What kind of "Funeral" is needed?

What would it be like to lose your job? What about your home? Would it feel like a place that had been safe had suddenly become a danger? What would it be like to wonder whether the next day you'll still be there or not? What do you do with all your stuff?

Would you feel weighed down with your possessions or sad about what you'll have to get rid of? Would you be exhausted by the idea of deciding what goes? Would you be afraid because you don't know where to go or when you'll have to decide? Where do you move if you're evicted? What landlord will take you? How can you get a job with no address?

Would you blame yourself or others? Would you feel abandoned by God and try to find a way back into divine approval, or run the other way? Could you face your own heart or would you hide yourself in work, worry, fear, complaining, entertainment?

What do you do when you feel so trapped? Do you ask for help, and if so from who? What does it mean that God will take care of you?

Most of us have never faced these questions or felt these things. More and more people in the US are, though, and especially in Elkhart County where this final JRL gig is going to happen.

I don't think there's a quick or easy way through things like losing a house, a job, a marriage or a dream. JRL is a dream and a job that's ending for me. Other people are losing other dreams, jobs, and homes. My struggle has been to find courage, hope and God in the middle of all the losing. I'm hoping we strugglers will be transformed in the midst of loss.

A friend wrote this to me today: "What kind of a funeral is needed?  The sisters at the convent of Grandchamp in Switzerland speak of the day of one’s death as the day of resurrection."

Losing dreams, jobs, homes, relationships are a kind of death. Can they be a resurrection as well? If so, how? Ever hear of jazz funerals? Maybe what we're doing on March 20 at the theater is a bit like a jazz funeral...