A Prayer in the Waiting Room

I just finished with my oncologist.  While the news is still positive, the course of treatment is rough, and the atmosphere in the oncology department, well, it reeks of misery, desperation, and despair.  I wait my turn at “check out” and don’t find the irony amusing.  I look over the waiting room. 

There is an aged and limping husband who lovingly wheels his partner, gaunt, thin, and hairless into the room.  He replaces her vomit tray when it falls off her blanketed lap. He cleans her mouth. He patters with her a bit to pass the time.

There is the couple that bickers and bickers, loud and long.  Nothing is right. She does everything wrong. Maybe, just maybe, nothing has been right between them for long before these awful days.  Cancer does not always bring out our best.

There are some who look healthy, like me.  See me anywhere else, and you wouldn’t guess that malignancy may lurk beneath the surface and knives and poison are the tools of treatment.  Yet here they sit, and here I am waiting to walk down to infusion.

Worst on my heart are the parents leading their teenage child to a chair.  They ask gently if she needs anything. Their worried broken hearts are there for all to see.  I am a weeper and have to control myself.  I think of Anya and Rachel and Ketl. I wonder who really has it harder: me under the knife and needle or they able to do nothing but watch and hold my hand.  I wish the parts we play on no one.

So there waiting to “check out”, holding back the sobs, the sobs for me, for them, I do the only thing I know.  I pray.  I don’t even know what to pray for—certainly healing, certainly hope and light, certainly.  Mostly I invoke compassion.  “Lord, let them feel love: Yours, those around them, these healers working so hard, and mine, rouse my compassion.”  I have nothing else.

I no longer even can make sense of most prayer.  Does God not know?  If more prayers go up, does God hear more clearly?  If no one prays, what?  Mark Twain wrote a hilarious short story in which everybody in one small town who prayed had their prayers answered: one farmer’s rain blessed rice field floods his neighbor, an overly heated young man gives his aging neighbor pneumonia when his request for a cold spell is answered, a cheating boyfriend is struck down in the street, etc. etc. 

Even in the Scriptures themselves, the inspired writers express confusion when prayers are answered. Israel prays for purity and reformation (Make Israel Great Again???).  God sends the Babylonians to answer their prayers, and their temple is burnt, their walls are shattered, and they are carried away from the very land God promised to them.  Habbakuk wonders:

God, you chose Babylonians for your judgment work?
    Rock-Solid God, you gave them the job of discipline?
But you can’t be serious!
    You can’t condone evil!
So why don’t you do something about this?
    Why are you silent now? (Habbakuk 1:12-13)

All prayer seems, inevitably, to fail.  Everybody “checks out” despite our prayers for healing.  When that happens we walk away from our convictions that God answers our prayers and spew pious bumper stickers that we think make better sense of our disappointment: “Well God’s ways aren’t our own.” “God needed another angel.”  “He’s in a better place.”  “She’s not suffering now.” “God has a plan, even if we can’t see it.” Yuck.  Why do we try to avoid the pain and uncertainty?  Why do we avoid the rage?  Aren’t we human?  Didn’t we see on that Friday afternoon so long ago what ‘human’ really looked like?  What ‘human’ really costs?  Our God didn’t sugar coat it with pious claptrap.  He hung crying, asking why he’d been abandoned.

Yet even still, what comes unbidden to me is prayer: “Lord, let them feel love.”  The despair is real, but then so is the only task we have: “Let them feel love.” I plead for love and to be love for others because I have known its power for me.  I lived in it on a long walk across Spain.  I see it in the eyes of my wife, the calls from my children, the cards from church, the prayers of friends, and in the stories, the ancient stories. Even if I don’t quite understand why they are not real for us here in the waiting room.  Stories of sight for the blind, hearing for the deaf, healing for the afflicted. Those stories, don’t make sense to me right now, but they do tell of prayer in the midst of despair and the warm human touch of the love of God.

So, “Lord, let them feel Your love, and maybe ours too.  Please could you show us again how to be love.”  That’s my only prayer in that awful place, that waiting room.  

