Praytell

Monday, August 31, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

At first, the words have a sharp edge that marks the presence of injustice.

Leaving Bucharest, Romania, our driver took us to see the house in which he was born.  He has the deed to the house, but does not live there.  After the war, the communists took the fine house and gave it to their leaders.  Power being what power is, deeds no longer mattered.  Neither did injustice.  It had not been long since Ceausescu had been killed and a new government installed.  He wondered, without great hope, if the house would ever return to its rightful owner.

Would he have a right to return?

If he is, how about others who have also been displaced over the span of history?

Palestinians also have deeds, but their right to return is both disputed and denied.  Do Israelis have the right to return to lands they consider holy even though they are not part of Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries?  Are biblical promises a lesson in geography, or is it the geography of our heart?  Logic insists that we bring the question to America.  We know who lived in the Black Hills before we “owned” them.  What would happen if there was a right to return meant displacing those who broke the treaties and now call it home, complete with deeds?  On and on the dominoes fall.  Do the Cherokees have the right to return to the lands they were forced to leave as a result of the Trail of Tears?  How about the Crow?  Can Bozeman be part of  their reservation?  And just what are these reservations each set up with the assumption that its residents will forgo a right to return?

The right to return proves to be one of the more vexing and explosive questions we have before us.

But if we move those three words, “the right of return” from physical geography and apply them to the landscape of life itself, they utterly change their nature.

Grace, after all, promises us a chance to return no matter how controversial or even improbable our return might be.

Were we good enough?  No.  Were we loving enough?  No.  Were we full of mixed motives?  Yes.  Did we make time for others when we had the time?  Not enough.  Have we let down our highest expectations of ourselves?  Yes.  Can we still be loved, nourished, encouraged, received, forgiven, and enfolded by God?  Yes . . . we have this right of return, this chance to return, this re-establishment of harmony.

Sounds like a sermon, doesn’t it.

It is.

But not really.  It’s more about renewing a relationship somewhere . . . it’s more about knowing grace always allows us to start over.  It’s more about working from the few things we can control, and then sowing them like seeds.  That’s what grace does.

“Welcome home,” it says.

“Let’s begin again.”

But what about the West Bank?  What about Rapid City?  What about a house in Bucharest?

I don’t know.

But who knows.  Maybe grace can show us a way.

Even in me.

Surely in you.

And always in “us.”

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The Road We All travel

Nobody has to teach pastors how to do a funeral.

Yes, the Catholics have their liturgies, the Baptists their way of doing things, the Quakers their way of speaking when the life we have known comes to an end.  There is sequence to the service, often breathtaking when we understand and appreciate its movement.  Time itself is part of the story:  2,700 years ago Isaiah said this, 2,500 years ago we sang the Psalmist’s  words, two thousand years ago we learned that death is not the final word, and here is what Paul’s letter to the Romans said about that.

But when the liturgy closes, we need not refer to a text to know what we are to say.  We know we are giving to God one of God’s own.  We know there was light in that person’s life, no matter how complicated it may have been.  We know we are there to say a kind and truthful word.

In so doing, we instruct ourselves and the congregation to do the same, not just at the end of life, but on Tuesday afternoons as well.

My parishioner had been shot.  He had had too much to drink.  There were problems we didn’t have enough time to work out.  At the end he pulled a gun and the sherriff shot him.  Three days later we were in church to celebrate his life.

It was not a stretch to do so.  It never is, when it comes to doing funerals.  In each life there is light.  In each life there are events that spin out of control.  In each life there are disasspointments.  In each life there are bad choices.  In each life there is lonliness, dissapointment, grief, and some measure of violence.

And in each life there is light.

One Sunday he came to church an hour early.  He’d forgotten about the time change.  We both laughed as light streamed through the windows.  But there we were, in church, both making sense of life once again,both gatherng strength once again, praying for release once again, acknowledging God once again, confessing sin once again.

No, it was not hard to find an encouraging word.

It never is.

It is our calling, our duty, and our privilege to find the light, to listen to it, to learn from it, to be encouraged by it, and to encourage our congregations to do the same.

Nostalgia is one step removed from reality.  Some say eulogies have nothing to do with reality.  True, true, and once again true.  But what is reality?  The vision of a world before its fall?  The shards of light in a person’s life or the disappointments and tragedies that try to claim it?  Do we believe in the resurrection or don’t we?  We do and so,I’ll go for the second, each and every time.  The church always finds a kind word.  It must find a kind word.  It must go for the light.

