Ministry Musings: Transition and Death, Part 2: A Prophetic Response, and a Personal One

As I wondered about the many questions raised by the situation explained in my previous post, I found one of my usual standards for discernment coming to mind: Micah 6:8.  And I considered:

 

The new pastor:  It is surely a matter of justice that she be allotted the space and freedom in which to commence and establish her new ministry.  It is a matter of kindness that I not clutter her life with the distraction of my presence and others' feelings about me.  And it is a matter of humility for me to recognize that I am no longer called to minister to that congregation.

 

Moi:  It's an issue of justice that I am no longer officially burdened by the demands of a former congregation.  It's a kindness to myself that my care is focused on one group of people and not dispersed between two -- something I should surely recognize after the month of November! ~ in which I was preparing to leave one church and to begin anew at another.  And certainly I am humbled by the recognition that the new and unfamiliar is now my bailiwick, rather than the known and comfortable.

 

The deceased:  Well, he's dead. I'm not one to see signs of the dead in this life.  Maybe once, with Josh.  My mother has been dead for 53 years and not once have I felt her presence.  But I think that if this gentleman could come back, he would tell me that I had served him generously and well and, as someone long active in the church and its transitions and politics, he would say, "It's time for you to move on and let the pieces of the puzzle fall into their new places.  The church is imperfect in its practice of justice, kindness, and humility, but it's better that we try than that we just blunder along on the basis of our own limited responses."

 

And, the most important person, to my way of thinking:  The widow.  Here's where it falls apart for me.  It is, to some extent, both just and kind that her and her family's immediate care, including the entire funeral, be the responsibility of the pastor to whom she is entrusted for the next several months.  That pastor is likely to learn much more about her in my absence than she might in my presence, and thus will be able to provide better care in the weeks to come.  And as far as walking humbly with God ~ without a tried and trusted pastor of two years alongside of her, she may be pushed toward God in ways that I might delay, simply by virtue of being a familiar comforting presence.

 

Maybe.

 

The truth is, it does not seem kind to me that someone should be without someone she has come to trust in a time of acute grief.  And, knowing full well what it is like to see people of every degree of relationship return to their lives with astonishing speed, I really, really, really hate being one of those people.

 

I suppose that I, myself, am being pushed toward a deeper understanding of the communion of saints.  But I'm not exactly inclined to embrace that possibility.

 

Does this raise issues? Oh, yeah.  I am so thoroughly sick of death and its ripples throughout every other relationship in life.  At sixty, having just closed out a decade in which many of my friends have encountered death up close and personal for the first time, I feel as if it has saturated my entire life ~ and it's going to get worse, not better, as we all age. 

 

I have no conclusions to offer.  I have some more personal reactions to explore, though: Maybe in a few days.

 

 

 

 

Present for Death

I received a lovely thank-you note today, a note from the daughter of a man who died a month ago.  Her in-laws are longtime members of my home church; she and her husband were married there, and their children were baptized there.  And so, when her father was in a terrible biking accident from which he never regained consciousness, and she was called to his bedside from another city, she naturally reached out to my former church.  Both pastors were away for the week, and I had agreed to provide back-up pastoral care, which meant that I went down to the hospital to meet with the family on the day after the accident, I think, and was called back a couple of days later to spend part of the afternoon with them as they slowly gathered for the father's final moments.

 

It seems that it mattered a great deal to them, or at least to the daughter and her Jewish stepmother, that I was there ~ not necessarily me, personally, but someone who could be present to them, read Scripture with them and, perhaps most of all, pray in a way that embraced both Jewish and Christian family religious traditions. 

 

When my last stepmother died of lung cancer, also in a hospital room, the only people present were my father and I.  His usual instinct is to push others away, but I had simply called him late at night and said that I was on my way.  It took me about four hours to get there, and she died about half an hour later, shortly before the sun came up.  At some point in those early morning hours, the nurse stepped in to ask if we wanted a chaplain, and my father shook his head, "No."

 

I thought about that night a few years later when I was doing my chaplaincy summer CPE at the Cleveland Clinic.  There, families were not asked; we were always paged as a matter of protocol, at any time of the day or night, if a death was imminent.  I don't recall ever being turned away by family members at the bedside.  There was always some kind of way, even for those to whom faith was unfamiliar territory, to help them be present to the reality of the transition from life to death.  I wondered that summer whether, had a chaplain appeared as my stepmother lay dying, my father would have shown him or her the door.  Perhaps.  His experience may have been solely of pastors who intrude into sacred space with their own version of religion, welcome or not.

 

I am so much the opposite that I am sometimes startled by the things people say in similar situations ~ or rather, I am startled when they look to me for affirmation of platitudes I cannot affirm.  I have learned to keep my mouth shut and my expression neutral.

 

I guess what I wonder is, for someone who expects no one or, worse, a meddling someone, does it make a difference if someone does show up to represent, in some way, the presence of God, acknowledged or not?

 

The great irony of course, is that while I do, usually, at these times, sense God's presence very strongly, it is in the aftermath (years now, for me) that God's absence seems so profound.  And so I read that thank-you note this afternoon and thought: Huh.

 

Another Day in the Life

 

 

I had been planning to continue The Great Library Re-organization.  In fact, I had probably spent an hour on it, as well as some time on Sunday's sermon, when the call came: Could I come down to the hospital? 

 

And so instead I spent the afternoon there, where a Jewish-Christian extended family had already made all the decisions on behalf of the husband and father who'd had a serious accident earlier in the week. 

