Ministry

“The resurrection isn’t the only supernatural event in the Easter story. The disciples of Jesus lived in a world of the supernatural. According to Matthew, when Jesus died, the earth shook and coughed up corpses all over and “many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.” After the resurrection of Jesus, these saints showed up in Jerusalem. Well, if just by dying Jesus could empty all those tombs, maybe his own empty tomb was no marvel.

 

“No, in a world where spirits rose up on a regular basis, there had to be something more special going on than just another corpse walking about. This was a resurrection of many souls, not from death, but from deadness.

 

“What do I mean by deadness? I mean the things inside that kept the disciples away from Jesus’ funeral—fear, cowardice, lack of conviction and purpose. And I mean those same things in our own lives that prevent us from feeling alive—things like fear, cowardice, and lack of conviction and purpose. And things like the loneliness, grief, and boredom that numb us to life.

 

“It’s as if we let parts of ourselves die and stuff them away in a tomb of the soul. Sometimes that tomb is not such a bad place. It is like a womb—safe and secure, comfortable and predictable. Our tomb-life may be nothing more than the safety and comfort of a nice predictable routine. Or it may be a shelter from the world and its problems—a place to hide from the Jesus who called for a world where people care for one another. Whether it is escape or comfort, the time comes for us to roll away the stone and come out.”

 

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

 

I found myself as a chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital, serving as chaplain to AIDS patients and others. I was not feeling particularly hopeful—or ministerial. Seeing the man in the hospital bed was devastating. He was tall, dishevelled, and never stopped moving. He was connected to a lot of machinery. He was in a coma. He was dying of AIDS.

 

Two hours before this I had read a letter from his father, another minister, although a fundamentalist minister in the Midwest. Dear Brother in Christ, (it had begun), “Please save my son. He is dying from his sins and I am praying that you can save him. I know that he probably does not have much time, but I am hoping that your faith and my faith can save him from an eternity of damnation. While he deserves what he has reaped, I am hoping he will find salvation and be freed from his evil ways.” 

 

He then went on to quote some scripture from Leviticus and tell me about his faith and then repeated how awful his son was.

 

Now I was looking at this evil son, feeling hopeless wondering where I would find strength.

 

Where do each us find peace? Where do each of us find hope? 

 

Standing next to a hospital bed where a man in a coma is more restless than you is not something that makes one feel at ease. So, I jumped when the nurse put her hand on my shoulder.

 

“Sorry,” she apologized. “You must be the chaplain. I was hoping you would stop by. I was wondering if you could come back in an hour or so. Harold’s,” and she chose her word carefully, “friend comes around 3 every day. He’s the one who could use someone to talk with.”

 

I nodded and said I would come back. At a little after three I returned and there was well-dressed man in a suit by Harold’s bed. I guessed he was from India. I introduced myself and he said his name was Omar.

 

We talked for nearly two hours. It was the beginning of a pattern. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday when I was at the hospital as a chaplain, I would come find Omar after 3.

 

I learned many things. Omar was from Delhi. He was a businessman in the city of San Francisco, coming to the states for college. Despite the liberal nature of the US and San Francisco, he was not out at work. He had explained to his boss he had a hospital situation and could he work from 7-2 without lunch and then leave for the hospital. 

 

He and Harold had been a couple for 13 years, though the last 3 had not been together, he said, and he looked away. That triggered a wonderment on my part, so I asked, “Is that when he started using drugs?”

 

“Yes,” Omar replied. “I wanted him to go to rehab, but it was just after his father’s last visit that he had started using again, and he ran to the streets instead. Sometimes living on the streets was the only thing Harold could trust.”

 

I learned much about Harold and Omar. I learned that Harold’s dad was a minister on weekends and police officer during the week. He was also on his tenth marriage to his ninth wife. 

 

About two weeks into our visits, the nurse pulled me aside. She told me that they were going to try to talk to Omar, who had durable power of attorney over Harold, about removing the life support machines from him since there was nothing more they could do.

 

When I later talked with Omar about this, he said he they had told him they might want to do this. I asked him how he felt about this. “They don’t know Harold,” he said. He asked if I would accompany him to the meeting with the staff the next week. I said I would.

