceness; it is about belong-
ing, that sense of being in the Presence and through the qual-
ity of that belonging, the mild magnetic of implicating others
in the Presence. . . . This is not about forging a relationship
with a distant God but about the realization that we are al-
ready within God.
—­John O’Donohue

Just recently I found myself in the overflow room of a

church in a small Texas town. I was at the funeral for my
good friend Laura’s father. There were no choir members
or pianos in the overflow room, just a few hundred people
in folding chairs watching the eulogies in the main church
via a projector and computer screen. When we were asked
to stand and sing one of his (and my) favorite hymns, “How
Great Thou Art,” I wasn’t so sure how two hundred or so
strangers could pull off singing an old hymn a cappella in a
reception hall. But we did, and it was a holy experience.
Laura’s dad was a small-­town hero who never met a
stranger. All I could think in that moment was, He would
have loved our messy voices and singing hearts. The neurologist
Oliver Sacks writes, “Music, uniquely among the arts, is
both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. . . . ​
Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”
Funerals, in fact, are one of the most powerful exam-
ples of collective pain. They feature in a surprising finding
from my research on trust. When I asked participants to

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 Hold Hands. With Str angers.

identify three to five specific behaviors that their friends,

family, and colleagues do that raise their level of trust with
them, funerals always emerged in the top three responses.
Funerals matter. Showing up to them matters. And funer-
als matter not just to the people grieving, but to everyone
who is there. The collective pain (and sometimes joy) we
experience when gathering in any way to celebrate the end
of a life is perhaps one of the most powerful experiences of
inextricable connection. Death, loss, and grief are the great
equalizers.
My aunt Betty died while I was writing this book.
When I think of her I think of laughing, camping, swim-
ming in the Nueces River, driving to her ranch in Hondo,
Texas, and our silent agreement that we would never dis-
cuss politics. I also think of the time when I was about
seven years old and I begged her to let me go into the “card
room” where the parents, grandparents, and oldest cousins
were yelling, laughing, cussing, smoking, and playing Rook
(our family’s favorite card game). I was stuck in the “kids’
room,” which was so boring. She held my cheeks in her
hand and said, “I can’t let you go in there. Plus, trust me,
you don’t want to see what’s in there. It ain’t pretty.”
Rather than holding a funeral, it was Betty’s wish that
we come together for a family barbecue potluck in my
cousin Danny’s backyard. She just wanted us to laugh and
be together. Danny led us in prayer, we told funny stories,
and Nathan played the guitar while Diana sang the “Ave
Maria.” It was 90 degrees in the Texas Hill Country and
you could barely hear the stories and music over the shrill-

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 BR AVING THE WILDERNESS

ing of the cicadas. I kept thinking, This is exactly what it

means to be human.
This humanity transcends all of those differences that
keep up us apart. In Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant’s
beautiful 2017 book about grief and courage, Option B,
Sandberg tells a wrenching and wholehearted story about
collective pain. Her husband, Dave, died suddenly while
they were on vacation. Their children were in second and
fourth grade. She writes, “When we arrived at the ceme-
tery, my children got out of the car and fell to the ground,
unable to take another step. I lay on the grass, holding them
as they wailed. Their cousins came and lay down with us,
all piled up in a big sobbing heap with adult arms trying in
vain to protect them from their sorrow.”
Sandberg told her children, “This is the second worst
moment of our lives. We lived through the first and we will
live through this. It can only get better from here.” She
then started singing a song she knew from childhood,
“Oseh Shalom,” a prayer for peace. She writes, “I don’t re-
member deciding to sing or how I picked this song. I later
learned that it is the last line of the Kaddish, the Jewish
prayer for mourning, which may explain why it poured out
of me. Soon all the adults joined in, the children followed,
and the wailing stopped.”
An experience of collective pain does not deliver us
from grief or sadness; it is a ministry of presence. These
moments remind us that we are not alone in our darkness
and that our broken heart is connected to every heart that
has known pain since the beginning of time.

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