Suicide Prevention Advocacy

 

I'm off to D.C. tomorrow for the annual American Foundation for Suicide Prevention's advocacy event -- per FB post:

 

"Tomorrow more than 200 AFSP volunteer-Field Advocates from across the country will be heading to Washington D.C. for our annual Advocacy Forum. On Thursday, they will be going to Capitol Hill to meet with their members of Congress to urge more support for suicide prevention and mental health care."

 

I feel as if I should have something profound to say in advance of this trip.  But I have only a few observations to offer:

 

We're staying and working in the same hotel in which our young family stayed on two trips to Washington when the kids were small.  Not so easy.

 

I called the local county-seat-city newspaper for Small Church Village and environs yesterday to suggest a story. Pastor-Goes-to-Congress sort of thing.  No response.  I think the topic is too scary. I don't have a  lot of patience for that kind of apprehension, you know?  I'm going to write my own article for the community-produced newspaper in my home town, which is an edgier kind of place, and send it to county-seat paper.  We'll see.

 

Last month I went to a suicide prevention workshop for clergy and mental health professionals.  As far as I know, I was the only suicide survivor in the room of about one hundred people.  The tenor was quite different from what I've experienced in the presence of survivors.  I'm realizing that we've become pretty fierce people.  We are way beyond "let's help people and do good."

 

I'm not taking my computer, so look for me on FB and Twitter.  Being fierce.

Mentoring

This morning, as I prepare to preach on Galatians and Paul's three-year sojourn into Arabia, the sojourn marking the period between call and action, I find myself considering those who have mentored me in ministry.  That would be almost everyone, of course, but a few in my pre-seminary years stand out:

The non-mentor mentor, the associate pastor who, back when I was in my mid-thirties and beginning to ponder a call to ministry, was (with one long walk excepted) too busy and flustered to find time to listen and perhaps offer some pre-kindergarten suggestions for discernment. Reminder to self: If another person even hints at the intimations of a call in her life: make. the. time.

Her opposite on the spectrum, the associate pastor of my home church, whose primary gift may well be the nurturance of gifts in others.  She was the first person to invite me into the pulpit, and she spent hours and hours with me over the years planning our adult education program, technically because I chaired the committee but, in reality, because she wanted to share with me her wealth of church leadership knowledge.

The most ironic of mentors where I was concerned, the Jesuit priest in his seventies who spent two years helping me discern and plot my official embarkation on my call, and then more years after that helping me to stick with it after Josh died.  Hours and hours and hours of listening, with the occasional penetrating question tossed my way, and then email after email, helping me to envision a way through the thicket of grief which defined the last two years of seminary for me.

 

There have been others, of course, in seminary and beyond, but today I'm thinking about those early desert-of-Arabia years, those Be still and listen yourself years. 

 

What about you?  Who has listened to you, and who has helped you learn to listen to God?

Newbies

The ostensible subject matter of this particular Mary Oliver poem is crickets, but I think it applies to my house finches as well:

 

 

Let us hope

 

 

It will always be like this,

each of us going on

in our inexplicable ways

building the universe.

 

from

 

Why I Wake Early (2004)

Hatching!

 

As of early this evening, one of my house finches is making a break for it, and it looks like there's a crack in the other egg at the top as well.

 

It's a bit chilly, so I promised myself one picture, and one only, until it warms up late tomorrow morning.  This is requiring every ounce of self-discipline I have. 

 

I'm leaving Church Town tomorrow afternoon for a few days at home, so I hope they all decide that tomorrow's a good day for hatching! 

 

 

Suicide Prevention Advocacy

Next week I'm off to Washington, D.C. for the Annual Advocacy Summit of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.  We'll be meeting people from all over the country, learning a lot, and spending Thursday on Capitol Hill meeting with our senators and representatives.  (I agreed to co-ordinate the scheduling of that effort.  We have eighteen of  'em, in five different buildings, and six of us from all over the state. Remind me not to do that again.)

 

We were asked to supply "vignettes" for the packets we'll be delivering to the Hill.  Here's mine:

The photo was taken on the morning he graduated from college.  Honors at the University of Chicago.  A beautiful girlfriend and a great circle of friends.  A job and a new apartment lined up.  Nothing could have prepared us for the fact that one and one-half years later he would be gone.

Our son, Josh Williams, was a patient and loving brother to his twin brother and their younger sister.  He had always been ready for adventure – all-day kindergarten;  summer camp in North Carolina, 600 miles from home; his full junior year of high school spent in France; a college road trip to Idaho and back over a holiday week-end.  He enjoyed photography and played soccer; he canoed in Canada with his grandfather and visited Montreal with his French brother and lots of Europe with his twin brother.  His loved his whole extended family and looked forward to creating one of his own.

We saw no signs.  In retrospect they were there, and we were to learn, when it was too late, that he had probably been suffering from a serious and desperate depression for at least the last couple of years of his life.  Unrecognized, unacknowledged, untreated.  Depression is a vicious, deadly illness, and yet is so easily concealed by those determined to do so, by those who do not realize that their lives are in jeopardy. 

I never planned to become a suicide prevention advocate.  How could you prevent something you had no idea was headed your way?  But as the years have passed, I have learned that much might have been done to alert us and our son to the danger he was in, to address his illness, and perhaps to save him to become the husband, father, and multi-gifted contributor to the world whom we had imagined he was becoming.  To continue his life as our beloved and treasured son.