 

I always leave with the same question.  How is it that I am called, again and again, to sit with families in the final hours of their loved ones' lives, to ensure that prayers are said, to try to alleviate some of the fear, to affirm the decisions made, to offer assurance of resurrection?  How is it that this happens, again and again, when I could do none of it for Josh?

 

It makes me a little crazy.

 

And very tired.

End of Life Conversations Which Don't Happen

I am finding that one of the most challenging aspects of ministry for me is engaging in conversations with people whose lives are ending. 

 

Not because I'm hesitant or apprehensive.  Not because I don't know how to ask open-ended and evocative questions.  Not because I have nothing to offer in response, whether to wonderment or fear or acceptance.

 

But because people really don't want to go there. Either bodily or in conversation.

 

Neither the people who are dying nor their family and friends who accompany them.

 

I am baffled by this.

 

 

Holy Week Wondering

In the fourth station of the cross, Jesus and his mother encounter one another. 

 

It's difficult to find an image of this moment ~ difficult for me, anyway ~ which depicts it as I imagine it.  The expressions, the postures, the greeting, the embrace.

 

I do imagine it, often.  In the lives of Jesus and his mother.  In the lives of my son and me.

 

Very few of my friends whose children have died have been gifted with the opportunity to share that time with them.  (And, as they remind me, being present to a child's final moments of suffering is the sort of gift that strains the definition of the word.)  For most of our children, death came suddenly, and far from loved ones. 

 

I've been wondering, a lot, this week, about some of the what-ifs.  Mostly about what life would be like if Josh were alive.  If the past five years had happened differently.

 

I don't harbor any illusions about having become a kinder, gentler, more empathetic person.  I am mostly a person more easily tired, more impatient, more short-tempered, and probably less kind.  

 

I suppose that I do wonder, though, more than I might have, about being part of the story.  Yesterday afternoon, I visited with three women, each dealing with life in the tenth decade, each at her own juncture on this journey toward the cross and beyond.  By the time I reached the third, who is in hospice, I was very, very tired, and departed perhaps too quickly ~ although as she is very tired as well, it was hard to tell.

 

One of the women told me a few days ago about a former pastor (from another church) who always seemed intimidated by her circumstances and ~ she snorted in disgust ~ eager to escape.  I have that in common with Mary ~ no fear about being present, no tendency to shrink from aging or injury or death.

 

But it is a wearying journey.

Companionship Unto Death

I sat with a dying woman for a little while tonight.

She's ninety and I've visited with her several times since her third and fourth heart attacks in the past year.

Due to a meeting, I arrived very late, shortly after her family had left the hospice ward.  She was surprisingly alert and laughed at a joke.

I prayed with her and asked her if she would like me to stay with her until she fell asleep.  "If you wouldn't mind," she said. 

Just the two of us, quietly alone together in the silence of the night. 

It might be my favorite part of this life.

Ashes - I

I think I'll post three reflections today. 

 

This year's perspective.

 

One from four years ago.

 

Tonight's sermon.

 

**********

 

Ash Wednesday presents a particular dilemma of dissociation for me. 

 

There is the public me, who will preside over an Ash Wednesday service tonight.  I have burned last year's palm branches in my fireplace and crushed what was left into fine ash, which now sits in a plastic bag on a kitchen shelf.  This doesn't sound very holy, does it?  But the ordinary and the sacred always blend in a life of faith.

 

I think of Forrest Church, preaching at Chautauqua many, many years ago, and proclaiming that "We have religion because we live, and then we die, and we need to make sense of that."  I didn't ponder that while I was burning the ashes last week, but today I do.

 

There is the pubic/private me, who will preach a short sermon tonight, a sermon which emerged from searing experience.  As time passes, you are indeed able to take that experience and give words to it that are more universal in scope. 

 

I don't consider that to be a particularly good thing.  I would prefer to have foregone the experience.

 

There's the private me.  The one who has an urn half-filled with ashes in her bedroom closet.  Jan Edmiston says today that most of us hide our ashes in the closet.  She is speaking metaphorically.  Those of us with tangible ones keep them in all sorts of places.  I keep some in the Pacific Ocean, some in the Atlantic, some in Lake Chautauqua, and some in the mountains of North Carolina.  Some in a locket. And some in the closet, because it takes a long time to scatter ashes across the globe.  Or at least across our small parts of it.

 

I don't much care for Ash Wednesday.  I used to love it, but now it's not exactly as if I need a reminder.

 

24

Ministry: Cultivate Imagination; Interpret Experience

I wrote the following during my days walking alongside the water at Birch Bay, on almost the northernmost edge of Washington State, last June.  After two weeks of preaching Job, with two to go, and a bedside vigil Tuesday and funeral Saturday, I'm off to the beach here on the North Coast of Ohio, to ponder it anew.

I think that those might be the tasks to which I am called: to cultivate imagination and to interpret experience.

I've been trying to distill the diffuse activities, plans, thoughts, and priorities of my daily life into a short phrase that might provide me with a sort of plumb line by which to gauge whether I am in alignment with who I am supposed to be and what I am supposed to be doing.  Life as a pastor is, as I had suspected, much like life as a mother in the variety of its demands, which often materialize as if out of nowhere and on the turn of a dime.  (The analogy between pastoring and mothering occurred to me when I was deep in the discernment process with respect to seminary, and has caused me to wonder ever since exactly how it was that men managed to reserve ordained ministry to themselves for nearly twenty centuries.)

