O Taste and See

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. 

"From Blossoms" by Li-Young Lee

Mr. Flores and I sat at a wooden kitchen table on a hot, dusty summer day in the East Bay. Mr. Flores' wife, Maria, is a home Hospice patient. She has advanced dementia and is bed-bound. She is very thin, contracted into a fetal position, and appears quite childlike. She does not speak but for an occasional “coo.” Mr. Flores has cared for his wife for three years, and she has not spoken coherently to anyone for at least that long. He feeds her three times a day, carefully, slowly, compassionately. He tucks pillows around her body. He offers each small spoonful of food with words of gentle encouragement and love. 

 

Mr. Flores and I spent an hour together talking about his faith and doing what we call "life review" - a steady recollection of their early life in the Philippines, his time serving in the Navy, their first home. Mr. Flores proudly described his adventures and comic misadventures with their three children and several grandchildren. The conversation was tinged with an air of sadness; the longer he spoke of his life with Maria, the more tearful his eyes grew. 
 

Mr. Flores punctuated his marriage anecdotes with occasional questions about my life: whether I was married (not yet), whether I had a “suitor” (yes), and whether I wanted children (yes). He hoped that I would understand just how much of a blessing his marriage was, and how being married is one of many ways to grow closer to God. His Catholic faith was a source of steadfast comfort, and it taught him to "take the good with the bad, and to know that God is present with us - not just you and your wife, but you three: God, wife, husband." His eyes brimmed with tears as he spoke of his wife's eventual demise.  Even though he did “know that she cannot stay like this forever, I want to keep her here with me, touch her, kiss her, hold her hand, so that she knows I love her.” 

His grief became palpable, and the conversation trailed off. He jumped up from the table. “Here! I have plums from my daughter's tree up north. Have one.” I accepted a plum from a huge paper bag. Quietly we stood together in his kitchen; together, we bit into perfectly ripe, juicy plums. My plum was delicious, fragrant. “O taste and see that the Lord is good,” I said to Mr. Flores, quoting Psalm 34. He laughed, aglow in the beam of his kitchen skylight. 

"There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background," as it says in Lee's poem. There are days when we stand, plums in hand, in the midst of storytelling, quiet loss, abundant gratitude.  There are days when the plums are ripe, and we must take and eat, taste and see.

Last week, the Church celebrated the Feast of Transfiguration.  We brought baskets of fruit to the sanctuary, and at the conclusion of the service, the bountiful pile of plums, peaches, grapes and berries were blessed and shared.  The blessing of fruit on this day is a reminder of the final transfiguration of all things. It signifies the ultimate flowering and fruitfulness of all creation in Paradise where all will be transformed by the glory of God. It teaches us to "taste and see" these sacred moments as they are presented to us. It teaches us to remember that we always "carry within us an orchard." It teaches us to share plums in a quiet, sunny house, in sweet and sacred fellowship.

"Christ is Risen! You Too!"

How truly holy and all-festive is this saving night, how full of light!

Ode 7 Irmos, Paschal Canon, St. John of Damascus

At the service of the Divine Liturgy of Pascha (Easter) celebrated by Orthodox Christians, the traditional greeting is, "Christ is risen!" with three kisses on the cheek. 

The response is, "Indeed He is risen!"

A few years ago, I celebrated Pascha at the community of St. Mary's Orthodox Church in Cambridge, MA.  As we reached the height of the service, the canon of Pascha echoed joyfully through the brightly lit sanctuary.  We sang the special hymns in four-part harmony, amidst cries of "Christ is risen!... Indeed He is risen!  Christos voskrese!... Voistinu voskrese!  Christos Anesti... Alithos anesti!"  The church bells rang vigorously as we greeted each other in fellowship.

A young boy came up to me, smiling and waving his candle in the air. 

I said to him, "Christ is risen!"

He responded with a high five and yelled, "YOU TOO!"

Exactly.

While There is Still Time

We should be careful of each other;

We should be kind, 

while there is still time.

-Philip Larkin

A version of this was originally published in the St. Nina Quarterly, an online journal exploring the ministry of women in the Orthodox Church.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

- John 1:1

A handsome, charming twenty-eight year old, “Michael” had spent recent years making money, dating successful women, wining and dining and feeling fulfilled. I met Michael in an isolated, stark white room, in the locked psychiatric unit of the hospital where I served as chaplain. Michael had attempted to take his own life the night before, by swallowing extreme amounts of painkillers.

What a soul-shock it must have been to awaken from an anticipated death. My heart felt full with the heaviness of his story as I entered his room. My intention was to provide a safe space for him to begin to face his deeply complex and painful emotions.

As I gathered background information, I noticed that Michael’s medical record read “Atheist.” In my experience, many atheist patients are quite willing to talk to chaplains, because they take the subject of religion seriously and have devoted real thought to it. As it turned out, Michael had spent a good amount of time reflecting about God. Once he decided that I was a non-threatening presence, Michael chose to share his story with me.

Raised by a zealous and devout Christian mother, he saw her faith as legalistic and superstitious. Michael devoted himself to understanding his experiences—his world, his work, his relationships—from a non-religious perspective. He took in a confusing world, and tried to formulate a worldview from it. Not surprisingly, this, along with a tendency toward clinical depression, a series of losses, and a lack of expressed love in his family, led him down a path of isolated despair.

