2014.10.19 Flor y Canto—Assisted Dying

Recently a dear friend, with whom I have shared both affection and a medical bond, died. We would call each other “lung buddies,” because we both had lung disease. We did everything we were told to do, took our meds, and ran ourselves to panting on the treadmills, because exercise strengthens any organ. Her condition finally took her life. Just before she died she told me, in a passionate and lucid way, that she wanted to die and was ready. She wasn’t a lingering person in life, so in death she didn’t want to linger and drag along. Me either!

It got me thinking........ (OK, fuzzy thinking image, because this classic Thinker image is not really me:)

In our present culture and church we celebrate life, life, life—life abundant, the divine imperative to choose life (Deut 30), God’s gift of life in creation. And we worship a God who brings life out of death. Life seems the only option that accords with divine desire. (OK. St. Paul wanted to die to be closer to Christ, but that was a little whacko. And the blood of persecuted Christian martyrs is out of fashion, thank heavens.)

What if someone feels called, moved, motivated to choose death? What then? Some religious folks think God is against this, that it's a sin, called suicide. This idea gives people little choice but to blame God for their circumstances: Why doesn’t God take me?  That would be the thing a compassionate God would do, right?

Maybe God doesn’t take anyone, like a body snatcher. Maybe God doesn’t take as much control as we’d like. Maybe God defines life by its quality not its quantity, though "length of days" is a good in scripture. And too, what if death is God’s idea? What if the freedom many believe to be granted by a Creator God really is free? Didn’t Jesus choose death?

Freedom is the hardest darn gift ever given. Damn! Still, it is amazingly respectful; it makes me love this Godde more and more. 

Personally, I’d like to take advantage of this great gift. I’d like the chance to choose death without guilt or shame, and with hope, while I’m still in state of mind, heart and soul which is sane, healthy, alert, that is, not distorted by physical pain, mental illness, or being under the influence of addictive substance.

But it’s illegal.

We have assisted living. Why not assisted dying? I mean for real, and legal. Statistics show that in Oregon, where assisted death is legal, the option is not exercised frequently. The feared rash of “suicides” just didn’t happen. Hospice care assists death, but is it enough?

I know this is complex, but if we don’t have serious conversations about it in families, in our churches, and at the level of public discourse, death remains enemy. I know when I bring this up with my children they shrink. I understand, yet I wish I’d had the chance for such a conversation with my parents.

IN THE MEANTIME.............  Here is a lovely way to celebrate life even in death, and while still being realistic about the pains and limitations in our celebrated freedom of life: flor y canto, flower and song.

The Amerindian ancients looked to BEAUTY as a reflection of the divine. Their intuition survived in the Spanish phrase flor y canto and in the tradition of fiesta. Beauty signified the blessing of the divine and also was used to communicate back with the Sacred. They arrived at divine truth, not through linear abstractions, but in an aesthetic praxis. They trusted in the hidden power emanating from flor y canto. Social justice and ethical conduct proceeded from the practice. First things first.

The Eucharistic banquet is our flor y canto—a little stiff and pale in comparison, but we're anglos.

This is what we can learn from the U.S. Hispanic community. A people whose lives have often been marred by great suffering, currently in the immigration crisis, find God in a party—first. They don’t sit down to deliberate doctrine and form a plan, or write wordy blogs full of questions (see above); they form the Beautiful and live life in the subjunctive mode—as if.  It’s their spirituality, their theology. Mi casa, tu casa first—telling stories at table and getting to know each other comes first.

Maybe we have things backwards? Maybe we should throw a celebrative coffee hour before we hit the pews, right in the narthex?

Yet, maybe too, each people and culture has its own mystical ways to celebrate God EVERYWHERE EVERYONE ANYWAY.  But I wouldn’t mind a little flor y canto as I die.

2014.10.12 Emily Brontë Poet of Spirit

The poet employs her quatrain form, not for a simple song of praise, but to assert a balance of power, a delicate exchange of breath for Life: God-in-Soul/Soul-in God.

Perhaps it's significant that this is one of the last poems Emily Brontë wrote before the creative upsurge of Wuthering Heights, her only and great novel, published in 1847. In her poem she is praising an immortal deity, while preparing for her own immortal life as a writer.

It's said that Emily Dickinson chose this poem to be read at her funeral. It's a pleasing thought. Emily Brontë had a good deal in common with a sister poet, Emily Dickinson: their solitude and independence, their hymn-like metres, the pointed use of the m-dash—like this—and of course language as brisk and crystalline as a surgeon’s cut. Both women thought big on a miniature scale.  