Buen Camino

Doxology

I am sitting at a coffee shop inside of a library, as fine a combination of institutions as I can imagine.  I am listening to Daniel Barenboim’s rendition of Mendelssohn’s 'Songs without Words’ on my headphones, but the tune drowning out Barenboim in my head is The Old One Hundred.  I am chant/humming the ending to some 300 year old Christian hymns for the morning and evening prayers by Thomas Ken that we now call The Doxology.

Yesterday my surgeon called me at home.  He said he had the pathology reports from the samples sent for biopsy during my lobectomy last week.  The waiting for the phone call had been difficult.  As the time Ketl and I first expected we might hear from him passed, I became more anxious. “Maybe the news is bad and he wants to wait until the 'tumor board' (yes there is such a group) meets to add authority to his news and treatment plan.” “Maybe he is too busy and wants to put off bad news.” Maybe, maybe, maybe.  You cannot reliably infer from silence.

I had tried to promise myself to sing Dayenu no matter the news.  Yet despite my prayers, as Ketl and I walked in the evening I grasped her tight to me and sobbed.  I sobbed for our future, my children, for my life.

Anyone who tells you not to argue with God has not carefully listened to the biblical texts as they formulated such ideas.  The psalmist, in a tight spot, surrounded by enemies, or I imagine, waiting for pathology reports, pleads, “Who will praise you if you send me to the dust of death?” Or, “Who will sing of your great power to heal, to set things straight, if I am dead?”  (see Psalm 6 or 30 or 115) You get my drift, I wanted to sing Dayenu, but fear, loss, regret, longing, all rose up as I waited.  I always told Ketl I just wanted one more day to be her husband, the father to our children.  Just one more day.  And if given that day, surely near its end, I would want another.  That is why Dayenu is such a profound response to the inevitable about us.

But now I sit with coffee and books and Mendelssohn's lieder and The Old One Hundred in my head.  The results are negative, no sign of cancer.  No return to the halls of that surgery unit to hear, and possibly endure, horrors.  Time to hold my wife some more. Time to hear Anya sing and laugh some more.  Time to find adventure and a good night market meal in Singapore with Rachel.  As he spoke the words to me, 'the results are negative’, a new song “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.  Praise Him all creatures here below.  Praise Him above the heavenly hosts. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.” just broke into my head.  Years of Sundays in church with faithful parents and later as an adult, 40 days and 500 miles walking and praying in Spain, holding hands and singing this song after sharing the Eucharist at my new church, Bethel AME, all that repetition over all those years splashed that tune and those words into my heart.  That was my Dayenu.  Well maybe it wasn't gracious equanimity in the face of bad news quite yet, but it surely was gratitude for a return to an open-ended future.

I shared the news with friends and cribbed from the V'ahavta of my Friday nights, 'Cue up the Doxology and sing it when you rise up.  Sing it again when you lie down.  Sing it as you enter, and again when you leave.  Write out the words and tie them around your wrist so they are always handy. If you need to, make a recording and play it through headphones so you are always humming it.  Make sure your children know how to sing it too.  Sing it so often it is as much you as your very blood and bones.’ So if that 300 year old song is really the first thing that springs from my mouth when I hear that I am out of a tight spot and I will live: dayenu.  I will have to keep singing for a while longer to be ready so it springs from my mouth when the news is otherwise.  Meantime, cue the Doxology.  Ketl's rabbi showed me a 400 mile pilgrimage trail across northern Italy to the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul in Rome. Ketl and I have to get in shape for surely days of sweat walking through wonders and nights of wine and holding hands in village squares will be involved.  Cue the Doxology indeed.  Hum along. Buen Camino.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqBnzM1JBWM

Dayenu

I wasn't really supposed to hear.  “It looks like the chest tube site might have become infected.  She is on meds for schizophrenia and she is a type 1 diabetic.” I wasn't really supposed to hear, but I am walking the halls of the thoracic surgery unit.  I am exercising and regaining my health.  She, whoever she is, she is in my prayers.  I am shuffling along in stocking feet.  She, well, I hope someone who loves her is close by. 

