During my preparation for the ministry, I spent several months as a chaplain at a busy hospital in Chicago. I've told you a lot about those formative months in my sermons, but the encounter I want to tell you about today is not one that I am not particularly proud of.
I had only been there a few weeks and was just beginning to grow accustomed to my starched white lab coat with its bulging pockets and large chaplain patch emblazoned on the shoulder - when a call came in for a chaplain to go visit a woman on the neurology unit. It was my floor, so off I went, eager to see someone who had actually requested my presence. When I arrived at the unit I stopped in at the desk and took a look at her chart - MS it said, multiple sclerosis, diagnosed today.
I took a deep breath and entered the room, and there was an obviously beautiful and strong woman of 65 who welcomed me in and began to talk. She was crushed, she said. And afraid. She knew a bit about what the future might hold for her and she was angry, too. She and her husband had been working hard for years to get to this age - kids out of the house, mortgage paid off, and the promise of a dozen of years ahead touring the country in their newly purchased RV. It just wasn't fair, she said, over and over. What kind of God would do this to her - a good and devout Catholic?
Her anger and sadness frightened me, so I went about trying to make this woman feel better. I talked about the things she could still do, the folks who loved her and would stick by her, the new ways she would surely find to live out her dreams with her husband. But she wouldn't listen. Whenever I'd shut my mouth she'd speak up again - sharing her fear, her sadness, and her anger. We talked back and forth this way for awhile, and eventually, after many missed opportunities for understanding, she grew tired and I left.
And this is the part where I admit what you already know - that I did a far from perfect job in that moment. My own emotions got in the way. It was hard to see someone so sad and disappointed, and I mistakenly believed that is was my job to move this poor woman from anger to acceptance, all in that one hour - because that is what I thought it meant to be helpful. I couldn't have been more wrong, of course - but I didn't know that yet - not until my live encounter with this particular woman, with this incredibly powerful teacher.
Over the next couple of days, I discussed my interaction with this woman with my colleagues - all of whom groaned when I mentioned that there - on that first day of her diagnosis - I had tried to help this woman "gain some perspective on the positive things still to come in her life." They reminded me of the often long and winding journey we all take as we move toward acceptance of the challenges in our lives - and they suggested that I go back, apologize, and simply listen this time. And so I did.
My first revelation came when this kind woman welcomed me back into her room. She seemed genuinely happy to see me, and I couldn't have been more surprised. After my apology, she began to speak again, opening up about her pain and sorrow, and this time I listened, really listened to what she had to say. It was truly a live encounter - a moment of deep learning that has changed my approach to ministry and to the seemingly simple act of listening.
"Live encounters," the Quaker teacher Parker Palmer tells us, "are partnerships in which the full powers of two or more beings are at play."[1] They require our full attention and intention, and they rarely happen by chance. Live encounters ask us to see the other as a whole and valuable being, capable of rediscovering their own inner strength and truth, capable of health and healing without any of our advice or suggestions or great ideas. They ask us to leave our own agendas at the door, especially the unconscious plan we often carry of simply making ourselves more comfortable.
"Live encounters," Parker Palmer goes on to tell us, "are unpredictable, challenging, and risky. They carry no guarantees, so they are much less popular than those 'inert collisions' in which we treat each other as objects. But live encounters offer us something that inert collisions lack: they are full of the vitality that makes life worth living, and they enhance our odds of doing worthy work."[2]
Live encounters are risky business indeed - they require two people paying attention and leaning in with compassion at exactly the same moment - and this can seem like a rare occurrence, indeed, in our world today. But live encounters are worth the risk, I believe - because they offer us something that those inert collisions that fill our lives lack - they offer us compassion and connection and a reminder of the vitality and wonder that makes life worth living. We will make mistakes, yes, as we run into one another, but the risk involved in caring for one another, I believe, is more than worth the gamble.
In the Wellspring groups here at church, I invite participants into the experience of a daily spiritual practice for the duration of the ten month program. Participants choose what ever spiritual practice suits them best - and together we support one another on the journey of discovery that often follows. At some point during the year, someone inevitably takes the risk of sharing that their spiritual practice just isn't working for them - they're doing it they say, but they aren't feeling any different. We go over what they're doing, think through the possibility of changing approaches or disciplines all together - and eventually find ourselves back at the truth of the matter. A daily spiritual practice does not guarantee a daily spiritual awakening - but it does, as our own Unitarian prophet, Henry David Thoreau once said, increase the opportunities for light to shine in on our soul.
And this is how it is when we reach for help and when we reach out to help, too. We will not always make the mark. Sometimes our own emotions will get in the way, and sometimes we will leave each other feeling like we said the wrong thing or didn't get what we needed. But other times, we will hit the jackpot - getting help we couldn't have expected - reveling in the aftermath of a live encounter that renewed our faith in the gift of being alive.
Earlier this morning, Grace shared with us the journey she went on over the past year as she did her best to help her daughter while living herself with the fear and helplessness that the disease brought to their lives. At the beginning of her story, Grace shared her disappointment at missing the opportunity to explore a variety of different spiritual practices through the wellspring program - but I'd like to offer up a different interpretation of events.
