While it is day

A conversation with Rev. Songbird

1:13 a.m.

The morning of 9/11 I was standing in my friend Donna’s office at the Methodist Retirement Center where I was one of three part-time chaplains.

“I heard a plane hit the WTC,” Donna said. “I’m going to find a TV.” I joined her, and the day of horror began.

The thing about cognitively impaired old folks is, their emotional antenna are more acute than other people’s. They may not be able to spell out why they feel fear or angst, but they feel it keenly. And they pick up whatever’s floating in the air.

So I spent the day playing on the piano soothing old time hymns of faith.

By day’s end my fingers fell off.

A month later, emotionally overwhelmed, I resigned. The company (which was building an upscale new facility in Williamsburg VA) had no use for three chaplains.

Knowing one of us three was to be let go, and knowing I was about to go on disability, I chose to be the one to get the ax. Might have been me any way.

My 25 year old supervisor and I never got along. (The Associate Administrator said of her, “This chick is going places.”) 

I had this odd notion that a Methodist facility ought to understand pastoral care as a discipline, and view ordained clergy as professionals, whom a secular MSW grad would not be prepared to supervise. But like so many facilities, this one was Methodist mostly when raising money and recruiting new residents and volunteers. The rest of the time administration was almost always business and secular.

With some relief I began life on disability. My days began to be more and more ordered by osteo arthritis and cerebral palsy from infancy.

What’s it all about, Alfie?

What’s it all about? If you’re just eating and sleeping and watching the Food Channel, the meaning of life on a 1 to 10 scale (1 = little, no meaning) sinks quickly to minus 10.

My online friend Rev. Songbird mentions her search for the meaning of illness. So here’s my shot.

I found you’re invisible even to a well meaning church, if you can’t be there on Sundays at 11. So with the help of cool neighbors and committed seekers, I began a couple Bible studies in my home. The psalms. How to pray. Now at Christmas: Mary, the mother of Jesus according to the NT.

I write the blog, though lately I’ve questioned its value. Frankly, I feel called to silence. To the ancient spiritual riches of the early and medieval church.

So I don’t chat with other bloggers. No surprise then you don’t often chat with me.

My call to silence, to seek the Center, has grown stronger. Our fractured, faltering, dark, globally warming planet with its mass extinctions and vanishing habitats, needs new colonies of the committed, whether Buddhist, Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Jew. More than once in history, renewal movements have begun with a few.

Illness and vocation

Illness can be acute, like my wife’s current bout with heart and kidney disease. Frightening, it shreds your schedule, stops you dead in your tracks. Suddenly all the demands of schedule are stripped away. There you are, dependent on God, subject to contingencies of which even the best health experts are only somewhat aware.

Illness can be chronic, creeping along, the little red wagon on the shoulder of the interstate. Getting a bag of groceries takes all morning. Rest becomes the second commandment.

So much you thought you’d do with your life won’t  get done. Ever.

So what you do has to count. It has to cover the essentials. Love God. Love spouse, kids, extended family, neighbors.

Your further calling shrinks to one or two specialties like writing or cooking or weaving. And your flock becomes one or two or five or six whom God gives you to love and be loved by, in return.

More than anything else, chronic illness teaches you to loosen your grip; hold life as if it were a cat that wants to scamper away at any moment.

For at any moment all that you call yours in life may be gone.

Cherish it now, while it is day.