Lent Commences

It occurred to me this morning, as I was remembering to be grateful that I could put on clean clothes, washed by me (since I can now descend to the basement) in a warm bedroom where the cat had been tidied up after by me (since I can now walk and bend over), that perhaps the reason I feel so removed and numbed to Lent is that I've just spent the winter there.  A winter longer than Lent: somewhere around 56 days from break to first halting, unaided steps. 

 

It's been a very lonely winter Lent.  Two groups kindly came to my house for our weekly meetings, and I did start getting out to the church after the first month, although more for crisis management than for worship, so it felt like a massive mountain of struggle rather than any sort of peaceful pond of repose. 

 

On the whole, though, I saw almost no one beyond my immediate family, the couple of people stopped by to visit, and my online book group.  It's made me wonder:

 

Was it the cold and snow?  It's been an awful winter.

 

Is it me?  I can't discount that; maybe I am a compete drag to be around.  Entirely and most definitely possible.

 

Or: Are we really so busy?  There have been long periods of time in the past few years, in the darkness of loss and after now two major surgeries only two years apart, not to mention my work 1.5 hours from home, when I have been painfully aware of my inability to do my share of caring for family and friends who had problems of their own.  But I figured that others were picking up the slack; we all have periods of time in our lives when we are more or less able to tend to needs beyond our own.  But . . . maybe not.

 

One of the major aspects of ministry in Small Rural Church was the Ministry of Visiting.  I was surprised ~ very surprised, given my own experience of large program-oriented churches ~  that people much preferred me to spend my time journeying from homes to hospitals to nursing facilities to assisted living so that I could hang out with them, rather than planning and delivering beautifully designed educational and spiritual growth programs. 

 

There was a gentleman who had a massive stroke shortly after my arrival there, which left him almost completely disabled and a permanent resident of nursing care.  My ministry to him often consisted of stopped by to watch portions of absolutely dreadful television shows and movies with him.  I would offer wry commentary and he would laugh and nod his head in agreement. 

 

There were people who warmed up to me after long days spent sitting in hospital waiting rooms together, people who never came near any classes I tried to offer.  There was one lady who said, "Those are really good questions!" when I pushed her husband's heart surgeon for clearer answers.  Never once did she comment on the "really good questions" on which I preached Sunday after Sunday.

 

There were ladies in their nineties who cried when I left.   They couldn't get to church anymore, but they could invite me to assisted living lunch and dinner, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. 

 

It's becoming more evident to me now how many people live in a sort of permanent Lent. I don't know why I'm surprised; I've been doing it myself for five years.  But this particular detour into a deeper version is causing me to rethink my priorities in a big way.  I'm not entirely up to much in the way of visiting just yet, although I've been to funeral home and funeral mass and hospital and hospice in the past few weeks.  But I think I will keep my own extra layer of early 2014 Lent in mind as I re-focus on the future.

 

Week 8 Begins

It's hard to believe, but that swollen mess on the left, which barely moves in the outer direction, is on the verge of walking. 

I so miss my walks!  I suspect that progress back to three miles a day will be very slow, and I don't know when I will feel confident on hiking trails again, especially out by myself.  But, someday . . .

 

I would not want to have to give up hiking the North Carolina mountains!

 

Six Week Anniversary of Ankle Surgery

Off to PT today, where I was permitted to walk (with crutches) in a regular shoe for the first time.  Painful and dizzy-inducing, but it will come. I've learned to go up and down stairs on crutches, but it's exhausting.  It's all exhausting.  I've been out of the house every day for six consecutive days, and it's so tiring that I've started sleeping in the living room again ~ I'm too tired to go upstairs.

 

I tried to write a post on the spiritual practice of fatigue, but . . .  I was too tired to finish it!

Hair Washing Memories

 

(My boys on a similar trip a few years later.)

 

Many summers ago, my father, my two sons, who were about fifteen, and I spent a week canoeing in the backcountry of Ontario's Algonquin Park.  One acquires a layer of uncomfortable grunge on such expeditions, and so I planned to clean off in the water about midway through the trip.

 

 

(A portion of Algonquin.  I think that on this trip about which I am writing we were up in the square jutting north off the map.)

 

 

We camped on a small peninsula jutting into one of the hundreds of lakes marking Algonquin and, as the sun began to set, I eased a canoe into the water and paddled to a nearby stretch of rock for some privacy.  I lathered myself up as completely as I could while remaining dry, and then slipped into the frigid water.  My goal was to rinse hair and body as thoroughly and speedily as possible so that I could clamber back onto the rock and dry off before I was frozen into a pillar of ice, never to look back.