While we were on vacation a couple of weeks ago, I intently focused my thoughts away from the church and my role therein.  The consequence has been that the cauldron of  ideas bubbling away beneath the surface of my consciousness has now boiled over.  It's possible that trying to contain them will be as elusive a prospect as would be attempting to scoop up tangible bubbles which lie glistening on the ground after having overflowed their pot.

Four little stories to illustrate where I might be going with all this:

Some months ago, I sat talking with a lifelong and actively engaged church woman whose death appeared to be imminent.  She had insisted on pursuing further medical treatment, which even her doctors had suggested was futile at that point. (And, as my son says, when the doctors finally say so, then you know that you should have stopped six months ago.)  I suggested that perhaps God was inviting her into a new path on her journey.  "What are you talking about?" she asked.  I paused, confused.  Was it possible that our death-defying culture had so permeated her approach to her illness that she was incapable of envisioning a change in direction?  Of course it was.  And I was stymied as it dawned on me that I had, at most, a few days in which to help her gain a sense that God was at work in the heartbreaking and agonizing road she had begun to walk.

Last night, I spoke with a man who has invested several weeks in tests that may (or may not) reveal very bad news and will no doubt indicate a need for a prolonged course of treatment of some sort.  How well I remember the unsettled frustration of last fall, when the wait for results and the complications of decision-making were far worse than the concrete reality of diagnosis.  Recognizing that he has at least several more days of uncertainty ahead of him, I told him that the morning's reading had been Mark's narrative of Jesus stilling the storm.  I suggested that he is in a rocking boat in the midst of a veritable storm of unhappy symptoms and medical testing, and that perhaps he might pray to know the presence of Jesus in the boat with him, stilling that storm with the gift of peace.  "Thank you," he said,  And again, "Thank you."

I see, finally (because I am often extremely slow on the uptake), that I cannot merely ask the question, "Do you think . . .?" but that I need to offer the beginnings of an answer, in order to help someone see and understand his or her experience in the light of religious faith.

When I was seven years old, and my family was in the terrible car accident that took two lives, the adults responded by walking away from God, from church, from any conviction that there was anyone or anything at work beyond the obvious and horrific reality that confronted us.  I have often wondered, especially in the past few years, whether my outlook on life might be dramatically different from the one I possess if someone at that time had tried to articulate something, anything at all, about God's relational presence to us.  Even something sappy about angels in heaven.  What if someone had offered the slightest hint that our experience might be interpreted in light of something beyond the devastation that lay before us? 

Decades later, when I was making the Spiritual Exercises (yes, there they are again), someone finally did.  By that time, I had become a leader and teacher in the church myself, but it was not until that year of gentle prodding that I sensed my own spiritual imagination being cultivated, my own experience being opened to an interpretation in the light of Christian faith.  There wasn't much in the way of verbally articulated direction, which is no doubt why I hesitate to impose much on others, knowing that I learned from a master how to step out of the way and let God issue the invitations.  But there was a question here, a directional pointer there.  "Have you considered?"  Have you ever looked at it this way?"  "Maybe you should consider thinking about it that way."

But that degree of restraint often leaves people in the lurch.  And so I am trying to learn ~ how to teach and model and then invite them to mine their experiences and utilize their imaginative gifts to begin to see where God is at work.

Angels

This is one of those not-for-the-faint-of-heart posts.  Don't read it if brutal details haunt you in difficult ways.

I am also somewhat extremely hesitant to post this for other reasons, as I know there are people reading this blog who will conclude that my mind and I have finally parted company.  But, you know, fools rush in  . . .

And where is it that angels tread, exactly?

The first time I was with someone who died was in 1960, when I was in the automobile collision in which my mother was killed instantly.  Although I am told that I was conscious when we were discovered, I have no memory of that event.

The next time was in 2005, when I sat with my stepmother as she died after a several-months journey with lung cancer.  My father left the hospital immediately, but I stayed with her for about an hour.  I was so sure that we were being accompanied by Others that I occasionally looked out the window into the 5:00 a.m. darkness, expecting to see someone.

The next many dozens of time occurred during the summer of 2008, when I was doing my clinical chaplaincy education at The Cleveland Clinic.  Sixty actual workdays and nights over a ten-week period.  One of my units was a medical intensive care unit, and at a hospital like that, the people in the MICU are desperately ill.  When we were on call in the hospital at night (about once a week), we were each the only chaplain for 1000 beds -- all units.  I had two days that summer in which no one died.  Many days and nights the numbers were two, three, four.  I did not have any sense of the physical presence of Others that summer.

A few weeks after that, my son jumped to his death. Some months, maybe a year afterward, the shock beginning to wear off a bit, I began to wonder whether it was possible that the small patch of ground outside his apartment building had been crowded with angels that night.  I didn't particularly believe in angels, or not, but I began to wonder. I found that I kind of like to imagine that there is, quite literally, a host of beings of light who rush to lift the broken to God.  That they appear on isolated country roads, in high-tech hospital units, in suburban neighborhoods.

Yesterday, sitting by a hospital bed and waiting through the final moments of an elderly woman's life, I closed my eyes and bowed my head and -- yes.  Despite the occasional beeping of machinery and the voices of nurses in the hallway, I heard it -- or rather I sensed it.  The light brush of Others in the room.

I wondered, later last night, what angels look like.  Probably not like us, and probably not wearing white robes and bearing feathery wings.  Probably more like columns of light.  Think Tanner's Annunication.