The kind words that grace funeral services are the truest words we will ever speak.  They have the gentle power to turn adversaries into friends.  They cause the lion to lay down with the lamb.  They launch hope once again.

Thank God for them.

In these days of division, may we all be owned by them.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

He is a pediatric oncologist.

He came to his profession by reading the causes of death in Boston.  Over and over again he noted how many times death was attributed to cancer.  Maybe, he thought, he could do something about that.  And so, he specialized in cancer, and then pediatric oncology.

Over the course of his career, medical advances changed the landscape of his practice.  Most pediatric cancers can now be arrested or even cured if they are detected early enough.  It is less and less likely that he will “lose” a patient.  The fact tha science is on his side has made him more careful, not less careful, in his treatments.  On most cases he is careful to consult with others, just as they consult with him in a life-and-death attempt to do the right thing.  The right thing means being deeply aware of the emotional, spiritual and even financial baggage that comes with the diagnosis of cancer in a child.

I met him at a cancer camp several years ago.  In the course of my days there one could not help but be inspired by the hope and the gut wrenching reality of cancer.  Recently cancer units have been giving beads to patients after they complete a treatment, a transfusion, another set of tests.  The beads become powerful symbols.  One teenage girl had a string of over 1,000 beads.

One afternoon the doctor and cancer kids and I took a walk up a crick to see where it went.  I told him I wanted to write a book entitled the Geography of Healing, and that I’d like to interview him.  He agreed.  And a few weeks later invited me to lunch in Billings.  I recorded our session, and later wrote it up for the book.

I was interested in the boundary between faith and health, and asked him what word he might have for the church.  What might the healing doctor say to a church that also proclaimed healing?

I will parapharse his answer.

“Tell them to not underestimate the importance of funerals,” he said.  It was not a response I expected.

“How so?”

“When we do lose a patient, it is the church that gives us a new beginning.  The church tries to make sense of it.  It gives us some hope, it brings us together, it tells us not to give up, it asks us both to remember and to move ahead.  Nothing else can do that.  We will drive 800 miles to a funeral, and know it is important to do so.  I’m not sure the church always realizes how important these funerals are.”

They too are part of healing.

Today, just a few hours ago, our nation gathered in Boston for Ted Kennedy’s funeral.  We do so in an era of politics that is all to often toxic.  But there we are, sitting side by side in a church, hearing about the work of a man in the midst of a gospel reading that reminds us that God once said, “As you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.”

Our medical systems, and the debates surround them, seem to be not working.  How good it is that for a moment, we take a deep breath, say a prayer, start over again, and do so as a congregation of God’s people.

Shadowlands

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The conversation might go something like this.  “The test results have come in, and they’re not good,” says the doc.  “Your bone is indeed fractured, the cancer has indeed gro”wn and keeps on finding new places to grow, the wound is infected.  You’re not going to be able to work.”

“I see,”  I say, wondering, could this be true?

“But . . . ” my doc says slowly, and leaning towards me a bit.

“But what?” I ask.

“But you’re alive.  And you’re going to keep on living.”

“How long?”

“For a while,”  she says.  We both begin to chuckle.

“Guess that’s true for both of us, isn’t it?” I say.

“Yep.  So let’s talk a little.”

“About what?”

“About  life.”

It seems like a pretty deep topic.  Maybe its actually a sermon, or a prayer, or a moment of counseling with all kinds of psychological implications.  But this is a doctor’s office.  The diagnosis is unerringly, and almost un-nervingly correct.  The diagnosis is life.

Almost immediately, the conversation begins to block itself.  Comparison and competition keep asking what life “should be.”  Doubt keeps wondering if it can be.  Pride is intent on asking what it must be.  X-rays, MRI’s and CAT scans keep track of the distance between what it was in a desperate attempt to return to that very place.

The clock is ticking.  Fifteen minutes isn’t very long.  But the diagnosis necessitates taking a stab at some questions.  I’m not quite ready for the questions she asks, but I savor them because they are unexpected.  She tells me to answer them quickly, less than a minute.  Nobody’s timing, but we don’t have all day.

What do you care about?

Who do you care about?

Will you let this diagnosis of “life” strengthen your life?

What would you like to do?

What hopes will carry you through?

For what are you thankful?

What makes you cry or laugh?

I do my best to answer.  But then ask if she’ll answer the very same questions?  After all turnabout is fair play.

“Go ahead,” she says.  We go through the list.

We’re 14 minutes into the visit.

We’ve talked about life rather than what ends life, what complicates life, what threatens it.  I realize how much I long for such a conversation.  And I’ve realized again how very possible they at.  At the end of this week’s Bible study, Mary asked, “So, what are we working on?”

