Plan B or Hopeful Waiting?

One of my favorite Advent readings is Henri Nouwen's piece, "Waiting for God" found in Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas for November 28. It's taken from "A Spirituality of Waiting" in The Weavings Reader, based on a sermon by Nouwen. So it was lovely to be able to turn to it this morning on this first Sunday of Advent. I invite you to read it in one of those places, if you can, and come back. I'll wait.

Nouwen captures our issues with waiting: the fear and frustration that usually infuse our waiting, and he looks at the Advent heroes of waiting: Zechariah, Anna, Elizabeth and Mary, whose waiting was done securely in the promises from God in their lives. They wait actively, present and alive to the moment. They wait in hope.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)

Living in faithful hope is hard. I've been writing songs about waiting. I am happy to celebrate that I did use the word hope in my new anthem, Waiting. And if you wait until the fourth Sunday of Advent, I will record my church choir doing the premiere of that piece and will post it here.

It is the same watchful expectancy that Matthew 24: 42 calls us to. This morning we sang this hymn text to go with the Matthew text:

Keep alert, be always ready,

God's time approaches sure and steady,

God's strength will keep your heart from blame.

Clouds, the Spirit's light concealing,

disperse, God's purest light revealing;

creation will its Sovereign name.

Dry branches burst forth green,

God's advent signs are seen:

Hallelujah!

Christ's judgment won,

God's will be done;

God's new dominion thus begun.

New Century Hymnal #112

with this tune.

"God's will be done?" One of the things I've done in the last few months while waiting in the search and call process is to think about Plan B options. I've called it thinking outside the box. But since I found this wonderful piece on God's Call to Plan B, let's explore the idea of waiting in hope as living in Plan B.

God's Call, Plan B?

The Bible is full of plan B stories. Joseph who had so many aborted plans in his life gives us this message. He tells his terrified brothers, "You meant to do harm but God meant to bring good out of it by preserving the lives of others . . ." You may want to stop now and read the whole story again. (Genesis 50:18-21.) All of life is plan B. …

At this time of year, Mary and Elizabeth are our models. What a plan B they both lived. Luke 1:26-56. Are there some clues for my life? Mary spent time quiet and alone to hear God. Obedient to what she heard she hurried to check it out with a trusted friend. She and Elizabeth apparently shared a vision of what could be. Wondering what God might be doing? Could they really be part of the plan? You can almost feel their joy and excitement as you read the story. Maybe they thought about Hannah. Her song was similar to Mary's. (I Samuel 1:26-2:10). Certainly there were many times in their lives that they had cause to think that God had got it all wrong.

What does it take to live abundantly in plan B?

Waiting in hope, living in hope, requires faith and understanding that God keeps promises. As God calls us, God will sustain us. We need to be present to God's continued call and presence. What does the Lord require of you today? (Still Micah 6: 8?)

This is a good time, to follow Mary's example , and look for community and friends to wait with you as you wait on God's call. Online this weekend, I found two great website resources and communities that I'd like to share with you:

1) Lumunos is the successor to Faith at Work and has a wonderful set of resources on God's call in our lives, including the full piece on Plan B, mentioned above.

2) The Uncluttered Heart provides a daily Advent reflection and is also a book, and provides an option for an online Advent retreat. I found this site because The Upper Room originally published Nouwen's piece on waiting and they also published The Uncluttered Heart by Beth Richardson.

How is God calling you? What is God's promise for you in that call? How do you sustain your hope and faith? If your faith and hope are in tatters, perhaps you can trust God to mend it for you, as poet, Emily Dickinson, who wrestled with faith and doubt wrote:

To mend each tattered Faith

There is a needle fair

Though no appearance indicate –

'Tis threaded in the Air --

And though it do not wear

As if it never Tore

'Tis very comfortable indeed

And spacious as before --

For Advent, I'm planning on reading through more of Dickinson's poetry in a reflective way with the help of this book: Mending a Tattered Faith by Susan VanZanten. Let me know if you can join me. Meanwhile, welcome to Advent, where we learn again the lessons we need about waiting and hope and about being present and ready to hear God's call, in whatever guise it comes.