I don't suppose it matters what they look like.  It matters that they are there.

Image: Lakeview Cemetery, Cleveland OH

Great Sermons

My experience on Saturday got me to thinking about the other sermon moments that have sent me running out of , the sanctuary, either literally or figuratively.  I have not, sadly, forgotten any of them, but perhaps, now that it's happened again, a full four years later, that's a good thing.  Perhaps it will encourage me to apply a litmus test every time I speak in public, or every time at all: What kind of pain might I be about to cause?

The answer won't necessarily prevent my moving ahead.  But it might, or it might enable me to change some of the wording, or to try to make a space for the experience of others. 

Yesterday, for instance, my sermon title was "Consult Not Your Fears," words of Pope John Paul XXIII which had come my way via Michelle Francl. I was preaching about Jesus telling his disciples not to be afraid of those who were unknown, and about the Book of Esther, in which Esther has to overcome her fears to save her people.  During Saturday's RevGals' Preacher Party, Martha directed me to a post on the topic of fear, which caused me to make a change on Sunday: to ensure that I acknowledged that we all have fears, and that we are not called to repress them in unhealthy ways.

I think that was an excellent check.  I hope that if there were people in the congregation contending with great fear, they were able to hear both sides of the story.

Of course, I could have totally screwed it up. 

A few days ago, Questing Parson wrote an intriguing column about great sermons, which you should read for yourself.  The gist of it has to do with the degree to which you remember a sermon ~ which has nothing to do with whether you agreed with it!

I'm not sure that his standard works entirely.  I do, sadly, remember the four that have caused varying degrees of torment for me.  

But I also remember those on the other end of the scale.  And here they are:

A sermon which Barbara Brown Taylor preached at Chautauqua (and most likely elsewhere) about the treasure in the field.  The man in question buys the whole field, she suggests, because the treasure is all over the place, glittering right there on the surface.  I think it would be fair to say that her interpretation informs my thinking just about all of the time, even when I am too wracked with grief to access it.

William Sloan Coffin's sermon after his son died in 1983.  I was aware of that sermon long before Josh died ~ it was preached the year before my sons were born ~ and I've thought of it often during this first year of pastoring ~ my Year of Listening ~ as I have been inundated with claims for God's will for events which I am sure were not God's will.  I did not realize, until looking for a link just a few minutes ago, that it may have been William Sloan Coffin who gave me the words, embedded deep in my subconscious, that whereas the death of a parent takes away a a portion of the past, the death of a child steals the future.

The sermon preached by Edwin van Driel at my ordination service: resurrection  life has begun.  Jesus speaks in the present tense.  I am the living water. As I've mentioned, I've listened to it several times in the past few days.  My dear friend Karen responded to a previous post by stating that for those of us who have lost children, his words are hard to comprehend.  I totally get that.  The way we have to live now, it's hard, a lot of days, to care about the treasure of the kingdom of God sparkling in the sun, or to recognize God's heart breaking when a young man's life is lost, or to see the in-breaking of the kingdom in a world flooded with sorrow. 

On the other hand, it's kind of easy to see bits and pieces of the kingdom of God arriving in the friendship and work of the bereaved mothers I know.  We would, every one of us,  chose otherwise, but there it is.  

Bewildering, isn't it?

I suppose my own test for a great sermon has to do with whether it stakes a claim for God in all things in a way that offers hope for the transformation of all things, most especially all the terrible things, in our lives.

Always the Unexpected

I pastor a small church, and the only other employees who work any significant number of hours are the secretary and the custodian couple.

Early this morning our secretary of thirteen years, age 47, died of a heart attack.  She and her husband have no children.  Her nursing-home bound mother told me today that her husband died of cancer when their daughter was thirteen months old, and so for most of their lives it was just the two of them, until her son-in-law came into the picture.

I don't even have a breath of protest left in me.  It just is.

Maternal Suicide - Part II

Part I is here.

Now I am moving toward territory of which I know little.  I know what it is like to lose a mother when one is a child, and I know what it is like to lose someone to suicide.  But put the two together?  What can we do for a bereaved child in such a situation?

Let's start with a few points about mother-loss, exclusive of suicide.

First, children do grieve, and they grieve intensely.  But it looks different than in does in adults. When I reflect upon my childhood, I recollect it as having been awash in sadness.  But I also see images of children running and playing in fields and woods, children jumping on and off the school bus, children playing their games and building their treehouses and meeting in their clubs.  We looked like ordinary children, and in many ways we were ~ which may have fooled the adults into thinking that we were in all ways just like our friends. We weren't.

Today there is excellent therapeutic support for children of loss, support that simply did not exist fifty years ago.  But a lot of adults are reluctant to access it -- too busy, too inconvenient, too distant, the kids are fine.  I would simply say: Think again.  Actually, I would say: Make it your highest priority.

Here are some things I do know from experience and training, as both a child and as an educator and a family lawyer:

Children don't articulate things in the ways that adults do.  They don't have the vocabulary.  But kids draw and color, and kids play with dolls and stuffed animals and toy figures, and kids act out stories.  A child may never come to an adult and say, "I miss my mommy."  But a child may develop an elaborate and extended drama with her stuffed animals that would tell us far more than that simple sentence would, if we but knew how to look.

