Six Weeks: Suddenly I Have Things To Say

I have been thinking a lot about Psalm 88 in the context of preaching. I can see why it doesn't pop to the top of the list of homiletical text choices. The majority of sermons I've heard in my life have been of the exhortative variety, and it's difficult to imagine sending a congregaton off with the admonishment to walk in darkness.

But there's another way. It was when I first heard Barbara Brown Taylor's evocative sermons (at Chautauqua, where she has preached many times) that it dawned on me that I might be a preacher. How well I remember that stunned realization almost literally spreading through and warming my entire self: if that's what preaching can be, then maybe I am...?

It took me a very long time to get out of bed yesterday. I won't admit to how long. But once I had achieved that most monumental of tasks, which is exactly what it is during a time of profound grief, and had taken a shower, I called the director of my spiritual direction training program, who happened to be free, and drove over to the university to see her. We spent about an hour reflecting on our family's loss, on my situation, and on what I might do about returning to seminary and about returning to the spiritual direction program. Seminary is more than two hours away and my return is going to require some planning (although the administration and professors have been generously willing to go the extra mile in accomodating my needs). The spiritual direction program is right here, but this year entails a practicum and I am not about to attempt that at the moment. We concluded that I would go to this month's class next week and we would think about the practicum in a few months.

The director mentioned a difficult period in her own life and noted how grateful she had been at that time for work, for college and graduate classes to prepare and teach. "I know this loss is different," she said, "and I know that it will never not be with you, that it changes who you are, and that 'distraction' is not really the word that you are looking for." I responded by talking of one of the aspects of grief we all know about intellectually but still cannot overcome when we are personally affected: that everytime you do or think about something else, you feel that you have betrayed the person who is gone. "Somehow," I said, " if I am going to have any kind of a life again, I find to find a way to hold the two in balance: the life and work that go on, and the vast ocean of loss and sorrow that accompany them."

As I left, I thought about Pslam 88. The balance involves learning to live in a way in which ordinary tasks and events, laughter and frustrations, are intricately woven into the fabric of darkness. If I were to depict this balance in a quilt, it would be one in which patches in all shapes and shades of black were sewn together with threads of all colors, some of them even shiny and sparkly. A quilt on which you could stretch out on the grass in the sunshine, a quilt in which you could roll around and curl up in the darkness of a stormy day, a quilt which you could hang on the wall and gaze upon as you pray to embrace and live out both darkness and light.

Cynthia, whose husband died last spring, wrote yesterday about those events of life from which everything else streams as "befores" and "afters." I wrote about those events once; I can't remember whether my words were here or in a sermon, but I know that I said that the things that we think constitute such markers -- the long-planned for graduations, weddings, and births -- tend not to be nearly as significant in terms of interior transformation as those which are unplanned, sudden, and cataclysmic. Those other, expected events - they change your status. The catastrophes change your very being.

Cynthia acknowledeges that it is too soon to know where this phase of life will take her. I commented that yet another, seldom-mentioned, aspect of loss is the coming to terms with the reality that we are now someone else, not by choice, and learning to be that person.

And so. Psalm 88. Those words of the psalmist -- full of trouble, overwhemed, engulfed -- those are the ones I am looking for. I am learning to live as a different person. Gingerly and tentatively. But I am learning.

Psalm 88

We have been to Chicago to empty our son's apartment.

We have taken the first steps to open an estate. For our child.

I have wished many times over the past week that I had gotten to know my mother's mother better than I did. For the usual complex assortment of factors that affect family dynamics, although not for want of trying on their part, my brother and I never had the same depth of connection with our maternal grandparents that we did with my father's parents. Now, for my own selfish reasons, I am so sorry that I did not have more of a relationship with the grandmother whose daughter died at 28. I want to know what those first weeks and months were like for her. I want to know what the rest of her life without her beloved daughter was like for her.

Psalm 88 is the only one that applies. I have been interested to discover how many of its readers are puzzled, alarmed even, by its utter bleakness, its complete unwillingness to resolve itself in solace or praise. It does not even merit a mention in Textweek, which offers resources and commentaries that go almost all the way back to the beginnings of Christianity, as a possible preaching text. Apparently our own 21st century western culture is not unique in its reluctance to stare unreservedly into the abyss of darkness.

Only one psalm out of 150 speaks to this time. I know that I am going to begin to cycle through some of the other psalms of lament soon, the ones that do end in expressions of hope. But thank God that there is one to which to turn when the authenticity and power of unrelieved anguish is called for.

Five Weeks Almost

Ansel Adams

I'm worn out. I looked up synonyms for "depleted." Drained, sapped, impoverished, bankrupted. They all apply.

We went to a family wedding this past week-end, a beautiful event that went off without a hitch and was surely one of the most difficult celebrations I have ever endured.

I have to do some very much harder things in the next two weeks.

And somehow, as Lisa says, I have to continue to place one foot in front of another on the journey that goes from here to the new way of carrying it all.

For now,

I can't write publicly anymore. Cynthia says there is no comfort. And it is becoming impossible to describe a geography where the terrain is so desolate and the silence so immense.

I will let some of Mary Oliver's words, written after the death of her partner of many years, open the door to my hiatus. I am nowhere near the final verses that speak of laughter and admiration. Maybe someday. I am, I suppose, practicing.

********************

Heavy

~ by Mary Oliver

That time

I thought I could not

go any closer to grief

without dying

I went closer,

and I did not die.

Surely God

had His hand in this,

as well as friends.

Still, I was bent,

and my laughter,

as the poet said,

was nowhere to be found.

Then said my friend Daniel

(brave even among the lions),

"It's not the weight you carry

but how you carry it --

books, bricks, grief --

it's all in the way

you embrace it, balance it, carry it

when you cannot, and would not,

put it down."

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?

