It’s been a quiet week here in Pittsburgh, my adopted hometown. Pirates are in first place and some lovely weather – enough heat and humidity to remind us that it’s summer, but rain and cool breezes at night to let us sleep comfortably with the windows open. Several weeks ago I received in the mail an invitation to my 35th High School class reunion – I’ll pause to let you do the math. Paola High School of Paola, Kansas – Class of 1978. The school mascot was the Paola Panthers. The school theme song started like this: Hey look us over, sound out a cheer; we are the panthers, aren’t you glad we’re here? Put on black and gold folks, get in the groove, and cheer us on to victory ‘cause, hey, we’re on the move… There was more to the song, but by this point the cheerleaders’ pompoms and jiggling gyrations had rendered every drooling teenage boy slack-jawed and incapable of singing any further.
Due to schedule conflicts, I wasn’t able to attend the reunion, but I did think about my classmates from Paola. This was never a group to be overly concerned about etiquette and social convention. The reunion invitations were Xeroxed on plain paper and mailed in what looked to be recycled, credit card bill envelopes. At our 20th class reunion, no one had remembered to get name tags, so the hosts simply wrote our names on pieces of duct tape. There were about 110 in our graduating class – a large enough group that, even when were in school together, you didn’t really know a good chunk of your classmates. Now, 35 years later with early senility setting in, what were the odds of remembering anybody’s name – especially if they forget the name tags again?
The problem with class reunions is that you haven’t seen most of the people in years and so your only points of reference for many of them are things that happened back in the late 70s. Is it polite to go up to someone in their 50s and say, “Oh, yeah, I remember you. You were the kid who ripped out the seat of your pants in gym class.” Isn’t there a statue of limitations for some of these memories? And at what point are we obligated to stop calling someone by their school nickname? No one ever gets a flattering nickname; isn’t it always the slowest runner that’s nicknamed “Flash”? At Paola High School there was “Lumpy” Duncan – a big-hearted, offensive guard, lumpy-kind of kid who started shaving in 7th grade and who was best remembered for accidentally crashing his Dodge Rambler into the side of a giant red Coke truck on his way to school, claiming that the sun got in his eyes. Ironically “Lumpy” is now a driver’s ed teacher. There was also “Bulldog” Bob Brown, so named not because of his tenacious spirit but because he had a terrible underbite.
Reunions, by definition and design, are places where old nicknames and old stories are re-visited over and over again. No matter how many years have gone by or how much you’ve accomplished in your life, everyone remembers the day you turned the wrong way in the marching band half-time show or when you started that food fight in the cafeteria. Calvin Rosey was a classmate of mine – a farm kid and a good trombone player. Even though he’s a successful adult now, everyone remembers how he was out in a hayfield as a kid when a Kansas thunderstorm came up suddenly – and a bolt of lightning hit so close to Calvin that he was zapped and ended up losing the little toes on both his feet. Now, to 7th grade boys, there is nothing cooler than being the kid who now only has eight toes because he survived a lightning strike. But is that something you necessarily want to re-live at your 35th high school reunion?
Class reunions can be hard, especially if you’ve moved away from your home town. They force us to ask who we are now. Are we still the track star, the cheerleader, math whiz, the kid who could fix any car? Are we still the awkward teenager, the one not asked to prom, the kid with bad acne, the druggie, slouch or nerd? Reunions set before you the hard questions: Who are you and what have you done with your life? Back in the 60s and 70s, we knew about the Beatles and Rolling Stones, polyester leisure suits, bell bottom pants, and baby-blue tuxedos for prom. We knew about Vietnam and Watergate, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. And after graduation day, we had dreams of college and marriage, kids and careers. But looking back over the years, reunions force you to realize all the things you’ve learned about that you wish you’d never ever heard of: addictions and divorce, prostate cancer, miscarriages and mastectomies, Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary School. Our cars are safer to drive now and medical care has greatly advanced, but we’re not necessarily happier and healthier; and despite the Internet and all the social media available at our fingertips, we often feel lonelier and more disconnected than ever. More Americans die today of suicide than in car accidents. And when we look for answers, we don’t look for them in church the way we used to when we were young and living at home.