Children try to protect the adults they love.  You may not feel protected when the police car pulls up at 2:00 a.m. with your teenager, slightly drunk and recently busted for shoplifting, in the back seat.  But for reasons perhaps known to adolescent psychiatrists, but not to the rest of us, our children are far more likely to try to protect our feelings by engaging in unacceptable behavior than by "using their words" and saying, "I need my dad.  I don't need a step-dad I didn't choose." 

Children need support.  We have become very fond, as a society, of saying that "children are resilient."  And they are.  But how much resilience do you want to force?  If you've experienced a marital break-up, or lost a job, or sustained a serious injury, or survived a serious illness, didn't you need help?  One of the signs of adult maturity is that we know how to ask for help, and how to accept it ~ but children are not adults.  They don't know how to ask, and if help doesn't come their way, they conclude that matters are up to them.  Think about Jem and Scout and Dill.  Even they ~ self-reliant as they were, and every one of them missing a parent ~ even they needed Boo Radley.

A second major point: Mother-loss is for a lifetime and it's largely invisible.  Many of my adult friends have lost their mothers in the last decade or so, and those friends have been devastated.  The women who were in many ways their best friends and who shared in most of the critical junctures of their lives are gone.  But for a child, there is no one to fill that place at those times:

Dates, jobs, graduations, relationships, college and grad schools, weddings, jobs and careers, pregnancies and adoptions and babies, adult crises.  

Every once in awhile, like about once a decade, someone will tell me something about my mother and how she might have felt about something in my life.  "How do you know?" I wonder.  "What was she like?  What did she care about?"  No one wants to say.

I have probably missed my mother more in the last four years than I did in the preceding forty-eight.  I remember ~ unbelievably, I do remember this ~ that after both she and my baby brother were killed in the accident, a couple of people said that she would have found it unbearable to go on without her baby.  Well, I have to do that, and I would like it if she were here to help me.  My surviving children and I talk all the time, but I haven't talked to my own mother since October 5, 1960.

On the upside:

Really?  There's an upside?  

There sort of is.

Another thing Hope Edelman discusses in Motherless Daughters is the fact that girls who lose their mothers tend either to be crushed into lives of sadness and dissatisfaction or to become remarkably strong and self-sufficent.  Some are done in  by the lack of a cookie-baking caregiver and role-model.  Others in the same situation break free of traditional female roles and become ~ hmmm . . .  lawyers and pastors, for instance.  Doctors.  Artists.  Engineers.  Corporate executives.

Support comes in many different forms.  I missed out on a lot after my mother died, but I was still given an incredible education, courtesy of  my school-obsessed father, and many opportunities to see the world, thanks to my grandmother's frustration with my grandfather's refusal to hop into a boat or onto a plane.  In fact, my six years in boarding school and my many summers spent at some distance away are probably a direct consequence of my mother's absence.  She would have insisted upon schools and summers closer to home; my stepmother couldn't wait to say sayonara to all children in her vicinity.  

That means that one could conceivably argue that my passionate commitment to a life of faith, my fascination with interfaith dialogue, my determination to forge a legal career that would provide me with independence, and my life today as a pastor and spiritual director crossing two major religious traditions, all started in the midst of a deadly collision on a country road.

One could argue that. I'm not sure that I would.

(And my brother, who has also turned our childhood catastrophe into an adulthood of meaningful work and contribution to the world, might argue the same.  But he's a Republican, so I'm definitely not sure about that.  ;)  )

But what I would argue, with conviction and experience both behind me, is that a child who loses his or her mother is not doomed to a lifetime of failure and hopelessness. Quite the contrary.

The more help, the better, though.

Next, I'll finally get to the point.  Suicide loss.

What It Comes Down To: With the Dying

I spent some time this afternoon sitting with a 103-year-old woman who is dying.  Which is to say that I spent some time praying, some time remembering, and some time observing.

I don't know this woman at all.  I've often visited with her son, one of my parishoners, who is recovering from a massive stroke, and his wife and their two daughters, and I have listened to humorous stories about "Grandma" and her efforts to conceal some of her misadventures in her apartment, falls and injuries that would have cost her her independence had the wrong people gotten wind of them.  I met her when she was moved into hospice care some weeks ago.  At that time, even from her prone position in bed, she was still a boisterous, no-nonsense kind of gal.  I kind of wondered whether she had ever been a rodeo rider.

Today she is unconscious, heavily medicated, and breathing laboriously.  I had ample opportunity to take in her surroundings and ponder the results of 103 years of living:

Half of a double room, a curtain pulled carelessly between the two sides as a pointless divider;

A twin bed, a couple of machines that apparently do something, a bedside table, a lamp inexplicably turned on;

A sippy cup with a straw, no doubt unused for several days;

Tousled gray hair strew across the pillow, thick and curly;  paper-thin eyelids closed in the sunken sockets of an angular face.  She must have been a beautiful woman.

There is no art.  There is no music.  There are no photographs.  There are no books.

I have told my children many times that should I approach this condition, their task to to get me to the beach.  I would like to die within the sight and sound of the ocean and the seabirds.

I see now that I need to mention a few other things.  If I should land in similarly spartan surroundings, they are expected to show up with some artwork, whatever future i-invention produces the best music, and a stack of books.  If I can't die with my feet in the sand, perhaps I could at least be surrounded by remnants of my life.

And if I am unaware of all of it, if I am already elsewhere despite my body's resistance to its departure, I would like for the sounds to be other than my own ragged breaths.  The second movement of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 would be my preference, followed by the Largo from Dvorak's New World Symphony.