It was a life-centered question that asked for truth.

“I’m working on generosity,” said one.  “I want to be generous, and I am with my time, but when it comes to money I seem to freeze up.”  I was touched with her honesty.  I wondered what I might say.  What would be true?

“I’m working on hope,” I said.  “What we’re up against is steep.  And so, I’m working on hope.  I keep whistling, “Great is thy faithfullness, all I have needed thy hand has provided, morning by morning new mercies you show.”  But then I wonder, is it true?  Is it?  And so, I’m working on hope.”

“Me too,” another said.

Fifteen minutes.

We talked about life.

You see, we’ve been diagnosed.

And the diagnosis is life.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Hope

All I had to do was buy a watchband.  The one I had had worn out, as two-dollar watchbands tend to do.  The thought of somehow losing the watch my father gave me in August, 1967 was not something I wanted to contemplate. It has been serviced only a few times since then, is still self-winding, and continues to remind me of the love of family that surrounded me when I was in the hospital following a series of reactions that were life-threatening.  There would be many times ahead of me, my father affirmed. And so I needed a watchband.

Walgreens doesn’t carry them.  And so, one day, when I actually used the car instead of my bicycle (actually, my father’s bicycle, a 1957 Schwinn Traveler) I passed by a Kohl’s department store and decided to go in and see if they had any watchbands.

They did.  I bought the ten-dollar version that seemed sturdy enough to last for several years.  As I checked out, the clerk asked me for my e-mail and asked if I’d log in to rate my shopping experience.  Had she been helpful?  Did the store have what I needed?  Without thinking I agreed, thanked her for her help, and headed out into the night with the watch on my wrist.

The next day I had an e-mail from Kohls.  If I dropped by the store in the next 48 hours, I would receive a 20 percent discount on anything in the store.  I didn’t need anything in the store, so I didn’t go, but the next day there was yet another e-mail.  And then another.  I was impressed with their outreach, these little appeals to return, these strings of incentives were each an offering of commercial hope.   And it got me to thinking.

My last doctor’s appointment was about three months ago.  Using a drill I inadvertently put a hole in my finger that didn’t look good.  My doctor said it would probably be alright and she was right.  I left the clinic and haven’t heard a word from them.

Health may be a 24/7 concern, but our connections with healers are sporadic.  Needless to say, they also cost more than a watch band.  Once we leave their office everything stops.  But not so at Kohls.

And so I wondered what e-mail follow-ups from my clinic might look like.  Maybe something like this:

Thanks for coming in.  We’ll let you know what the cell count is as soon as we have the results.

Keep washing those hands.  Its the best thing we can do to protect ourselves from infection.  We do it all the time and hope you do too!

How are your blood sugars faring?  hey are important.  But don’t get discouraged.  Diabetes is a full-time occupation.  Glad to have you as a patient.

Hope your exercise program is going well.  Don’t have one?  Log in HERE.  It is so very important.  You’ll feel better because your body will be better.

Whoops!  You missed your last pro-time.  Yikes!  We forgive you!  But those numbers do count.  So come on in.

Are there ways we could be a better clinic?  Let us know.

And so on.

The silence between healers and patients is deafening.  Discouraging.  Disheartening.

It shouldn’t be that way.

And it needn’t be that way.

My watch band is working just fine.  So is my watch.  When I look to the hills I see the seasons change.  If they can . . . so can we.

Larry

March Lake, Winter Mountain

As the healthcare debate swirls around us, there is hope and fear that the outcome will be either “this way” or “that way.”

In March the lake looks “this way.”  Not so in April.  Not so in May.  Each season finds its way.

Maybe we will too.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

For the most part I try to stay away from tends.  Like fashion, it’s just a matter of time until they prove me wrong.  I prefer local drug stores to Walgreens, but I don’t know what we’d quite do without them.  When my insurance company wanted nearly $300 for a single bottle of pills, Walgreens charged just $38 due to their own prescription program.  And so I’m not in favor of large chains, but thank God for Walgreens.

But trends have their place if we are to make sense of the world.  In the current storm of healthcare debate (complete with guns, rifles, posters, and a dose of fear on all sides) a trend comes to mind.  One way or another the debate is mostly about money.

And here’s what I notice:

The farther you get from working with people the more you are paid.  The cashier meets, greets and exchanges pleasantries with thousands of people a day.  The store manager a few hundred.  The regional executive fewer.  The CEO still fewer.  At such a level, a single board meeting, with all of its angsts and its bevy of weighty decisions employment becomes leadership and leadership needs and receives its rewards.  The farther away from the customer one is, the greater the pay.

