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Good afternoon. My name is Dave Jensen. I serve as academic dean here at Austin Seminary, and it's my honor to introduce our Curry lecturer for the second time. It's always harder to introduce someone the second time.

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Essayist and poet Thomas Lynch has written widely for publications as varied as the New York Times, Newsweek, and the London Times. He's published five collections of poems, four books of essays, and a book, The Good Funeral, co-authored with homiletics professor and previous Curry lecturer Thomas G. Long. His work as a funeral director has been the subject of two well-acclaimed film documentaries.

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The Poetry Foundation describes his work in this way. By using his own daily routine as poetic fodder, Lynch has transformed the mundane task of preparing the dead into a life-affirming event. His lyrical elegiac poems describe the dead citizens of Milford, Michigan, his own family relationships, and scenes and myths from his Irish Catholic upbringing.

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Sometimes described as a cross between Garrison Keillor and W.B. Yeats, Lynch's work dissects the vicissitudes of the human experience with grace and wit. In his own words, Lynch attempts to dispel myths about the profession of a funeral director. Quote, I am no more attracted to the dead than the dentist is to your bad gums,

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the doctor to your rotten innards, or the accountant to your sloppy expense records. Clearly, there is much here for theological reflection. If Christian faith at its core is about how the ordinary becomes extraordinary, body, bath, table, and the gathered people, then Lynch's writing invites us to consider this incarnational faith all over again.

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And he does this by telling stories and crafting images. Mr. Lynch, welcome to Austin Seminary. We are eager to consider the stories and images you bring to us today.

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Thank you. So you are the hearty, heartiest bunch, right? Because anybody in their right mind would be golfing or napping at this time of the day. And I have to say, I'm very flattered and a little worried for you that you're still here.

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And I should say, I never know who should be the most offended, Garrison Keeler or W.B. Yates. I'd like to find the fellow who made that one up. But anyway, my wife says I'm a dead ringer for Brad Pitt, and I'm going with her on this one.

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It's the only vote that counts. But this is the time of day where if I wasn't in the indenture of Austin-- come on in, ma'am, you're all right-- Presbyterian Seminary, I'd be sitting in the wingback chair in my house while my wife is making a list of Law and Order reruns, and I'd be nodding off. And if you begin to nod off, it's okay with me.

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I'll just say you're agreeing with me. Then if your eyes close and you breathe deeply, I'll just say a swoon of agreement with the obvious genius. But a cautionary tale, if you make a noise, as she says I sometimes do when I'm in full throttled sleep, we'll have you removed, which in my line of work is sort of a permanent thing, so. I'm also told that the timing is different than I had in my brain box when I set out to write some of these things down.

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So I think what I'll try to do is abridge my comments in hopes that we might fill it out with some... Maybe you have some questions. I'm tired of the sound of my voice now. It's going to get worse as the afternoon

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carries on. So it would be nice if maybe the conversation went in the direction of your curiosities rather than my blather, which is an endless supply that I come by naturally. So I say this because either you'll have when I stop, and I'll tell you when the time is coming, I'll warn you about this. Like Dante, I just have two more poems.

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then it's the international sign for question and go to the microphone ask away if I don't know the answer perhaps I know a book where I could send you to in search of the answer. If I have neither an answer nor a reference, I'll just make some shit up because that's what we do. We're given a license for that, all right?

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So my wife and I were having one of those animated conversations and she came to a point of exasperation. She said, Tom, You've gotten to an age where you just make crap up. And I thought, well, I'll start writing fiction now.

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I did. I started writing fiction almost immediately. And I will. So I think I'll hold forth for maybe 25, 30 minutes, and then I'll ask if there's any questions.

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And if you don't have any questions, I will launch into the two and a half hour poetry reading, just waiting for a church-bound group of Presbyterian Methodists. to unleash upon. This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy really.

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Nothing is simple anymore. Cities have sprouted up along the rivers, teeming with people at cross purposes, a million schemes, a million wild looks, disappointment on shoulders, a knapsack. Here he pitches his ragged tent. This is the sticky part where the plot congeals, where the action suddenly reverses or swerves off in an outrageous direction.

