Advent from the Underside: Symbols of Compassion

A rosary ? Why, yes. Despite my deep Protestant roots, literally centuries deep, decades of chaplain training have made certain I always have a few in the glove box in the car. 

 What exactly does a Menorah look like? Let me google it on my phone and we can look at a picture together.... Half an hour or so and several sheets of construction paper later- an almost perfect representation if the Wikipedia pic. 

The hope of divine compassion real in human life. Light overcoming darkness. The comfort of familiar ritual- centuries proved. Human suffering knows no bounds, cares not for doctrine or belief. It seeks only the blessing of relief, the strength beyond strength of hope amid overwhelming grief, suffering and unrelenting pain. 

At a shelter for the homeless, unmedicated mentally ill: Advent from the underside. Come Emmanuel, come soon.  

Grace and Gratitude from the Underside:

For the deep and abiding Truth of this good grace I am grateful ever day. If it were not so I could not continue the work that beings me to my knees with gratitude, daily, for all these decades: "The word is full of suffering and the world is full of the overcoming of suffering," Hellen Keller

http://www.wimp.com/helenkeller/
1930: Rare footage of Helen Keller speaking with the help of Anne Sullivan. Amen.



Christ is King of the Underside:


If Christ were not King I could not do my job. Every time I see the carnage that some parents wreak in the lives of their children who continue to love them, still. Every time I stand with my arm around the weeping wife of someone dead to alcohol’s seductive betrayals. Every time I see the records of the birth of some young one as I enter notes about their death—from things that different choices would have saved…

Every time, I rely on Christ the King. Living on the underside means living into death in the hope of new life. It means that I have hope and faith that as I die a thousand deaths in each of these encounters, our risen Lord is holding me as I struggle to hold the pain and grief and fear and sorrow of those who come to us for care; feelings of hopelessness and helplessness that are far, far too much for any of us to know alone.

When all is lost. Strength is spent. No direction is before us. When we have died. And, died. And, died. Again. There is only grace. The grace of the infant Jesus who Mary held as every young mother does, cradling all the hopes and dreams of the coming of new life. The grace of Jesus who suffers with us, coming desperate and despairing to his knees at prayer all alone before his death , those who were to accompany him fallen away to sleep. The grace of the Christ raised and walking in the garden, whose very words held Mary’s grieving, hopeless heart turning its sorrow into joy, it’s grieving into fresh hope and expectation.

If Christ the King did not hold my heart, it would be broken, everyday, beyond repair. But Christ is King. A King whose true reign is not hi up upon a throne lording over all, but down on the underside, a place we will all visit if we are human and we live, Christ’s true reign holding those hearts most in need of grace and hope, of faith and the promises of some new life for the living of these days. Amen.

Here is what I Iove about basseting, besides the bassety stuff: Conversations about the weather (horse people always talk about the weather), the plight of aged parrots whose owners die, the genocidal practices of humans against whales (Disney) all in the name of entertainment and money, really good husbands and post-Thanksgiving relocation to Wellington,  good Port, the Hunt Ball, and of successfully  prosecuting sex offenders  and what the Swedes and  Germans do (permanent sterilization is an option) and of deep love and commitment and the beautiful  tender sufferings of how easy and how hard it is to  love someone  in sickness as well as during all those healthy days. And, I saw the real and beautiful truth of  compassion and kindness. And, we conversed about the weather, because we really do love to talk about the weather.

Edge of Glory

I spent last Friday at a ministry conference at the University of Chicago. It’s an annual event sponsored by the Divinity School. Lady GaGa fans will recognize this right away, this Chaplain was a bit slower off the mark, the title of the conference was Edge of Glory. For the postlude to the noon worship service the Sr. Organist for the University Organ, played… Lady GaGa’s “Edge of Glory.”

