I KNEW MY GRANDMOTHER WOULD DIE while we were in the Philippines, so we went to visit her before we left. “This is Bill,” I told her, introducing the man who is now my spouse of 25 years. “We are on our way to the Philippines to do mission work.”
My grandmother wasn’t saying very much by then. She was hooked up to a bunch of tubes that were pumping stuff in and out of her body. The out-of-sync beeping was kind of crazy making, and I struggled not to lose focus.
“Bill and I are going to be missionaries,” I repeated, searching her face for some indication that she had heard me. She must have known I needed her affirmation, for suddenly she opened her eyes wide and raised her eyebrows for emphasis exactly as she used to do. And then she said, absolutely definitively, “I knew it!”
“I knew it,” she said. Other than the incoherent muttering about the quality of the food they were trying to feed her and the “love you” she forced out when I finally managed to leave, these are the final words she spoke to me. She knew it. She affirmed what I was becoming because she had already been standing with me in my life.
This way of my grandmother is also, I think, the way of the Spirit.
The Spirit gets a lot of press, to be sure, for “blowing where it will.” It acts in ways that are unpredictable and surprising. The Spirit drives us into the wilderness, fills us with righteous anger, causes us to speak in languages we don’t understand and aggravates us by working through people who, we complain, are utterly unqualified.
But the Spirit is, at the same time, perfectly reliable and consistent. Jesus promised the Spirit would come not only to shake us up, but to comfort us, teach us, counsel us and help us remember. The Spirit reassures us that Christ is present, even as we grieve his absence, watching and praying for his return. But the Spirit also makes sure we are nevertheless present, even when we find ourselves incapable of relating to God and the world. “When we cannot pray,” Paul testifies, “the Spirit intercedes for us with groans and murmurings too deep for words.” There is an old song in which someone recalls being given “strength” when they were “weak” and a “voice” when they “couldn’t speak.” This is exactly what the Spirit gives us: strength and voice and vision — even when we truly believe we do not have any of these things.
I left the hospital knowing my voice had actually never been lost, even in the years when I wondered if I had anything to say and what it would be. Because in those years my “prayer warrior” grandmother prayed for me every morning of her life, checking my name off the long list she kept on the worn-through pages of her memo pad “prayer journal.” It was in and through that habitual praying that my grandmother stepped into — and carried me along in — my life.
“I knew it,” she said. She had made my life her own, holding it in trust until I could join it myself. But she didn’t hand it back to me, on that last day that I saw her, as if she were merely looking after someone else’s valuable possession. As she lay dying, my grandmother held onto my life as something that had always also been hers, whether or not I had ever conceded to this. She took the life she left with me along with her into the great cloud of witnesses. In that place, and so also here, I continue to be made present — even when I am unable to speak, see or pray.