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Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph to why Miriam does not want Edward's child. Someone hides a letter under a pillow. Here the aria rises to a pitch a song of betrayal salted with revenge.

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And the climbing party is stuck halfway up the mountain. This is the bridge, the painful modulation. This is the thick of things. So much is crowded into the middle, the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados, Russian uniforms, noisy parties, lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall, too much to name.

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too much to think about. So Billy Collins gets the middle right, that long stretch we're all hoping for year after year after year past our schooling and sun-lit youths, the darkening sense of death's pendency begins to instruct us years before it really comes into view. We keep saying, Oh, we're in middle age. The middle

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is where we begin to live as if we will die someday. It's growing up, coming to terms with this quiet little truth. We die. And the numbers are really convincing on this, hovering as they do around a hundred percent.

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And then what? If every cradle asks us whence, then every coffin wither. Where did we come from?

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Where do we go? Where is the middle? When will it end? I had this theory as a young man based on the observation I got from making a lot of funeral arrangements that you could figure out the end of yourself by knowing the middle when it came.

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I had observed that the young people always look to the future while old people, as they age, look more towards the past. And that if you wanted to sort of figure out the middle, all you had to know is when you had found that place where you were equally balanced between your visions of the future and the past. You were neither yanked too far one way or too far the other. It's a kind of Groundhog Day when you neither see your shadow

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nor its absence. You're simply living in the moment, the present tense, endlessly possible, not bothered by what you've done or failed to do or what you might do if enough drink has been taken. I know it happened to me when I was 41. It was the end of October, All Hallows' Eve, and we had buried my mother that morning in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery.

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All of us standing around the abyss, the open ground into which we would have to let her down and leave her there, dead of cancer at 65, and then home to the desolation to pass out candy to the trick-or-treaters, those ghosts and goblins, pirates and princesses that run up and down the street among the scattering, skittering leaves playing out themes of horror and fantasy, and maybe This is middle age, when we learn to balance ourselves between what we fear and what we fantasize, our fasts and festivals, our hungers, our highs and lows, our love and grief. And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge halfway up the mountain. This is the bridge, the painful modulation.

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This is the thick of things. So much is crowded into the middle. I remember falling into bed that night beside the blessed body of my paramour, who made a gift of such comforts as humans do when they offer themselves to one another. And then I sat up looking out the window, considering the mysteries of the day, my mother's burial,

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my true love's gifts, as if on the edge of twin abysses of death and desire, beauty and bereavement, love and grief, and suddenly it seemed I had middle-aged that painful modulation. I had crossed a bridge. No longer on my way to becoming, I simply was who I am, making my way. if my measurements were true, according to my theory, to 82.

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That was 26 years ago. So much is crowded into the middle. Most daunting among the sentences in President Warlow's letter last spring was the one that said, All of the various lectures will be delivered from the pulpit of Sheldon Chapel. That one sent a shiver through me.

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It's a shiver, I'll hazard, some of you have felt as you rise to the occasions of your calling, to wit, the call to preach, to hold forth, to say how it seems after everything, in front of all these people, all these willing ears and eager faces and teachable wits. And unlike you, I don't do this as a grand commission. I've just tried to teach myself to say yes as an act of faith upon which I can cast myself as if on language, as if on the goodwill of whomever's in charge here, that if I simply am willing, no harm will come to me and possibly some good will come of it as we are promised instead. So yes is the answer I'm inclined to give, especially

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when I am asked by my betters, as it goes without saying, and I almost always am. Very rarely do poets get asked, get tasked, get paid to stand and deliver. I've never had someone call me and say, I need that sonnet by Tuesday, Tom. I've been pestered for essays and stories and newspaper columns on this or that.

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But I've never been asked for a villanelle, or a sestina, or a couple of quatrains that rhyme nicely or don't. I was in Lafayette, Louisiana years ago. I was sharing this with Jeff and Rebecca earlier. I was in the indenture of the National Book Foundation who sent me down there to talk to high school students about how to get into this malarkey business of writing.

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And there was this young woman from the foundation whose job it was to get me from place to place, and with the afternoon off, she took me to Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, where they were in full sway with the Crawfish Festival. If you've not been to it... Well, anyway, I was there in the Crawfish Festival, and... It changed my life.

