Where there is doubt ...

A photo by Timm dated June 5, 2005, from among a series of shots of some downtown close to Salem, Oregon, where Timm lived - Canby or Mount Angel or Silverton.

There are times when it feels like Timm got out when the going was good -- so much has fallen in the world of late, precipitously, calamitously, so hard and fast that we can't see yet what sort of place this is, how many will go unemployed, declare bankruptcy, live on a global dole (for we as a country are never alone in this world again). As in all things, the situation is probably not as bad as we fear nor as good as we hope; but the daily toll of bad news is quite staggering, and the aggregate is too large to comprehend.

Just yesterday, let’s see: There were bad corporate earnings reports for the quarter - Wachovia Bank had $23 billion in losses ad Boeing lost 23 percent of its value, causing the Dow to fall 500 points, spurring in turn massive losses on the foreign exchanges this morning, the South Korean market taking the biggest hit, losing 7 percent of its value. Foreclosures are up 70 percent in the third quarter and the stock market has lost more than a trillion dollars in value since its high a year ago. That's just another's day's news, soon and sure enough to be replaced by something worse.

Neither Presidential candidate say much of substance about what is to come -- they're too busy being candidates, which these days is about promises and attacks. Our mailbox is flooded with attack ads and the TV -- well, enough said.

And that Sarah Palin -- sorry, I have to vent -- she gives me the willies with her “plain talk,” a stylish shorthand for massive inexperience. Just what we need in this crisis - wrong-headedness prettied up as coffee klatch banter.

At least gas is getting cheaper.

Unemployment figures are ballooning and who knows how high the number will grow. It will be hard to make the sort of living Timm tried to exist on - social work follows the reverse scale of goodness, where the occupations serving the greatest good get paid the least - and his photography was a marginal living, never enough. It will be hard for anyone to make ends meet, at least in the world whispered into existence by all I fear, listening to hard voices on the wires of the wind. When those voices whisper, as it does this morning, late in the year, where darkness claims more of the morning and night, when the wind in the trees sounds tired and old and futile, there are moments when I think Timm is in a far, far better world than the one the rest of us, the living who remain, are now entering ...

... But such thoughts are dispelled by the sad clarity that Timm had so much more to live and love and accomplish in this world. What Timm strove so hard to become is the hope which rings clearly in every night, something so basic in our better human nature, growing roots deepest when skies are driest, bringing serenity to calamity, beauty to pain ... Timm is so needed these days, his smile, his gentle way, his relentless service to others, the bouquet of beautiful images he was so ready to offer. In his job as congressional district aide, Timm was noted for his ability to reach out first and farthest to the hardest-suffering constituents - Congresswoman Hooley lamented that deep loss to her office speaking at Timm's memorial - whether it was a late Social Security check or some Medicare issue seemingly lost in the endless bureaucracies of care, the need for methamphetamine treatment or simply words of consolation and hope, Timm, truest to his nature, reached out there first, meeting his own needs by serving the common weal. If his center was blurred, surely it was because he was so quick to reach out to another.

How desperately such people are needed these days, in the days to come ... Timm's email inbox continues to fill with requests from various national non-profits he once subscribed to, Christian outreaches and addictions recovery foundations, world hunger action committees and the Obama campaign, missions to teens here and the suffering in far countries, doctors reaching across borders: They're all crying for help, a dollar, an effort from someone, and Timm isn't here to respond.

Timm’s his service is done. Those big shoes of his are empty, his camera is in one brother's hands, his computer in this other's. The work which remains here is up to us to perform. I don't know about you, but something of Timm has grafted onto me as I have tried to remember him here; perhaps my sleeping, distant-twin nature has simply awakened. It seems to me now, after these six short months, that remembering Timm means honoring him with a similar commitment to love and cherish and serve this world, for the better of what is always latent in the worse. Shakespeare understood the power of grief - it is the "whetstone" of MacDuff's revenge against the usurper Macbeth for murdering his father the king; it turns the heart of the brooding exile king Prospero a turn further, going being revenge to reconciliation of the worlds in "Tempest." Fate turns the wheel of fortune wholly apart from our intentions; grief allows us to turn our own wheel, deepening and radicalizing our heart at the same time. We choose how far to turn back to the world in our grief, saying Yes once again.

"Live from the heart" -- that was a maxim of Timm's: it proves greater than the fate which would kill Timm through the anterior descending artery of his own heart. To love and live from the heart means to be ride free in the wilderness of the world, to the best of our ability to turn its wounds into wombs, rooms of welcome vast as the booming sea. Timm rides freest now in that element, leading the way perhaps, his blue grey eyes as merry and deep and complex as the sea, leaving to us carry on that welcome for the better of every ill.





At noon on September 11, 2001 -- an hour after the second tower had fallen in a fatal cloud of dust -- I attended my usual AA meeting where many were ashen-faced, shrouded with the same dust that freshly fallen on the world. You would think there would be a lot of talk about thirst, but instead we talked mostly about reaching out to others in that great time of need. We ended with the Prayer of Saint Francis, a prayer I believe serves as both Timm's epitaph as well as our mission to keep singing his song from our hearts:

Lord, make me a channel of thy peace, that where there is hatred, I may bring love; that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness; that where there is discord, I may bring harmony; that where there is error, I may bring truth; that where there is doubt, I may bring faith; that where there is despair, I may bring hope; that where there are shadows, I may bring light that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted; to understand, than to be understood; to love, than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.

It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.

Amen.