The conference was a mix of some very scary statistics from Duke's Mark
Chaves, Professor of Sociology and Religion about the shifting demographic trends in American religious affiliation away from institutional denominationlism, along with some truly awe-inspiring and innovative ministries which are responding to those scary shifts in the religious landscape; including the Rev Rick Hudgens, from Evanston, Il's Reba Place, Pastor Phil Jackson and Spiritual Transformation Through Hip Hop, Rev Nanet Sawyer from Chicago's Grace Commons and the Rev, Dr Shanta Premawardhana, President of the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education in Chicago..

I’d gone hoping to get some new information or insight which might improve my evidence based practice of ministry with our patients and their families and our Associates in the hospital where I work.

And, I know that I my time there was well spent and that my reflection on my work as a Chaplain in your midst has deepened. This, alone, will improve my practice. But, what I realized by the afternoon workshop I attended, led my an internationally known leader in the area of interdenominational and inter-faith cooperation in ministry, is that, perhaps, next year’s conference ought to feature the truly awe-inspiring and innovative ministry of anyone who works healthcare—Chaplain, nurse, doctor, counselor, tech, administrator, maintenance person, housekeeping person, medical imaging or lab tech… Any one of us.

For, the thing that unites persons who find sustenance and hope in an organized religious faith and those who would tell you that they are “spiritual but not religious” and those who claim atheist or agnostic or secular humanist or whatever is that when they walk through our doors they come as suffering sharers of our common humanity. They come to us our suffering brothers and sisters.

No matter what our role or discipline among the members of the multidiciplinary healthcare team, we are all committed to serve in our healthcare system with genuine respect, a joyful spirit and passionate caring. And, no matter what our role or discipline we share the common purpose of offering healing and wholeness and hope to any who come here. The word patient has its origin in the Greek, pathos, suffering. We share a common commitment to meet our patients, our suffering brothers and sisters, at the deepest point of our humanity—compassion. To understand this is to understand the central truth of the commonality of our human journey—the thing which unites those of diverse faith and no faith. The compassion you live in your daily life, and especially in your work, is service with ultimate genuine respect, spirit-filled joy, and with the deepest passion of caring. To work here with compassion, is to, literally, from the Latin, suffer with another. It is to feel for your patients, if we are to take seriously the ancient Hebrew scripture which unites the three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam— the same great swell of love and concern with a mother feels for her newborn baby.

So perhaps, standing on the Edge of Glory belting out the chorus to a Lady GaGa song is not such a bad idea in this place that gathers our sisters and brothers, sufferers of every sort, from this world of truly scary statistics:

I'm on the edge of glory, and I'm hanging on a moment of truth
Out on the edge of glory, and I'm hanging on a moment with you
I'm on the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge,
I'm on the edge of glory, and I'm hanging on a moment with you
I'm on the edge with you.
I'm on the edge with you
I'm on the edge with you
(You, you, you...)

 Let us come to prayer this week. Let us come with all that we are, all that we have, and in everything that we do. Let us bring our compassionate hearts before the throne of Glory, praying that we might bring them to anyone who comes to us in this place, this place on the edge of glory; praying that we might offer them to anyone hanging on in a moment, a moment of truth—of diagnosis or prognosis, of accident or circumstance, of worry or concern. Let our prayerful, compassion-filled hearts join this week with our suffering sisters and brothers singing: “I am standing on the edge of glory with you, hanging on, hanging on. I’m on the edge with you. I’m on the edge with you. I’m on the edge with you….”Amen.

The Graces and Compassion of Unknown, Nameless Women

"Be Humble," Charlene Chartrand

Today, in the Outpatient Behavioral Health Women's Group on Spirituality I facilitate: In the midst of lives overflowing with the most profound grief and suffering, brokenness, abuse and betrayal  there is witness to an incomprehensible depth of love and compassion, kindness, mercy and gentleness. God beyond God incarnate in the lives of women, who if the story of the people of God were told, would remain nameless and unknown. Today, I am humbled to have shared their sacred space.

