 Standing on a thin patch of grass between the road and a huddle of trees we waited for it to arrive. We leaned out from the signpost watching down the winding street of cobblestone and asphalt anticipating. We had our hiking shoes on and I wore a big ridiculous hat to keep the sun off of my face. The two of us, my then partner Sarah and I, were visiting central Mexico staying with a local family and studying Spanish. Each morning and afternoon as we walked from our host family's house to the school and back again we had seen it pass us by. The bus. After the first several days of exploring our neighborhood we wanted to see what the downtown was like to visit the Cathedral and the Zocalo and that meant taking the bus. It was shorter than the city buses we were used to in the States painted white with tall backed comfortable looking seats. When we spotted it coming around the bend near the La Vandaria we flagged it down paid our fare and took our seats near the back. We watched together out the window as the new geography of our daily lives flew by quickly at a jostling pace. We passed Pharmacia Similares whose corporate spokesman is a round-bodied cartoon pharmacist with a bushy gray mustache named Dr. Simi. One of the employees was out front in their Dr. Simi suit dancing to Mexican pop music to attract business. He waved to the bus. We waved back. After ten minutes or so we'd gone further than we'd ever gone on foot before crossing into unfamiliar territory. On the right we saw the new Costco shopping center built on a hillside of flowering plants with an attached art gallery. For a little while I tried to keep count of the restaurants I saw. Most were either Italian or Japanese and Italian was winning. The newer and the older parts of town were so mixed but as the buildings got closer and closer together we began to see more people walking along the street and we knew we had reached the heart of the city. We watched for the cathedral, the stop where we were told we should get off. It never came. We did see it from a distance a few times. First up ahead but then later behind. After a while the buildings got further apart. The people thinned out and then nearly disappeared. The bus once filled the capacity grew more and more empty. We had gone too far. I reasoned aloud to Sarah that the bus must loop around eventually and go back along the same route. As we went further and further on I hoped that I was right. Eventually the houses outside our window just stopped. No one had gotten on or off of the bus for what seemed like a long time and the road brought us right up to a steep drop. It turned sharply and zigzagged back and forth down the hillside. At the base the bus pulled up to a little cinder block building with iron bars over the entire front face. It was a convenience store but customers weren't allowed inside. They had to stand at the grate and ask the clerk for whatever they wanted to buy. After that building the road ended. There was nothing but jungle ahead. The driver turned off the bus and got out. We too were the only passengers left. The sun began to set and the noises of the early evening began to seep out of the forest. We had no idea where we were. That moment sitting on a bus at the forest edge night coming on gently was the most lost the most physically lost that I think I have ever been. I had just enough Spanish that I might have asked don't day a stop where are we but not nearly enough to understand the answer now I may not always know what I'm doing but I usually know where I am and not knowing something as basic as that leads to a lot of uncomfortable feelings fear and frustration and regret and uncertainty and the feelings that come from being lost have a lot in common with the feelings that come from loss itself from losing a dream or a relationship or a person you love. Since I began in it the greatest privilege I have found in ministry is the humbling way in which so many people have invited me into the most tender and vulnerable moments of their lives. Both as a hospital chaplain and as a congregational minister I have been witness to death it is a sad and yet still potentially beautiful part of the job but more often than literal dying the deep loss I'm often called to attend to is actually the loss of role of some ability or identity that was a cornerstone of life and now the whole house has to be rebuilt without it when I am with folks struggling with such existential loss I sometimes think back to that moment sitting on the empty bus at the very start of night with nothing but jungle in front of me at the pace of modern life with all of the work that it takes just to live it is all too easy to forget that each moment of time is unique and irreplaceable we can remember the past and we can anticipate the future but we live in the present and as each new moment begins another moment passes into memory there is loss and renewal in every second of every day this to me is what is so powerful and beautiful about any sort of enduring love between parents and children or between close friends or partners that sort of love says I love you the you that I know and more than that I love you the you I do not know the you I have not met yet and will not get to meet until a month a year a lifetime from now that is the hopeful love of a birth or wedding it helps us feel the promise and potential of each new moment in time the other side of that not the opposite but the complementary experience is grief when we lose something truly precious to us it becomes hard or even impossible to feel the newness of each moment all we can feel is the loss in their essential work proverbs of ashes in which they challenge the faulty theology of salvific suffering Rebecca Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock speak to the necessity and transformative power of grieving they begin with these words grief knows that life has been altered with finality there are depths of loss for which there simply are no words both in the hospital and in the parish