Dementia: In Life and In Death We Belong to God

 

One of the beautiful ordination gifts from my magnificent sisters and brothers in Christ at Presbyterian Church of Barrington was a copy of John Swinton’s Dementia: Living in the Memories of God.  Perhaps the adjective “beautiful” strikes some as odd or gratuitous in relationship to a book on dementia, perhaps some have wondered if it wasn’t all together a bit of an odd gift to begin with for such a joyous occasion.

Swinton is an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland and a RN with decades of experience in mental health nursing, also an ambitious researcher and a prolific author.  He was a keynote at the University of Chicago Conference on Medicine and Religion when I presented there several years ago. About 5 minutes into his presentation I developed a deep and enduring intellectual crush.

When I did my second Clinical Pastoral Care (CPE) internship at the Colorado State Psychiatric Hospital, back in the “bad ol’ days” before dedicated memory care units, those who suffered most with the indignities of dementia in its most combative and assaultive forms were consigned until death to the Geriatric Forensic Ward.   My learning struggles that summer would bring me to know, deep in the marrow of my bones, the existential fallacy of Descartes.  We, who are created in the image of God, are so much more than our thoughts. Swinton reminds every one of us of abiding holy truth of our species: though we may forget—our family, our friends, our surroundings, to feed ourselves, even to know ourselves—God never forgets us.

 

Swinton asks us, among many things, to consider (I’d say in prayer and discernment) the final line of the tender and grief riddled poem Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his Nazi prison cell: “Whoever I am, Thou knowest, “God, I am Thine.” When we forget all that we know of ourselves and our world we are never forgotten. We are always known by the One who gave us life. As Presbyterians we affirm this deep and transcendent truth of our living in the Brief Statement of Faith: “In life and in death we belong to God.” And, so I am grateful to proclaim and affirm with my sisters and brothers at PCB the final lines of that same Brief Statement of Faith, as we join togeather: “With believers in every time and place, we rejoice that nothing in life or in death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen.”