This week I finished Lamentations by Ken Scholes. Preview chapters and other stories are available on the publisher's website (sign in required, but if you like fantasy/science fiction this is a good site). This is a good read about religious authorities who try to control the flow of information and what happens when power corrupts. It is post-apocalyptic in that this world has already survived disasters, and confronts another one. How do we learn from our mistakes, how do we confront our own demons, what will we kill for, what will we die for, who will we bury: a man who had been Pope, an orphan, a king, and a courtesan are the lead characters who must answer those questions. I stayed up to finish the book and just downloaded some short stories from the author's website. It's the first in a series, and that's good news!
Last summer I "met" Sister Fidelma, the medieval Irish dailaigh/detective/religious woman/sister to a king who is the central character of a mystery series by Peter Tremayne (a pseudonym for Peter Berresford Ellis, a historian). Having zoomed through most of the books available at the time, I was delighted to find Dancing with Demons in the new books section at the library this summer. This particular book is not a "whodunit," but a why did he do it, but of course with a wonderful final denouement. I would recommend starting at the beginning of the series. It's a glimpse into a time in Ireland when women had equal rights and when Celtic Christian spirituality and religious life had not yet become overcome by the Roman church but is still confronted by its Druid past. As a current fan of the Iona Community, I think that Sister Fidelma does a good job at revealing the roots of Celtic Christian practices while providing a good mystery read. If you like the Brother Cadfael mysteries by the author Ellis Peters (pen name of Edith Pargeter) you probably will enjoy Sister Fidelma.
Then, because it's been one of those weeks, I find myself in the middle of reading four other books, depending on where I'm sitting. The first paragraph of Tethered by Amy MacKinnon sets the tone for this mystery about a woman undertaker who believes in death, not life—at least so far:
I plunge my thumb between the folds of the incision, then hook my forefinger deep into her neck. Unlike most of the bloodlines, which offer perfunctory resistance, the carotid artery doesn't surrender itself willingly. Tethered between the heart and head, the sinewy tube is often weighted with years of plaque, thickening its resolve to stay. More so now that rigor mortis has settled deep within the old woman.
The demons that this heroine confronts are her own childhood traumas in the person of the young girl who finds peace and safety playing in the funeral home, and her belief or fear that death is stronger than life and love.
I indulged myself with a trip to my local independent bookstore on Thursday and got Empress: Godspeaker book One by Karen Miller. How does god speak to us: in slavery, in war, in our children, in our friends, in certainty, in love, in pain or in sacrifice? When do demons overcome god's will? What is sin? The heroine has more will to live and to endure than any other fictional or real character I've met recently, and so far, Hekat is certain that she knows god speaks to her and that she is in god's eye. The god in this book is not one whose eye I would want on me necessarily, but it is an engrossing read, nonetheless.
Barbara Brown Taylor faced a number of her own demons in Leaving Church—a book that was hard to read as I am trying to find a church. But she's a great writer, so I picked up her new book, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith. She writes about practices for encountering God in everyday life, not necessarily within the walls of the church. I just started reading this and hope to participate in the book group discussion on Monday September 28 at Rev Gal Blog Pals.
Finally, as an antidote to the early August Red Sox slump, I picked up The Faith of 50 Million: Baseball, Religion, and American Culture, edited by Christopher H. Evans and William R. Herzog II. This book of essays discusses baseball as a central part of American civil religion. Although this book was published before the Red Sox broke the curse to win the World Series in 2004, it reveals and captures the religious fervor of baseball fans, a fervor most ministers might wish their congregations shared just in part. It is a fascinating analysis of American culture and how sport influences our religious institutions and vice versa.
(p.217) Commentators who wax poetically about the virtues of baseball will point to what they believe are its intrinsic qualities of greatness—the fact that the game reflects a uniqueness that metaphorically and literally can open our souls to a vision of paradise. Yet, what the accounts of the Dodgers [1956 World Series] and Red Sox [1975 World Series] suggest, and what many of the chapters in this book suggest, is that baseball is just as likely to break our hearts as give us ecstasy. For many who passionately follow a sports team, who play a sport, or who love someone who plays a sport, we are amazed at how difficult it can be to absorb a loss—even with the passing of years that pain still lingers (ask any Red Sox fan about the 1986 World Series). To say "It's only a game" is little solace when we as a culture are so passionate about winning—no matter the context or the cost.
As I am in mid-read and describing these books, it occurs to me that these authors are trying to describe the ways we not only seek meaning, but also redemption. Because, often, in trying to make meaning of events in our lives, we find that we need to make reparations or at least to make things turn out differently, or to find a way to change our experiences of loss and conflict. As summer draws to a close and we begin to gear up for fall and school starting (how odd it is, after five years, not to be thinking of fall classes), perhaps these summer reflections set the stage for a time of t'shuvah—the forty days the Jewish sages set aside for repentance and making things right prior to Yom Kippur.