Those pieces constitute the soundtrack that I am sliding into the images with which I am left this afternoon.

Serious Illness: What Would You Want to Know?

Due to a series of encounters over the past few years, I've come to realize that my own thirst for knowledge (INTP-related, apparently) is not universally shared.

A few months ago, a local pastor asked me to fill in for him while he was away, and so one day I spent some time with a gentleman who was suffering from metastasized cancer.   He was alert and engaging, discussing the national political situation, his recent travels, and his doctor's suggestion that he consider hospice care.  His own preference was to continue with his chemotherapy.

"What does your doctor say about your prognosis at this point?" I asked him.  "What effect is continued chemo likely to produce?"

"I don't know," said the man.  He paused.  "That's not really a question you want to ask."

I sat quietly, thinking, "That's exactly the question I would ask."

The conversation reminded me of several that I had had with my dying stepmother a few years ago.   When her doctor told her that he was cancelling the remainder of her course of chemotherapy, that it was doing more harm than good, she refused his counsel and insisted on a treatment that afternoon.

My stepmother and father and I had many conversations over the short course of her illness, but never, to my recollection, did we have a candid discussion about her prognosis.  I made some attempts, but was rebuffed at every turn.

At the time, I blamed the doctor.  It seemed to me that at the beginning of their relationship, he had built up, or permitted to be built up, her expectations for survival  ~ despite her appearing in his life with three inoperable lung tumors and ten lesions in her brain ~ and that a few months later, his approach caught up with him:  he  had not provided the information and counseling necessary to support an end-of-course change in direction.

But now . . .  I wonder.  In retrospect, it seems that my stepmother was incapable of hearing the words that would have described the reality of her predicament.  And my father as well.  After she died, my father expressed tremendous resentment toward the doctor for not explaining what her treatment would entail, stating that if they had understood how sick the chemo would make her in exchange for a 1% chance at survival, they would have opted out.  But who knows, in the aftermath, who said what and who heard what?

That sort of conversation is not an immediate concern for me personally.  There is no reason for me to expect anything to come of my bout with breast cancer.

But if it were a concern for me, I'm 99.99% sure of what I would do.  I may not be much interested in plastic surgery, but I am very interested in disease progression and outcome.  I am most especially interested in life and death.

If I had metastasized cancer, you can bet that I would insist upon a lengthy conference with my doctor(s), and that I would emerge with a clear picture of all likely outcomes and what each would involve.  And then I would call hospice to arrange a similar meeting.

And if we were talking weeks, or even months, I would put aside everything else for the things I would like very much not to miss in this life.

And I would, I think, be intrigued by and curious about my final months here.  As someone said in a Christian Century article some years back, "Dying is not a medical process.  Dying is a spiritual process."

(And, you know, one of my children is dead.  There is very little left for me to fear.  Other than physical pain ~ I'm not a fan of that.)

My real concern now is not me, however.  My real concern is other people.  We live in such a death-phobic culture that even deeply religious people (and the man with whom I was meeting was a lifelong church leader) approach their own in a state of resistance and denial.

And I'm not at all sure of how to approach that.  

People often make remarks, in funeral homes and at gravesides, to the effect that "He waged such a valiant battle."  And if someone tells his doctor that he's finished, had enough, is headed for home and hospice, those friends of Job say, "Don't give up."  Over and over again in my hospital  chaplaincy did I witness the latter: adult children insisting that elderly parents in what were clearly the last days of their lives "not give up."

I tend look at these situations in a way diametrically opposed to that which our culture fosters.  To my way of thinking, a person who asks to be told what is likely to happen to her, and then insists upon the beach over the hospital, is one with great fortitude.

But I can't slice of gash of clarity into another person's carefully constructed portrait of himself.  I can't assume that, because my own thirst for knowledge is unquenchable, so is that of everyone else.  I have to realize that careful omissions of information that I would angrily refer to as "lies" are can be sources of comfort for others.

What to do, I wonder?  How to listen?

What would you want to know?

Image here.

Fire After Death

I went to a funeral this morning.

And tonight I read this, which I think might be the very best piece of writing I've ever read on the subject matter in question~ and I've read a lot of them, and written some, too: carrying out our immediate responsibilities and trying to honor our most beloved people in body and spirit  after they've died.

More Questions: What Does the Cross Mean to You?

This is one of those not-for-the-faint-of-heart posts.  But yesterday's generated such interesting answers (which will surely lead to another post eventually) that I thought I'd try something similar today.  

This one began with  a piece Michelle wrote on Wednesday, in which she says that "[i]t is difficult for us who make the sign of the cross when we pray, who let the crucifix lead us into and out of the church, who finger the rosary in our pockets when we are worried to see the cross as anything other than a familiar icon of protection and comfort."  I commented that protection and comfort are not the things I think about when I encounter the cross.  But, of course, she got me thinking . . .     .

As a Protestant, I am accustomed to seeing an empty cross, rather than a crucifix, in church, and I tend to see it as a symbol of victory.  In my home church, however, the center of the simple white wooden cross is encircled by nails, and so for me the cross has often become a focus for meditation on suffering.  I often thought, before Josh died, that I would like to do a sermon on that particular cross.  Now I'm not sure that I have it in me.