The poem is as bold as its title suggests. I love the massing of verbs for the Spirit: animate, pervade, brood, change, sustain, dissolve, create, and rear. Such a résumé!

We live now, according to the ancient desert sages, in the era of the Spirit’s dominance; that is, a time when we awaken to and recognize the presence and work of God Spirit. God Creator and God Christ enjoyed each a thousand. Now we notice and study pneumatology with more care.

Pneumatology is the study of God Spirit. It’s amazing what we have attributed to the first two persons of the Trinity that is likely the work of Person #3.  One obvious example is how different cultures creatively appropriate religion to fit their languages, customs and circumstances. Think Spirituals or hispanic devotions to Mary. Is Jesus God son or Mary’s itty-bitty baby? Both, no? We say these are interpretive distortions, but scholars wonder if these are the work of God Spirit.

Brontë’s verbs “creates” and “rears” are parental terms. Perhaps the poet is suggesting that her deity is motherly as well as fatherly, enfolding the qualities of the mother she had lost in early childhood into the Godhead.

Poets like Emily Brontё, under-mothered, under-schooled, make their own nurturance. This poem is honest and brave and brimming with life. For someone so closely acquainted with death and loss she is terrifyingly on the side of life.

No Coward Soul Is Mine
No coward soul is mine,
No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere:
I see Heaven's glories shine, 

And faith shines equal, arming me from Fear.

O God within my breast,

Almighty, ever-present Deity!
 
Life - that in me hast rest, 

As I - Undying Life- have power in Thee!

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men's hearts, unutterably vain; 

Worthless as withered weeds

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one 

Holding so fast by Thine infinity;

So surely anchored on 

The steadfast rock of immortality.

With wide-embracing love

Thy Spirit animates eternal years,

Pervades and broods above, 

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though Earth and moon were gone,

And suns and universes ceased to be, 

And Thou wert left alone,

Every Existence would exist in Thee.

There is not room for Death,

Nor atom that his might could render void:

Thou - Thou art Being and Breath,

And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

2014.10.05 Don't Suffer Fools Foolishly

While writing my memoir, I connected with my women lunch buddies at Yale Divinity School, my God-school. We were mostly commuters, somewhere in the middle of our lives, and of different denominations. We majored in lunch. It wasn’t for the food; it was for the spiritual food of this small company of women, sharing gallows humor about the church, and perfecting the fine spiritual art of the lament while honing our debating skills on arguments about each one’s favorite heresy.

Excited by all the new knowledge we were exposed too, and being fools about how much we really understood, we weren't foolish to celebrate it in this informal way—a holy communion that felt just as holy as the altar one.

Beneath our ignorance and hilarity lurked truth: the late 70s was a crucial time for women in the churches. Doors were opening wider than before to welcome female flesh as ordained presiders at the altar and preachers from pulpits. We weren’t sure who could fit through. 

Oh, it was so hard to leave the refectory and trudge back down halls, and more halls, to get to the next class, or to the library where we read, and read, and read—alone.

I loved these women as much as I loved God—more because they gave hugs. When I found them all years after we left our seminary, we swapped memories. I asked each one the same question: Which big Christian idea is the hardest for you to believe?  Incarnation won.  It’s crazy to think of God becoming human. Or was it that humanity, chiefly of the masculine sort, inflated to fill big shoes? 

Incarnation seemed too demeaning for a big God, and yet, too impossible grand for humanity, even those at the top of the food chain. Is there a narrowing, a claustrophobic squeeze into which divinity is willing, for the sake of love, to enter? Do we suppose that our humanity, chiefly of the masculine sort, inflates to become God?  Although Incarnation is more common in world religions, it’s easier for Christians to swallow resurrection, the idea for which we cheer mightily and sing plethoras of alleluias in or out of Easter season.

Ah, we had so much fun battling out all these puzzles, not solving a thing but loving each other in the suffering of it all. We all knew that suffering was the mark of a good Christian, after all, so why not suffer intentionally over theology too slippery for any of us individually, or all of us collectively, to hold onto. Perhaps the point:)

I find Incarnation easier to swallow than Resurrection, possibly because it feels more intimate, and possibly because I like to think that my own fleshly womb has participated in Creation’s unfolding, and contributed its share of labor and suffering. This could be a control issue of course, or it could be simply a wonderment. God knows, having children transformed my life and still does.

And if suffering means anything at all it’s transformative. Franciscan priest Richard Rohr wrote in April of 2014 in a Meditation "Transforming Our Suffering": 


"All healthy religion shows you what to do with your pain. Great religion shows you what to do with the absurd, the tragic, the nonsensical, the unjust. . . .  Unless we can find a meaning for human suffering, that God is somehow in it, and can even use it for good, humanity is in major trouble."

