KINGSVIEW

The Cloud of Witnesses Locks In

Michael A. King

When we’re young we do younger person things and when older we do older person things. My early writings pondered young marriage, babies, children growing. More recently I’ve written my way through the decline and then death of both my parents. There is more to life than aging and death, and the day will come again to celebrate that. Yet for now I find the death of one more major mentor producing this column’s focus on being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, as Hebrews 12:1 so memorably puts it.

Last spring’s death was of key mentor Paul M. Schrock. Paul taught me publishing. In the 1990s with heavy heart he downsized me from a financially distressed Herald Press. But he wrapped my termination in the ongoing support that contributed to my being able to own my own publishing company after leaving Herald Press. Then his support contributed to my becoming a seminary dean. But  April 2011, after a fall in a library, working among the books he loved, he was gone.

As I mourned his departure amid gratitude for ways he had blessed me, his moving on intertwined with my parents’ departure. And it dawned on me that without intending to, I was visualizing Paul along with my parents and other departed loved ones in a kind of cloud, a cloud of those who had by faith "run with perseverance the race marked out" for them (Heb. 12:1), a cloud of those who
were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. . . . .longing for a better country—a heavenly one. (Heb. 11:13-16 NIV)

We each, I’d guess, experience having a famous idea, long known, lock in so personally it seems that only now do we get it. Last week was my time to feel "cloud of witnesses" locking in. I don’t mean that I perfectly grasp Hebrews, whose writer might find my appropriation unrecognizable, but simply that the image has now become for me particularly powerful.

We do, if we feel the longing for that better country, seek to run our race toward it. As Hebrews puts it, we welcome the things promised from a distance, never fully experiencing them here. So there is always sorrow in the race, the sorrow of a destination not fully reached, a yearning not wholly fulfilled. I suspect in addition to the grief of losing physical contact with those we love, our sorrow at funerals comes from awareness that neither the one we memorialize nor we ourselves when our time comes get as far as they and we would wish. Along with the here-were-the-wonderful-achievements parts there are always the didn’t-get-there parts wistfully to ache for.

But precisely in regret over the country not reached emerges the power of the cloud of witnesses image. Because the witnesses, though within Mystery we can’t fully know, are now nearer that country. They become the cloud of those who know how impossible it is to get all the way to God’s country in this life yet whose vision of it far off shaped their lives on the way toward it. Then beyond their earthly race they’ve become our cheerleaders, these who have been there but have now handed us the baton with which to race on as faithfully and far as we can amid our own longings we also will not entirely satisfy.

I suspect that a gift of many memorial services is the power to peel back the veil between those who have raced beyond death and those still racing here. At memorial services the barriers between those living and those dead, those past and those present, we ourselves as living beings versus the dead ones we will someday at our own funerals be, fade away. For precious minutes we live in God’s time, in God’s way of experiencing, as those by the finish line and those still racing toward it intertwine.

The living can feel the dead and the dead, I suspect, can touch the living. Tears and joy mingle, tears because so much grief will pour in when the holy moments of the service pass yet joy as we experience a foretaste of existence beyond division into here versus departed.

The cloud of witnesses is a way of celebrating that we’re all in this together, we who have run the race and we who run on, as cheerleaders and runners seek to mingle in that most real of families, God’s family—a family larger even than the categories of alive and dead in a country where we welcome the things long promised.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania and Harrisonburg, Virginia, is Dean, Eastern Mennonite Seminary; and publisher, Cascadia Publishing House LLC. This reflection was first published in The Mennonite (July 2011), as a "Real Families" column.