The Future of Faith—in Review

I just finished reading The Future of Faith by Harvey Cox. Clearly this is essential reading for a blogger who writes about growing in faith, but I would highly recommend this to you all. While I can't resist saying that this is vintage Harvey Cox, given that the book is published this year as he celebrates his 80th birthday, this book is a really broad brush of the history of Christian faith. His definition of faith ends chapter 2 as follows:

The three ways we encounter the great mystery—the universe, the self, the other—all leave us with a sense of uneasiness, incompleteness, and dissatisfaction. … Faith, although it is evoked by the mystery that surrounds us, is not the mystery itself. It is a basic posture toward the mystery, and it comes in an infinite variety of forms. (p. 35)

Cox calls the era from the time of Jesus to the time of Constantine the Age of Faith, where people believed and acted upon Jesus' teaching that the Kingdom of God is at hand, or what Cox teaches as the "Reigning," rather than the Kingdom, of God.

Clearly the object of Jesus' own hope and confidence—his faith—was the Kingdom of God. (p. 45)

By the third and fourth centuries CE things were much different in the Christian churches than the work toward the "Reigning of God" that Jesus had lived and taught. Central in the book are several strong chapters summarizing "the devolution from faith to belief," (the subtitle to chapter five) as followers of Jesus lost their way as People of the Way: 1) by developing creeds, 2) by agreeing to or allowing apostolic succession, and 3) by merging with empire under Constantine. [I recognize and readily admit my own, and perhaps Harvey Cox's, Baptist biases in decrying this devolution, being non-creedal, non-hierarchical, and an advocate of the separation of church and state, and as a matter of full disclosure, I note that Harvey Cox and I are members of the same Baptist church.] The next era is the Age of Belief, where

Along with the "imperialization" of the church and the glorification of the bishops, now "faith" came to mean obeying the bishop and assenting to what he taught. Faith had been coarsened into belief, and this distortion has hobbled Christianity ever since. (p. 98)

These chapters are insightful summaries of the politics, theology and history that shaped Christianity over the next fifteen hundred years.

The primary thesis of this book, however, is that the Age of Belief is drawing to a close, and a new age is dawning—the Age of the Spirit. As a part of that new age, Cox asserts "fundamentalism, the bane of the twentieth century, is dying." (p. 1) It is an assertion not yet proven. In his final chapter, Cox compares the changes in the "nature of religiousness" in Christianity to similar changes in Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism.

The change assumes different shapes, but some of them overlap. With globalization, religions are becoming less regional. Christians, Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus now live on every continent. Religions are also becoming less hierarchical. Lay leadership and initiative flourish in all of them… In addition many are becoming less dogmatic and more practical. Religious people today are more interested in ethical guidelines and spiritual disciplines than in doctrines. They are also becoming less patriarchal, as women assume leadership positions in religions that have barred them for centuries, sometimes for millennia. … [But] as these changes gain momentum, they evoke an almost point-for-point fundamentalist reaction. (p. 223)

Optimistically, and perhaps prophetically, Cox then concludes his summary of the fundamentalist reactions across the world's religions by saying,

All these, however, are in the true sense of the word "reactionary" efforts. They are attempting to stem an inexorable movement of the human spirit whose hour has come. (p. 223)

I can hope that the Age of the Spirit is dawning. If it is, and we embrace some of the harbingers of that age: local congregations acting as followers of the Way—acting on the teachings of Jesus; reaching out to the poor and needy, theologically summarized in liberation theology as a preferential option for the poor; and applications of two core beliefs of Spirit-filled Pentecostalism, that promote change and act against materialism:

conversion ("you must be born again") and holiness ("be not conformed to this world"). In political and cultural terms conversion means that people can change and that therefore fatalism—either personal or societal—is not acceptable. Holiness means that you need not buy into the latest mind-numbing fads of the commodity lifestyle. You can be "in but not of this world." (p. 211-2)

In these movements that are part of the Age of the Spirit, there is great joy and vitality. The church, at least as a global whole, is not dying, but is being born anew. People are engaging with one another, with the mystery, and with the stories that hold the tradition.

As a side note, making a connection to the power of story telling that I recently recounted, and as an ah-ha moment about my own and other fellow Baptists' secret love of ritual (a Baptist friend recently ascribed her love of the communion ritual to being a "closet Episcopalian"), Cox writes:

Most people describe the Baptist denomination, in which I grew up, as not having any rituals. Even Baptists often make this claim. But it is not true. Rituals are enactments—in song, story, visual representation, and gesture—of the narratives that inform a people's identity. (p. 39)

Certainly Baptist sermons, hymns, and Sunday school posters were and are full of song, story and visual representations.

