I’m now singing my third setting of the words of Isaiah 40:6:

“All flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flowers of grass.
The grass withereth, and the flowers thereof falleth away,
But the word of the Lord endureth forever.”

The first time was at a memorial service three days after 9/11. We were a choir mourning the loss of one of our own on that day, and the Hebrew Enosh is one of the most moving laments I have ever heard. Even the conclusion, that the glory of God does last forever, is part of the same, haunting line.

The second setting actually is taken from the new testament, which quotes the original passage in the context of a buoyant celebration of the fact that the resurrection makes us all imperishable. In Blessed Be the God and Father, Wesley turns those piercing old Hebrew words into melodramatically sad English ones before a terrific organ chord and the choir bursting forth with the bit about the word of the Lord enduring forever, breaking into a seemingly uncontrollable fugue in their uncontrollable joy.

Tonight we’re singing Brahms’s setting in Ein deutsches Requiem in memory of John F. Kennedy, here on the 50th anniversary of his death. Unlike the rest of the piece, much of which proceeds with a heavenly shimmer, the movement with these lyrics begins as a dirge, taking death on darkly and truly. But then before getting to the “but the word of the Lord” bit (also a bouncing fugue here) Brahms detours us through some new text, from the book of James. The verses counsel listeners to be patient and to wait for the fruit of the earth like a “husbandman,” in a playful, almost childlike waltz. It’s that earthiness, that earthly comfort, that I find so interesting here, set against text that is meant to clearly remind us that anything earthly is so transitory, even if there’s a deity that can help us transcend it all. This is somewhere in the middle — between the dust to which we return and the heavens to which we hope to ascend. You don’t often see too much of this kind of earthly comfort in requiems. Why did Brahms stick that bit in? I’m not sure but it’s one of my favorite passages in a piece brimming with some pretty amazing moments.

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In his short story “Pigeon Feathers,” John Updike’s fourteen-year-old character David is terrified of death: “a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you are drawn while the white faces above recede. You try to reach them but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt into your face. There you will be forever…and in time no one will remember you, and you will never be called.”

The story is about faltering faith in God, and its desperate ending does nothing to convince us that Updike disagrees with his young mouthpiece’s doubt. David has just cruelly shot a handful of pesky albeit beautiful pigeons when the story concludes abruptly: “He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

Compared with this ugly brashness, David’s earlier description of human death is much more palatable. And while it is true that every poet and perhaps every human legitimately fears being eventually forgotten in death, in pronouncing this fear, Updike also announces its remedy: the remembrance and “calling” of the living. Just as Wordsworth pleaded with his sister to “remember me and these my exhortations,” I think that what Updike does here in effect is to remind us of what makes us most human (and least pigeonly): that we care about and can remember each other, even across the bridge of death.

Updike suggests that those actions are meaningful not just to ourselves, but perhaps (we can only imagine) to the dead as well. And so it is a human strength, and not a weakness, that when we gather around the “long hole” of a loved one, we choose to overcome the ugly brashness of death by engaging in the acts of remembering, and of calling.

My experiences of the last year have certainly informed my re-reading of Updike here, as those of you who know me probably suspect. But it is two deaths in the past week which have brought me specifically to put pen to paper (or fingertip to keyboard, I suppose), as friends, acquaintances, journalists, and I remember a coworker’s father, and Updike himself.