Introducing God

A thoughtful post on the blog Liberation Lutheran Theology, tells the delicate story of the Lutheran author’s yoga teacher introducing her to the Gods and Goddesses of her Hindu faith in their shrines in a space adjacent the place of yoga practice. The post goes on to explore how its author might introduce “the God I worship” to someone from another culture, someone as unfamiliar with Christianity in the cultural setting of 21st Century America as she with Hinduism. The author concludes: “If I said, ‘Come meet my God,’ where would we go? To my church? Perhaps. To some spot in nature? Perhaps. To the downtown church, when my suburban church brings dinner to the homeless and stays for chapel? I'd probably start with that option and work out from there.”

I think her’s is a fine starting point, one at which many of us who might consider ourselves “thoughtful, progressive mainline-Protestants” begin. But, as I too consider this most thought provoking question—how I might introduce the God who invites me, and us all, into deeper and more intimate relationship with each passing day, to one who is completely estranged from him —I think I might chose another starting point. I think it might be a good introduction to have the person join me as I sit with family members of patients who are dying doing not much of anything but sharing in their sorrow and their grief. Or have them present as I struggle to hold the holy words a young woman uses to describe her experiences of sexual abuse for the first time to another living soul. Or even bring them along to a group therapy session where I sit and wait and pray on Something bigger than myself to once again weave sacred strands into a compassionate container for the holding of the shattered fragments of the broken lives gathered there in search of hope.

The God I would introduce them to meets me in the Christ event, in the broken lives of people and in the brokenness of my own life. This is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). Borrowing from Moltmann (The Crucified God), “this is God, and God is like this” I would say; the suffering, betrayed, abandoned, convicted God; never more glorious and powerful and divine than he is in his humiliation, self-surrender, helplessness, at the most dehumanizing moments of his humanity. This is my God crucified hanging there, God on the cross, the risen Christ. Here is the depth of the love of his entire being for us, come closer to us than we come even to ourselves.Here is the love which changed the history of the world and here is the love which can change our personal history too, if we would only accept the invitation.

How would you introduce "your God"? Amen.

The Truth is... Elvis Speaks the Truth

Awhile back I had a really good day in a Chemical Dependency group I lead. In attendance were several young second-generation gangbangers recently shed of their orange wardrobes (been released from jail). They all had been in our program for a couple of weeks and gamely tolerated their once weekly cruel and unusual punishment of mandatory participation in the Chaplin’s Spirituality Group fairly well up until this point; mostly trying, quite successfully, to keep a low profile by not making eye contact with the enemy (me) and volunteering only minimal information when asked; survival skills honed, and which no doubt served them well, in both their gang and prison lives.

My first hint of trouble came in the introduction and goal setting portion of the group (right off the bat). A really, really, big young guy dressed all in black and sporting a complex collection of ink and piercings introduced himself by shifting in his chair, slumping to an almost prone position, opening his legs wide toward me, while simultaneously crossing his arms against his chest, and stating that his goal was “to be more open.” Translation: “F’off lady!” In the monkey-see-monkey-do spirit that can saturate a group dynamic in less time than it took for the first monkey-to-do, the three other young men in the group with gang affiliations and prison time in their backgrounds soon followed suit.

Of the ten other patients in the room, after a quick mental survey, I recon about four of them of similar mindset, just not strong enough to launch an initial sortie but quite willing and happy to lend ground support, and the rest sufficiently intimidated to keep to themselves.

It’s working. Therapy is working and in those initial moments I am both terrified and grateful. Terrified, because I have no real idea of what to say and how to make the next fifty minutes of any real value to these patients who deserve my best efforts to help them come to a deeper understanding that it is only a power greater then themselves that can lead them to sanity amid the insanity of their addiction. Grateful, because something in the room has been getting to these four over the past few weeks and its making them uncomfortable enough to act it out it the group. If they do not bring their pain into the group there is no meaningful way to point them toward the Power that is more powerful than it, or themselves or their gangs or their drugs, or sex or money or power or anything else in which they put their faith.