A God who comes into human flesh as in Jesus Christ, and me too, help me live through suffering—not without much kvetching and lament, but with some assurance that the God in my flesh suffers with me. Incarnational spirituality sacralizes my smallness and my wounds, and resurrection spirituality gives me an out with hope. 

Theology aside, I prefer the religion of Christmas (Incarnation) to Easter (Resurrection.) This may change as I get older—and older!  Yet even the secular images represented by infants in creches or fat old men in red suits with beards, or by bunnies, chickies and colored eggs, carry spiritual messages of divine generosity and humility (Incarnation) and generativity (Resurrection.)  

Whatever your preferences, we all must face the truth of our condition and its limitations, the sheer humility of the flesh with all its foolishness.

I must admit, however, that, foolishness and preferences aside, both the Christmas idea of Incarnation and the Easter idea of Resurrection  merge divinity with humanity in such inextricably lovely ways that either way we, what?, are not alone—ever.

2014.09.28 Women Who Talk Too Much?

When I’m in an informal group of women, 2 or 3 but no more than 6 or 7, I notice a phenomenon. It’s enough to die laughing over—or die for.

I only notice it when I stop talking myself and listen—detached from my own thoughts enough to hear the whole.

All the other women talk at once and keep right on talking. It sounds like the proverbial hen or chicken house, but, at closer hearing, it’s not.

Women seem to be able to talk and listen at once. Everyone talks at once, everyone listens and hears at once, and everyone comes away knowing what was said and mostly by whom—and still with her own reflections intact and often enriched or altered by what she has heard. Now that’s amazing! My husband says it's baloney! (He really used another b word.)

It seems to me that the key to this phenomenon is in the breathing pauses. We all do have to breathe after all. Perhaps it is in the breathe that the thread of meaning and content is picked up. How Spirit-uelle.

Of course you might not want to count on such a group in any formal way. Such groups have only one agenda: being together. We’re usually not trying to accomplish a task. I’ve been in groups where we women take turns in an ordered way, a linear way. I prefer the breath-filled chaos.

Learning theories about women suggest that in fact some women learn best by connection or in relationship—in a group. Connected learning.

                                                     

                                                         

                                                            YAK IT TO ME, BABY!

This practice can be risky. Occasionally, a gavel might be useful. Also, basic relational rules, to say nothing of courtesy, suggest that one person should speak at one time, a space should be left, and then a response made. ONe. ONe. ONe. Such rules of conversation work better for my own "sin" of interrupting—usually out of the fear I may not get heard at all, an old conditioned habit.

My spouse, a man, sometimes shouts out, “Stop talking.” He clutches his hands to his head: “I can’t get my thoughts together. You don’t know what I was going to say. Let me finish!”  He thinks I’m interrupting, filling in his blanks. He has a point. I tell him I'm only commenting, interjecting stuff as we go along. To me, I interject as HE goes along. I don't understand why he just doesn't pick up and keep going. “This is a conversation,” I say, and add, “Besides, you go on and don’t stop.”  Then I talk some more, just to clarify—until one of us exits the space.

I mentioned this phenomenon to my male dentist and his female hygienist. She and I laughed. The dentist said: “Tell me about it, I eat lunch with all of them,” and waved his hand, referring to a good-sized all-female office staff.

Perhaps Godde made women multi-task thinkers and talkers needing snatches of breath—a mind on several tracks. It could be a gift to help us hold onto women friends and keep track of children, or even lively canine pets, who dart and race through the world exploring recklessly, in their developing years and beyond. It’s like having antennae.

As we evolve, and gender roles lose their grip, men and fathers might develop this capacity, though I suspect not to the same breathy degree.

Godde the Spirit breathes in us, in each one differently, as any sensitive deity would.

2014.09.21 The Old Nantucketeer

In this morning moment, I try to memorize summer as it fades before my eyes. I shall miss it so, as the coldness creeps, then settles, into my bones. But for now, I memorize its every sweetness and prepare to give up berries for apples, bare shoulders for hunched, shivering ones, bare feet for double socks, clear lungs for congested ones, and soft Nantucket sands for my thick comforter. I do, however, adore the beauty of naked trees in winter—also, the glitter of new snow and the gleeful shouts of sledding kids in the nearby park. Still, my island home is kinda mystical to me—a little scary, a little awesome, like the holy.