As it is in stores, so it is in the medical world.  General practioners have a hard time making ends meet.  As a result there is no shortage of specialists, but an acute shortage of family practitioners.  How odd . . . any doctor can diagnose a stroke, but neurologists get paid ten times as much.  (I’m making the number up . . . but not the point.)

And, as it is in the medical field, so it is with churches.  One is expected to move from a two-by-four church to one with four-by-fours to one with pillars to a denominational level at which point some salaries are unimaginable on the local level.

I can anticipate the retorts, and feel them myself.

Family physicians have their place, but when it’s time to operate on the spine, the feet, the neck, the heart isn’t it important to have the best?  Yes.  Mom and pop churches have their place, but the skills they require are not in the same league as denominational executives.  Yes, different skills . . . but our view of local, tends to be either romantic or dismissive.

When it comes to the national healthcare debate those who speak the loudest are well-insured.  I applaud the administration for inviting so many to share their personal stories.  But these stories, and their witness, seem to have had little effect. The discussion soon returns to generalities known as policy, program, and politics and costs.  In such a world, we scarcely have time for the personal.

I have yet to receive a call from my insurance company asking, “How are you?”  But the note saying that they did not need to hear from my doctor, or “that doctor,” as they called him, is unforgettable.  He, you see, was the GP who saved my life.

Good for me, and bad for them.

What’s this have to do with faith?

If healing involves caring for each other, everything.  After all, the command, “Love one another,” was given by an unemployed, and uninsured, carpenter.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

The article couldn’t help but catch my attention.

“At the End, Offering Not a Cure but Comfort,” the headline in today’s New York Times read.  The picture showed a palliative care physician speaking with a woman whose cancer was fast bringing her life to a close.  Palliative care, which is a relative newcomer to medical care, has long been a primary concern of the church.  There is a sense in which its very presence, and necessity, signals defeat.

Palliative care appears when chemotherapy doesn’t work, when all the neurologist can do is diagnose the damage but not fix it, when the tides of dementia, chronic disease by whatever name, cannot be stemmed and so we’re left wondering how to live in whatever time remains.

Palliative care can’t help but be about learning to accept our losses as an intrinsic part of life.  Palliative care can’t help but always raise a question or two . . . but couldn’t we?  Shouldn’t we?  Are you sure?  Isn’t there something that could be done?  Is there a Mayo Clinic somewhere?  Some place that can do what you can’t do?  Isn’t there some medical magic?  Are we giving up if we just accept?

Palliative care walks a mine field.

So does the church.  If we believe in prayer, why doesn’t it work?  What on earth do we do with all those Psalms that promise God’s protection?  Is it that we don’t have enough faith?  Is our faith pure enough?  Strong enough?

The questions grow thin, and even shrill.  Stay with them long enough and they also turn out to be shallow.

What both pastors and doctors learn is how to be loving enough.

I will never forget what our church knew how to do before we knew how to name it.  Neil was dying.  He knew it.  His wife, Vivian, knew it.  We knew it.  We had the emergency run to far away hospitals.  (I followed the ambulance, breaking the speed limit all the way but somehow figuring it was okay because my parishioner was in the ambulance, his wife was with me, we were a team . . . we, the church, the family, the ambulance, the hospital . . . only later did I find out I could have been ticketed had an officer seen me).

Neil came home.

Vivian wondered what to do now, while “dad” ran out of strength.  We felt her fear.  We felt him sliding away.  So the deacons figured we’d do what we could.  I would sleep beside his bed, a kind of vigil.  So would Dwayne.  We’d spell each other and other deacons through the night.  Loraine would be there.  So would Florence.  So would we all.

We prayed, we cared, we did what we could as the river of life headed wherever it wanted to go.  That’s what churches do.  The question is always about love, always about presence, always about grace.

At the end of the article the woman died.  The writer noted that her physician would not be calling her husband.  “Dr. O’Mahony had not spoken with [her husband] his his wife died and he does not expect to.  Once the ferryman has delivered his patients across the river, he rarely looks back.”

“How sad,” I thought. The appointment is over.  The connection is broken.

In the church, we try to not do that.  “How are you,” we ask the widow, knowing it is somehow a river of life that connects us whatever is destination.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

We were on the 23rd flood when we heard the wind.  We looked up from the paintings, and saw the air suddenly thick with rain, hail, sticks, papers, and debris.  We went to the window.  Over there, right over there, three blocks north of here, we saw the tornado touched  ground.