 

The next week, in one of the most amazing displays of courage and hope I have ever seen, Omar refused to let the doctors stop the life support on Harold. “Harold’s a fighter. You don’t know Harold like I do.” He repeated these sentences over and over.

 

With no one happy the meeting ended and we all left. 

 

His father, who had been calling the critical care unit daily, stopped calling a few weeks later. It seemed it was taking too long for his son to die.

 

It was a month later, one evening after I had left the hospital as Omar was talking to Harold, that Harold regained consciousness. So when I walked in 2 days later, and Omar said, “This is Keith, the chaplain,” and Harold waved a finger at me a little, I nearly fell over. I recovered quickly and Omar was beaming.

 

Two weeks later, the ventilator was removed. A month later, Harold was transferred out of the critical care unit and to the AIDS ward. 

 

A month later, for the first time in five months, Harold took a step. Omar was there. Three weeks later he could walk on his own around his hospital room. The doctors began to talk of releasing him. 

 

I found myself stopping in one afternoon and talking with Harold before Omar arrived. He now weighed almost as much as I do, despite being 8 inches taller. Still this was progress.

           

The important thing about our feelings is that we have them. Harold and I eventually talked about his feelings and using drugs as a way to escape them. We talked about his feelings for his father, for Omar, for himself. He seemed to understand that his father loved him but was confused by how it was expressed. When I suggested his father was struggling with some of the same messages that he was, Harold admitted he had not thought about that before. Of course, we also talked about setting good boundaries with his father. Upon learning I had taught elementary school and collected children’s books, Harold often asked me for a story. His favourite was Shingebiss. He said he thought of himself as the duck and his father as the North Wind.

 

A month later, despite the hospital rules, Harold got up out his wheelchair and took Omar’s hand and walked out of the hospital.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

You cannot find life by avoiding feeling.

 

I am going to share with you some thoughts by author Gary Paulsen about what happens to people asked to avoid feeling.

 

War is always, in all ways, appalling. Lives are stopped in youth, worlds are ended, and even for those who survive—and the vast majority of soldiers who do go to war do survive—the mental damage is often permanent. What they have seen and been forced to do is so frequently horrific and devastating that it simply cannot be tolerated by the human psyche. Now there is an attempt to understand this injury and deal with it. It is called post-traumatic stress disorder by those who try and cure it. They give it a technical name in the attempt to make something almost incomprehensible understandable, in the hope that by doing this they will make it curable.

 

In other times and other wars, they used more descriptive terms. In the Second World War the mental damage was called battle fatigue, and there were rudimentary efforts to help the victims. These usually involved bed rest and the use of sedatives or other drugs. In the First World War it was called shell shock, based on the damage done by the overwhelming use, for the first time in modern war, of artillery fire against soldiers in ….trenches. The concussion of exploding incoming rounds, thousands upon thousands of them, often left men deaf and dazed, many of them with a symptom called the thousand--yard stare. The afflicted were essentially not helped at all and simply sent home for their families to care for. Most were irrational, many were in a vegetative state. In the US Civil War, the syndrome was generally not recognized at all. While the same horrors existed as in modern war, in some ways they were even worse because the technological aspect of war being born then, the wholesale killing by men using raw firepower, was so new and misunderstood. The same young men were fed into the madness. But in those days there was no scientific knowledge of mental disorders and no effort to help the men damaged. Some men came through the combat unscathed. Most did not. These men were somehow different from other men. They were said to have Soldier’s Heart.

 

Many people, most people here in North America have not experienced war as Paulsen describes it. But many people have found themselves in a position where it is easier to not feel, where they too live with their own version of soldier’s heart.

 

My friend, Kim, who stays in a marriage despite being hit by her husband.

 

My friend, Jama, who survived sexual abuse.

 

Rob who numbs his feelings of his recent diagnosis with Parkinson’s with alcohol binging.

 

Marilyn who overworks as a way not to notice her husband’s infidelity.

 

Mona who obsesses about things endlessly as a way to avoid her real feelings.

 

The woman at the drugstore who spent 25 minutes arguing over the price of chewing gum.

 

A friend who said he was going to work despite have been laid off for 2 months before.