By the time we were ready to leave Sunday school, these sagas had become permanent features in the topography of our imaginations. They did exactly what rituals are supposed to do. (p. 40)

Read The Future of Faith. Harvey Cox tells the story of Christianity and of some of his own encounters with the key movers and shapers of faith of the last fifty years, Gustavo Gutierrez and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, among others, and engages our imaginations in the possibilities for the Age of the Spirit to come.

Truth Values and The Future of Faith

It was a week that drove me to chocolate in quantity, up until Thursday evening when I left work behind to head over to Harvard Yard where Harvey Cox was celebrating his retirement after 44 years. Harvey exercised his ancient cow grazing rights as Hollis Professor of Divinity, by bringing a lovely Jersey cow to the yard, named Faith.

Harvey asked our church choir to sing Robert Louis Stevenson's poem The Cow (set to the tune of Amazing Grace) and then one verse of Amazing Grace as the benediction to the event, so I was part of the event, as well.

Harvey was also celebrating the publication of his latest book The Future of Faith, and I took the opportunity to get an autographed copy. This is an important book, perhaps a necessary one for people of faith, as a guide to what lies ahead in the Age of Spirit, as we leave behind the Age of Belief, the Christian era since the Emperor Constantine's takeover of Christianity in 355 CE.

Harvey emphasizes that beliefs and faith are not the same thing, and that we are leaving behind the Age of Belief where a list of items that we must believe was enshrined in our religious lives. Rather, in the Age of Spirit we have increasing numbers of spiritual, not religious people, who do not believe in all/any of the items in the creeds, but instead understand that practicing our faith is more than reciting a litany of what we believe. Actions speak louder than words, and doubt is perhaps a necessary part of the way of faith. For Harvey this was highlighted when an acquaintance described himself in conversation as "a practicing Christian, not always a believing one." (p. 16) I've only had time to read the first thirty pages, but recommend this book to you.

In Harvey's speech at cow/retirement celebration event, he said the arguments about science versus religion are dead (or at least need to be). His perhaps prophetic look at faith (like all prophecy, we'll have to wait to see) dovetailed nicely with the second profound event of my week—an outing with friends to see the play Truth Values by Gioia DeCari at the Central Square Theater. It only has one more week in the run, and I highly recommend it. It is a one-woman show, an autobiographical look at the actor/author's years in trying to make it through the math maze as a Ph.D. student at M.I.T. She captured in her writing and in her acting the essence of the time and place, and of the dilemmas and sexism facing women in math and the sciences.

In one early scene DeCari attended the Good Friday service at the MIT Chapel and is struck by a mathematics professor's reading of Pilate's question to Jesus: "What is truth?" That reading spurred her research about truth values. But what are those? Not what we unsuspecting lay people would think. In one interview about the play, she said,

I especially liked the idea of using the math research I was doing at the time as a central metaphor. The title, “Truth Values," is a technical term for the notion of true vs. false. My research examined the consequences of adding other values between true and false, sort of a formalization of the idea of nuanced choices. This resonated with the choices I was facing in my life at the time…

The common theme in both Harvey's celebration and book and in DeCari's work is that a binary, black/white approach to human behavior and motives, to passions and faith, to truth and beliefs, and human relationships with creation, is inadequate. Asking if you believe in one creedal statement as a litmus test of Christianity is as untenable as asking if, because you are a woman, why aren't you at home raising babies rather than learning math.

DeCari's play reminded me of how much I don't want to be put in a box because someone has a preconceived notion about who I am, or should be. I suspect and hope that Harvey Cox's book will help us find a path out of the belief boxes that Christianity has been trying to maintain for the past sixteen hundred years into a faithful and faith-filled life.

Moral: Faith and art (with a side of chocolate) are better than just chocolate for a tough week.

Resonating with other

Preaching this morning using the text on the anointing of David by Samuel from 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13, I said, in part:

We are all David.

How many of you have ever said or done anything you've regretted?
How many of you have ever done anything you weren't very proud that you'd done?
How many of you have ever had someone do something amazing for you completely unexpectedly?
How many of you are loved by God?