Have you heard

the laughter

that comes, now and again,
out of my startled mouth?

How I linger

to admire, admire, admire

the things of this world

that are kind, and maybe

also troubled --

roses in the wind,

the sea geese on the steep waves,

a love to which there is no reply?

The Hereafter

I've been thinking a lot about a woman I met early in my CPE program this past summer. Privacy considerations preclude me from providing many details, but I can say that I was called for a withdrawal of care (life support), that the initial phone call gave me the impression that the family had made the decision, and that that impression was far from accurate.

The final decision involved most of my afternoon and much of the evening of the on-call chaplain, and included a consultation with a Catholic colleague who carried around a little book outlining the Catholic position on extraordinary life support measures and the cessation of same.

At one point the anguished woman asked me whether I believed in heaven. "I do," I said.

"What is it like?" she asked, with that intensity that you only encounter in these situations, an intensity that demands absolute honesty.

"I don't know," I said.

I am not consoled by a belief that we will meet our loved ones in heaven, that life there will somehow maximize the good things of life here. (It seems that C.S. Lewis and I are in agreement on this one -- he mentions cigars as a would-be desirable feature.) I am not by any means a Biblical inerrantist, but I tend to believe that when the Bible says we shall be changed, it means that we shall be changed in a way we cannot imagine as long as we are still here.

I was intrigued when I spent an afternoon summer before last walking in the cemetery behind the Glasgow Cathedral and picked up a guidebook, from which I learned that the great cemeteries founded in the second half of the 19th century (like the one in which I walk at home) were designed on the basis of a fairly new-at-that-time development of sentiment surrounding death. The park-like atmosphere was meant to foster opportunities to "visit with" the dead, and certainly many people continue to derive great comfort from the sense that they are doing just that.

And maybe they are.

I don't know.

Gratitude, Burnoff, and Confusion

Isle Royale in the Fog

1. I don't know to whom I should be more grateful: Sarah Palin or Tina Fey. Or perhaps the Russians, the ten or twelve of them surveyed by Alaskans gazing across the water every morning before breakfast. Whomever -- I'm just thankful for anyone who can give me a moment of laughter.

2. Many, many, pre-child years ago, the Quiet Husband and I went backpacking a couple of times on Isle Royale, a national park island in Lake Superior above the U.P. Because of time constraints, we went back and forth via float plane rather than ferry. The plane from the mainland in Houghton, Michigan to Isle Royale's Rockport Harbor always seemed an iffy proposition -- you'd wake up in the early morning to a town blanketed by fog, and listen to the locals' breakfast reassurance that "it'll burn off soon." Which it did.

I have had, over the past couple of days, a few short periods of my own burnoff. The fog that has enshrouded me lifts for 20, 30 minutes at a time, and my mind functions with clarity. It feels good. It feels like me. It doesn't last, and the ensuing fog is as thick and impermeable as before, but it offers a sense of hope.

3. When I began seminary last year, it was with a great deal of trepidation, which only increased over the first several days as numerous young students told me with great confidence that they knew they were following God's will by the ease with which things had fallen into place for them -- money, jobs, housing. It wasn't until I began to meet the students of my generation that I found peers whose experience mirrored my own -- students struggling to manage their own tuition and that of their college-age children, students quitting or changing employment, students making challenging commutes, students transforming or dismantling well-established lives to undertake seminary educations.

So no, I was never in the group of people who felt able to evaluate their calls to ministry on the basis of the ease with which they were unfolding. But the death of my child? Off the charts.

I have no idea what to think or how to proceed.

Book-Ends

I have known, for almost all of my life, that people, no matter how beautiful, how gifted, how beloved, vanish. That the universe is a hazardous and uncertain place.

October 1960. I am seven. My mother and brother are gone.

October 2008. I am fifty-five. My son is gone.

Baring war, holocaust, or natural disaster, what are the chances?

Perhaps I am intended to uncover a new solidarity with survivors of the foregoing: war, etc.

But I can be forgiven, I think, for at the moment anticipating the future with little more than dread.

Four Weeks: One Turns to C.S. Lewis

It occurred to me last night that perhaps Lewis's A Grief Observed would help. Of course, I couldn't find it. So I went to Amazon and extracted the following quotes, which seem to me to reflect the universal experience of anguish in grief. Your mileage may, of course, differ, particularly if your experience is one more of observation than immersion. Many of the Amazon reviews note that the tone of A Grief Observed, written in the aftermath of the death of Lewis's beloved wife, differs considerably from the detached, scholarly (and, one might say, clueless) tone of his much earlier The Problem of Pain.

"Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand."

My version? Dozens, maybe hundreds, of the cards and emails I have received have assured me of the comfort God provides. In the past few days I have found some relief in opening cards from two friends in which they tell me how long the cards have rested on their kitchen windowsills as they have stared at them, wondering what to say, until finally they concluded that there is nothing at all to say beyond the much longed-for "We are here." (Of course, I accept all the other mail in the same vein. We are all doing the best that we can.)

"Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy . . . if you remember yourself and turn to [God] with gratitude and praise, you will be - or so it seems - welcomed with open arms. But go to [God] when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you feel? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside . . . ".

My version, as expressed to my spiritual director, was far less eloquent and a good deal more profane.

"The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.'"

Exactly.

There is, of course, more. But I am only on the threshold of this journey.

From today's Inward/Outward:

The Deepest Levels of Being
~ by Edward Farrell

Prayer is a waiting. It is hunger; it is love. Prayer is a relatedness, and prayer is a stillness. A primary dimension of prayer is receiving, is learning to listen.... Prayer is a growing; it is a discovering; it is a communion.... Prayer is an inscape, a totality of the universe experienced in the most minute atom. Prayer, rightly understood, is an expression of the deepest levels of our being.