May these last weeks of summer still offer time for making meaning and making amends, for confronting our fears, finding love and knowing God, catching up with ourselves, our gardens, our friends and family, and for getting back into the lead in the AL East, or at least into the wild card race.
Today I am mulling what tomorrow is bringing me. I've hired a new person and the staff that has been reporting directly to me for the past twelve years will report to her and she will report to me. Partly this is succession planning for the time when I either leave or go part-time when I get a church, and partly it is so that we strengthen the financial depth and skills at the agency. All good reasons, and I think the person I've hired will be a good fit for the department and the agency. Nonetheless, tomorrow I am saying good-bye to certain relationships, as I am welcoming someone new, and as I am facilitating change.
What I'm doing is not so unusual—we all navigate relationship changes of one sort or another throughout our lives. Still it's hard. I am reminded of the insistence by my CPE site supervisor on the need to say "good" good-byes. A "good" good-bye is not slinking out the door without saying anything or acknowledging how you feel; it is not a hit-and-run good-bye—see you around. A "good" good-bye takes the time to say to people, "you are special to me, and I'll miss you, and while I may be in touch, this particular relationship we've had in this space and time will not be the same." CPE interns have to say good-bye to make space for new interns, pastors have to say good-bye to allow a new pastor to do the work, and tomorrow I get to say good-bye while staying, and allowing new and old people to form relationships with one another, and trust that I have enough internal security and confidence to know that my relationships will survive and matter, although they'll be different, and allow a new person to change what I've been building for the past twelve years, while I watch.
I understand grieving and loss, have taken classes about it, written about it, experienced it myself and with others. In some ways it is easier to face our own losses rather than those of others. I know what I can bear. I can feel when my breaking point is coming. I really do have a break in my voice when talking about those things--a real breaking point when sadness gets the best of vocal self-control. And now when confronted with the immediate tough griefs of sudden deaths, I have grown unfortunately more practiced in being with my friends, colleagues and loved ones. I listen, I empathize, I give a hug, I sit: I've been there.
Gradual loss, saying good-bye while still there, is a different thing, and I have begun to face my own questions about how to be a friend and companion with people who are on that journey, and how to be on that journey myself. I have two friends at church who have been diagnosed with memory disorders, probably Alzheimer's disease. They are still here, still present, but in some ways they are starting to be not here. It's hard to know what kind of friend I can still be, both to them and to their spouses.
I just talked to the son of my next-door neighbor—well, I haven't seen her in three years because she had a cardiac incident and the blood flow to her brain stopped for too long, and perhaps—I think he feels—not long enough. She lives with her daughter now, has supportive caregivers, has a "g" tube. She's alive, but maybe not really living; present, but not here. Some days she recognizes him, some not.
Admitting that you have or that someone you love has a chronic illness is hard. At my workplace we are running support groups for people with chronic illnesses, based on a model developed by Stanford University School of Medicine. One of the things that the research has shown is that while chronic diseases have different symptoms, they share in common these symptoms: fatigue, depression, anxiety, frustration, stress, pain and isolation. Those common symptoms combine to keep the person from living as fully as possible. Chronic disease often and unnecessarily robs a person of control and independence.
In one of my seminary classes, The Transforming Power of Rituals, we brainstormed a list of events for which we have no rituals, and chronic illness was on that list. We have rituals for liminal events, those transitions from one state to another: christenings, dedications, weddings, bar/bas mitzvahs, confirmation, baptism, graduations, and funerals, for example. Clearly we need to create rituals and ways to acknowledge the impact that the gradual loss of capabilities has, not only to the person who is losing capabilities, but for all of us around that person, because our relationships change. The activities we used to do together, the food we ate together, the conversations we had together: all of these can change with a chronic illness. But when it affects your own life it becomes a hard personal task, and any help you might get is a good thing.
Pain and illness do have important functions that we don't usually acknowledge. Gregg Levoy writes this wonderful essay in his book Callings, called "Pandora's Mirror" (p. 90-92).
Several years ago state educators in Lansing, Michigan, halted plans to teach a breathing exercise as part of a health course in kindergarten through the health grade, deferring to concern that deep breathing could promote "devil worship and mysticism."
I understand why they're afraid. As a child, I knew the power of breath. I knew that is I held my breath long enough, I could turn blue and pass out, thereby generating gales of attention. And I used it regularly, or so I'm told by my mother, who still describes it with the kind of dreadful fascination people typically reserve for reminiscing about floods and earthquakes.
Breath is life. It the holy wind that carried the Word. When children begin to feel that this power resides within them, they become too powerful to control, too intuitive to frighten easily.
But Lansing didn't let the program through, thereby doing its part to prevent any swelling in the ranks of devil-worshipping kindergartners, and adding to the already colossal alienation people feel from their bodies. It is an estrangement that prevents us from honoring our bodies as the emissaries they are. Who, after all, wants to enter into intimate relationship, or even conversation, with any-body they were taught to rise above or ignore?