In the Catholic church which I began to visit after Josh's death (a complex story involving a need to be with people in prayer and the sense of trauma that bubbled up every time I tried to enter our own sanctuary),  an enormous crucifix hangs above the altar.  One day I happened to glance up as the priest raised the cup and plate and sang the words, "Through him, in him with him, in the unity of the holy spirit . . ".  That cup and plate looked so very small and that crucifix so very large; I was quite struck by the simplicity and fragility of the eucharistic act in the face of the overwhelming evil represented by the cross, and that one man's act of compassionate love had overcome all terror and evil.  It was a significant moment for me as I sought to contend with the horror of suicide and to find some sense of reassurance that my son had found welcome and safety in God's embrace.

Two years later, still contending, I spent a lot of time with the Stations of the Cross while I was on retreat at Wernersville.  I wasn't too clear on what the Stations of the Cross were ~ they represent stops in Jesus' final journey, from his appearance before Pilate to his entombment ~ but my retreat director provided some help and sent me off for what became several days of on-and-off focus on Jesus and his mother.  I'm not sure that I'd recommend that particular pilgrimage for a person in my shoes without the companionship of someone who is both a priest and a psychologist, but it was a powerfully healing journey for me. 

Did that experience transform the cross into an icon of protection and comfort for me?  I can't say that it did.  It remains a symbol of anguish and evil, albeit one that has convinced me that every moment of my son's pain was shared. 

I do wonder, though, whether a long-enough confrontation with the cross, of the nature into which I have been forced, might alter its impact.

And what about you?  What has your experience been?

Body, Breath, Place (Sermon ~ Ezekiel 37: 1-14)

There's a good chance that when  I preach this tomorrow, I will refer to my son's death in only the most general way.  I realized, as I printed the bulletin into 28-point font so that I can read it, that there may be very young children in this congregation, as they do not usually have Sunday School during worship.  Their parents are not bringing them to church so that they can learn the definition of suicide.  (I remember my horror when one of my friends at my own church, whose wife sings in our choir and was there for our son's funeral, talked about explaining what had happened to his own little nine or ten-year old son.  Horror that my family's circumstances mandated such a discussion in his.)  But this is how it emerged earlier in the week, with a little subsequent RG editorial assistance.

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I’ve been here enough times in the past few months that I think we know each other a bit.  Enough for me to preach a bit more personally then usual, at least insofar as sharing some of my experience in encountering today’s texts.  Perhaps that experience will speak to all of us who have found ourselves in deserts filled with dry bones. 

 

As I think most of you know, we in our family lost one of our young adult sons two and one-half years ago.  He died of suicide, just as I was preparing to return to Pittsburgh for my second year of seminary.  I use the term “died of suicide” these days because I have learned a lot in those two-and-one-half years.  One of the things I’ve learned is that very few people “commit” suicide, not any more than they "commit a heart attack" or ""commit a stroke."  Most people who die of suicide suffer from unresolved or – in the case of our son – even unrecognized clinical depression or bipolar disorder.  And that’s a problem we won’t even begin to confront successfully until we get rid of the very language that implies the victim is somehow at fault.  And so – my son Josh died of suicide.  That means that he died suddenly, and unexpectedly, and violently, and alone – and left behind a completely crushed and devastated family.

             

A desert of dry bones, indeed.

             

Josh’s death also means that when I looked at the OT and gospel texts for today – the texts we’ve just heard, Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones and Jesus’ raising of Lazarus, my heart stopped for a second.  There are certain texts which preachers steer clear of, for personal reasons, and these are the kind that I avoid.  They’re just too hard – one of my seminary professors refers to the situation as one of “existential dissonance.”  My own life experience and that of the text simply do not match up.  Not yet, anyway.

             

Even a year ago, I wouldn’t have tried.  I would have just gone off lectionary and preached on something else.  But this year – well, Lazarus seems a bit beyond my capacity, but I thought that I might try Ezekiel.  And I tell you all this not to be self-indulgent, but because sometimes, as we contend with our own desert experiences, it helps to have something concrete in someone else’s desert to hang onto. To know that while our experiences are unique to us, the realm of the desert is something that we all experience, one way or another.

             

One of the things I try to do in my preaching is what I call “preaching ahead of myself.”  We are all called, I think, to move beyond ourselves, especially in our suffering – to move beyond our own self-absorption into a space in which we might have something to offer others.  If I were a nurse, for instance, and my son had died, I would try to work ahead of myself by returning to my unit and caring for other people’s sons, helping them to heal and live.  As a preacher, I try to preach ahead of myself by preaching into what I hope, what we all hope, rather than falling backward into the hard specifics of what I merely know.

             

 So once I had decided to give it a try, I started to prepare for this morning by thinking about Ezekiel, imagining him and this bizarre vision of his.  I looked at some paintings online; I even found a wonderful short video, which you can probably find as well if you google-image something like “Ezekiel dry bones.” I looked at all these images of deserts and bones, and I thought about all of the people whose bodies I have cared for and prayed with, in my family and in my chaplaincy training at the Cleveland Clinic, and I wondered what Ezekiel thought and how he felt.  What did he think and how did he feel when God invited him into this vision in which death becomes life?

            

 And so I went back and re-read the text, and I found out.  At least, I think I found out some of what the writer of Ezekiel, perhaps Ezekiel himself, was thinking and feeling as he shaped this vision into words for later generations.

            

I discovered that at both the beginning and ending of this passage, Ezekiel talks about three things.  He talks about bodies, incarnational beings.  He talks about Spirit – about breath enlivening those bodies.  And he talks about places – geographical places.  Body, breath, place – things we all need to live.

