THE AUTHORITY TO ABSOLVE [W, 7-28-21]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Quite a few years ago, I had the funeral of a ten-year-old boy, an only child, who was struck by an automobile and killed. His family was very loosely connected to the church I pastored, meaning his grandparents were members but never came. I barely knew them. His mother, though, had grown up in our town, been confirmed in our church. I had never met her. She and her husband and son lived in a city fifty miles away. Since she and her husband did not go to church anywhere, I was the closest thing to a pastor those folks had.

When I heard about the boy’s death, I went to visit the grandparents. The boy’s mother and father were there. The mother was understandably distraught. She had seen her son killed. She was waiting in her car, to pick him up after school. When he saw her, he dashed out into the street and was hit by another parent who was driving perfectly legally and safely but just couldn’t avoid the boy because he had appeared so suddenly.

That mother had never met me, but she latched onto me immediately. Her whole demeanor changed when I announced who I was. To her, when I walked into the house where she had grown up, I brought the presence of God with me. She did not pose any of the unanswerable questions people ask in their grief. She did not express any hostility, to God, or the driver of the car, or at her son for running into the street. She just held on to me and talked about how wonderful it was that I had come. This went on every time we were together.

But there was the undercurrent of her own guilt. She was there. She was the mother. She should have protected her child.

She never articulated that, but I could feel it in her bright-eyed, almost frenetic attachment to me. She needed absolution, and I was the only person who might have the authority to grant it. So I did.

That’s one of the neat things about being a pastor. You have some authority. But you can’t use it too quickly. Absolution doesn’t work just with an upraised hand and some pretty words.

The absolution I was able to pronounce upon that suffering mother, without ever actually pronouncing it, came over a long time. I knew she had accepted it when she stopped telling me how wonderful I was, what a magnificent job I had done with her son’s funeral, how lucky my congregation was to have me, when she stopped clutching my arm when we talked.

One day she gave me none of the usual plaudits or grasps. She just smiled and said hello. I raised my hand and said, “You’re welcome.” She laughed. A sadder but wiser laugh, but a real laugh. She understood.

John Robert McFarland

“Each of us wears a shadow.” Mary Oliver