We are all David. …

Up until the point where the oil gets poured on your head, where you are chosen, singled out, marked as other, you really don't have to do much. Once you are chosen, once you are singled out as different, then, then you start having to figure out what this means for you. Now people are paying attention, now you have to do something with what God has given you. …

So the second lesson is that, like David, we are all being called out to be other. …

What is your reason or excuse to come out and share with someone outside of these walls what this faith community means to you, or what our prayer time means to you, or what God is doing in your life or how you hear a story from the Bible reflected in your own everyday life? When you do the work of social justice that so many of you are called to do, do you tell people about the faith that motivates you to do so, and if not, why not? It's one thing to be called to be different, to be other; it's quite another to figure out how you really need to live that out and speak out about our difference. When we are called out, how do we live faithfully as other, as different? …

God is calling us out. We are all called to be ourselves as people of faith, both in and not in the world, to be contemplative and activists, to be do-ers and be-ings. We need to come out to live on the thresholds, in the boundaries.

But how?

For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, "Move from here to there," and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. The One who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always confident—even if one of us is not in the moment, like last week when I asked for your prayers, we as a community are a container for faith—we are always confident, even though we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord—for we walk by faith, not by sight.

Have faith to be other. Like God called David, God is yet calling us. Come running in from the fields, and see what God has in store for you. It is through that faith in showing up and coming out that we will find God, and be about doing God's work, here, on the boundaries, on the thresholds. The love of God will meet us there.

What struck me then in the time of community prayers is how much people variously resonated with otherness. One person asked for prayers for faith to be other while she begins to do ground breaking research—no one has done preliminary research in what she is trying to do. One person asked for prayers as he travels with a group of formerly homeless veterans who've formed a rock band—talk about knowing about otherness, he said. I am reminded that we all have fears and feelings of being other and thus outcast, and I was trying to reframe otherness as a gift that we each bring to the world in/as our faith journey.

The chorus of a song I've just been listening to by the Talley Trio, Orphans of God, has this key phrase: "There are no strangers, there are no outcasts, there are no orphans of God." What does it take for us to know that? And to know that being other, not being the same, is why God created us in our glorious diversity, and that being different is not to be feared?

In my meeting with the committee on ministerial preparation, which, give thanks and praise, has affirmed me in my call to ministry and so I move onto the next step, I said in response to the question, "What is my learning edge?" that I was reminded by my recent CPE experience of the blessing it is when we learn ways to get people to see us outside of the boxes that they put us in and when we remember to see other people outside of the boxes that we have put them in, and that is what we most need to do. If it were a bumper sticker, would it be "Question assumptions," rather than the 1970's "question authority?"

Rejoice today in your otherness, for it brings you close to the holy mystery and Otherness that is God. That perhaps is what loving the neighbor as ourselves really does. Then, I was reminded of this poem about neighbors and prayer and finding ourselves going places we don't expect to go.

(from Claiming the Spirit Within, edited by Marilyn Sewell):
Answered Prayers by Kathleen Norris

I came to your door
with soup and bread.
I didn't know you
but you were a neighbor
in pain: and a little soup and bread,
I reasoned, never hurt anyone.

I shouldn't reason.
I appeared the day
your divorce was final:
a woman, flushed with cooking
and talk, and you watched,
fascinated,
coiled like a spring.

You seemed so brave and lonely
I wanted to comfort you like a child
I couldn't, of course.
You wanted to ask me too far in.

It was then I knew
it had to be like prayer.
We can't ask
for what we know we want:
we have to ask to be led
someplace we never dreamed of going,
a place we don't want to be.

We'll find ourselves there
one morning,
opened like leaves,
and it will be all right.

Lawn mowing, or not, as theological exercise

Yesterday I went early to the garden center to get potting soil, edging for the new flower beds I'm creating and a replacement for the clematis that was a victim to some overzealous weed whacking early in the season. I confess that I hadn't mown my lawn yet this week. I will also say that I don't use weed killer on my lawn and I have really splendid crop of dandelions (not the usual dandelion greens kind, but a more tenacious, spreading/take over the lawn kind) that looked quite sprightly and yellow as I left the house.