Source: Prayer Is a Hunger

Miscellaney

I keep thinking that it did not happen. Any minute now the front door will slam and he will call, "Hi, Mom!"

A friend whose husband died in a biking accident in the metroparks says that she thinks the same thing. "I imagine him standing in the doorway and saying, 'Hey, I've been lost in the Park for four years ~' "

I wonder how we can ever move out of this house. If he comes back, he won't be able to find us.

My friend says that when she sees changes around town ~ a new paint job, or a new building ~ she thinks. "He won't recognize where he is."

There is an article in today's paper about a woman who lost her 28-year-old daughter a year ago to a sudden wave that washed her out to sea from a spot near Manarola on the walk at the Cinque Terre. We walked that same walk as a family on our 2000 trip to Italy. The mother, who was ordained to ministry a couple of months after her daughter died, notes that the experts says it takes four to seven years to recover from the death of a child. I have watched my father for what in another week will be 48 years. Obviously the experts are clueless. I assume that by "recover" they mean reaching the state the mother's blog reveals today, a blend of hopeful joy in life and anguished sadness and distress in loss. Or maybe they don't mean anything at all.

At the root of Ignatian spirituality is the conviction that God is to be found in all things. Yesterday I began to wonder, for the first time and in the most tentative way, where God might be found in this. A beginning, I thought.

And in the afternoon I accepted my CPE supervisor's invitation to sit out on the beach with her at sunset and I talked nonstop for more than an hour. In May I thought that I was doing CPE this summer to meet a Presbytery requirement. And then in July I thought that I was doing it so that I would discover the work I would want to do for the rest of my life. And now in September I think that maybe I was doing it so that I would gain a friend who can look death directly in the eye, because I would need her only a few weeks later.

Last night I paged through the guestbook from the funeral home. People from California, from New York, from North Carolina, from Arkansas. Rabbis, priests, nuns, ministers. People I have met once or twice in person via the internet. People I have known my entire life. Our son's teachers and classmates from Montessori preschool through middle school, from high school, from college, colleagues from work.

One person said that night, "I thought you said that Montessori school was small. Is the entire school here?"

A phone call from France. "I am so sorry I cannot come; it is just so far...".

We asked that memorial contributions be sent to the summer camp he so loved as camper and counselor. Word has come to us that the camp directors are responding to every gift with a personal note.

Just the thought of God's grace at work is disorienting and exhausting. But perhaps it is there ~ in the friend who sits at the kitchen table sharing ash-scattering stories, in the people who drive or fly for hours to share a few minutes with us, in the evening light over the beach.

Starting Again

This morning I thought that maybe I would try to start to pray again.

It seems such an improbable task, one requiring such courage, to seek Presence in the vast emptiness that lies endlessly and silently before me.

What came from today's music and text here was too raw to process here.

The wind goes round and round.

On Another Topic: Mad Women

In the past few days, I have watched the entire first season of Mad Men and most of the second. In my need for something to take my mind off the life I have been handed, I have become completely addicted.

As I have mentioned, the rampant sexism of the early 1960s is on display as an overarching theme and in every detail of this brilliant production. I've been thinking a lot about the women characters:

Betty (Bryn Mawr) ~ childlike wife of ad genius Don, with her intelligence and sexuality simmering rapidly toward explosion.

Helen (Mount Holyoke) ~ scorned by the neighborhood housewives due to her status as a "divorcee' " and her job in a jewelry shop.

Joan (Radcliffe? BU? I tend to think perhaps the latter on the basis of her roommate's reference to having seen her on the first day of college walking across the "Common" rather than the "Yard," but maybe the writers thought the former allusion would be more accessible to viewers) ~ the office manager with a figure that seems to grow more pronounced with every episode and a pragmatic desperation that enables her to keeps tabs on every type of temperature in the office.

Rachel (Brandeis? Barnard?) ~ exotic (to Don, because she is Jewish) and adult, a businesswoman whose mind gleams with ambition.

Peggy (no college, no husband) ~ whose quixotic combination of innocence, intelligence, and drive are pushing her out of the secretarial pool and into the no-woman's land of copywriting.

The fashions in this "Marilyn or Jackie?" world (one of the running metaphors of the series) highlight both the narrow path each woman walks and the barriers she seeks to circumnavigate:

Betty ~ form-fitting bodices and full skirts, breasts and waist accentuated and hips hidden under the petticoats of a little girl, the madonna of her era.

Helen ~ pencil skirts marking a return to the dating world and cardigan sweaters a nod to her status as mother of two.

Joan ~ full figure molded by armoured undergarments and poured into her clothing, exuding her own confusing and distracting blend of office professionalism and blatant invitation.

Rachel ~ elegant suits and elaborate hairstyles, the businesswoman who longs for genuine love.

Peggy ~ the wardrobe of a young adolescent trying to figure out who she is and where she belongs, hiding the reality of a pregnancy she could not believe in and an ambition equally mystifying to her.

Who would I have been?

Peggy, I suppose. When we were a year into Mount Holyoke, one of my friends and I decided we should drop out and go to Katie Gibbs, where we might learn to type and thus become actually employable. We harbored no dreams of finding husbands in the cool elegance of Boston office buildings, however; our plan was to make enough money to head for British Columbia and some kind of adventurous outdoor life. Like Peggy, we were somewhere in the middle ~ uncertain about who we were, dissatisfied with the role models of the past, unsure about how to create a different kind of future.

Three years later, I was in law school. I hope Mad Men remains a success so that we can watch how its women veer out of the roles the 1950s seemed to have preordained for them.

Three Weeks

The Wires of the Night by Billy Collins

It's Like This

You get out of the shower and put back on the pajama bottoms and t-shirt that you slept in and crawl back into bed and the phone rings and it's the coroner two states away and you talk to him and then you sit in the middle of your heap of sheets and blankets with your hair dripping wet and you stare at the wall for awhile.

