Wayside Pulpit

Contrasts

Today I carried a birthday cake through the emergency room.

The journey was an exercise in contrasts. It wasn’t that the ER was filled with its expected grief. There was no blood. There were no weeping family members waiting word on a heart attack or a car wreck. There was no small child cradling a twisted broken arm. No, this ER is the place that has replaced the family doctor, because most family doctors require the proper credentials for appointment admittance – your insurance card. This ER will see you with or without a card. This doesn’t mean that you’ll get treated, it just means that you will be seen.

And into the milieu I walk, holding the cake comprised of organic, vegan, cruelty-free ingredients bought at the local natural food store. Its been baked in my convection oven; an oven that costs as much as some computers. The cake is covered in plastic wrap and braced with four tooth picks to make sure the frosting doesn’t get smudged from home to office.

And we walk by, that cake and I, through the sweaty sickness that fills the place by noon. The overly stretched bodies from too much fast food, panting with shortness of breath. The pink-eyed children and those with green drippy noses. The moms with one, two, three toddlers all demanding a piece of the cheese-n-cracker combo from the vending machine. CNN blasts through the cries of babies, and the TV speaker pours the news into the room that President Bush has veto increased health care funding for children of the working poor.

And I walk with a cake that I cannot tell you how much it cost to bake. We walk.

Some Kind of Healer

Ministry abounds with the concept of the wounded healer; the idea that we bring comfort and healing from those places inside us where we’ve been wounded. I think that this idea isn’t altogether true. I think that comfort and healing come not from wounds, but from the places we’ve been touched. It could be that we’ve been touched by grief, by happiness, by horror, by abandonment, by fear, by love, basically, by really anything.

I feel exposed when I preach. I find myself a few hours after a sermon wondering why in the world I told people all the stuff I did. I think I find writing a similar experience – though not quite as intense. I come forth to the world from the places that have touched me and they are very personal, so personal I don’t know if anyone can ever relate. The underlying fear being, “If you don’t relate, what does that say about my experience of the word? Am I as weird as I sometimes feel that I am? Am I normal?”

Am I wounded? No. Am I not wounded? No. The truth of the matter is, we are not about wounds, as much as theology and psychology would like to think we are. We are about the questions, the aches, the insights and the flashes of knowing and unknowing that pass through our experiences. The energy of this space, the whirling dervish of the soul, this is where healing comes from.

What Weighs Me Down

I was talking to a friend today and had a flash of realization. I really believe that the thinner I am, the smaller the number on the scale, the more loveable and competent I am. The inverse then is, if I weigh more or feel heavier then surely no one loves me and I am as worthless as a rock in a field.

I suppose I am not alone in this belief; the belief that weight and body shape define whether or not I have worth as a human. Still, I feel pretty alone and stuck in my head on this issue. The social conditioning about body image and weight has been so powerful in my life that I cannot imagine how it is not true. I know that it is simply a belief, but I cannot believe it is only a belief. It is as true as true gets.

My friend that I shared this with said, “Well, you can let that one go.” I immediately became defensive. It is so easy for someone on the outside to take a really thick socio-spiritual issue of someone else and just cast it away like an unwanted fish. If it were so easy to let go, trust me, I’d let it go. So much of the dissatisfaction of my life is rooted in the social conditioning I have in my head related to perceptions of my body, my weight and my beauty.

I don’t know how to let this go. Just like I really don’t know how to let go of many of my deeply held beliefs. I’ve seen a few evaporate into the nothingness that created them, but for the most part I’m still holding on pretty tight.

If I think about the two religions that touch me the most, Christianity and Zen, both are fundamentally about letting go of socially conditioned beliefs. This knowing about letting go is an open window; the knowledge that I can move beyond what society has programmed me to be. Yet, even with the window, I don’t know how to get the ideas that hold me to fly from the room.

As Mourning Doves

A number of days ago I found a baby dove in my front yard. I watched it for a number of hours, wanting to see if its parents were taking care of it. The bird was not quite a fledging, meaning that it left the nest a bit too soon. It was still covered in its downy infantile feathers. It just sat huddled in the sun.

The same day I found the dove I also had a visit with a patient whose leg had just been amputated. When we talked about it she told me, “I just can’t believe the leg is never going to come back. That is the hardest.” My visit with her was followed by another in which the patient is slowly dying from an infection that can’t seem to be stopped. He and I talked at length about his wish to die; the suffering is just too great.