 As an ode to summer's end, I jotted this proem:

The Old Nantucketeer

We met an old Nantucketeer
on line at the ferry dock—
there to meet a ferry pick-up,
there to pick up guests.
On the rear window of his sizable SUV—
portly as was he—
there was a familiar identifier: a white shield
with a red cross emblazoned, its
upper left corner blue with little white stars
forming an X, five from upper left
to lower right and five from upper right to lower left.
Tic tac doe, or is it toe?
Above the cross arrangement is written
The Episcopal Church.
The church calls its pretty little shield, “soft evangelism.”
For me it was recognition.
My emergent aging extroversion kicked in, “Hi...........
I saw your decal." I stuck my head part way into his window,
interrupting his snooze.
He was buckled into his seat in a reverie of ease.
He awakened and chuckled: “I’ve been coming here
since I was a child; my parental home was in Monomoy
so I know it must have been a mansion,
characteristic of Monomoy and of our Episcopal church.
With some exceptions, I thought.
“Natives fuss about tourists and the summer influx,” he continued.
“I’ve been coming here for over 50 years, summers
and sometimes in winter, “ I interrupted, noticing initials
primly embroidered on the cuffs of his white shirt.
Fancy. Sweet. I’d met a Brahmin.
"People like me, he added, "are called visitors, but we visitors
shed tears when we leave the island." (I know.)
"My brother is fatter than I am," he said. Bragging?
"I can hardly get about anymore."
The ferry horn blasted, signaling
more noxious tourist-types arriving—beloved immigrants—
and some leaving.
My new friend opened his car door and, with labor,
heaved his bulk forward and landed his feet on the pavement.
“You know what they say about Nantucket?” he said.
I waited.
“Nantucket is a chronic infectious disease
 not covered by Medicare.”
He shook in silent mirth; I laughed out loud.
True.
Then I spotted my son and his family bounding
down the ferry gangplank. Hi. Hi. Hi.
I was here when this son was conceived, or was it
when I was pregnant with his sister?

Time gets lost.

My Episcopal friend waved down his friends, turned to
me and said, “I’m devoted to St. Paul’s Episcopal here,
but I worship now at the Congregational Church.”
My irritation rose, fell, and vanished.

I thought, but didn’t say: Next year in Jerusalem.
It sounded like a psalm, more stately than what I actually said:
"Next year in Nantucket."

2014.09.14 Holy Cross Consecration

Today, in the Christian church, it is Holy Cross Day, a day we remember the holiness of the cross of Christ. (I think it is good to have another day, so that we do not pile all our dolorous grief into one day, Good Friday.)  But a holy execution? Weird, huh? Yes, it is, but it is historic. Jesus Christ is our hero and he dedicated his life, and lost it, condemned for treason to crucifixion. Why holy?

Because:  (1) Jesus taught that God was Love unbounded and died in that faith. (2) Divine grace, he preached, meant forgiveness, erasure, different from pardon, of all sins—a clean slate for those who sincerely desired it. And (3) He had converts who believed his words, loved and followed him, and thought he was “king”—too rivalrous for the Emperor of the day to ignore. He didn't recant from his message and suffered torture for it. There is is holiness in such brave love. It deserves reverence—not to laud suffering, but to honor courage, conviction, and trust in God.

I try to remember that there is no one who has never suffered. There, of course, are degrees, but what you have suffered and do suffer is yours and to be honored equally in the economy of grace.

Comparisons about suffering are about as odious as any other comparisons, though they sometimes help us feel a little bit less narcissistic in our own plights—which is not a bad thing. When I look at the Crucifix with Jesus hanging there, I shudder, and I thank God for thinking ahead. Suffering is not the last word.

Today I am praying for and with my sister who is in pain. I pray courage and good medicine her way. She is feisty and will walk........if not on her legs, then on her butt in a motorized chair.

Yesterday, I, and thousands of other faithful Episcopalians, clergy and lay, attended the consecration of Alan M. Gates, as the 16th bishop of Massachusetts. When the Church gathered does a big new thing, we all come, and we all cheer, and we all sing our lungs out, and hope our hearts out. It is a new day.

We will mourn our former bishop, who is in the process of his dying, and we will cheer our new bishop who will provide new and different leadership. It’s hard to do both at once, yet tears belong in equal force to goodbye and hello. When I saw the former bishop hand over the crozier of guidance to his successor and then walk off the platform and leave, I cried. Later I cried again as I watched all the old, mostly male, bishops slowly come down from the platform to process out. I thought: “I am watching the old boys’ patriarchal church proudly march out—and I am an old girl."  They have served with grit and faith. So have I. It is a new day. I don’t know what the new church will look like, but I know the Spirit will stick around to set fire to it.