I wasn't really supposed to hear, but I was walking awaiting my own news.  I had a 'spot’.  Then it was a 'lump’.  Then it was cancer.  That word caused all who heard to shrink back.  I often wept as I said it aloud.  In my Sunday School class a woman put her hand on me and cried '”Begone.  Just Begone.”.

My surgeon says, in a slightly different form, much the same.  He worked with great skill, as the Imago Dei he was meant to be, to, as my Rabbi's prayer says, bring order to chaos.  He took the top lobe of my right lung. "Begone".  So I am shuffling the halls and hearing horrors.  I am pacing waiting for the pathology report.  Was order really restored or has microscopic chaos escaped his skilled hands? 

Today as I await my news, I have been humming a song from the Passover we celebrate with such joy.  The song is called “Dayenu”.  You sing of one of the blessings of the great liberation and the chorus “Dayenu” reminds us 'it would have been enough.’. We sing of the next blessing and again sing “Dayenu”--it would have been enough.

I walk the halls, regaining strength.  I think on my wife who has held my heart next to her’s for these many years.  I sing “Dayenu”.  I settle on my beautiful children so full of grace.  I sing “Dayenu”.  I think of a long walk with a dear friend, 500 miles across Spain.  I sing “Dayenu”.  I whimper in the face of the news to come.  Oh let me sing “Dayenu” today, before the news, and tomorrow, after the news.  I should not have really heard about her chest tube or her schizophrenia or her diabetes.  No one should hear because no one should have chest tubes and schizphrenia, and diabetes, and so much more.  But she does have. We do have. We await pathology reports, so we must learn to sing “Dayenu”.  Buen Camino 

A baptism long ago and a pall for days to come: life well dressed.

A couple of weeks ago I contacted the church my parents belonged to in Battle Creek, MI where I was born.  I wanted to find the date of my baptism and the name of the officiant.  The current pastor at Maple United Methodist was very helpful.  She got back in touch quickly.  The news was mixed.  While they had a record of my mother's and father’s membership and the date of my sister’s baptism, there were no records of my baptism.  Indeed, there was a gap in all records of baptism, marriage, and membership beginning in the summer of the year I was born and continuing for 3 and ½ years.  Apparently, the minister and officiant at my baptism was not the greatest administrator in the history of the Methodist church.

I went in search of the specific date of my baptism because I wanted to plan a specific portion of my funeral.  You see, I’m not one who is much enamored by the trend among American Protestants to call funerals “Celebrations of Life”.  Celebrations of Life are, as one author called them, “the triumph of the biographical.”  They send us back through the life of the deceased, and we remember the moments of light comedy, the accomplishments, and we highlight that which her/his friends and family find worthy.  Then we are instructed not to mourn, but to “Celebrate”, because the deceased has “gone home”.   Indeed, oftentimes, there are hints that the deceased has not ‘gone’ anywhere at all, but hovers over the proceedings watching and smiling in nebulous bliss.

Despite the hints of orthodox theology, life over death and all, there is more than a whiff of Gnosticism wafting about these celebrations.  Gnosticism disparages the world.  Gnosticism denies the scriptural testimony of Elohim’s experience at creation.  There it is, plain as day, “And God saw that it was good.” But no, for the Gnostic, this world, our bodies, matter, well, they really aren’t that good. Some vaguely ‘spiritual’ world, found either inside of us somewhere or in some ethereal ‘heaven’, is superior.  The early Church spent much of its time and intellectual effort trying to turn away the many heresies spawned by the Gnostic world view.  The Apostles’ Creed begins with creation and ends with resurrection of the body: nothing other worldly there.  Unfortunately, a version of Gnosticism has spread into American Protestantism.  In many of our churches “going to heaven” is preached as the goal of the Christian life.  We are told to mistrust our bodies because they so obviously are subject to weaknesses and corruption.  Why our intellects that contemplate the “propositional truths” or the ‘lessons’ of Scripture aren’t equally weak and corruptible is a question not asked.  Mind or spirit is, “of course” superior to body or ‘this world’.

