Eulogizing the Living...

eulogize (verb): to praise highly in speech or writing.  

eulogy (noun):  a speech or piece of writing that praises someone or something highly, typically someone who has just died.

A friend and I are reading a book by Richard Rohr entitled, "Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life." It's part of my Lenten discipline - and it's worth a read, if you get a chance.   I love Rohr and his analysis of the Enneagram, and while this is in the same vein, it's a different focus and depth that I'm appreciating in this season of life. It's dense and deep, and it's making me read, re-read and ponder a lot of things - among them, who I am - what God has taught me about who I am in the past three decades - and the ways that He might be inviting me to live in the next hopefully many decades.

As I've been reflecting on that, I have been reflecting (not morbidly, I promise) on eulogies - or what we say about others, after their lives have ended.  Our last great reflections on the lives that they lived, if you will.  And you know what I've decided?

Eulogies are beautiful.  They are fantastic ways of immortalizing the dead.  Capturing a snapshot of the very best that that individual longed to be.  Remembering their good.  Celebrating their lives.

However, if we only eulogize the dead, I think we miss an incredible opportunity to celebrate and honor the living.  We are (nearly always) ourselves those who crave true, honest, affirmation and praise - often covertly or overtly demanding it from others - even while we rarely notice others enough to freely give it it unrequested, non-necessitated or unrequited.

What if we were to eulogize the living, more often?  With wisdom, with truth, and with discernment, pulling our heads out of our own metaphorical asses more often to see those around us, and use our voices for their benefit while they are yet living.  To name for them their strengths, gifts, and the ways that they have positively influenced us, while they still have ears to hear.

And beyond that, what if we actually spent time considering the people that we want to be today, and wrote our own eulogies, with the intent of living into them?  Instead of our lists of goals we hope to achieve, what if we thought more about the people that we want to become?  What if they weren't (just) summaries of the lives that we have already lived - only the positives of course - but real, honest, reflections of where we long to live, in light of the broken places, but with hope.  Real-time, they are not fluffy - but reflect a solemnity of hope, grounded in reality and a desire for growth and fullness.

I spent some time earlier today, writing my own eulogy - I hope, Lord willing, to live for many decades more; you need not worry.  I wrote it merely because I wanted to be intentional about considering the woman that I am, and the woman that I want to become.  It has been a helpful exercise for me, over the years, because it then shapes how I pray, how I make decisions, how I deal with failure, and how I define "success" differently.  It's written as a prayer, in present tense, but it's shared out of the hope that it will become reality - it is not yet who I am, even as it is grounded in the reality of who I am presently - as time passes and I grow through grace:

Jesus, help me to be someone who eulogizes the living not just the dead.  Who affirms and blesses, with truth and grace, for their benefit not my own.

A woman with peace in her presence - who is so comfortable in her own skin that others feel more comfortable in their own around her.

Someone whose laughter is frequent, free and not forced - who knows how to play in her youth and old age.

Father, may words of wisdom and discernment, preceded and followed by prayer, be my gift to others.  And may your presence consume and destroy my false self, even as it reveals and refines the true self.

Help me to use my stubbornness for others, not against them - and my truth and advocacy for their benefit, not manipulation of them.  May my sins ever be before me, binding me only in as much as they bind me to you.  In light and truth, not darkness or secrecy.

Teach me to be vulnerable, needy and humble - not denying my strength - but living humanly as a whole person, not the mirage of one.  Forgive me daily.  And change me over time through these daily acts of release and freedom. 

As my body becomes older, frailer, and fails me more and more, would you set me increasingly freer, making me even more spunky and even more alive even as my outward strength decreases.

May adventure and I not be strangers - now or in the future - and even as fear and I know each other well, may our acquaintance and influence diminish, under the weight of stories and adventures taken in the glory of obedience and letting go of the familiar and the safe.

May my life, Jesus, be filled with holy yeses, obedient no's and deep-time perspective which comes from a life-style of reflection, prayer, introspection, and the aid of wise and true companions.

Amen.