You watch five episdoes of Mad Men in a row because the storyline distracts you for five or ten consecutive minutes at a time and the rampant sexism opens the door to a new understanding of what you were once up against as a young female attorney and that gives you something else to think about for another five minutes.

You try to frame an email to the church where you are supposed to be working but you can't figure out how to do that.

You stand between two Jesuits in their kitchen and realize that even the people who know more about prayer than anyone else on the planet are not going to be able to do anything at all except accompany you through this because even they cannot produce the only thing you actually want.

You spend an hour on the phone with your seminary advisor and realize that some other part of you that isn't you anymore longs to re-engage intellectually and go back and take the class on Tillich and you realize at the same time that the past four months have rendered you incapable of sitting through lectures on pastoral care any time in the near future so you can't figure out what to do about seminary either.

You realize that all those vases your grandmother had must have arrived with flowers after your mother and brother died because now you find yourself emptying and washing vase after vase after vase.

Your other son goes off to his new job for the evening and it occurs to you that people still go out to restaurants to eat.

That's sort of what it's like, but not really.

Sea Change

My friend Lisa writes about the ordeal of sharing in someone else's grief, and about trying to find appropriate words.

There are none.

I am not so unacquainted with grief, you know. I was seven when my mother and baby brother were killed in an automobile accident, seventeen when my first stepmother died after a fall, in my mid-twenties when my aunt got out of bed one morning and collapsed and died. (She also left behind a seven-year-old, as well as two teenagers.) It's only been a few years since I held a beloved stepmother's hand as she succumbed to cancer.

During the one day I spent on retreat at the end of August, I spent my entire time with my spiritual director talking about my summer CPE and realizing that, much as I had loved it and begun to suspect that I might have found my deepest calling in life, I had also been traumatized by a summer in which I watched people, usually at least two or three, die almost every single day, and in which I tried to create some space for an encounter with God, recognized or not, for the devastated members of their families. The deep sense of loss that I have carried with me since I was seven widenened into a vast lake, encompassing the reality that eventually washes over all of us.

I have no platitudes. No words of comfort. No certainty. My faith has always been more about doubt than conviction. I have been showered with great gifts and graces throughout my life, most of them marked by laughter and love and joy, but among them I must number a knowledge of a darkness so bright that I can barely look at it sideways.

Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange....

The Tempest, I. ii.

Memory

Some weeks ago, I said to someone dear to me, "So you are 78 and I am 55. What have you learned in the last 23 years that I need to know?"

And he talked about three things, one of which is memory ~ the importance of its role in shaping our understanding as we grow older. The particular example he offered had to do with how his own understanding and appreciation of his mother has developed and changed as he has sifted through memories that reveal much more to him now than they did some years ago.

I have had occasion to think a great deal about memory in the past two weeks - in a confused and fractured kind of way. And then someone sent me the homily from our son's memorial service, which at the time I had had little ability to grasp. Here is the first paragraph:

"At the conclusion of the great Russian novel The Brothers Karamazov, a group of boys is standing at the graveside of one of their deceased companions, Ilyusha. Alyosha, the adult at the gathering says this: 'I want you to understand, then, that there is nothing nobler, stronger, healthier, and more helpful in life than a good remembrance…you often hear people speak about upbringing and education but I feel that a beautiful, holy memory preserved from early childhood can be the most important single thing in our development. And if a person succeeds, in the course of his life, in collecting many such memories, he will be saved for the rest of his life. And even if we have only one such memory, it is possible that it will be enough to save us.' "

Two Weeks

1. A friend of mine who has been through this experience says that she believes that it changes you at a cellular level. I think she is right.

2. I went to mass again tonight. I should have taken a look at the Catholic lectionary for today first. I left in the middle.

3. I did a lot of other things today, including making a six-hour round trip drive with my other son to pick up some things from his apartment. He is going to live with us for awhile.

It's hard to remember the life we had two weeks ago.

About Something Else

Perhaps I should not even post this. Perhaps I will regret it and take it down. After all, I haven't yet come up with a way to get out of bed today.

But ~

I have been vaguely aware of national politics for the last week or so. And I have been reading my usual smattering of blogs, which cover a wide political and theological spectrum.

What I am really struck by, in the starkness of life as I now live it, is the unhappy reality that there are, indeed, two sets of views that are almost completely irreconcilable. In the church and in the nation.

I have read some religious posts so at variance with what I know and believe of God that I can hardly believe that they were written by people in my very own denomination. And they are always roundly applauded by a host of commenters. The adjectives that I would use are quite different, but I know that I am in no shape to respond with a modicum of decorum, so I will limit myself to saying: I finally get it. I finally get it when some say we simply cannot be in the same church.

And Sarah Palin? I had a great deal of respect for John McCain the man, if not for his politics, but that's evaporated. Again, I think it prudent to limit my comments, other than to say that if the Republican ticket is elected I will, for the first time, start thinking about my father's idea of moving to Canada. And yet -- I have friends, people whom I like and admire greatly, who are enthusiastic about her nomination. How does that work? How can we be so completely at odds in our respective visions for this country?

Perhaps it has been ever thus.

Mass with the Carmelites

That's where I've gone the past two Sunday mornings. I can't go to my own Presby church, full as it is of celebratory beginning-of-the-year-ness. I need a mass that is a sacrifice. For those of you familiar with the Ignatian Exercises, my life now is an immersion in Week 3. Week 4 looks light years away. And I need a place where I don't know anyone.

So today, of course, an acquaintance of mine, mother of former classmates of my children, was there, and came up and asked me whether I knew any of the sisters. "A couple of them," I said. "Would you like to be introduced?" "No," I said. I tried to soften it. "Another time."