Then the sirens began their deep-throated wail.  The tornado had come so fast nobody had time to see it coming.  Yes, the day had been unbalanced.  My wife tells me there was lightening without thunder long before I awoke.  There was light in the western sky, when everyone knows dawn comes from the east.  But still . . . there was light, flashes of light, and the whole sky seemed to say, “I’m unsettled.  Get ready.”

At two o’clock we were not ready.  But there it came.  The wind; the hail; the rain; the debris; the light grey funnel that touched the convention center where 2,000 Lutherans were trying to decide what to do about the presence of lesbian and gay clergy among them.

Their pronouncements were perhaps predictable.  “Whatever the decision, we will still be a church,”  some said.  Those who violently disagree can still be in communion.  But both “sides” of the issue had a different take.  The arc of history, said one, makes inclusion both desirable and inevitable.  To discount history is to discount the hand of God.  But scripture has not changed, the other intoned.  How can we be “one” when the basis of “one” is contested?  Can there be hope for any protestant for whom protest has always been part of the DNA?  Is there such a thing as transcendent truth?  Your “yes” is my “no” and my “yes” is your “no.”

We have a tendency to see these storms as threatening.

But what if they aren’t?  What if they are the very nature of life?  Everything is flux, the Greeks thought.  Just when you think nothing will change, it changes.  Are we in a conservative era?  Just wait.  Are we in a liberal revolution?  Just wait.  Is the morning sky quiet?  Just wait.  Is a tornado coming?  Just wait.  In a few hours the city will smell of newly fallen rain, the skies will clear, the sunset will be spectacular.  Just wait.  As you do, as I do, as we do, stay centered in humility, mercy, and justice.

“Abide with me, fast falls the eve’n tide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide,” Is one of my favorite hymns.  “Abide” is one of those words that stretches over time.  It has little to do with positions of the moment, with decisions that seem desperately important, but actually aren’t, with being right.  Instead, it asks for time and lovingly requires grace.

What does God do when Christians denegrate each other’s witness?  Abide with me in grace.

What happens when violence betrays the peacemakers?  Abide with me . . . in grace.

What happens when these ever-so temporary constructs known as denominations realize how bound their time frames are?  Abide with us, forgive us, renew us, and allow us to begin again.

The tornado was not something unheard of.  It was part of this afternoon’s weather.  It’s what happens in Minnesota when August’s heatwonders where to go, and a cold front moves through.  Those church disputes?  Those issues that demand and have every right to receive our attention, they too are part of the weather.

Love them.

We don’t have long to say, “We’re on the 23rd floor.  Look there!  And look over there!”

Oh my.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Out there, on the edge of the prairie in southwestern Minnesota and out there, at the edge of the Crazy Mountains in southwest Montana, news of war came our way.  We heard that “over there” in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Kuwait, a war was underway.  We had all kinds of feelings about that war.  Some feared for their husbands, some for their sons, some thought it would come to no good, but everyone knew that our lives had changed.  And, more importantly, everyone knew we were a church.

And so, we figured we’d better get together.

In each place, we called a meeting.  In each place we were concerned about the images of war that incessently invaded our space, our place, our minds.  The jets kept flying into the World Trade Centers, then they did it again, then again, and then yet again as though each update might somehow have the power to make the unbelievable truly unbelievable.  We watched the films as bridges collapsed, as buildings exploded, as Baghdad lit up in ways no city is ever supposed to light up.

And so, we met.

It was not a time to talk politics.  It was a time to give ourselves to each other, to think about the children, to spend some time in prayer, to ask yet again, “What good can we do?  And how might we do it?”

We shared.  We assured our children that we would be with them, that we would surround them with our love, that our highest hopes are for peace.  In both places and in both wars we reached out to each other as best we could.  On 9/11 we called everyone member just to “check in,” and to invite them to a service that night.  We had some songs to sing, some prayers to offer, some counsel to give given the trauma of that day and the news that insisted on pulling us from our spiritual centering.

It was not a time for denial.

These were not times for escape.

But these were times for church to actually be church.

“Clouds do cross the sky,” we said.  But then we found words for such a time.  “No storm can shake my inmost calm, while to that rock I’m clinging.  Since love is lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”

Our highest hopes were in those gatherings.

“I wonder what churches actually do,” many people wonder.  “What do they do in there?”

It is a good question with a sometimes answer.

Sometimes, we actually care, actually gather, and actually sing.  Sometimes, we are actually “church.”