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There were people listening to Cajun music, which is to say Acadian music, someone was kind enough to say to me and gave me a brief history of the desolate country up north they came from, where maybe Ted Cruz has some, I don't know. They were guzzling the local beer and chomping on crawfish, all in excess, and they had a queen proclaim for her beauty, which was self-evident. I scoured their faces as any Christian Papist or Calvinist would, and looking for sinfulness or its attendant guilts and finding none, finding nothing but joyousness and being in every one of them, I began to think that their tribe might be different, but similar to my own, where I've sometimes felt like I just stumbled into abundant grace. and the ever-present, low-hanging grace of simply being.

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And it took my breath away. I got roomy-eyed and began to weep. I suppose I was talking to myself, but no one said anything. Some of them were talking to themselves, too.

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And I can tell you, 20 years since nothing has diminished, that it was meant to change me. It was meant to make me alive to the possibility, the possibility that I felt yesterday when I stumbled into your, what I'd call, recital, Eric, when you were making music out of that box keys that made a soaring noise in this upturned boat and I thought there is grace here who's ever in charge I didn't even see you tucked as you were behind the instrument and then to find out the last night was sort of your debut for this church I thought well fair play to him because it felt like grace again abundant undeserved Some of you know that book by the Cuban master, now dead, Oscar Huelos, Mr.

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Ives's Christmas, and especially the description of the beatific vision this ad man senses near Christmas Eve on the corner, I think, of 51st and Madison Avenue. I'm pretty sure that's it. Let me just read you the paragraph that I know. He has come down, the elevator was stuck and he was trying to make a pass at one of his co-workers and failing that, the doors opened and he went and bought a Snickers bar then walked out into the daily traffic of an afternoon in New York around Christmas time.

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Then something else unusual happened. Walking down the street towards the impossibly crowded avenue, and standing shoulder to shoulder amid a throng of shoppers on the corner. Ives was waiting for the light to change when he blinked his eye, and in a moment of pure clarity that he would always remember, began to feel euphoric.

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All the world's goodness, as it were, spinning around him. In one slip of a second, anything seemed possible. had the moon risen and started to sing had pyramids appeared over the Chrysler Building weeping Ives would have been no more surprised this is the low-hanging ever-present Grace of being being alive in a world in which we die the sense that all of us get sometimes that whatever the clock holds for us whatever future We can behold such things as this and feel more and more alive even though we're working into our mortalities.

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These visions serve as countervailing weights to the everyday visions of mayhem and murder, atrocity, and random meaningless suffering that punctuate our daily lives and news and entertainments. The night I was at the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival, I got a call from the New York Times. This was May of 1998, I think, and a woman on the other end, and I felt really important. This was my first call from the New York Times for something besides an obituary.

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I'm Mr. Lynch, she said, Did you ever think about the identity of the unknown soldier? I know I said I haven't lately. Possibly you know the DNA science has increased in such a way that we can actually determine who the body, who the body belongs to that's buried in the unknown soldier of the Vietnam War.

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It's either and she gave a name or and she gave another. And the question on the day, Mr. Lynch, and we thought you might be one to answer it is, should they find out or let it go?

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Well, I said, I'd be happy to think about that and get back to you. She said, Well, do think about it. And by this time tomorrow, get back to us with 750 words. I'm an artist, an internationally unheard of poet, an essayist ignored on six continents.

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I can't be told what to do and when. It takes me time to work into a lather of creativity. I thought to myself and did not say it. What?

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I questioned her. What are you going to do for me? Figuring we could at least settle the Dosch question before I spent too much time. She said, I'll give you a million and a half readers.

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This is like narcotics to writers, you know. It's like folks in the pew for the likes of ye. People who will listen to what you have to say for no apparent reason and shake your hand on the way out of church saying, That was nice. One of the gifts that a half a century I've spent directing funerals is that I think I've spent something like, I've heard maybe

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25,000 funeral sermons. And no one brings their bee game to the funeral. It's like the potluck at the Methodist Church. It's the best dish or nothing at all.