             

It’s not surprising, I suppose, that these matters come up on the fifth Sunday of Lent, the last Sunday before Palm Sunday.  Lent begins in the same way: with Jesus, the incarnate one, the embodiment of God, being led by the Spirit, into the desert.  Body, spirit, place.  Jesus needs those things in order to live, just as we do, and he needs them in a specific way in order to live into his ministry.  He needs his body as a source of temptation: a body that hungers, that thirsts, that might triumph, that might be imposed upon others.   He needs the Spirit, the Spirit that belongs to and participates in both him and his Father, to lead him.  And he needs the desert, that empty, desolate, vacant place, in which to come to terms with the life to which he is called.  We heard all of this at the beginning of Lent –

             

And now we hear it with Ezekiel.  The same three requirements for life are brought to bear. “The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.”  Me – Ezekiel is the person, the ordinary, embodied human being.  So ordinary and embodied that he describes his encounter with God as a physical one: The hand of the Lord came down upon me.  As metaphorical as that statement might be, we visualize it, don’t we?  We see God’s hand - the same hand that reaches out to Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel - we see that hand clamping down on Ezekiel’s shoulder.  The hand of the Lord came upon me –

             

And he brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord – there’s the first appearance of the Spirit who will be so ey to this passage.  The Spirit leads Ezekiel just as it leads Jesus.  Just as it leads us. 

            

Now we like to think that with the Spirit’s leading, we will be directed to good places.  Joyous places.  Places filled with possibility. 

             

Not desert places. 

             

And yet, the place to which the Spirit leads Jesus is the desert. And the place to which the Spirit leads Ezekiel is the valley of dry bones.

             

Imagine this valley.  You don’t need all those internet images. Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine:  the bare ground, sandy here, rocky there, stretching before you for miles.  Perhaps in the distance some mountains, but they are barren, rocky.  The colors?  Greys, browns, deadened colors, colors as devoid of hope as the ground itself.  And the silence.  The oppressive, weighty silence. 

             

And then you realize: the ground before you is littered with bones.  All sizes and shapes of bones, grey and brown and bones bleached to white. 

             

Now me – as you might guess, I see this scene pretty literally.  And perhaps some of you do as well.  It depends, I think, upon what the barren, desert places are in your own life right now.  What bones cover the ground, when you have the courage to look there?  What disappointments?  What frustrated hopes?  What losses?   What lies around, lifeless and hopeless, in your own existence?

             

Oh, this is a hard one, isn’t it?

             

God knows it is hard.  And God tells Ezekiel to speak to the bones, and he does, and they begin to get up and be melded together again, muscles and tendons appearing and skeletons being reconstituted.

             

Now how do you think Ezekiel feels? 

            

 I’m guessing that he’s reminded that bodies are not enough.  It sounds as if these bodies are complete – but they do not live.  They do not live until God tells Ezekiel to speak again, so that the winds will come and breathe life into these bodies.  Wind, breath, spirit – all the same word: ruach – in Hebrew.  The cultural memory is triggered: In the very beginning, according to Genesis, “a wind from God swept over the waters.”  Now a wind from God sweeps over the desert valley.  In one of the Genesis stories of creation, God breathes life into God’s first human creation.  Now God’s Spirit breathes life into an entire population.  A population of bones.  Bones in the desert.  Bodies, spirit, place.

           

Where are these places in your life?  Where are the places in which bones lie, in which the wind of God needs to rush in, into which the Spirit of life needs to breathe?

              

This is the why of Lent.  We know that without the cross, there is no resurrection.  We know that unless we look deeply into the desert places in our lives, there can be no wind of life.

           

“O my people,” says God through Ezekiel. ^“I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken and will act.”  Bodies, spirit, place. 

             

We can hear this story literally, as the Israelites would have done, as Zionist Jews do today.  Real people, enabled by the Spirit of the Lord, are returned to their land, to Israel. Or we can hear it as God’s engagement with us, regardless of the geography of the matter in question. We can hear that God cares about who we are – embodied people, animated by God’s own Spirit.  We can hear that God cares about where we are, because embodied beings have to be somewhere.  We require place. If we find that we are standing in the middle of a dry valley, we can hear that God is laboring there.  If we stand on the precipice overlooking the valley, afraid to move, we can hear that God is ready to force air into our nostrils.  If we have crashed onto the plain, we can hear God saying, “Oh, my people.”

             

What did Ezekiel think?  What did he feel?  Was he terrified, watching those bones being re-assembled  into bodies, and listening to those bodies being re-animated by the wind?  Was it all that he could do, to stand there and not run away?  Or was he filled with hope, astonished by God’s love and God’s willingness to try again with God’s people?

             

In another two weeks, we will celebrate a similar story – a story in which a body is reconstituted, breath is released – and people do run away. At least, some of them in some versions run away, before they all get it right. And when they do get it right, and are able to grasp the reality – body, spirit, place – then they will recognize, and perhaps we will as well, that God still sighs, "Oh, my people.”  That God still seeks to transform valleys of dry bones into meadows of life. 

             

This is what I mean by preaching ahead of myself.  I mean this: that our God, who sees the starkness, the emptiness, the shattered lives strewn across the deserts of human existence, says to us: This is not the end of the story.  This is the Lenten journey, this is the journey through the wilderness but, Oh, my people, this is not the end.  My hand will roll a stone away from a tomb, and you will know that your God speaks and acts.  You will know that you are beloved and that you live, O my people.

             

Amen.

Image: Barry Donaldson, Ezekiel Speaks to the Dry Bones