All that is to say that a Celebration of Life denies the movement of time unrelentingly toward eternity.  There is, according to the Scriptures, an “In the beginning” and there is an announcement by the Lamb, “Yes, I am coming soon.”  There is memory, as in “remember you too were once slaves in Egypt.”  But there is no rewind.  This world, corrupted by sin as it may be, has meaning that is not to be denied by sentimental do-overs on a last day.  Just ask the apostle Thomas.  The once stone-cold dead and now risen Jesus still has the hole of a life pierced by pain and a Roman spear in his side.  Jesus lived and died in the world that His Father loves.  His life and suffering are not to be ignored and passed over,  just as our sufferings as well as joys should not be passed over.

 More importantly, Celebrations of Life practically shout at us to deny our feelings.  We are hurt by loss.  I remember quite vividly coming to attend a funeral of a saint of the church and when I mentioned to the officiant that it was a sad day, I was chastised, told my feelings were mistaken, that “no, this is a great day.  She is with the Lord she followed through life.”  Au contraire, I thought.  Even as I share both the now deceased saint’s and the pastor’s hope in the promise of resurrection—the day of the saint’s funeral was not that resurrection day.  I was missing her.  Those of us who call ourselves friends of the grieving are simply being nervously thoughtless or near hopelessly self-centered when we try to convince the grief stricken, either in private conversations, or worse yet from the authority of a pulpit, that ‘good’ Christians are happy in the face of loss rather than devastated by the hole death opened up in the ground right there in front of them.

 Why do we downplay the pain?  Are our histories with the dead, our lives of uncertainty due to loss, and the real anguish of our body aching to hold a loved one close to be so discounted and minimized?  Now it may be true that a long lived, died in her sleep, saint of the church deserves to have her virtues proclaimed at the ceremonial recognition of her death.  They are proclaimed because we will miss them.  They are gone from this present.  Her life mattered.  Her loss is felt.

So, back to my search for the date of my baptism and my funeral plans.  I recently stumbled upon an ancient Christian practice: the funeral pall.   The use of a funeral pall seems to me to properly weigh and balance a Christian recognition of a life lived and now gone, the pain and finality of death, and the hope of life to come.  Since early in the life of the Church, the dead have been draped in a cloth: a mort-cloth [mort, literally death, in Latin], or pall.  It can be black or white (more usual now) and it is usually embroidered with a cross or other Christian symbol.  It is laid over the body or coffin (or nowadays, urn).  At some point in my service, I want the officiant to point to the pall and say something like this, “As St. Paul told the Galatians, ‘For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ’.  So too, Peter, presented by his faithful parents, MaryBeth and Chuck Doan, was baptized, and so clothed with Christ, in 1954 at Maple Methodist Church in Battle Creek, Michigan with Rev. Robert Dobbs officiating.  So here, signified by this pall, Peter is still, even in this day, clothed in Christ, and will be clothed in Christ as he sleeps in the dust in the hope, promised by Christ, of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting yet to come.” 

Now that, to me, is a fine testimony to the fullness of life, the finality of death, and the hope of life to come.  The goodness of the creation is honored in recounting of the name of the place where I was clothed in Christ.  God’s careful formation me, bodily, in the womb is recognized in the remembering the names of my parents. The church, one visible part of the body of Christ in this world, is recalled by naming the officiant.  The finality of my death and its consequence is named aloud in the recognition that I return to the dust out of which humans were formed.  The hope of a day to come, not a day in which I will ‘get to heaven’ but a day in which Christ will  bring heaven to earth and raise me bodily from the dead is proclaimed in the words of the Creed. 

In the end, as my last act of evangelism in this life, I want a funeral pall.  A pall announces the Good News that Jesus has come, died, and lives again in order to clothe the world in Himself.   A pall evokes the wonder and majesty of the scope and stretch of God’s presence in His Son, Jesus, in and over my life and death, in and over this world He so loves.  As I was baptized and clothed in Christ, so I will wait for His return well dressed.  Buen Camino.

When I was young. . .