The opening salvo is predictable; I am accused of forcing Jesus down their throats. This is a familiar and always amusing criticism, intended to put me on the defensive turning attention way from the accuser. It is amusing because I never mention Jesus, of my own accord in group and only in response to a particular patient’s stated Christian belief or in a litany of examples of a teaching which exists in all the major faith traditions. With a bit of therapeutic conversation I refocus the conversation where it belongs and start probing for what they have really brought to the group: Lives which have known mostly pain and suffering, abandonment, death, loss, abuse and victimization, guilt and shame, loneliness, grief, fear and trembling.

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth, have you come to destroy us?” (Mark 1: 24), is ringing in my head, and all the while I am praying because I have no idea what Jesus has to do with any of this in their lives as they have lived them in a world light years away from mine; it begins to seem the height of hubris for me to be standing there trying to speak for Jesus to all of that… Then Elvis speaks. Yes, Elvis. There is an Elvis impersonator in the group and he loves the King enough to look quite a bit like him, even in his off time. “I guess what were trying to say is, ‘Where is my God?’”

Suddenly, Ivan Karamazov, after watching wealthy land owner set his hounds upon a boy ripping him to death before his mother’s eyes, is speaking with him: “It isn’t that I refuse to acknowledge God, but I am respectfully giving him back my ticket to a world like this. Understand me, I accept God, but I don’t accept the world God has made. I cannot resolve to accept it.” These young ex-con-addict-gangbangers have not rejected God but are rebelling against the unexpiated suffering (borrowing from Moltmann) of their lives. They are challenging not Jesus of Nazareth but a cultural Christianity that holds up on Sunday mornings with folks who would never be like them—never enter their world of seemingly endless hopelessness and pain—preaching a mind numbing gospel of repentance and goodness and blessed success, illumining their lives as worthlessness and wanting, relegating to the shadows Christ’s radical transforming message of acceptance and love.

If I would speak to them for Jesus, and that is what I’m called (and paid) to do, I had best take seriously the message of Jesus. The Kingdom of God comes closest to the suffering of the poor, to the sufferers who society rejects and judges most wanting. Jesus of Nazareth offers to them acceptance and a radical love of healing and peace and hope, not in some distant time come but here and now. For today and tomorrow and the days after that. Jesus of Nazareth expiates their suffering, but not by asking them to deny it but by joining them there and traveling with them along their way (Luke 24).

So I travel, as best I can with them, acknowledge their experience of betrayal by the Faith and speak with them, as they are able to hear, of how they might find healing for their suffering souls. It is enough that on this short journey, they might however briefly recognize Him. This is what Jesus of Nazareth has to do with them and with us all.

If I would dare to speak for Jesus to them or to any, I had best take seriously as well the suffering journey of my own life. Stand squarely in the face of it. I had best, come like Job, festering, sitting on the midden of that which is my own and pray aloud its truth in sorrow and loss, and sufferings and pains. In praying there recently in this space, I was more fortunate then Job. The blundering Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, Elihu and the ungrateful and phenomenally unsupportive Mrs. Job did not appear, thank God for that, but the blessed voices of the two in whom I recognize God’s presence; a willingness to reach out into a world which may not be their own, but which they nonetheless entered with compassion and concern.

If Elvis were to ask me now, I would answer, “There, there is my God.” I am so blessed. Amen.

The Rechem of God

Among those present: fathers of dead children, to suicide, to murder, to degenerative pediatric heart disease; men whose careers were cut short by cardiac disease and drunk drivers; a woman who had been raped and others whose history of physical and sexual abuse is unimaginable.

There is only to pray to create a safe container for the holding of these stories and the sharing of this grief before the unimaginable powers of evil. Gently then and by grace, the prayer becomes to sit among the uncompromising threads of their suffering and their sorrow. It is to wait, in silence, for the still small voice of the mercy and compassion in this place of suffering-with and their to begin to establish the frail bonds of hope beyond all reason and good sense, to call forth in them some dim faith light years removed from any sense of entitlement or justice for the continued living of their days.