 

The painfully thin woman at the gym who spends an hour on the treadmill, fearing she is too fat.

 The man who overeats because food numbs the pain.

 

At times, in different ways, many of us live with our own version of soldier’s heart. It feels safe. Yet ultimately, it cuts us off from life. We all have experienced the deadness. Some of us experience it now. And we all know people with some deadness in them.

 

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

You cannot find life by avoiding feelings.

 

You cannot control your feelings; you can control how you deal with them.

It was Thomas who taught me about this. Thomas was 5. He had two broken arms and a broken leg. He was sitting at a small table colouring, somehow, with limited arm mobility. His picture a vast collage of fiery reds and oranges. His paper expressed the anger that he could not.

 

Thomas had every reason to be angry and scared. A few days later, he had lost his mother. One cold night his mother, a very sad and self-involved woman, had jumped to her death off the Golden Gate Bridge. She had not wanted to be alone, so she had taken Thomas to the Bridge with her and held him in her arms as she jumped. His mother’s body had cushioned his blow and he drifted to shore where he was found several hours later.

 

Now he was alone in the hospital. I was standing next to therapist who told me that the only way Thomas could survive this trauma was to talk about it. He had been pretty unresponsive when questioned directly. Over time, with the help of art and play therapy Thomas began to heal. After a month, he was able to retell what happened the night his mother jumped off the bridge using words and play figures. The angry reds and oranges that were predominant in his drawing now had a wider variety of colours with them, including more calming greens and blues. 

As his pictures became more varied, his speech became less muted and more alive. He became more emotive. He was able to get angry, to say he felt sad, and even occasionally to laugh.

 

I often think of Thomas. He would be 14 today. Has he been able to say he was mad at his mother? To see her as selfish, frightened, hurt, and troubled? Is he able to see her as a person unique from who he is? She will forever be a part of a past, but how much of his future will she be? How much will he let her be his future?

 

Thomas’ struggles made me wonder about my own. What feelings could I have that I have left unattended that affect me today.   What have I tried to avoid in order maintaining peace—however uneasy that is?

 

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

You cannot find life by avoiding feelings.

You cannot control your feelings; you can control how you deal with them.

You are but one person, but you are one person.

 

Sometimes the ability to recover who you are requires help from others. Often, people diminish their worth or over inflate it as a way of coping. Our Unitarian Universalist principles ask us to value the inherent worth and dignity of every person. The following story from Dr. Rachael Naomi Remen in her book Kithen Table Wisdom exemplifies this well. She sees her patients as individuals, individuals with great gifts who occasionally need help.

 

“Max was the sort of man who lived close to the edge, smoking, drinking, fighting, driving fast cars. He was there wherever the edge was. At 63, he had been married 4 times and made and lost 2 fortunes. At present he was a successful cattle breeder. He sat in my office, in a ten-gallon hat and battered boots, as uncomfortable and uneasy here as one of his own beloved bulls, penned up too small. In response to my questions about the past, he told me he had grown up on a ranch in the Midwest. His father had been a cowboy, his mother the only daughter of the town banker. His older brother, a robust and fearless child, had been close to their father. Their father had loved him he said, and looked away.

I looked at him sitting there, large and competent, and reckless-looking. His hands, resting on his denimed knees, were scarred from a lifetime of outdoor work. They were a man’s hands. Why then did I feel this stab of protectiveness, this fleeting sense of him as a frail little boy? Following this hunch I asked him what he knew of his own birth and early childhood. He told me he had been born prematurely. For the first two years of his life he was sickly and had absorbed a great deal his mother’s attention, worry, and time. His father’s frustration had built until in one violent argument with his mother he had told her, ‘If that little runt was one of the animals, I’d have put it out to starve.’ I asked if he had overheard this or had been told about it by someone. He could not remember, he said, but he’d always known it and he knew beyond doubt that it had happened.

 

“His father’s resentment toward him had remained unchanged even after he had become big and made himself physically tough. ‘He was not a forgiving man,’ he said. Sometimes his father would not speak to him or acknowledge his presence for weeks, acting as if he were not there at all. He never knew why. It had been no easy childhood and at 15 Max had left home.