When I was young . . .
     Curmudgeon culture is pretty popular these days.  You know it when you hear it.  In fact, there is a near perfect correlation between a comment that begins "when I was young " and curmudgeonliness. A curmudgeonly Facebook posting often features this sort of thing, "I was spanked.  I turned out alright [evidence generally not provided]. Today's kids are bad.  We need to bash them some, and then they'd be like me: alright."  More genial, but just as curmudgeonly,  "We came in when the streetlights came on [yes, kids, we actually were supposed too]."  "We played outside."  "We said 'Yes sir.' and 'No ma'am.'"  We did thus and so.  The logic is always the same:
1) a bit of self-congratulation,  "We, and our ways, are good."
2) a bit of analysis often based on scanty anecdotal evidence, "Today they [and you know who 'they' are--'they' are decidedly not 'us'] don't do that stuff."
3) and now the acid to the face,   "And just look, anyone can see, they are bad."

There is even a political version of curmudgeonliness: The golden age [for 'us' at least] is gone. 'They' took it. Give me power.  I will get it back for 'us'.  Yuck.  Dangerous and often deadly, yuck.

     One of the things I vowed to leave behind on my 2012 pilgrimage through Spain was my creeping case of the curmudgeons.  You know when you have that first reaction to something or someone and it's negative.  Well, I vowed to try to choke that off for at least a moment and let openness have a chance.  What is so maddening about a curmudgeonly character is that it is simply a closed off heart.  It is to look at a fellow human being and to shout "No, you can't do that!  No, you can't be that!  There is no room in this big earth for you.  It is for me and my ways.  Not for you and your ways."

     I must admit I failed. I'm still all too quick to pass judgement, to criticize, and if maybe, in my own defense, I don't toss acid to the face, I do all too often toss chilling waters.
 
     Yesterday, I got a simple but clear reminder of what I learned in Spain.  My north of 85 mother-in-law has been having trouble with one of her ear piercings.  Anya suggested that she go to a tattoo parlor and they could help.  So off went the family to Pangea Piercing in downtown Ann Arbor.  "When I was young" only "weirdos" had tattoos.  You never saw one of your school teachers with a tattoo (well maybe the shop guy).  Your doctor never had tattoos.  Nope not a one.  Neither your pastor, your politicians, your friends nor your neighbors (unless they were a sailor in their youth!).  I'll admit it.  I'm a tattoo curmudgeon.

     Well, this fella, was competent to a fault.  He solved her problem.  More important, my mother-in-law suffers from dementia and is often anxious and confused in all but the most familiar of situations.  As you can imagine, sitting in a tattoo parlor qualifies as an unfamiliar situation for her.  He was not only competent, he was compassionate.  He calmed her and did not start working until she was ready. Then to put a hilarious punchline onto the whole adventure, he said she needed some lubricant to use if the problem returned. He directed her next door.  So the whole family trooped next door to shop called "Bongs and Thongs" to purchase lubricant. Just wonderfully hilarious: three generations of Freedmans crowding into a place that sold glassware for smoking dope and "toys" for, well I'm so square I probably can't imagine, leave it at 'for intimate moments'.  I'll bet that made a picture that went home from work as a story that night.
   
     "When I was young",  the world  was really a smaller, meaner place in some pretty important ways.  I learned small and mean lessons about what to think about 'them' and how they differed from 'us'.  God spare me the curmudgeon.  Yesterday, was a reminder to me of how simple it really is.  We are all peregrino, each and every one of us. We are pilgrims and wanderers, not yet home.  Let your first impulse be always to 'love God', and your next impulse let it always be to, 'love your neighbor'.  And Rabbi Hillel is right, the rest is just commentary.   Buen Camino.  Thanks guy with so many tattoos.