Of course, there are things I miss. The celebrants are always male and, so far, not trained in preaching Protestant-style. It is often difficult to follow the homilies. They seem to be thoughtful and well-prepared, but the delivery somewhat misses the mark. Nevertheless, I get bits and pieces. From last week:

Know yourself. (Socrates)
Be yourself. (Cicero).
Give yourself. (Jesus).

And from this morning:

Sometimes people are under the impression that faith is like being covered by a huge electric blanket. But it is much harder to believe than it is not to believe. (Flannery O'Connor).

I have no idea what the point of either homily was, and the quotes are unlikely to be accurate. Close enough, though.

I did go and speak to one of the sisters this morning. I suppose it is of those degrees of separation things. A couple of years ago, my former spiritual director had preached there (and he is, in fact, a brilliant preacher) and referenced my photographs of Chartres Cathedral. She had talked to him about it, and he had asked me to call her, which I did. We never did get together to talk about Chartres, but we did meet, walking around the Little Lakes one day, and so today I re-introduced myself and told her a little of the circumstances of my being there.

The Carmelites pray all the time.

Not for Prime Time

In my comments, people write that my entries are "raw" and "authentic."

In reality, I am filtering and censoring every thought.

My interior truth is not for a public forum.

Prayers are still appreciated. I have seldom been one to find much in the way of comfort in my experience of faith, but I suppose anything is possible.

Stratoz found that his imagination took him a long way here. Quite different, but the same.

The days are so long.

Ten Days

A lot of people, dozens of them, possibly hundreds, have said things to me that begin with the phrase "I can't imagine...". In case you are wondering, that is not a phrase of comfort. It is not reassuring to know that others cannot put themselves in your shoes. And I do not say this with rancor. It's just a useful piece of information. To tell the truth, I can't imagine it either.

**********************

There was a movie, some time back. It came to mind when I was on the retreat that wasn't, before the horror of the last ten days. I don't remember why it found its way into my prayer, but it did.

The movie is about a young man born blind who is given the opportunity to see, thanks to a radical new treatment or surgery. In the end, his vision fades and and he is left blind once again, with the added burden of knowing what he has lost. If I recall correctly, it is in that final circumstance that the main point if the movie is found: that deprivation is all the more terrible to the extent that we know and understand what it is that we are missing.

What I suddenly remembered about the movie last week, an out-of-the-blue memory of a movie I haven't thought about since I saw it -- what? 25 years ago? -- is what happens to the young man when he is first able to see:

Jagged and seemingly unrelated fragments of light, of color, of shape, of dimension. He thinks that he is going insane. Having never seen anything at all before, he has no capacity for the organization of visual stimulii. He does not know what a tree, or a street block, or a person, looks like. He does not know what it means for something to "look like." Bombarded by all that sighted persons unconsciously filter and coalesce into wholes that make sense, he is almost overcome by confusion and anguish.

That's what this exerience is like.

Trying to find a way to absorb the unexpected, the unthinkable, the unknowable.

Imagine.

This is the hour of lead or, Things that come to mind

After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?
And yesterday--or centuries before?

The feet, mechanical, go round
A wooden way
Of ground, or air, or ought,
Regardless grown,
A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead
Remembered if outlived,
As freezing persons recollect the snow--
First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

~ Emily Dickinson

********************

There are truths that can only be discovered thorugh suffering or from the critical vantage point of extreme situations.

~ Ignacio Martin-Baro, S.J.

********************
Faced with death of those they love, these characters of mine don’t seek some vague afterlife. What they seek, what they demand, against all reason, is the return of the loved one in all his or her familiarity, ‘the profile and the grace,’ as Lorca called it, ‘the answers quick and keen, the honest look,’ in Millay’s poem. My characters, my fictional Catholics, understand the Church’s promise of eternal life, but nevertheless find it lacking. For what they really want is life returned to them in all its magnificence and love and heartbreaking detail. Life uncompromised by death, death utterly defeated. Anything else is unacceptable.

~ Alice McDermott

Week One

Numbness.

"The house looks like a cross between a florist's shop and a food court," says my father.

There's a wideness in God's mercy. The beautiful version from the Episcopalian hymnal, not the impossible one from the Presby hymnal.

Numbness.

Cards, flowers, emails, phone calls from across the country and two other continents. College students and recent graduates from the west coast to the east appearing in our church and on our doorstep.

Oh Lord, hear my prayer. Oh Lord, hear my prayer. When I call, answer me.

Crematorium. Gratitude for the book Here If You Need Me, which I had just finished. Not, as I had thought, because I needed to read about someone else's experiences after my own CPE. It seems that I read it because I needed to know how to accompany my son on his last journey.

Numbness.

People people people. Family and friends of twenty years taking care of everything. Going with us everywere. Bringing everything we need. Planning speakers and music. Being the speakers and music. Pastors completely at our disposal. A spiritual director who comes for hours. Jewish and Christian clergy from across the spectrum showing up at the funeral home.

John Bell/Iona music:

And wherever you go I will meet you,
Till you draw your last breath in the birthplace known as death;
Yes, wherever you go I will meet you, saying, "Here am I."

A church filled with people who care for us and nurture us and grieve with us. A church that causes me to shake my head in disbelief at those who would criticize or deride or dismiss us because we come together as Jew and Christian, gay and straight, believer and atheist, because we truly and deeply believe that it is impossible to be separated from the love of God. A Christian service which causes Jewish and atheist friends to say, "I love being in church." A service in which humor and sorrow blend in acknowledgment of reality.

A surprising number of voices saying to us, "I have walked in your shoes. Call me."

Psalm 139. Not Psalm 23.

And every once in awhile, a jagged crack in the numbness.

The first week with this terrible hole in our family, in our home, in our lives, in our hearts.