Besides, who knows what we'd find out about ourselves if we peeked into that Pandora's box? Who knows what we might discover our souls are missing, and who needs the grief? A lot of us prefer to treat the symptom rather than face the source. We would rather be cut open from stem to sternum than open our hearts from the inside out.
In addition to our appalling disaffection from the body, we also have a long and pernicious history of linking sickness with sin, of dressing our wounds with guilt and judging our illnesses as failures and evidence of general unworthiness. The cruelest question that is always present, even if unasked, in the presence of illness, said the anthropologist Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death, is "Why are you sick?" Or worse, "Why have you done this thing to yourself?"
This attitude is guaranteed to make a sufferer feel worse, and it betrays a kind of arrogance. It implies that we are masters of our fate to such a degree that we can not only create disease but also make it disappear by the ordination of sheer willpower and the proper sort of faith. We are not, I think, so much in control of things. We have not necessarily drawn to ourselves everything that happens to us, and not every symptom is a metaphor. There are bugs in the world, and they carry diseases. There's arsenic in the water and exhaust in the air. There are tragedies like pits that people fall into. There are accidents, wrong times and wrong places, floods and earthquakes. There is also no guarantee that healing our lives will cure our diseases.
Rather than using sickness as an opportunity to beat yourself up, or set off on a crusade to figure out why bad things happen to good people, better to try and use illness and pain for what they were designed for—to get your attention. Understand that though you may not have created them, your soul may still be attempting to communicate something to you through them. We are not so much responsible for our illnesses, says author and Buddhist teacher Stephen Levine, as we are responsible to our illnesses. The question is not so much what to do about our suffering, but what to do with it.
Being responsible to an illness, he says, means being willing to relate to it, have a full-on experience of it, and investigate not just the pain but also your reaction to it. It means letting it communicate with you rather than merely trying to subdue it. Though that's certainly the natural reflex, it probably is an accurate mirror of how we resist whatever is painful and unpleasant in our lives, whatever doesn't go our way, whatever makes us feel out of control. It's a mirror to how we regard not only the physical but also the emotional symptoms in our lives: our sulfurous marital fights, our obsessions with money or love, our wayward kids, our debts piled up to here, that low-grade anxiety running like a white noise through our days, the constant feeling of something missing. To say nothing of the symptoms scattered around the body politic.
This sense of responsibility cannot be soft-pedaled. It will try your most grim self-restraint, for instance, to lie in bed and just let sciatic pain be while it yowls at you. But there is knowledge and therefore power in following its migrations, plotting its geometry, and noticing how sometimes it burns and sometimes it vibrates, sometimes it spills boiling oil down the legs and sometimes it spreads hot coals in the pan of the pelvis, and always it make you feel so vulnerable. It would be so much easier just to grab a fistful of aspirins, wash it down with an immediate appointment at the chiropractor's, and get back to business as usual—which might be what landed you on your back to begin with.
Being responsible, Levine says, means asking not "Why am I ill?" but "What is illness?" Not "Why am I in pain?" but "What is pain?" It means seeking the what rather than just the why. The mind is so desperate for answers, and so easily settles for the simple and convenient ones, that it often ends up leaving completely untouched the deeper truths and deeper processes. It also routinely ignores the need for change, which is the unspoken petition of any illness. This can be the need for a change in priority or posture, a change in attitude, approach or tempo.
Change may or may not ameliorate the symptom, depending on how long we've waited before making the change, but it can have a powerful impact on the course of not only an illness but also a life. For instance, among those who have experienced spontaneous remissions—inexplicable recoveries from "incurable" diseases—over 90 percent, Bernie Siegel says, first experienced major, and favorable, change in their lives prior to the healing: dramatic reconciliations, religious conversions, the admitting of long-denied truths, the removal of obstacles to a career or a marriage, the birth of a child or grandchild. These people, however, didn't make their changes in hopes of effecting such an outcome, but "to do things more appropriate to living than dying," as one man put it. Healing was the by-product of the change.
If our only approach to the body's deep cries is to clamp our hands over our ears, we have dismissed the dreams of the body. If we medicate our symptoms away or get them "fixed" by the doctor, hoping to return to our lives and pick up where we left off without missing a beat, then we've missed the point of pain. Fortunately and unfortunately, though, the opportunity to grow will come around again.
As I reflect again on tomorrow, being responsible to this good-bye while still present means that I need to say good-bye and to say welcome, and to accept the change that I am facilitating. My ritual for doing so is to bring in some food, some fruit and breakfast breads, and to make introductions while sharing hospitality, and to acknowledge the bittersweet moment that this is. Perhaps in making space for these feelings and in facilitating this change, I will find that I have removed an obstacle to my full-time ministry—that being the sense of commitment and responsibility to this agency that I have, and haven't been able to let go.
May God grant us all the gifts of "good" good-byes, of being present, of listening deeply to our bodies, and of accepting the moments of grace that can be a part of each day as we pay attention.
