I Was Not Sober at the Funeral

The stone is gray and the lettering is cut deep because his father chose it himself two years before he needed it, and it says nothing about him except his name and two dates and one line about his wife.

Ilan is fifty five. It was eleven years ago.

He was not falling over. He wants that on the record because he has met people who assume that, and the truth is more ordinary and, to him, worse. He was steady. He was, by any outward measure, entirely present. He shook about ninety hands, he said the right things to his aunt, he stood where he was supposed to stand and did what he was supposed to do, and the whole of it happened through a kind of glass.

He remembers the weather.

His brother spoke and Ilan does not know what he said. His father's oldest friend, a man of eighty three, told a story that made the whole room make a sound, and Ilan does not know what the story was, and he has never been able to ask because asking would explain itself.

He stopped drinking nine years ago, two years after. And in the nine years since, that day has quietly become the thing he is. Not a memory. A name. When he thinks of himself, at a certain level, that is the file.

He has not been back to the grave since the stone went up.

You know that day. It might be a funeral, a birth, a bedside, a wedding. It was the one day that was not repeatable, and you were behind glass for it, and there is no way to go back and be present.

You have iniquities carried out by somebody other than you, and you were never the one who had to carry them anywhere. Leviticus says the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited, and the bearing is done by a substitute; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live fact for a man standing at the edge of a cemetery eleven years on.

Unto a land not inhabited

Let me be honest about what can and cannot be said here.

You cannot go back and be at that funeral. Nobody can offer you that, and any comfort that works by minimizing it, by saying you were there really, or that your father would understand, is going to slide off, and it should. The day is not recoverable. That is true and it stays true through everything that follows.

What is on the table is different: whether that day is your name.

So here is the strangest and most physical picture in the Torah about how a thing gets taken away.

And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.Leviticus 16:22

Two goats. One was offered. The other, the live one, had the iniquities of the whole people laid on its head by a man with both hands, out loud, in front of everybody, and then a fit man led it away into the wilderness and let it go.

Notice what the people did not do. They did not carry it. They did not walk it out themselves, they did not go with it, and they did not follow it to make sure. It was laid on something else and something else took it, and their entire part was to stand still and watch it go.

You have your part described as standing still while something else carried it, and you were never in the procession. That is what stands written in Leviticus 16, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ancient arrangement mean something to a man who has been carrying one day for eleven years.

And unto a land not inhabited. That phrase is the whole of it. They did not take it to another town. They took it to a place with nobody in it, a place where nothing is built and nobody lives, and the reason is that a thing taken to a place where people live can be picked up again and brought back by somebody.

You have your day taken to a place with nobody in it, and you were never going to meet anybody out there carrying it back. Scripture specifies a land not inhabited on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that geography settle a man's eleven years.

And here is the thing that changes a name. The day was called the Day of Atonement, and afterward the people did not become the people who had needed a goat. They became a people who had been made clean, annually, publicly, by a means God provided, and the whole nation knew what the ceremony meant. Nobody in that camp walked around named after what was laid on that animal's head.

You are named after what was done for you and you were never named after what was carried away, and the whole ceremony existed to make that clear. The written word ends the chapter with the people clean rather than the people ashamed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that naming to a man at fifty five.

And now the plain thing, which this site says every time and means completely. Eleven years of carrying one day, and nine of them without ever saying it out loud, is a great weight, and a counselor is exactly the right person for it. So is a friend, so is the room where people say true things out loud. That is God's kindness with a face on it. And your father's oldest friend may still be alive, and men of ninety four have been known to tell a story twice.