Strange Blessings

Made Flesh

Recently, a friend of mine sent me a ten-year-old story from the Arkansas Times. It’s the story of a small-town woman named Ruth Coker Burks.

In 1984, Ruth was 25, and had a friend with cancer at University Hospital in Little Rock. She went to visit her friend regularly enough that she got to know the place pretty well. 

Then came the day she saw the door covered in a big red bag. She didn’t know what it meant, but she would watch the nurses draw straws to see who would go in.

“Best two out of three,” they’d say, and then, “Can we draw again?”

Ruth began to suspect the patient had AIDS. She knew a little about it from a gay cousin in Hawaii. She kept walking past that red door, watching the nurses draw straws, until her curiosity got the better of her – or maybe, as she says, it was “some higher power moving her.” She walked through that red door, and found a skeletal young man. He told her he wanted to see his mother before he died.

Ruth marched back to the nurses’ station and demanded they call the man’s mother. They laughed at her. They said, “Honey, his mother’s not coming. He’s been here six weeks. Nobody’s been here and nobody’s coming.”

Ruth walked back to the room, trying to summon the nerve to tell this man his mother wasn’t going to come. But when she walked back in, he said, “Oh, momma. I knew you’d come.” 

“And then he lifted his hand,” Ruth says. What could she do? She took his hand, without gloves – probably the first person who’d done that in the six weeks he’d been there. She pulled up a chair and said, “I’m here, honey. I’m here.” She sat there by his bed for the next 13 hours, until he drew his last breath. 

After he died, she got his mother’s number and called her. She still wanted nothing to do with her son. So, Ruth paid for the cremation out of her own savings, put his ashes in a chipped cookie jar for an urn, and took him to her old family cemetery. There, alone, with a post-hole digger, Ruth laid him to rest beside her father’s grave.

Over the next few years, word got out in the Arkansas gay community that there was a woman who wasn’t afraid. She sat with dozens of men as they died. When their families wouldn’t take them, she buried them in her little family cemetery. Her daughter would bring  a spade, and Ruth would use the post-hole digger. They did the funerals themselves, because they couldn’t get a single priest or pastor to come. 

All of that is thirty or forty years ago, now. It’s mostly been forgotten, because the people Ruth  knew have all died.

Today, when she looks back on those years, she still sometimes cries from the horror of it all. But then, according to the article, she will wipe her eyes and say, “They were good days because I was blessed with handing these people back to God.” 

Blessed are those who are poor in spirit. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the meek and the merciful. Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you.

These are strange blessings. I do not think Jesus is saying we should seek suffering so we can be blessed; I think Jesus is saying, “All you folks who the world won’t bless? You are blessed. In my world, you are loved, cherished, remembered.” That is what Ruth came to know deep in her bones. That’s what she shared with person after person: Blessed are you. Blessed are you. Blessed are you. 

Ruth isn’t sure how many men she buried in her family’s cemetery, alone with her daughter, their post-hole digger and spade. She believes it was forty-three, but she’s not sure. 

Somewhere in her attic, in a box, there are dozens of yellowed day planners she calls her Books of the Dead. They are filled with the appointments, setbacks, and medications of people from forty years ago. In between all those notes of care, each precious name is recorded. They are not forgotten. 

Children of God, every one of them. Sinners and saints. Beloved. Blessed.

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Dwelling Among Us

Jesus’ blessings reveal holiness where we least expect to see it. As you go through your day, experiment with internally blessing people you come across who do not seem very fortunate, very blessed. How does it change how you see the world, to call each person blessed?