Our Heartbreaking Loss

For anyone who might be confused by the sudden number of comments, I will post what has been posted over at RevGals:

One of our sons, one of the joys and lights of our lives, died Tuesday night in Chicago. He had turned 24 the day before. He leaves behind his devasted parents, twin brother and younger sister, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, all of whom who have surrounded us and filled our home with food and companonship and love, but cannot bring him back to us.

I have read the many comments here and elsewhere and for now, I simply thank you all for your presence and prayers.

Psalm 139.

"If I make my bed in Sheol, You are there."

Gone on Retreat...

Five days of silence, and so I offer you your own mini-retreat:

Moonrise Over Prince Edward Island

August 2005

North Carolina V

Triple Falls

DuPont State Forest

August 2008

Friday Five

A terrific set of Labor Day questions from Singing Owl:

Tell us about the worst job you ever had.

Summer after my sophomore year of college: Hasbro Toys assembly line in Pawtucket RI, making yellow plastic GI Joe flashlights. "Nuff said.

2. Tell us about the best job you ever had.

Adjunct instructor in English at community college: students from countries all over the place and an array of income brackets, many of them about to lose their public assistance benefits under the Clinton Administration's revamping of the welfare system, and trying to earn as many college credits as possible to make themselves more employable. A number of of my students had struggled against alcohol and/or drug addicition and lost children to County Services, and their comeback stories, written in formats we struggled to transform into pieces recognizeable as basic English compositions, were truly inspiring.

3. Tell us what you would do if you could do absolutely anything (employment related) with no financial or other restrictions.

I would be a pastor-spiritual director-adjunct college instructor-photographer. (Sound familiar? Two more years?) Our way too-big house would be transformed into a retreat center and we would live in the bungalow next door. Or in someplace spectacularly beautiful. For instance, Oregon, or the desert southwest, or Maine, or Paris. The American church in Paris was looking for a pastor last year; I thought that sounded just about perfect. And French learned via the hanging-out-in-cafes method would be a breeze after Greek and Hebrew.

4. Did you get a break from labor this summer? If so, what was it and if not, what are you gonna do about it?

I don't think CPE counts as a break. But I did have that one day in North Carolina. And I AM going on retreat next week.

5. What will change regarding your work as summer morphs into fall? Are you anticipating or dreading?

Back to seminary, back to spiritual direction program, onward to church intership. Mostly anticipating, but a little apprehensive about my ability to pull off this balancing act for yet another year.

Bonus question: For the gals who are mothers, do you have an interesting story about labor and delivery (LOL)? If you are a guy pal, not a mom, or you choose not to answer the above, is there a song, a book, a play, that says "workplace" to you?

My twin boys were born on Labor Day week-end 24 years ago! Bullet points: overdue, induction over Friday and Saturday, c-section, and by Saturday night I was a nursing mother of two! OR photos show one baby settled peacefully into a satisfied sleep and another baby wide-eyed and frantic about the new turn of events. Nothing much has changed.

So Far: Disappointed

It's 10:37 p.m.

I don't know how long Barack Obama has been speaking, but I am less than thrilled.

This is akin to a b-o-r-i-n-g state of the union address. Although the Senator is a much better speaker than the gentleman who has delivered the last eight such addresses.

I was looking for inspiration. I was hoping to feel a sense of I Have a Dream vision and pride. I was anticipating an eloquent energy for hope.

I feel like Emily Litella.

Never mind.

Convention Watch

Having made fun of John McCain and his unknown number of houses of which he cannot keep track, in all fairness I now need to note that Barack Obama's Parthenon Pretensions are no more endearing. He has a perfectly nice house on the South Side of Chicago and I think that he should stick with that as his one and only.

And I expect to vote for him, but Oprah's role is another negative in my book.

Why is America so eager to follow's Oprah's lead on style, books, and political candidates? Or anything at all?

Am I really the only woman in America who has never been able to last through an entire hour of Oprah?

Gustav?

Some of you know that The Lovely Daughter began her college career at Tulane University. While she did spend the second semester of her freshman year there, she had fallen in love with the school she'd attended as a first semester refugee, and today she flew back to Oregon to move into her apartment and begin her senior year.

I am still on Tulane's mailing list, and I have followed the rebuilding of city and college with great interest. My own trip to NOLA in January 2006 was a sobering and moving experience. (There are links in my sidebar.) As we listened to the weather reports over the past couple of days, I began to wonder whether class of 2009 would begin its senior year as it began its freshman year. And sure enough, here's this afternoon's announcement:

"Dear Tulane Community,

While Tropical Storm Gustav appears to be tracking to the west of New Orleans at this time, Gustav’s path is still too unpredictable for us to be sure of its ultimate landfall.
After many discussions with our senior leadership team, as well as up-to-the minute reports from our national weather monitoring service, we have decided to close the university at noon tomorrow (Friday, August 29). ***** At this time, I want you to be ready to enact your personal emergency preparedness plans *** "

If it sounds familiar, that might be because this was on my blog three years ago:

"Message regarding university closure:

In response to Hurricane Katrina's shift to the west, Tulane University will close as of 5 p.m. today, August 27. *** Everyone should begin implementing their personal hurricane plan now."

My heart goes out to everyone in the New Orleans and Gulf Coast area, along with prayers and hopes that Gustav will head back out over the water and dwindle down to nothing.

North Carolina IV

Blue Ridge Parkway Sunrise

Pisgah National Forest

August 2008

More New Beginnings

So far, so good. Actually, so far, great!

This year I will be doing what's called field education -- essentially, an internship. I'm doing it in a church in my home city rather than in my seminary city a couple of hours away, which makes great good sense in terms of participating in worship on Sunday. (For at least the first quarter, all of my seminary classes are on Mondays and Tuesdays. My two-city life will become more complicated after Thanksgiving, but we will persevere.)