If you think it is hard to go back to your old high school after 30 or more years, think about going back to church when your religious education stopped in 4th grade Sunday School – when you haven’t thought seriously about God and Jesus since the days of flannelgraphs and film strips; hearing stories about David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den, and Jesus feeding the multitudes from a few fishes and loaves. We open up the bible now and hear Jesus say things like “Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but I have nowhere to lay my head” or “Let the dead bury the dead, but as for you, proclaim the kingdom of God” and we shake our heads wondering what all that means. Real faith takes work, study, grappling and wrestling with hard things like Jacob wrestled with that angel long ago. In that way, it is just like life itself – which also takes hard work, persistence, grappling and wrestling with tough things.
We need to ask ourselves: Are we the same people we were in high school? And is our faith the same now as it was 30, 40, or 50 years ago? Reunions force us to ask who we are and what have we done with the years God has granted us here on this earth. Sadly some members of my class of 1978 weren’t gifted with as many years of life as their classmates. And those who remain have assuredly passed the halfway point of their lives – a point marked by when they starting thinking more about the past than about the future, less focused on writing résumés than about writing their memoirs. Reunions force those who gather together to answer the poet Mary Oliver’s lingering question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” At their best, reunions let you sit down next to someone and start over – to simply let them tell you about the person they’ve become, without pretense or the baggage of the past. Kelly, the cheerleader, is now a nurse midwife. Todd, the mortician’s son, happily works in a camera shop. Bill, best remembered for being able to flip up butter patties so they would stick to the cafeteria ceiling, has spent a career as an air-traffic controller. Toby, who doubly struggled with smoking pot and being the principal’s son, is a gifted artist and glass-blower. Some classmates never left our home town, which is fine. We rarely give the respect we ought to those who lead “ordinary” lives, who don’t follow a great path of ambition, but who stay and put down roots in a community. They are the ones who keep our memories safe; they are the ones who deliver the mail and fix the plumbing and teach the next generation of students the Paola High fight song.
It’s at a class reunion that you can sit down next to Calvin Rosey, who memorably lost his little toes back in junior high, and hear about how he is married and has several kids of his own plus some he adopted; and how this former trombone player in the marching band has spent much of his adult life running a small music store – one of those establishments that rents out instruments to school kids – instruments that constantly have to have their valves fixed because they were broken by unthinking boys, or need to have their clarinet pads replaced because they were popped out by inattentive girls; renting out dented French horns and scratched trumpets destined to be further mangled and mishandled but miraculously used to play Sousa marches on brightly-lit auditorium stages year after year after year. Calvin touched scores of lives, but you’d only learn this if you do the hard work of starting fresh with him, asking without pretense or guile “What have you been doing since we last met?” It takes work and intentionality to go back to a reunion and have a good time.
The same is true about going to church after being away for a while. To carry your childhood faith back inside church walls and be willing to open yourself up to God, who sits down right next to you on the pew and asks, “What have you done with your one wild and precious life?” And in that conversation with God, there’s no need to try to pretend you’re something you’re not. God’s seen you naked as a baby and naked in the shower last night. God’s known you as a kid with acne, as an awkward high schooler in an ill-fitting graduation robe and mortarboard, and as an adult driving through town or riding the bus. God already knows all the choices you’ve made, but God still wants to hear you talk about them – how you make sense of your life, how you’ve learned so much about so many things you wish you’d never heard of.
If you’ve willing to do the hard work, to be vulnerable before God, God promises to help you make sense of your story. To sit beside you as you read about Jesus rebuking his disciples when they were mad at the Samaritans and wanted to call down fire from heaven to destroy them – and God quietly asks, “Why is it you and other people are so anxious to call down fire from heaven on those you fear, those you distrust, those whose stories you simply don’t know?” God sits beside us as we re-tell our old stories and invariably fall back into memories of how we’ve been hurt and treated unfairly by others, and then God quietly says, “Let the dead stories rest in peace now. Don’t look back. Where are you now in your journey of faith? Walk forward with me toward my kingdom and my peace.”
Faith takes work. It takes guts to believe that God’s unconditional love is for us, not because we’ve earned it through our résumés and physiques and bank accounts, but because that’s the way God is – loving us despite our flaws and failings and messed-up life stories. Faith takes work, because it reminds us that in this life, every day is a class reunion. Because everyone you meet is ultimately a classmate. All of us have been teacher’s pets and the ostracized kid no one sits with in the cafeteria; all of us have been bullied; all of us have been loved. It takes work to remember that you belong to God and you’re forgiven by Christ. But it is work worth doing. Hey look us over, sound out a cheer. We are the panthers, aren’t you glad we’re here?
And that’s the news from Pittsburgh, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the Presbyterians are above average.
AMEN