As I watched the dove I thought of Matthew 6:26,“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” There was no food for the bird in my yard. Just as god did not save the leg or ease the suffering of the patients in the hospital.

I ended up bringing the bird in for the night. I fixed up a box, made a nest and decided that I was providing hospice care for the evening. The dove was small, barely moving and making no sounds. I had no assumptions that the bird would make it through the night. When I woke in the morning I opened the box and it was still breathing. I called a vet and figured out how to feed it.

Life is just plain awful sometimes – and god doesn’t always fix it. Yet, still, life takes care of itself. In this process of life, of god, some legs are saved, while some infections can’t be cured. Just as some birds die before they fly. The truth is, on a flat semantic level, god does not feed all the birds. However, if god is bigger than semantics, food is always being had.

A Well Flown Life

My daughter and I recently found a butterfly slowly flapping next to newly planted tomatoes. The creature was something beyond lovely. It was a good seven inches wide and about as half as long. Stripes of yellow and black, as well as bright blue “eyes,” were painted on its wings. My daughter asked, “When will it fly?” I wondered the same question for about an hour and then realized it wasn’t in the backyard to fly, rather it had landed to die.

My realization gave me pause, like all deaths do, about the short time life provides for living. I thought about the days it must have flown, flower to flower, doing what butterflies do. It didn’t know the end was coming, it just arrived there in manicured lawn suburbia. It choked me up a bit, even though death and I have become quite comfortable in my hospital chaplaincy career. My daughter said, “I’m sad it has to die.” I replied, “Yes, so am I, but I’m glad we are here so it doesn’t have to be alone.”

We checked on the butterfly for the rest of the afternoon, making small comments on how much it had moved or hadn’t moved. By the time the clock had set the sun, death was done. The color of its wings had changed to a muted yellow and the flashy blue of the painted eyes was a flat grey. The next morning the body was gone, mostly likely drug away by a neighborhood cat or the like. A fitting end, I suppose, for a well flown life.

A Visit

Why is healing so rare when I see
	a doctor?
He or she comes knocking 
	on the door.
Me wondering,
	“Why knock?  
You’ll come in anyways.”
And they do enter,
	full of knowledge, smarts and
	often extensive expertise
	attached just behind the M.D.
	embroidered on their coats.
But wisdom,
	I rarely witness,
	or compassion.
And if you can’t 
	really see my heart,
how can you heal me?

Real Savior

I want a savior that really died,
not the half-assed man who
got the gift of a second chance.

I want a savior that
knows, really knows,
about the
permanence of death.

I want a savior that
was born and died.
Died.
Died.

I want a savior that
knows long term suffering,
not the 12 hours
nailed to a piece of wood.

I want a savior
that has slowly felt a body
fall and fall apart
over and over,
a body that has lost everything
down to speech itself.

I want a savior that
is still buried in the tomb
covered in cloth
aging oils
rotting.
Because then -
that savior,
my savior,
would really know
what it meant to be alive.

The One Called Lazarus

A caregiver in motion
he travels the countryside,
stoically healing
without much emotion
(or at least the story goes).

He has seen death, blindness, leprosy, demons -
blood that didn’t stop flowing.
Yet he was never really moved
until him.
That man somehow connected to him,
connected enough so he could say
from miles away,
he is dead, not sleeping.

He arrives too late.
But they all believe,
really believe that he
can wake him.
And this is what he wanted
Isn’t it?
To be known as the man,
the man who can heal
So they all will know
that he is -
The One.

Tears fall around.
And he looks down on
hands that had lifted paralysis away,
hands that had changed water into wine,
hands that had opened the eyes of the blind.
And he realizes that it does not matter
if they see - The One.
He simply knows he loves him.
And he weeps.

His tears are for him,
Not for them.
And they move his heart
from inside his robe -
to his death clothes.
And he no longer cares
if they believe or not.
He just wants to heal
to heal
and make the dead man walk.

Exam Room

She says, “I’ll be back in just a minute,”
The door closes,
Her white coat disappearing
around its edge.

My legs swing
from the exam table,
bare heals hitting
its metal underside.

Chronos is palpable
moving slowly through the room,
echoing off jars of tongue depressors,
packaged needles and diagrams of lipid systems.
The sound is deafening.

Then silence descends,
Kyros fills the room.
I am pulled into my own hope
that this place, this doctor,
this now, will cure this pain.
And I can leave the lifetime
of Chronic and be born again.