The turning point for me came when I was diagnosed with breast cancer three years after Josh died.  I quickly saw that, whenever I mentioned my diagnosis, other women would step forward with support, encouragement, advice, and every possible kind of help – whereas, if I mention that my son died of suicide, I can clear  room in a matter of seconds.  The topic of suicide, I saw, occupied the position that breast cancer had when I was a girl: stigmatized, unmentioned, poorly researched or understood, little publicized. 

THIS.MUST.STOP.   We cannot continue to allow individuals to suffer such despair that death seems preferable to life.  We cannot continue to allow the lives of families and friends to be altered beyond recognition by unnecessary deaths by suicide.  We must find ways to identify and care for those whose lives are threatened by mental illness and other forms of anguish.  We must fund the research and the treatment and the education programs that will end this terrible scourge.   We must bring this subject out of the darkness and into the light, and end the suffering that leads to suicide and the suffering caused by suicide.

Spiritual Consolation

This morning, I am supposed to be packing and then en route to a lovely retreat center three hours away for three days of Presbyterian reflection and planning.  I spent a lot of time preparing two liturgies for today, and was all set to lead the opening worship service and this evening's compline ~ and was so looking forward to this time of getting to know and working with my colleagues.

 

Instead, I will be writing a sermon for the funeral service that I'll be conducting tomorrow for a lifelong church member.  He and his wife, who died just a year ago, were the only ones in their family still members of our church.  His adult children had not, therefore, seen the bulletin announcements the last two weeks indicating that I would be away for three days, and made their scheduling plans before involving me.

 

It's a privilege to preside over tomorrow's Service of Witness to the Resurrection for someone with whom I've spent a great deal of time as he has struggled with his health and the loss of his wife of fifty-eight years.  But it occurs to me that, under the circumstances, I, too, need to hear a portion of what I wrote for today's noon service for the Presbytery retreat, the opening of a day dedicated to exploring The Way of Consolation.

*****

The essence of spiritual consolation is the sense of an inner  movement toward God.  We all experience fluctuations in our relationship with God.  Sometimes we feel that we are moving toward God; sometimes, away.  Sometimes we feel that God is moving toward us; sometimes, that God is pulling away.  At times our relationship with God is one of peaceful confidence that God is present to us and active in our lives -- whether things are going well or not.  At other times we are confounded by turbulence and a sense of distance from God -- again, whether things are going well or not. 

 

These movements, or changes in  feelings and experiences, are not indications of success or failure on our part.  They simply are.  What helps, however, is to learn to recognize them.  Our capacity to see clearly, to make choices, to determine whether to follow new paths or to re-commit ourselves to the old -- to discern -- is grounded in our capacity to appreciate when and where God is at work in our lives, guiding and leading us toward God.

 

Sometimes we experience spiritual consolation as a overwhelming sense of God's presence that seems to come out of nowhere.  An awareness of God's gift of love, a feeling of strength and confidence that God is present and active, may come as pure gift.  Perhaps you wake up to a particularly beautiful sunrise and are flooded with feelings of gratitude for God's goodness and care for all creation.  Or perhaps you look up from your desk in the middle of composing a difficult letter in response to a troubling conflict and are nevertheless overwhelmed by the sure knowledge that God is present and offering love and reassurance to you in the midst of struggle.  The external situation is not the determining factor in an experience of spiritual consolation.  The determining factor is the awareness of God and your own connection with God.

 

More often, we experience spiritual consolation, a movement toward God, as the result of some form of activity that is clearly leading us toward God.  If we are engaged in prayer, or in study or preparation for preaching or teaching; if we are conversing with someone in a pastoral encounter; if we are working on a mission project or even an administrative task; if we are doing, or planning, or preparing for the work to which we are called, we often experience a corresponding sense of spiritual consolation.  That sense of being drawn toward God, of our deepest core self being in accord with God's desires for our lives, of satisfaction in our calling, might come in the feeling of deep affirmation in the context of a sermon that's going really well.  Or it might be the only thing getting you through a meeting that's going really badly.  Again, the external situation is not the decisive standard.  What matters is that sense of movement toward God -- which most often reveals itself when we are alert to who we are as someone being uniquely shaped and molded by God and what we are doing in response to God's individual and loving call to us.

 

 

 

 

Housekeeping

"And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole."

 

~ Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

 

 

 

A week ago, having insistently been made aware of what I thought was a house sparrow zipping away from the porch each time the screen door slammed, I finally investigated the gutters for the nest which had to be there.

It had been carefully constructed in a hanging basket of geraniums. 

Last night, my google image research convinced me that the birds are house finches ~ the eggs are too blue and too lightly speckled to pass muster as those of house sparrows.  Male house finches are splashed with red, so if the father shows up ~ and I presume he will if all six eggs hatch, as there will be plenty of work to occupy both parents ~ I will have a definitive identification.

My grandmother maintained a small museum of birds' nests, which she used to present to school groups and classes whenever she was invited to share her store of avian knowledge.  For several summers, a pair of wrens nested in her clothespin bag.

 

I have become my grandmother!  Not a bad fate.