It makes great good sense in other ways as well, as I will continue learning about ministry in a theologically progressive, community-minded, social justice-oriented church. The building is a magnificent historical structure in a university setting, which is also home to several of our city's finest cultural institutions. Great preaching, great music. A vibrant regional congregation. And all of it a mile's walk from my own front porch!

This morning I stopped in for a meeting of the interreligious task force of an interfaith organization, and returned after lunch for the weekly staff meeting. So I've had a chance to meet some people and introduce myself, and I feel warmly welcomed indeed. I've got work to do and plans to make -- and, I think, a terrific year ahead.

North Carolina III

Hooker Falls

DuPont State Forest

August 2008

North Carolina II

Blue Ridge Parkway Sunset

Pisgah National Forest

August 2008

North Carolina I

Looking Glass Falls

Pisgah National Forest

August 2008

Ignatian Week-end

We sat around in Adirondack chairs on the patio of the retreat house late last night. Catholic, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist. A little wine and a LOT of laughter. One of the first year students had been heard to say that she had not imagined a retreat like this one. Well, no; the silent retreats are NOT like this one. This one was for learning about each other and worshipping together and exploring the spirituality that has brought us together to form an unlikely but passionately engaged group.

The first year of our Ignatian spiriutality program is largely academic: classes every other week, all day workshops scattered through the year, SEVENTEEN papers on the theology, practice, and challenges of spiritual direction. Those of us laughing so freely on the patio have weathered that year, and not without rather vigorous debate. We have affectionately nicknamed ourelves The Fractile Fifteen. I haven't read The Shack, but I'm told that if you have, you'll get it.

Now we begin our practicum year, sharing the journey of attentiveness to God with our own directees. Classes are down to once a month, but we still have papers, as well as verbatims (shades of CPE), meetings with directees, meetings with supervisors, meetings with our own directors. Plus whatever else it is we do in life -- work, school, ministries, caring for kids and spouses, caring for elderly parents.

It's a good thing that we're all well versed in humor.

*************************

(PS: I'm off to my own silent retreat in two weeks and, as it turned out, one of instructors for this weekend's first year students, a 92-year-old Jesuit, had come down for the a day from my destination and is slated to be my director when I get there. I am thrilled. Rumor has it that he has been a major influence on my original director. I love being the beneficiary of decades and decades of Jesuit wisdom!)

New Year

I've been emailing seminary friends about an event we're planning for September ~

I've met with my internship supervisor and on Tuesday I get to go down and function as an official intern for the very first time, at an interreligious task force meeting hosted by the Presby church where I will be interning ~

In a few hours my spiritual direction program will begin with a week-end retreat ~

And, bizarrely, there has been a pair of cormorants at the Little Lakes for the past week or so. Guess they came up from the Great Lake and found the fishing good. (Image from a Canadan news site.)

Campaign Humor

I decided tonight that it was about time for me to start giving some concerted attention to the Presidential campaign. I can't think of an election year when I've had less time or energy to devote to the process, and I'm feeling pretty ignorant.

What a great evening on which to begin!

I can't remember how many houses I have, either. But if the number is nine, here are the locations I choose, in no particular order:

St. Augustine Beach, Florida

Brevard, North Carolina

Paris,France (Sixth Arrondisement)

Monhegan Island, Maine

Chautauqua Institution, New York

Glen Arbor, Michigan

Cannon Beach, Oregon

Truro, Massachusetts

Williamstown, Massachusetts

I've thrown in an illustration of my place in Paris. If I'm at one of the others, go on up and make yourselves at home!

21 Years Ago...

My friend Mary Ann and The Quiet Husband and I were wandering up and down, up and down the hallway of one St. Luke's Hospital. We had spent all of the previous day there, to no avail. After a fitful night of sleep at home, complications had made themselves dramatically manifest again, and so there we were. Walk walk walk. Groan groan groan. One contraction hard upon another, doing . . .nothing. Please please please. Not another c-section.

FOUR other women came into the hospital, fussed and yelled, and produced babies. We passed their rooms over and over again, hearing the sounds that indicated that at least some people up there were reaching their goals.

4:00 in the afternoon? It would be ten more hours before I would cry, "I can't I can't I can't" and grit my teeth and grind my heel into my doctor's knee and call to him from somewhere far, far away, "Joe, HELP me!" Before he would say, "PUSH. THE. BABY. OUT." Before The Lovely Daughter, with limpid blue eyes wide as they could be, would be placed gently on my belly and look at us as if to say, "I know who you are, too."

Expanding

I'm venturing, in a tentative kind of way, out of anonymity and into the arena of ecumencial and interfaith dialogue to which I am increasingly and insistently called.

I'm setting up a new blog, to which I will refer here only on rare occasion, such as this one, in the form of an invitation to email me if you want to read it. I'm keeping this one for the personal reflections on all topics that come to mind, and so I'm sticking to my pseduo-anonymity here, and I'm not linking back and forth.

Will I come to regret this? Only time will tell. There are some either/or folks in my world who don't necessarily welcome the both/and-ness of my perspective. But really, a girl can only be who she's called to be.

End of CPE (Two - Postponed)

CPE ended today and I have been in bed -- mostly asleep, and feeling lousy whenever I wake up -- for hours. I'm hoping it's just the letdown -- and not that I managed to pick up some hospital bug on the very last day. (I only foamwash my hands maybe 200 times a day.)

We had a wonderful little celebration, and finished up some paperwork, but otherwise my day was very busy, with two deaths and two people very near to death on my MICU, one of my five units. The people who arrive there are mostly as sick as people can possibly be. I realized in responding to a colleague's question that I have had, I think, two days at the hospital this summer without deaths -- and there have been several days where the number has exceeded one. One night there were four deaths in the space of a few hours on the palliative care unit. Four is not, actually, unusual for a night. (At night, one chaplain is responsible for the entire hospital.)