 

Photo: Former Bishop M. Thomas Shaw (left) says goodbye and newly consecrated bishop Alan M. Gates (right) says hello. The Rt. Rev. Mark Hollingsworth (seated) bishop of Ohio and preacher of the day looks on. This day we applauded everything!

The consecration Eucharist was joy on steroids—diverse and amazing soul-music, a panoply of festive red vestiture, and prayers of gratitude and blessing, and a hockey rink dressed up to be  Church-for-a-day!  It was a red-letter day. Red is the color of the Holy Spirit. She is all aflame, spreading her fiery grace on us all—no one consumed. All fired up, as they say.

Bishop Gates, in his own printed message, recalled a French proverb, attributed to Jean Massieu: “Gratitude is the memory of the heart.” He elaborated some of his own memories, looked forward to making new ones, and closed with these words:“If gratitude is the memory of the heart, then my heart is overflowing with thankfulness. I thank you. I thank God for you.”

Whereas, if the heart be moved,
Although the verse be somewhat scant,
God doth supply the want;
As when the heart says, sighing to be approved,
‘O could I love!’ and stops, God writeth, “Loved.”
        George Herbert (1593-1633) Anglican priest/poet A True Hymn

2014.09.07 Who/What Is God/Godde or god?

A wondrous tweenager I'll call Tweenie  got in a ‘tween-fight with other girls at school. What in the world would girls fight about but boys, or maybe fashion?  These girls were fighting about religion. Excuse me?

One of their number was from an Assembly of God tradition and had very clear ideas about religion. To her, God was Jesus, and you had to be “saved” to get right with God, not to mention the community. My Tweenie, having been less “carefully taught” in the Episcopal tradition, thought that her friend's brand of religion was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard of. The girls got heated in their dispute about salvation and ended up in the Principal’s office. (I bet it was the first time this principal had to arbitrate this kind of an all-girl dispute. Rather refreshing, don’t you think?) 

The Principal managed to extract what had happened and to arbitrate some mild reconciliation—with a bonus. Tweenie had said some very nasty things to the “religious freak.” There were witnesses. She was seized with remorse, so much so that she agreed to go to church with her freaky religious friend, at which point her mother called me—worried that her daughter would become a Jesus freak, or some kind of a politically incorrect fundamentalist.

I told Mom not to worry. Worse things than Jesus can happen. She wanted me to talk to her daughter.  I told tweenheart just to go to church and observe. Be curious. I explained about altar calls and told her that God had given her a good mind and heart and trusted her to make her own decision in matters of faith—something like, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, though you might feel pressured. I may have said Jesus wasn’t all that bad, but I don’t remember.

 So Tweenie went to church, and of course she came home with an "annunciation": “I am saved!”  Turning to her older sister, she added: “You really should be saved. It would help you a lot.”

Out of the mouths of tweenagers.............   Mom was relieved and told Tweenie she'd go to church with her the next week—good Mom. By the time next week rolled around, "salvation" was out and the mall was in. Annunciation # 2 and #3, just as vociferous, followed: “I am an atheist. I'm thinking about majoring in religious symbolism."

It’s easy to laugh at such innocence. It is quirky and wonderful. But I never scorn sincere confusion about God. You don’t have to be a teen to get confused. Many days I wonder myself.  I just wrote to a friend whose dear friend, a young woman of 45, had finally wasted away and died from cancer and its treatments. I’d met this woman, whom I will call BFF-Beloved, and had been praying like mad for remission. My friend has as many queries about God as Tweenie.

I had no good words except those of my Christian faith in the God of Jesus Christ, by no means an easy-answer religion. And I had the memory of a primary experience of this God I’d met under a table as a very young child who listened to my every word, even the nasty ones, and let me know I mattered. On these two poles I balance, most days precariously, like the spinning plates of a juggler, all my faith and all my doubt.

So I wrote: “I want to hold in my mind my memory of your friend's former vibrant self, which, by my faith, is still there and will be resurrected in God. God, you know, is only a name, a vocabulary word really, for the unfathomable mystery of Love. Most of us know how inefficient love can be, yet it is always effective. And most people believe in the power of love, finite and infinite. You loved well. love, Me"

Tweenie has loved well, too. Now 15, she is about to be a godmother. A GODmother?  I wondered what she’d do about the God she didn’t believe in. Still, she is honored to be chosen and proud to take on this role. Annunciation #4:  "I am now an “agnostic theist.”

Could you do better than that?