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And pastors bring their best game to the funeral because here the nose of our faith is pressed up against the windows of our theodicy. So it's your best game I've gotten to here, sitting in the other room where you're piped in, and sometimes I've winced, sometimes I've grinned, sometimes I've felt entirely uplifted and improved and grateful for your heroics to stand between the living and the dead as you do with nothing but your faith. No fix, no bottom line, no Bible verse, just you and your faith and your willingness to be there and say to them something on the order of, Behold, I show you a mystery. I've seen your kind stricken by the mothers and fathers of children who died.

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because the answer you gave them didn't suit, or didn't suit the moment, or the day, or the disaster that happened. So it takes courage. You are my heroes. Whenever I write about the kind of courage it takes to show up in the middle of the night at the deathbed, or the intensive care, or the funeral home, I think of folks like you

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who don't know the deep end of the pool you're playing in, but you're willing to go wading into it without the floaties. I don't know how you'd do it. And sometimes I know you've felt like you nearly drowned. I know you've gone to bed thinking to yourselves, Did I really say that?

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Because all of us do. What shall we say? What shall we say to these things? A friend of mine, a musician, Evan Chambers, a composer from the University of Michigan, once spent a spring afternoon in the old burial ground in Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire.

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His wife and his daughter had found an antiques mall where they were going to spend the afternoon. Evan went wandering around in these 18th century through these 18th century graves marked by limestone that had been badly etched and now had lost a lot of its legibility. In many cases he had to prostrate himself on the grave so that he could get close enough on his elbows to actually read what was going on and finding the characters humming alive in his ears, humming as the dead

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invariably do about their lives and times even 200 years gone by, Evan was suddenly populated by a community of the gone, but momentarily not forgotten, who had been etched into these stones and buried in this ground in Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire. He ended up in a kind of creative frenzy which meant that only sharing his experience and the voices he heard and the music he heard on the ground there with the wider world would give him any relief. He came away and maybe you know this creative frenzy.

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He came away from the graveyard with the community calling out their stories to him and he knew he could not get it done alone. He would need an orchestra, songsters, choristers, poets, an audience of ears. Evan happily knew where he could find all of them.

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He gave the poets, myself among them, their choice of the characters they wanted to write about. I chose Isaac A. Spofford because I didn't return Evan's letter and he sent it to me, and so by default I got Isaac A.

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Spofford, about whom I was told only the things that were written on his stone. Let me read them to you. Here is entered the remains of Isaac A. Spofford, son of Deacon Eleazar and Mrs.

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Mary Spofford, a brand plucked from the ashes of Reverend Labin Ainsworthshouth, 13 February 1788, age 8. A dead boy from another century, another winter, another town. Now, the exegetes among you will be rummaging your brain boxes for something in that headstone citation that echoes in your memory. That brand plucked from the ashes re-rings a bell that first sounded in maybe your reading of the book of Zechariah in chapter 3, which records the cleansing

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of the high priest Joshua, a harbinger of Jesus, his namesake, the Savior, the high priest of a Newer Testament, how he was purified by Jesus. by God's grace in flames from any taint of sin or corruption because we can infer God clothes his priests and presbyters, his ministers and teachers in spotless white linens of innocence. Here is Zechariah chapter 3 verse 2. The Lord said to Satan, 'The Lord rebuke you, Satan, the Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you.

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Is this not a brand plucked from the fire? Possibly the Wesleyans among you will hear deep in your Methodist memories again the story of little Johnny Wesley, whose father, like Robert Ingersolls, was a churchman hounded by his co-religionists in Epworth, a little northwest of Doncaster in North Lincolnshire in the UK, where it is rumored they set his house ablaze when Johnny Wesley was five and a half years old. It's late on the 9th of February, 1709.

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Samuel Wesley is the rector of the Epworth parish and lives with his wife, Susanna, and their seven daughters and three sons in the rectory, which is suddenly ablaze. All but John Wesley make it out of the house and into the garden where the boy appears in a second-story nursery window. You remember this, don't you? His father commends the boy to the Lord, seeing the hopeless predicament he's in, but it is a pair of local men who form a kind of human ladder and rescue the boy from the fire.

