Pure Religion 5 comments

By Bradford Winters

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. —James 1:27

Not that I had this verse from the Epistle of James in mind when my good friend, Nick, died a sudden and horrific death this summer at the age of 44 (lamented in my last post), leaving behind his wife, Laura, and their two adopted Russian children, Nina and Sasha.

But it took me all of five minutes upon seeing Laura at their house in upstate Connecticut the next day—the way she came outside and nearly fell into our arms on the front walk, the way she claimed the balm of Gilead—to decide that my family had no other summer plans but this: rent a house in Cornwall to be there for her and the kids not only in their grief, but in all their needs great and small that the aftermath would bring.

The next day a house up the road from them fell into our lap for the month of July.

Thus began the daily round of what little I/we could do to help: accompany them to drop-off at summer school, so as to buffer Laura from unwanted interactions with even well-meaning parents, and then be there likewise for swim-team practice at the lake after school; drive Laura to the Social Security office two towns over, hard as it would be for her to face the so-called “benefits”; call Sprint on her behalf to cancel the family plan and change the name on their account; take Sasha to Nick’s office up the road from their house, where his dad used to let him play a video game with headphones on while Nick worked; join them for breakfast, lunch, or dinner on any given day; do the dishes, screen unwanted calls, and most of all, simply share in the overwhelming absence of Nick....

If this sounds like a spiritual pat on my very own back, believe me, it’s anything but.

I’ll be the first to tell you how hard it is to pull off even a fraction of the Gospel on most days for me—love (my neighbor as) myself? don’t be anxious about tomorrow? take the log from my own eye before the speck from my brother’s?—not to mention the range of indecision that at times can beset me, from what to eat for lunch to whether or not we should rent or buy.

And it helps that Laura is not only a close friend (as the Apostle James probably had strangers in mind for his mandate) but a model of Christian grief if there ever was one. So strong is her faith, so unwavering her belief in the midst of all the pieces of her shattered heart, that at times being with her has felt as much, if not more so, a ministry to me.

That said, for a month this summer, a summer so full of death, illness, and general darkness that it begs a cosmic if not eschatological explanation, I experienced a purity of religion like never before simply by doing one of the more natural and decisive things I’ve ever done.

Granted that I have yet to address the second half of that verse from James, the part about keeping oneself unstained from the world. But that’s for another post on another day, or better yet...never at all.