there have been times when I have sat with a parent or a lover of someone who has just died and that was the only thing that seemed worthy of saying there are no words grief with its anger and its sorrow and its fear is a thing we need in the course of life and those who need it ought to be allowed to have it continuing Parker and Brock speak of the creative power of loss when they observe that those who mourn experience the mystery of a presence that is not wholly lost that accompanies the living with a tenderness and power that alters their lives the world changes the surface mask thins life becomes luminous with fire the heart expands its breath love is as strong as death getting to that place however and moving through the emptiness to a new relationship with life is rarely easy the Buddhist teacher Pima children explains how she came to be a Buddhist by telling the story of the end of her marriage she writes we lived in northern New Mexico I was standing in front of our adobe house drinking a cup of tea I heard the car drive up and the door bang shut then he walked around the corner and without warning he told me that he was having an affair and he wanted to divorce I remember the sky and how huge it was I remember the sound of the river and the stream rise the steam rising up from my tea there was no time no thought there was nothing just the light and a profound limitless stillness that I regrouped and I picked up a stone and I threw it at it it was anger a powerful overwhelming anger at her husband that set Pima children on the road to finding not only her religious identity but her life's work when her marriage ended she found that she could not get comfortable she could not find solace or refuge in her new reality as the person that she used to be she tried hard for a long time but it didn't work to regain some sense of comfort and well-being she had to change this week one of you reached out to me to offer your feedback on last week's reflection that is something that I welcome and I hope that it we will be able to have such open communication for all the time that I am in your midst I thank you for your permission to share this little bit of our conversation that you wished that I had shown more vulnerability I take that to heart so I will say a little more here than I might have otherwise although I have told that story about riding the bus all the way to the end many times before both from the pulpit and just in conversation a year or two ago I could not possibly have shared it with you because although that marriage that partnership ended on the best possible terms that I can imagine a relationship ended it did end and yet in my memory and in that story we are still both sitting at the back that empty bus still married still in love what had previously been a metaphor to me my experience of being physically lost to pair with someone else's experience of being emotionally lost had turned in on itself the membrane of the metaphor collapsed but today thankfully is not a year or two ago as the author Zadie Smith wrote in her essay that crafty feeling there is a weird inverse confidence to be had from feeling destroyed because being destroyed having to start again means you had space in front of you somewhere to go think of that revelation Shakespeare put in the mouth of King John now my soul has elbow room when my almost teenage daughter was very young we got her a little multicolored plastic fish with grooves and nubs on it for texture it was the sort of chew toy that can make it hard to tell whether it was meant for a young dog or a very young human but this one was of the human variety I assure you before she had any teeth at all my daughter already showed an interest in biting things so after being bitten more than a few times by her surprisingly strong gums we decided that she needed a toy specially intended for biting and we went and got her a little plastic fish that was fishy number one Mimi my daughter loved to bite that fish and we would carry it around with us when we went out of the house she particularly liked to gnaw on it while sitting in her car seat then one day we looked around for fishy one and couldn't find it we look behind things in things underneath things but it just didn't seem to be anywhere so Mimi may do for a little while she was and is a very adaptable child there were times though when we wanted to give her a toy to chew on particularly as her first teeth began coming in we found what we really needed in that situation was that same lost toy so we went and bought another one that was fishy number two we lost fishy number two about two days later it was that kind of lost where you don't even bother looking for the thing we've been out of the house all day before we even realized it was gone once again we had no fishy chew toy to give to Mimi and by now we felt committed so we went back to the store and we got fishy number three now the next week we found fishy number one it had fallen down behind her changing table and when we happened to move it one day there was the original fishy the lesson that I take from the story of the three fishies is as follows there are some things that we can lose and then find again there are some things that we lose that are not coming back and there are some things that we can only find because we lost something in the first place back at that bus at the edge of a jungle in central Mexico we could not stay lost forever eventually the driver returns to the vehicle and we wound our way back up the steep hill on the ride up we could look out over the forest and appreciate its lush beauty for the first time passing through the ancient city after sunset the dim lighting gave the people in buildings a ghostly beauty we wound our long way home through the night and found our stop and left the bus behind for our beds my friends the next time that you are lost at the edge of the forest I hope that your journey through the night might be as easy and that wherever it takes you you do not have to make it alone