Michael wanted to die because he thought life was meaningless and that in the grand scheme, his small existence did not matter. He looked around at his world—of plastic-seeming people focused on money and fleeting romantic encounters, a world of poverty, evil, and injustice—and concluded that if there was a God, He was horribly strange, and if there wasn’t a God, then life was utterly fleeting and empty. Either way, the prospect of non-existence seemed better.

I sat with Michael for an hour and a half. I felt the burden of his despair physically, in my body and heart. I sought to listen deeply to him. I knew not what to say. Clearly, the "God" he had known until this point was not the God I knew or the God I wanted to share. In my soul, I was aware of a struggle between wanting him to feel God’s love and knowing that I should not be overtly ‘theological’ at that vulnerable moment.

I kept mostly silent. Michael was highly sensitive to religious talk. Stunningly, his own mother had yelled at him that very morning, telling him that he was now guaranteed a place in Hell for his suicide attempt. He was deeply vulnerable, a wounded soul.

So, I sat beside him while he wept openly. We cried on behalf of life lost and found. We cried because it is easy to lose sight of joy, connection and love when the world is overwhelming. We cried because there is so much pain, injustice, and brokenness in the world. We voiced questions: Should we choose to become numb and disengage from the struggles inside us and around us, or should we experience them and try to live through them? Should we risk joy, risk heartbreak? Where is the meaning of life, at the end of the day, when all is still? Where is a real source of hope?

And I lamented inside myself because sometimes I don’t know how to speak of God when the weight of the world is too much to bear. I want to say something real, something profound. I want to minister as I have been ministered to in times of need. I want to reach out with words of compassion. But I gradually remembered, while perched on the dingy wooden chair aside Michael’s bed, that I must not be a mouthful of well-intentioned words. I must be a whole person actively sharing Michael’s space of suffering. I must, simply, show love.

This love, given from God, is one thing I know in my heart to be true. This love is the ground of my being and I am called, as we all are called, to speak it in ways not limited to words. As a Christian, I believe the most profound phrase God ever “spoke” was a being, a complete word of love in the person of Jesus, the Word made flesh. An unwavering presence, even a silent one, would speak volumes more than any simple words. The Word became flesh so that we might become the living words that embody His message.

I did not try to persuade Michael of anything. In that moment, it was not appropriate to tell him a list of reasons to live. No ideas for a better life would honor the depths of his pain in that moment or drag him out of it. Those questions would be carefully addressed by the clinical staff in the days and weeks ahead. No, I needed him to know that for this day, I would stay there. I would try to love him as a sister in God. He mattered to me; he mattered to God. We would sit for a moment, and breathe, and listen. The space between us was holy.

No fancy words were needed. The Word was most needed—the indwelling presence of God within all of us. It is a nearly silent presence, a quiet fullness in the midst of seeming emptiness. It is the still, small voice that spoke to Elijah - the "kol d'mama daka" in Hebrew. This love sits with us in our grief.

It cries with us as Jesus did for his friend Lazarus. It speaks creation into being; it breathes a word of life into the face of death, coming to dwell in the world and in our hearts. It seeks us out amidst the chaos of unknowing and fear. This Love stays with us in a stark, white hospital room.

Give Sorrow Words

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak 
whispers the o'er-fraught heart 
and bids it break.  ~ William Shakespeare

When There Are No Words to be Heard

Originally published in the Fall 2008 issue of the Beacon, a publication of HealthCare Chaplaincy

I met "Martha" when she was recovering from cardiac surgery on the Intensive Care Unit. She would reach out to anyone who passed by her bed. Her nurse told me that she was “needy.” A tightly fitted oxygen mask precluded conversation, but her wide, teary eyes cried out for companionship. I introduced myself to Martha and then sat beside her. As she grasped my hand tightly I noticed a rosary dangling on her bed rails, and offered a prayer for comfort and healing. At the end of the visit, she scrawled on a pad: “Come back.”

The next day I met Martha’s daughter, who informed me that her father, Martha’s husband of forty-five years, had died the week before. Suddenly, I understood what was behind the pleading eyes. Martha was acutely, deeply grieving. Martha, while aware and alert, was on a ventilator due to complications in her recovery. She could not speak, and her hands were losing their ability even to scrawl. This presented a challenging pastoral situation. I wondered, How can I help her grieve when she can’t express herself?; How can she lament without a voice?

I sought to provide a safe, compassionate place in which to address Martha’s grief, where we could draw upon her long-practiced faith as a resource. At the next visit I raised the subject of her husband’s death and her eyes widened as she began crying and patting my hand. She appeared deeply sad and relieved. I believe that she wanted someone to openly address her grief, which was at the forefront of her thoughts and engulfing her heart.

Over the next several weeks, I sought to give voice to Martha’s loss as best as I could, humbly and gently. I was treading on sacred ground. I read Psalms reflecting the grief I imagined: I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me. I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched (Ps. 69).

I was mindful of these ‘deep waters,’ and I was careful not to leave Martha in the midst of them at the end of our visits. I attempted to voice her anger and sadness while offering hope and trust in God, following a theme we often see in the Psalms. Psalm 13 affirms God’s love in the midst of tears: How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?...I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

As professional chaplains, we are called to offer a courageous listening presence. When there are no words to be heard, we listen at the ‘heart’ level, drawing upon our shared experiences of love, loss, and grief. We give voice to what must be said.

Martha and I had many conversations consisting of nods, hand squeezes, tears, and Psalms, though I never did hear her voice. After two months in Intensive Care, she passed away. She and her husband were buried next to each other—reunited, I believe, with the God who listens and loves us in deep waters.