 

“Annoyed with my questions, he asked why all this was important. His foot was tapping and his eyes were restless. He patted his pockets absently. I wondered if he was yearning for a smoke. I told him that people’s attitudes toward themselves sometimes made it easier or harder to recover their health and so it was good to understand as much as we could.

 

“He began to talk then about his self-destructive tendencies. He told me he had ‘pushed death’ for as long as he could remember, and described years of hard living and numerous injuries. Even as child he had been accident-prone and this had diverted even more of his mother’s attention toward him and fed his father’s resentment. He did not understand why this was so as he was so athletic and well coordinated.   ‘I always felt like I was no account, like I was no good.’ His many successes, in business or in sports or with women, had not eased these feelings but just covered them over. ‘Fooled ‘em all,’ he said grimly. ‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘it was hard to feel okay because you could never be sure what you needed to do to be okay.’ He looked at me, puzzled. ‘If you were supposed to live to please your mother, or die to please your dad,’ I said.

 

“My remark shocked him. He had often wondered if he had lived recklessly in order to win his father’s approval or to prove himself a tougher man. This put a new spin on it. ‘From the moment I was born, I was a real thorn in his side just because I was there. Nothing I could do made a difference. He didn’t want me anyhow.’

 

“I reminded him that despite his many brushes with death, the broken bones, the accidents, the risks he took almost daily, he was still here. I asked him what he thought had brought him through. ‘Luck,’ he said quickly. I shot him a sceptical look. No one was that lucky. He sat for a while with his thoughts. Then in a choked and almost inaudible voice, he told me that he himself had always wanted to live. I could hardly hear him. ‘Can you say that any louder?’ He looked at the rug between his boots. Unable to speak, he just nodded. Almost in a whisper he said, ‘I feel ashamed.’

 

“My heart went out to him. In a shaking voice he said, ‘Something in me wants to live.’ His eyes were still fixed on the rug. ‘Say it, Max,’ I thought. ‘Say it until it becomes real.’ I wondered if I dared push him a little further. ‘Do you think you could look at me and tell me that?’ I asked him. I could sense a struggle in him. Had I gone too far? He had never confronted his father. Most likely, saying such a simple thing out loud went against a lifelong pattern. Perhaps he would not be able to free himself even this little bit. With an effort he raised his eyes, his voice still choked but no longer inaudible. ‘I want to live,’ he said evenly. We stared at each other for a few moments but he did not drop his eyes. I smiled at him. ‘I want you to live too,’ I said.

 

“One-Way of looking at Max’s history would be that the old argument between his parents had continued on in his unconscious mind. Confused and caught between his mother’s commitment to his life and his father’s wish that he disappear, he had ridden the fence between life and death all of these years. Yet, hidden though it was, he himself had held the tie-breaking vote. Perhaps the intensity of the inner dialogue had made it necessary for him to reassure himself of his own choice by pushing it to the edge and casting his vote over and over again. Each time he had survived he could feel once again his own wish to live. When the unconscious struggle is that intense, you might have to revisit the choice often through accidents and dangerous living just to be sure.

Max had metastatic colon cancer. The experts had given him daunting statistics and offered only a guarded prognosis. Yet expertise is not clairvoyance. As experts we only deal with probability and not specific outcome. Like most people who do this sort of work, I have seen that the prognosis may not be the reality anymore than the map is the territory or the blueprint, for the building.

 

“Max lived for 8 years after this first meeting. We worked together for a few years exploring the doorway that had opened in this first session and I came to have a deep affection for this tough, funny, and very kind man. Gradually, he became able to understand and forgive both of his parents and to value and care for himself. His injuries and his accidents stopped.

 

“In the first few months he often joked about the moment when I cast my vote for him. ‘Outnumbered the bastard once and for all,’ he would chuckle.

When I told him that I wanted him to live, I spoke as person to whom life is important and not as someone who knew what the outcome would be. I just think that sometimes it is important to say these things out loud.”

 

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

You cannot find life by avoiding feelings.

You cannot control your feelings; you can control how you deal with them.

You are but one person, but you are one person.

 

Risk resurrection in your life wherever you need to this Easter.   

Live a life where you find people worthwhile.

Find your peace in your life—whatever life you have.