 

Afterward, there would have been fleece clothing and a campfire, packs hoisted into the trees to discourage bears, and a night curled up in a tent.  A routine evening, its memory merged with others.  But I do recall clearly the beauty of that cold bath in a remote lake as the sky lit up with streaks of evening sunlight.

 

That interlude was what I thought about this morning as I engaged in the arduous task of wheeling my scooter to the kitchen sink, washing my hair, wheeling to the tiny half bath to sponge bathe the rest of me, and wheeling to the living room to dress. 

 

I have nothing to complain about on this icy day of yet more snowfall; I am warm and safe inside.   But I decided that I much preferred to daydream about Algonquin while I bathed than to focus on the effort it takes to accomplish the same thing this month!

Reverence: Healing

The cat squirms in my lap for a few moments and then leaps, an elegant arc of orange and white fluff, four feet into the air and through the doorway into the next room.

 

The vet had told us that she would lie quietly, recovering for a couple of days, and not to permit her to run around.  Ah, but the cat is six months old, and I am sixty years.  There are some differences.

 

Yesterday, utterly discouraged, I huddled under my blanket in my space, the corner of our living room where my recliner and table scattered with meds and electronics are located.  I laughed briefly when I read another woman's account of her recovery from ankle surgery; she describes an identical geography.  But I wanted  to cry when I looked at the dates on her descriptions and realize how long a recovery this will be. 

 

Each trip to the bathroom, eighteen steps  through the same sunroom into which the cat flew with such ease, and eighteen steps back, hopping with my entire weight borne by my walker, hands aching, is an undertaking akin to hiking the Great Wall.   I have had to relinquish my teaching job, and to give up my long-anticipated retreat time.  Will my pastorate go as well?    There's so much to worry about, work-wise and money-wise.   

 

And yet, healing is taking place.  In some mysterious and miraculous way, the severed edges of bone are binding themselves back together, recreating blood flow and rebuilding marrow and spongy and hard bone.  Just as astonishingly, my body is accepting the presence of metal parts as the new normal. 

If all goes well, the result will be an ankle that will support walks on the beach some months from now.

 

Miscellaneous movements ripple through even this disrupted and limited life.  I hear from a lady twenty years my senior, a new widow, and I am able to write to her with the authority of experience about her days of freshly felt grief, the exhaustion and the disorientation.  I don't mention that the spirit often takes considerably longer to heal than the body. 

 

I ponder Ignatius, he of the 1521 cannonball injury, which resulted in months of bed-ridden recovery and the understanding of religious psychology that led to the Spiritual Exercises.   What would he think, I wonder, of my binge-watching of The Sopranos, which I have not seen before?  An extended meditation on spiritual desolation if ever there were one. 

 

And last night, or this morning, around 3:00 a.m., I turned to read a piece written by the Australian Jesuit poet Peter Steele S.J, to which my friend Michelle has linked.  When I first saw her post, I had saved it for later, thinking to pray with the poem as a form of lectio divina, but when I went to the link at 3:00 a.m.,  I discovered that, unbeknownst to me, Peter Steele died of cancer in the summer of 2012.

 

I am devastated. It was a stack of Peter Steele's poems that spiritual director emeritus had emailed to me in the first months after Josh died; the two men had developed a friendship while both were at Georgetown that year.  It was Peter Steele's poems that I sat reading, tears in my eyes, late one night in the computer lab at seminary, surrounded by other students pursuing their Greek or Hebrew, oblivious to anything beyond the linguistic challenges staring back at them from their screens. 

 

I never even met the man, and I'm sure he never knew of my existence, but I sat here, and sit here still, grieving the loss of someone who gave life to words in a way that touched me when it seemed that nothing could.

 

This poem to which Michelle linked, is an elegy of sorts, a litany of good-byes to places and sights the dying poet knows will not be his again.  And yet it is also a celebration, of the beauty of this life as recorded in one man's recollections.

 

It would seem that in his case, as in that of Ignatius, the body finally gave out, but the healed spirit continues to soar, with the lithe elegance of a small cat.

 

Representing . . .

 

 

 

 

1. At least 2 more weeks off work.

 

2. Probably no teaching this semester.

 

3. No retreat in February.

 

4. $$$$$$$

 

5. Sigh.

 

 On the plus side, the surgeon is pleased with the healing and lack of any complications so far.

 

Workin' that word "reverence."