I ran into one of my neighbors buying cosmos and she looked at my cart and asked, "so, did you mow your lawn?" The tone of voice implied that I was single-handedly responsible for the diminution in property values on our block otherwise caused by the recession in other parts of the country.

There are two theological questions that arise in response to this. One is a mental review of the conversation between Jesus and the young man about the great commandments: "love God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself." What I want to know is exactly how I am supposed to love someone who asks me that question in that tone of voice? The great commandment is, well, great, but the tactical implementation leaves me baffled sometimes. I smiled politely and said that I would be mowing the lawn when I got home. This neighbor has two four feet by eight feet patches of lawn on either side of her front walk, which I suspect that she trims with nail clippers. I have a corner lot, and a lot of yard that I would like to turn into something besides lawn, but that hasn't happened yet.

The second theological question, or perhaps it's a midrash question, is when did weeds happen in the scheme of creation? Did weeds happen when Adam and Eve got locked out of the Garden of Eden? Or did they happen as an American experiment in landscape democracy went wrong when lawns took over our gardens? See page four-five of the history of landscape design. I imagine that before that dandelion greens were harbingers of spring, and a tonic for the winter blues.

This Thursday I'm meeting with the committee on ministerial preparation as a part of the ordination process. I'm wondering whether my lawn mowing theological questions are perhaps part of God's preparing me for this meeting. These people are gatekeepers for my call to ministry, at least in this denomination. I will confess to some angst. While I have faith in God, I have experience and knowledge of human evil, stupidity, and/or fear of change. It's a similar tactical implementation question. Yes, we walk by faith, not by sight; yes, if God is for us, who can be against us; yes, and how do I do that as I walk into that room?

Your prayers are always welcome, because I also have knowledge and experience of human kindness, compassion and support.

This coming Sunday I'm preaching using the text on the anointing of David by Samuel from 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13 and incorporating the lectionary texts from Mark 4:26-34 and 2 Corinthians 5:1-17 on faith, with the sermon title, Having Faith to Be Other. When in doubt, preach about it.
I'll keep you posted.

Does anyone have an appropriate poem about dandelions for this spot?
Maybe I should just plant a pot of mustard seeds...

Confessions of a Data Geek

Other people have pastimes that absorb them during odd moments—knitting, puzzles, talking on the phone, reading, watching TV—add your favorite. One of mine is data analysis and pattern analysis. I can spend hours manipulating a block of data looking for the information in it. This past week I thought I would see what the church directories could tell me about women in ministry. I downloaded the most recent published online directories from the websites of The American Baptist Churches of Massachusetts (TABCOM) and from the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ (MAUCC). It's a lot of data to organize. I made it about a quarter of the way through a first pass on each of these data sets, so any conclusions are subject to change as the data set becomes more complete.

Out of the 77 ABC churches in this first data set which comprise three of the eight associations, with settled pastors, 25 out of 65 of the male pastors had been their church more than 10 years, and 3 out of the 12 female pastors had been in their church more than 10 years. In this incomplete set of data, 15.5% of the settled pastors were women, with an average tenure of 6.5 years, while the men had an average tenure of 10.9 years. There are only eight churches, or less than 10 percent, who have more than one minister—an indication of size. None of the five interim pastors in this sample were women. I leap to no conclusions from this data because the sample is incomplete. I'll keep you posted.

In the first set of UCC data comprising two regions of the state, I've looked at 107 churches. There are more UCC churches in Massachusetts and at first glance they have larger memberships. About one-third of the settled senior pastors are women in this set, but when you include associates and interims the number goes up to fifty percent. There are 144 ministers for 107 churches, so a significant number of women are associate pastors, and interim pastors, and many more churches have more than one pastor. I think that the tenure dates might not be so different for this list, relatively, although I did spot one women who had been in her church since 1980. One question to explore is whether women do have more of the smaller membership churches in the UCC, although one of the largest UCC churches has a woman as senior pastor.

But I have lots more data to organize for mining. What I hope to gather from this data are directions for questions to ask lay people and clergy. What prompted churches or rather congregations to hire women? Was it a conscious choice or simply the best available candidate at the time? What keeps them from hiring women as pastors? The ABC has a lot more ethnic churches—is it obvious what role culture plays in this vs. theology? What is it like to be the first woman minister in a church, or the second or third? How long did the search process take for women vs. men?