Sometimes when people die, I have spent parts of several days with them and their family. Sometimes I meet them as they breathe their last. I try, always, to offer words that mark the passage through death as one of utter grace, praying that the dying person be welcomed by the radiance of God, and that their loved ones be sustained by the knowledge that their presence and witness is a final and extraordinary gift. I would be surprised if any of those left behind remember my words, but I hope that they remember the moment as one that honored the life of their loved one.

It can be tiring.

And so for myself this evening, I think a little dinner and a very long and deep sleep are in order.

One

Slightly built, wearing jeans and a t-shirt and flip-flops, she stands in the waiting room. She looks thoughtfully out the window, unfolds her arms, and reaches for the Coke in the McDonald's cup. A couple of sips. Hands in her pockets. "We weren't expecting this," she says.

"Tell me about your mother," I say.

She smiles gently. "She is the most wonderful woman. The most welcoming woman. Her vegetable garden is unlike anything you've ever seen."

She glances at the door to the ICU.

"I'm going back in there to be with her."

This morning she was holding out hope. In another hour, she will make the most difficult decision ever asked of her, and then she will say good-bye. In between, I will sit with her family, and I will begin a prayer with the words, "Oh, Holy God, none of us wants to be at this meeting."





My friend Lisa has challenged herself to write something every day. I decided to go for my own version: five minutes of descriptive writing every day for a month. This is Number 1, with the people involved appropriately disguised.

More Fashion Commentary

From The Lovely Daughter, while shopping for college:

"Hmmm, just what everyone wants: to look like a gigantic flower . . . " .

"Or how about . . . a pumpkin?"

"I guess if this is what they have to offer in the way of jackets, I'm going to be very cold this winter."

Olympic Observations

Sitting here awaiting another Michael Phelps race . . .

North Carolina was the perfect respite. Unfortunately the computer is once again refusing to recognize my ancient camera's greeting, so the pictures may be a few days down the road. Let's just say that every CPE week should feature time for sitting in mountain waterfalls.

Look at those cameras of those sports photographers! Gannet is solid green with envy. Oh shoot, now the 200 fly is at 10:18. I can stay awake, but maybe not online.

CPE evaluations are upon us. I cannot believe that this summer is just about behind us. I will not miss the overnights. But I will miss my encounters - with the stunningly beautiful Arab women, with the patient looking astonished by her sudden possession of a new heart, with the people battling pre-surgery fear and post-surgery pain, with the disoriented and confused and lonely folks who find themselves facing unbelievable medical challenges, with responses to physical challenge and family heartache fueled by dignity, by terror, by faith, by anguish. I will miss the openness to challenge, dedication to hard work, and resistance to sleep deprivation of my CPE colleagues. I will miss our supervisor's insistence on self-exploration, on inclusive language, on building a spiritual program that reaches out to embrace people of all walks toward or away from faith.

I have so loved this experience. But I am very grateful for waterfalls. And sleep.

Goin' to Carolina...

Behind me:

Eight verbatims, four book reflections, weekly general reflections, I don't know how many overnight on-calls, an 8-10 page final evaluation in first draft form, so much suffering and death with humor and triumph blended in, so little sleep and so much tension and the inevitable tears and laugher . . . one week of CPE to go . . . screech to a halt:

We have to go to North Carolina for a three-day week-end to retrieve The Lovely Daughter from her life as a camp counselor. The waterfalls and the mountains and the trails of Pisgah Forest are calling.

We have to take my little car because The Quiet Husband's bigger one is still recovering from its encounter with a deer two weeks ago. It will be a very long drive in a very little car. But at the end will be those waterfalls and mountains and trails and, best of all, The Lovely, Lovely Daughter.

Silence

Michelle has written one of the best pieces I've ever read about a silent retreat, here, and has reminded me of some of my own experience.

When I was on retreat at Guelph last summer, the 90-plus degree temperatures every day made the pool a most welcome respite. I think that I went swimming every afternoon right before dinner, and a couple of times after dinner as well. At first I wondered: would people actually swim in silence? I needn't have asked. There were always five or ten people at the pool, and many nodded and smiled, but no one said a word.

Early in the week, I sprained my toe as I stumbled over a deck chair. The pain was excruciating, the kind the makes you feel momentarily as if you are going to vomit. Normally under such circumstances, such an encounter would be followed by a string of loud and angry expletives on my part, but I managed to be unusually restrained in the context of the swimming silence. I sat on the edge of the pool for awhile, hoping that the icy water would reduce the inevitable swelling and bruising, and limped back to the house. My labyrinth prayer walk after dinner was an exceedingly slow one. Hours later, in the middle of the night, I went down to the kitchen to fill a washcloth with ice and to dig around in the first aid cupboard for something with which to tape my throbbing toe.

As Michelle so eloquently notes, in the silence you make less of your needs, less of yourself. You discover how little of yourself you need to impose -- on the space, on others, on the silence itself. The normal chatter and rueful laughter that accompany minor klutziness -- unnecessary. The need for attention -- none, when others have considerately provided for your needs so that you can quietly take care of yourself. The will to overcome? It's up to you. You can live with the pain and the limp and walk the trails and labyrinth, and swim in the pool, and visit the barns and gardens and river -- or not. In the gentleness of the silence, your decisions are your own.

The company you keep is entirely with Someone Else.

Heart

I thought that it would be a shame to spend my summer doing CPE at Famous Gigantic Hospital without taking advantage of the opportunity to observe an open heart surgery.

So that's how I spent my morning, standing on a stool right next to one of the surgeons as they replaced a valve and did a bypass.

I could say a lot about what I learned from a scientific perspective, and what I added to my pastoral care perspective, and what I concluded from a theological perspective, and maybe someday I will. But for now I'll leave it at:

WAY COOL.