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And it is the boy's mother, Susanna, to whom we attribute the thanks, holding her boy in her embrace, a brand plucked from the fire, she says. Surely they all believe he was saved for a higher purpose. Thus do we discern the will of God and the mercy and goodness of happenstance, whereas Isaac A.

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Spofford's stone assigns his death, his body plucked from the ashes of a house that burned to the ground from the pastor's house he was staying with. They assign it to God's will. That's the 18th century version of theodicy. You can read it in a pair of rhyming quatrains, which follows the little note I read to you first.

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Here's what it says about Isaac A. Spofford and those who want to visit his grave. O say grim death, why thus destroy The parents' hope, their fondest joy Cease man to ask the hidden cause.

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God's will is done. Revere his laws. These sentiments come from the pen of Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire's local parson, the Reverend Lavin Ainsworth, whose house burned to the ground in which the boy perished. Lavin Ainsworth, it turns out, according to the University of Google, to have been notable as the longest continuous ministry in American history.

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From his calling to Jaffrey in 1782, after serving briefly as the chaplain in the Revolutionary Army and preaching at his own graduation from Dartmouth College, to which some Jaffrey folks attended and hearing his homiletic powers offered him a job. until his death at age 100 on St. Patrick's Day in 1858. 76 years of ministry to the one crowd, generation after generation.

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Let me read you a brief summation of the man's life. Oh, I won't. Let me just say he did everything in town. He was the real estate agent.

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He married and buried and baptized. and rented and sold and trafficked in everything that Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire needed. He was a full-time, full-frontal Christian minister and he is remembered for the fact that he had a profound sense of the dignity of his office was ceremonious to a degree unapproached in these latter days. Here is the poem I got to write and

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As it turned out, got to perform, I was thinking when Cheryl talked about her debut in Carnegie Hall, the only time I've been in Carnegie Hall was to read this poem with the orchestra of the University of Michigan under the direction of Evan Chambers, the one and only author of the song cycle and orchestral suite, The Old Burial Grounds. Here's my part of it, O Say Grim Death. No doubt the Reverend Ainsworth read from Job over the charred corpse of the deacon's boy to wit, Blessed be the name of the Lord, or some such comfortless dose of holy writ that winter morning after the house fire put all of the first Congregationalists of Jaffrey sent New Hampshire out weeping and gnashing out in the snow while the man sat Main Street and Gilmore Pond Road blazed into the early Thursday morning.

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God's will is done as often without warning as with one. Either way, revere his laws is cut into the child's monument to rhyme with a previous sentiment, cease man to ask the hidden cause. as if the answers ever were forthcoming. So little is known about Isaac A.

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Spofford, his father Eleazar, his mother Mary, his death on the 13th of February in 1788. A brand plucked from the ashes reads the stone of Reverend Lavin Ainsworth's house which frames the sadness in the pastor's burning faith in God's vast purposes. As if the boy long buried here was killed to show how God makes all things work together towards some good. And yet the stone's inquiry still haunts.

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Oh, say grim death, why thus destroy the parents' hope their fondest joy. Or say instead, grim death destroys us all. by mighty nature's witless random laws whereby old churchmen, children, everything, all true believers, all who disbelieve come to their ashen ends and life goes on. I have found myself like most of you have found yourselves come a little confounded by the countervailing senses each of them

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keenly felt each of one studied that we are children of a loving God and we are at the same time entirely alone I cannot believe as Ainsworth did that Isaac Spofford's death was God's will nor I nor do I believe in the doctrine of original sin not since my children were born less so since my grandchildren came into being. Their innocence, like grace, is manifest and evident. Some days, I behold, they need a change of diapers.

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Some days, total immersion is the thing. But baptism is more a naming and claiming than laving and purification, just as the common meal of our communion is more the table and the talk than the body and blood. I behold, in my own life, the grace of God, as well as the sense that we are alone. And death gives us, against all odds, our first glimpse at what is or isn't next.

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So I'm more moved to goodness by Ingersoll, who said, I deny nothing, I believe nothing, I know nothing. I wait and hope. I think his confession suits me. I wait and hope.

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I'm a member of one of those programs whereby the only article of faith is, If there's a God, I'm not it. That confession seems to suit as well. But if, as John says, God is love, then I've seen God in places I never thought I'd see. I've seen him in the courthouse in Michigan a couple years ago where my sister and her partner and their three adopted boys stood in line waiting for a license to marry.