Along side this data mining, I just started reading the results of a 1993 national survey and study among Protestant denominations on women in ministry, published in Clergy Women: An Uphill Calling by Barbara Brown Zikmund, Adair T. Lummis, and Patricia M. Y. Chang. This brings some historical perspective to my data mining. They divide their results "into three denominational clusters that reflect the differences in how authority is perceived and located within these denominations: congregation-centered, institution-centered and Spirit-centered." (p. 7) Allowing for the fact that all of these typologies are arbitrary, I will be focusing my study on congregation-centered denominations where " the essence of the church is found in the gathered people, the congregation. In these denominations, authority centers on local congregations." (p. 8) They include American Baptists, United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalists, and Christian Church/Disciples of Christ among these denominations in their study, and also look at Southern Baptists and Brethren.

What they found true among institution-centered denominations (Episcopal, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Methodist Church) is that if the hierarchy/tradition, where authority is more centered, although slow and thoughtful and orderly in wrestling with the idea, embraces the idea of women in ministry then "as a consequence, once institution centered denominations make the decision to affirm the ordination of women, they live out the new order with remarkable vigor." (p. 12)

Where the authority rests in the congregation, rather than in the institution/hierarchy, as my initial data mining confirms, affirmation and acceptance of women in ministry is much more varied. I will say that my perception is that the hierarchy in the UCC is much more supportive of women in ministry and has more influence on congregations than the denominational relationships with congregations in American Baptist Churches, and might that go some way toward explaining the higher number of women ministers in UCC churches? Where is influence being used to support women in ministry?

Today, the Executive Minister of TABCOM visited my church on his rounds and was expressing a vision for local association reorganization and of affiliation of ethnic churches and mission focus. One of our members, who attends ordination councils as our church's representative, said that many of the ethnic church leaders opt not to participate in the association of local churches because the association is allowing ordination of women. Now what do we do with that?

My prayer this week is for clarity and insight as I look not only at patterns and data, but also at the human hearts, dreams and fears behind those patterns. How can I remain both centered in my faith and hopes, and visionary in thinking about church in the 21st century?

We don't want to talk about…

Last week I went to a book signing by Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, for his new book, In the Eye of the Storm: Swept to the Center by God, and in his remarks, he noted how supported he has been in the U.S. Episcopal House of Bishops by the women bishops and by those bishops who are people of color. The success of that support has been because they are recognizing oppression as a common cause, not as a comparative exercise. That is, the women aren't saying, well, sexism is worse than homophobia, and the blacks aren't saying, racism is worse than either of those, but together they are saying we are all beloved children of God and deserving of love, respect, and equality. In coming together they can work against systems of oppression, rather than being divided and fighting against one another about whose pain and troubles are worse. He writes that one of the reasons he suspects that there is so much focus on homosexuality in the church is that it's a way to avoid talking about sex, sexism, misogyny, and heterosexism. More on this when I've finished reading Gene's book. I started his book this morning and it's pastoral, engaging and folksy, much like Gene himself, a Kentucky native who has been a priest in New Hampshire for over thirty years.

A few weeks ago, my college alumnae quarterly sent out a note that they were going to have an article on aging and elder care issues. Since I work for an aging services agency and have an aging parent, I responded that I might be able to contribute to such an article. So, this past week I spent some time at work responding to questions about my own experience as a caregiver and family conversations about aging, and giving a broad overview of trends in elder care. As a long distance caregiver for my mother, who has been relatively healthy, my experience of confronting aging and disability and being a hands-on caregiver has not been so hard. But like varieties of oppression, experiences of caregiving and experiences of disease have some things in common. I'd like to share my responses here to some of the questions posed by the person who will be writing the article as preparation for another blog posting that I have been trying to write on the impact of diseases of all sorts on the relationship of caregiver/friend/colleague with the person who has a disease or chronic illness.