On Leaders and Servants

I have been thinking about the official responses to the Flint water crisis as our politicians weigh in or ignore the folk in Flint.  Their health has been endangered.  Their children may face lifelong difficulty because the tap water hurt them.  Property values are probably near zero.  My goodness, my goodness.
By chapter 25 of the book of Exodus, all the action of rescuing from Egypt, getting the 10 words on Sinai, and confirming the covenant is over.  Now comes a commandment from God to build a tabernacle and a very detailed set of instructions about what that tabernacle is to look like, what the accoutrements of worship are to look like, and what the priestly garb is to look like.  Following that comes a retelling of the detailed instructions as the craftsmen and craftswomen actually build the tabernacle, the accoutrements of worship, and the priestly garb.  After the action of seas parting and Shekinah descending on mountains, golden calves and smashed tablets, well its a little boring.
Buried in that description is the following phrase, " . . .and I will dwell among them."  All that detail, Well the God of heaven and earth, the God of redemption from slavery, wants a place to live not up on Olympus, but "among them."
John begins his Gospel of Jesus by couching Jesus' coming in even more startling terms, "And the Word became Flesh and dwelt (tabernacled!) among us."  The God who rescues slaves and raises the dead and forgives folks who don't acknowledge it when it happens, that God now comes and dwells in a body just like mine.  Paul says that Jesus gave up the heavens to "empty" himself and become one with us.  Jesus presses his followers to empty themselves as he has done--thus the washing of feet, reaching out to the lame, the blind, the hungry, the suffering.
All these images of intimate sharing between Creator and creature I've strung together a bit too quickly here stand in sharp contrast to the politicians of our day. Has Governor Snyder said, "I am responsible for this mess.  These were my employees.  I will move to Flint and 'dwell' there until it's resolved."  Did Sanders or Clinton make that kind of suggestion?  Micheal Moore?  The churches?  Anybody?
 " . . .and I will dwell among them."

What word to bring for Easter?

On my way to church Sunday I heard an NPR story about a ministry to homeless youth in Seattle.  The tables are set once a week.  A meal is served, and the pastor shares a "word of encouragement" before the kids set out into the night.  One transgender youth who appreciated both the meal and the fellowship said, "I never came to church before.  I thought these were the people that hurt you." I felt like I was punched in the stomach.

What Word is the Church, my church, bringing for Easter?  A word that hurts a transgender homeless kid and keeps him/her away?  A word of hemming and hawing about Christ changing us--usually not into the image of a Palestinian Jew dying on the empire's cross, but more often than not into the image of  North American Mom and Dad and Bud and Sis primly sitting in neat rows for an hour or so on Sunday? A Word of grace, naked and honest to goodness grace? What Word do we really bring?

I visit an inmate in Milan FCI.  Unlike holy fire that burns without consuming, his passion, a passion he could not quench, burned his life down.  His wife died of cancer during his trial.  He seldom talks with his adult children.  It is always on his initiative. They never write or visit.  As I visited him this week, he said that he phoned them for Valentine's day.  After some stilted pleasantries, his daughter told him that all the kids agree: when he gets out, he will not be permitted to see any of his grandchildren.  Now, his unholy fire has burned even the bridges between generations.

I will next see him on Easter.  At my house, there is no big ham dinner to be made when I get home from church.  Easter is just another Sunday at chez Freedman-Doan.  But it's not just another Sunday in the life of the Church.  Without the Passion, the Cross, a dead body growing cold and stiff in a silent grave, and then women returning in tears from an Empty Tomb, well without all that, what is there?

Every Easter I can recall, I've heard a sermon on new life, resurrection power, and life renewed.  I've heard god awful chrysalis to butterfly analogies and God blessed exegesis that ponders the holy details of the mystery of life and all creation turned back to right by a God willing to pay great costs to redeem.

So when I go to Milan, what word do I bring from my church, from the Church?  What good is "new life" if you can't hold your grandchildren?  What good is release of the captive, when you have no where to go? When you find that some sin burned bridges will never be rebuilt, how do you get over to the Hallelujah? I think on the Thomas incident in the Gospels.  The holes are still, and always, in Jesus' body.  Death may be defeated, but the past is indelibly written in the flesh.  I have been tasked with bringing a Word and I am tongue tied.  Cliches, Pollyanna, nice, nice, won't do. The Word must be both gracious and true to the bone true.  A Word is what I need, but what Word do I bring on Easter?