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I watched, I knew it was love when I saw it. Even though I am told to believe that they are disordered in some way, queer in others, odd in some, if not quite sinful, not quite perfect way, I don't believe it. I reject it all. The man I owe most to in this Reformation is a man who's a friend to all of you, Thomas Long.

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So after he had become my mentor and counselor and colleague and co-conspirator, when they asked me to write a poem for his retirement, a thing that he hasn't really done, but he simply moved on to a different type of grace, I said I'd be happy to do it. I stole, as poets often do, the title from him, from the marvelous book that came out of his time with you in 2009, a little study of theodicy called What Shall We Say? What shall we say to these things?

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What shall we say to the mother of the boy in Milford last night who went fishing with his father on the ice in a little lake, and both of them drowned? A four-year-old and a 40-year-old. What will my son Michael say to them?

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I started in the dictionary as I often do, and I found out that the word for pulpit comes from the word for scaffold. You know, like for hangings. How does that make you feel?

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I wrote this in the form of a triptych because I was studying that Aristotle poem at the time and thought it's time to finish. So maybe there'll be time for one question, maybe two, or else I'll bring some more poems for for you, but let me finish with this one. What do you say?

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What shall we say? For Tom Long, teacher, preacher, presbyter. The etymology is perilous. Pulpit from pulpitum, meaning scaffold, by which we come at lake to catafalque those

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F's and A's like tongue and grooved boards like rope enough to hang or hoist or let a corpse down to its permanent repose. One platform's raised, one frames a coffin's rest. So, first the elocution, then the wake, like Lamentations or the book of Job, that vexing, god-awful, comfortless book. And yet we rise to the occasion,

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Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, a bit of scripture, a psalm, a poem, something that happened in the week just passed. We try to weave them all together as if to say a loving God's in charge, as if we were certain of a loving God. We see by faith. We live in hope.

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We love or play the odds as Paschal did. We fall Sometimes it all seems quite impossible, and yet we rise and walk the plank and sing into oblivion good news, unto God the glory, all praise, all thanks, while nodding congregants loll in their pews. Imagine Tom out on that fire escape between the world at large and inner life, edging the proscenium downstage right while

00:41:12.380 - 00:41:37.980

Curios and characters and shades unveil themselves as dancing beauties do. I have tricks in my pocket, things up my sleeve. Upstage, sheer curtains rise, transparencies, truth in the pleasant guise of illusion, like... John on Patmos, John the harbinger, voices crying out of the wilderness.

00:41:37.980 - 00:42:27.660

Make straight ye the way of the Lord, said Isaiah, eschatology and apocalypse. Think Esmeralda in the cathedral, Jim Hawkins in the riggings chased by hands, or Ishmael just flotsam at the end alone before God and all these people or Montaigne in his tower library the whole of man's estate in every man or Yeats pacing the boards at Badalee how can we know the dancer from the dance thus exegetes and preachers on their own hold forth against a never ceasing din of second-guessing out there on their limbs have faith Behold the mystery.

00:42:28.540 - 00:43:08.700

Behold. That fresco of the Sermon on the Mount by Fra Angelico, dear brother John, shows Jesus, semi-circled by his men, guilt-haloed Galileans, but for one who will betray him later with a kiss, atop there sandstone tuppets wrapped, engaged. He's going on about beatitudes, fulfillments of the law, the words to pray. Outside the frame, unseen, a multitude leans in to listen to the hermeneutics, which are not without some challenges.

00:43:08.860 - 00:43:39.980

To wit, though we be smitten, turn the other cheek, go the second mile, love our enemies. While we're forgiven only so much as we forgive those who trespass against us, a certain eye for eye in us in that scheme, a tooth for toothedness, a quid pro quo as if to finally get, we must let go. Sometimes it's so... sometimes it isn't.

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So, what shall we say to these things? Who's to know? Say, Who abides in love, abides in God, say.

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God is love. Love God. Love one another. Say, Grace is undeserved.

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Plentiful. Say, If we're saved, it's from ourselves.