No Easter sermons here; he is perhaps in a grave so deep one will never be proclaimed. Ehrman and his problem of God seems a sophist’s folly. Olstene’s, “all will be well” pails before the grim reality that it is not nor will it ever be again. Lacado proclaims that, “God is good… that faith is believing that God will do what is right.” None of this is right nor is any of it God’s doing. There is no reason for suffering such profound evils in any human life. The only hope this work can offer—to suffer with, to pray for a heart of rachamin*, to wait on grace from beyond this place, to sit quiet witness of love from the deepest depths, the rechem** of God. There is no other hope or grace, or strength for sitting in this place, the only container, by grace, the rechem of God.

* Hebrew for compassion
** Hebrew for womb

Meeting God in Your Suffering

Your pain and anger seem so palpable, your sense that everything you ever believed in is gone from you, not just your babies, but also your faith—for which you so deeply long.

I honestly do not believe that God is gone from you. I believe that every time we turn to God, even in anguish or anger, in longing or in fear, it is God at work in us. We cannot turn to him unless he turns our hearts.

I think that if you believe that God has spoken to you in the past, that he still speaks in your life and that God wants you to continue to listen for him. In my experience, God speaks in many ways to many people and in different ways at different times in our lives.

Yes, your story is different from the ones to which you are comparing yourself, but I know your story is not so very different from the multitude of stories of women and men throughout the history of our faith who have been called by God to a deeper and more authentic faith through horrible struggles with pain and suffering.

I do not believe that God causes our suffering, I could never believe in a God who would take my three children, leave me childless and alone and have taken my parents lives while they were so young. I do believe that the God of the cross is a God who meets in our deepest suffering and shows us the way out. Paul called it the faith of fools and folly, yet he knew in the depth of his being. It is easy to have faith in a God who rushes in to save the day. It is a deeper and more profoundly faithful heart that continues to seek and listen for God when all seems lost.

I wonder what encouragement you might find if you asked God to speak to you in the silence. I wonder what hope you might find in asking God to meet you in your fear and offer you there his hand so that you might be led, in the living of your days to a kind of happiness and fulfillment which is never proclaimed by the prosperity preachers, portrayed in TV movies, written about in feel good books. The kind of happiness and fulfillment which comes to those who are willing to do the deep and tender work of bringing their suffering to God-of-suffering-and-the-conquering-of-suffering and pray for hope and faith, and trust that that God will bring your living to a new and better place than any you can imagine.

I Believe in the Deep Mystery of Creation

I believe in the Deep Mystery of creation. Every time egg and sperm meet they defy the odds—the Mystery shows itself. Every time implantation occurs and cells begin to develop and divide, the Deep Mystery takes form and shape.

If these were purely biology we could repeat the process over and over in the lab with consistent, predictable results. Even with all our hi-tech fertility procedures, we cannot. All we can do is set up optimum situations for the Mystery to make itself known.

My three Dear Little Ones, even though they never drew a breath, connected me to this Mystery in ways which continue to reveal themselves in blessing and by grace, as I live out my days in live and grief of them.

Over the years I've sat with so may people praying for a miracle. So very few get the answer they were looking for. I’ve only known one family, in all these years, whose prayers for their child were answered in the way most people define a miracle. A three year old child who, for all of medical knowledge, had only the smallest fraction of hope to live a severely limited existence, if at all, recovered completely. Today this child is a healthy grade-schooler, on the honor role and continues to hit all of his developmental milestones. His parents got their miracle. The Mystery revealed full of grace and blessing. Sadly, these seven years later these parents are divorced and in enmity with one another. Their miracle child is very beautiful, and very confused by all that’s going on in the family.

I mention this because it is teaching me that the miracle is not the point, as deeply as we long for it. The point really is to live with depth and compassion into all our important relationships, most especially when we are in pain, with ourselves. For me, it is in continuing to struggle with this living in which the Deep Mystery makes itself known, especially when I feel deep sorrow for the losses I must survive.

I must force myself to remember that for reasons that I cannot understand and actually hate, yes, hate, that death, the death of my children and of my parents when I was so young is a part of that Mystery. I must trust that, in time, the Mystery will make graces and blessings known as I continue to struggle the living of these days in the depth of life and compassion.