I believe that asking for and receiving help is a spiritual practice. Pushing aside the inert collisions that can take over our lives and opening ourselves up to the possibility of a live encounter - with all of its risk, its vulnerability, it's unknown possibility - increasing the opportunities for light to shine in on our souls - that is a spiritual practice, indeed. And that, I believe, is the journey that Grace went on last year.
"I believe that my survival, she tells us, is due in a large part because I was willing to open my heart, to risk sharing my terror and helplessness-sometimes with people I did not know very well-and to ask for help...I was not alone through those long months because I was ministered to-not usually by professional ordained ministers, but by you, ministers of this congregation, who were willing to stand with me. And looking back I am more sure than ever...that there is a process at work in my life that has provided resources when I felt I could not survive changes or losses. The belief in an unquenchable life-force is a strong one for me. Although I may feel fearful at times, I know there is a strength and power beyond me."
Unitarian Universalist minister and Maine Warden Service chaplain, Kate Brastrup, shares in this experience with Grace. When her husband, Drew, a state trooper, was killed unexpectedly in a car accident and she was suddenly left alone to raise their three children - the unbelievable happened. Here's how she describes it.
"Perhaps forty minutes after I heard the news of Drew's death, I was sitting in the living room with my friend Monica when the doorbell rang. The sergeant was on the telephone, so Monica sprang to answer it. A young man stood on the front steps, clad in a spiffy dark suit, his hair neatly combed, exuding a scent of soap and virtue. Holding out a pamphlet, he beamed at Monica. "Have you heard the Good News?"
For a long second, Monica glared at him, not sure whether to punch him or laugh hysterically. She compromised by slamming the door.
A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again. This time, I answered it. It was my neighbor, an elderly woman I had exchanged no more than a dozen words with in the ten years I'd lived in Thomastown. She had pot holders on her hands, which held a pan of brownies still hot from the oven, and tears were rolling down her cheeks. "I just heard," she said.
That pan of brownies was, it later turned out, the leading edge of a tsunami of food that came to my children and me, a wave that did not recede for many months after Drew's death. I didn't know that my family and I would be fed three meals a day for weeks and weeks. I did not anticipate that neighborhood men would come to drywall the playroom, build bookshelves, mow the lawn, get the oil changed in my car. I did not know that my house would be cleaned and my laundry done, that I would have embraces and listening ears, that I would not be abandoned to do the labor of mourning alone. All I knew was that my neighbor was standing on the front stoop with her brownies and her tears: she was the Good News..."[3]
The truth is, that our lives offer up the opportunity to lean into one another - to rediscover the ever present web of connection and support that holds us up - each and every day. We don't have to go through the difficulty of a devastating diagnosis or the reality of losing a loved one to know it - we can choose to bring our full intention and attention to all of our daily encounters - lifting up our eyes to truly take in the experience of another - letting go of our own agenda for a moment and opening ourselves to the possibility and the potential of that a live encounter rather than an inert collision will surely bring.
But this is not so easy to do. Sometimes the small slights add up and the door of our heart swings solidly shut on its hinges. It isn't always the most serious of offenses or losses that close us down - sometimes it is the smaller stuff - the slights in the supermarket - the offhand but hurtful remark of a friend - the busy-ness of someone we long to have listen, if just for a moment, to our lives. These little inert collisions can harden us - slamming shut the door of our hearts to the possibility of the small restorative moments - moments like the poet Jane Hirschfield wrote of earlier -when all of the sudden with the smell of lavender in the background and a bee buzzing as she dozed in the sun there came the clink of the shovel on a rock and with it the clear question - what about joy? Even as her friend lay dying nearby, even as she knew without a doubt the winding river of suffering - still, in that moment, her heart was stirred. "I begin to believe the only sin is distance, refusal.," she writes. "All others stemming from this."
We all take an enormous risk by loving in such a precarious world. It doesn't take too long of a life to know the realities of loss, of disappointment, of pain and pure misfortune. "Suffering is part of how it is on earth;" the writer Robert Housden tells us, "it is an inherent part of the fabric of existence. And if we are lucky, it will break our heart open."[4] This is the truth at the heart of any honest religion. That there is pain and suffering in this life - that if we are lucky it will crack our hearts open - and through that crack will flow the kind of compassion and commitment that can heal this broken world. This is why we come together this morning, friends, to renew our commitment not only to one another, but our commitment to the transformative power of love as well.
We won't always make the mark - as the poet David Whyte reminds us this morning -but that is not the point. He and I "want to know" as he writes, "if you are willing To live day by day With the consequence of love" - with the commitment to keep your heart open - trusting that love and that life is always worth it - allowing our hope to be restored through a pan of warm brownies, the simple presence of our companions, and the vitality that is sure to flow through us when we open our hearts to another.
May we take up this risk together - trusting that we are the Good News for one another.
May it be so, and amen.
return to main page