1. Did you talk to your parents or spouse about what their wishes were for their care in their later years? If you didn't, do you wish you had? And what would you talk about? How do you recommend bringing it up? Would conversations like this make a difference in your decisions about care for your parents/spouse?
When my father died at 63, twenty-five years ago, as a family we were really unprepared for that experience. It was unexpected and he had made no plans or legal or financial arrangements. Despite having a history of heart disease, he thought he'd just keep working and that everything would continue on like it always had. The reality for my mother was quite different--within two years, she'd lost her life partner, she lost her home, and she had no income except social security. I wanted to think that now we are more prepared to talk about issues of aging and death, but about five years ago, I tried to get my two brothers and my mother to have a conversation all together about what my mother's wishes were: did she want heroic measures, for example, to be put on a ventilator or life support if something happened or did she want a "do not resuscitate" order? Where did she want to live if she could no longer live alone? What things did she want her funeral to include? Who should make decisions for her if she couldn't? Who gets what? Despite making that attempt for the week while I was visiting, my older brother avoided the conversation every time I brought it up. Finally, my mother, younger brother and I had the conversation one evening before dinner. I gave my mother the Five Wishes form to complete, which I would strongly recommend to everyone facing aging (that would be all of us). It gives a way to guide the conversation. As far as a way in, there is always something: someone dies, someone is sick, or you read something in the paper. You just need to start and have the conversation.

I suspect that this summer it will be time to check in again on all of these issues, and some new ones, when I visit. My mother has macular degeneration and says that she can see well enough to drive only when the sun is really bright--she lives out in the country and can't get to the store or to the doctor without driving. She has some significant hearing loss and can't afford hearing aids. These are different issues than the ones we talked about before. How do we help her deal now? When do we take away the car keys?

Often it is not just the big things, it's the little things. My mom lives close to my brothers and two thousand miles away from me, but sometimes I think that she tells me things that she doesn't tell my brothers--maybe it is the mother/daughter thing. She had a hip replacement several years ago, and can't reach her toes to trim her toenails, so she either has it done when she goes to the doctor to get her corns and bunions treated, or she waits for my annual visit. Last summer we had a wonderful conversation about foot washing as an inspirational rite of service while I trimmed her half inch long toenails and washed between her toes, but I also found the local pedicure shop and have bought her gift certificates for pedicures, which she absolutely loves. My older brother sees her almost every day, but she would never ask him to trim her toenails.

Of course, that also makes me wonder what she's not telling me...

2. What has been the best source of support for you during this experience?
I have friends whose parents are aging, and we talk. Because I work in the field of aging, I am fortunate to have a wealth of information in my colleagues. I think my work provides the opportunity for my friends and for people at my church, for example, to start conversations about aging, and while I'm providing information, I'm also getting support. It's important to talk about the demands placed on you as a caregiver, and the role reversal that starts to happen when you have to take care of things for your parents, or aunts and uncles or older friends, while still understanding that your parents are adults who deserve respect and the right to make their own, good or bad, decisions.

It's astonishing the number of people I know whose parents have Alzheimers, for example, and while we have a program at our agency that consults with people on what to expect, I think it's really important for family who are dealing with a disease and situation like that to talk to other people about how to deal with the day to day things, not the medical things necessarily. Aging sneaks up on us all, and many of us are thrown into crisis mode by some acute episode and don't know where to turn, but the truth of the matter is that there are thousands of our friends, neighbors and colleagues who are also dealing with it, if we just start the conversation, and lots of resources available.

3. What has been most surprising to you about this experience, something for which you wish you had been prepared, or from which you learned something important?
Perhaps it is the little things like trimming toenails that I didn't even think about, and I think that my mother just accepted as one of the costs of getting older, and didn't complain about it. I don't know whether baby boomers will complain more or not, but I think we don't have to accept these little things as a necessary part of aging, but it also takes a fair amount of energy and research, and sometimes money, to find the ways to work around and through some of the "little" things that happen. Those were things I wasn't prepared for.

The other piece is the tremendous emotional cost of the losses I see my mother having: not only the loss of sight, hearing, and mobility, but the losses of lifelong friends who are her support network, the loss of identity as the go-to person, as the care provider herself, the social isolation as she can't get out as much on her own schedule, the loss of hobbies and pastimes because she can't see as well, bend as much, hear as clearly: reading, gardening, going to church become less enjoyable.
One of my friends who has a memory disorder (undiagnosed as to cause or type) has been grieving the loss of his identity as a smart person because he just can't remember things now. He was not yet 60 when it started, and he now can't have a job because he can't remember many things in the short term. For his wife, the first couple of years were very hard as it crept up on them. Imagine living with someone who can't remember what you just said five minutes ago or whether they ate breakfast or whether they read the paper--it changes your entire relationship, and when it's a gradual change it takes time to come to terms with it for both of you.

My boss says it takes courage to grow old and to survive the losses. I took a class on death and dying for my M.Div. program, and one of the things I learned from that was that people who do better as they get older have learned to grieve better--they feel it, deal with it and accept it. My mother is actually a big support for me as I face her aging because, for the most part, she has a real acceptance of death and aging as a part of the natural cycle--that comes from living on a farm and near nature all of her life, and she has her faith which is that something better awaits her after death.

4. What do future caregivers need to know or think about before the elder care stage of life begins for them and their parents? What makes sense to work toward? What might have to be let go?
Caregiving is hard. We find that among elders it is often the caregiving partner in a couple that dies first because they are not taking care of themselves and getting help and relief from non-stop caregiving. Ask for help. There are agencies that provide services, but you don't even necessarily have to go to an agency. It might not be a big deal for your parent's neighbor to mow their lawn when mowing hers, or for a friend to get groceries when she goes to the grocery store. But people can't help if you don't ask. People don't know what's going on unless you communicate.

The average age of our clients is 85, so people are staying healthy longer. That's the good news. The bad news is that what often triggers a pretty rapid decline is one acute, and unexpected, episode and as a child who comes back onto the scene you have no idea what medications your parent is taking, who are their doctors or other professionals, where they are banking, where are assets, or who are their friends who need to know things.

So part of handling aging well is perhaps applicable to handling growing up well and handling being in the middle well: organize your stuff so that you and others can make sense of it, and communicate to your family and friends about the people and things that are important to you. Make lists of medications, passwords, account numbers, addresses, and professional service providers. Keep the list in a safe place, but let at least a couple of people know where the list is. Have a local emergency contact and check in buddy who has a house key: neighbor, pastor, or friend, and make sure your child knows who that person is. Have a check in plan: someone that commits to making a daily email or phone call, especially for a person who lives alone.

Aging does not mean that you have to give up. You don't have to let go of anything that's important to you. You might have to change the way you have done it. But one of the things that we want to do is to transform community understanding of what it means to be getting older. I have someone working for me now who is 82, and she isn't interested in retiring. She finds her work meaningful and her colleagues supportive. I have another colleague who is almost 65 and chomping at the bit to retire in two weeks because she wants to travel and do other things while she still has her health. Choices that people make as they age are as varied as people are. Some people will give it all up and sit in front of the TV, and others want to continue to work, live, learn, love, laugh, and cry.

Confronting Doubt

I have always thought that doubt is a necessary element of faith, rather like darkness is a necessary complement to light--how do you know it's light unless there has been darkness? Similarly, how can you know you have faith unless you doubt and question?

The article on Mother Teresa's doubts in Time magazine, and the book of letters that prompted the article, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light compiled by Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, which I have not yet read, give us a deep look into doubt, deeper than most of us are willing to acknowledge or speak. Based on the excerpts in Time, it is no wonder she wanted the letters destroyed. I hope to find time to read the book if only to see if it gives a clue about how she kept on going, doing the work she had been called to do, while being in such a state of doubt. Many others of us, when we doubt or question, just throw in the towel and think that it's not worth it--why didn't she?

In A Hidden Wholeness, Parker J. Palmer (p. 82-83) talks about the need to hold paradoxes as both-and, not either-or:
"Spring is the season of surprise when we realize once again that despite our perennial doubts, winter's darkness yields to light and winter's deaths give rise to new life. So one metaphor for spring is 'the flowering of paradox.' As spring's wonders arise from winter's hardships, we are invited to reflect on the many 'both-ands' we must hold to live life fully and well--and to become more confident that as creatures embedded in nature, we know in our bones how to hold them.

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love. But in the spring we are reminded that human nature, like nature herself, can hold opposites together as paradoxes, resulting in a more capacious and generous life."

I would guess that Palmer would suggest that Mother Teresa began with a very deep faith and had a long and excruciatingly difficult period of doubt as the paradox that she had to hold. May our own paradoxes be as fulfilling, so that despite the possibility of doubt, despair and pain, we can move toward faith, hope and love.