Uncomfortable Places Where I've Slept

 

There are no chickens in this story

MY LIVING ROOM FLOOR, NORTH CHESTNUT STREET, 

NEW PALTZ

 

I’d met this guy Jonathon while working semester opens at the college bookstore. He was really introverted but we got along. He invited me to a party in The City, although who he knew there I never figured out. The two of us rode out on the Trailways bus and took a subway to wherever the apartment was. I’m necessarily a little hazy on the details.

Most of the night for me was in bursts and flashes. I remember drinking tequila and then fashioning some concoction from other alcohols. I remember making out with a woman in a room away from the party but other than long reddish hair I don’t remember anything about her. This is a big part of the reason Jonathon later stopped being friends with me because I found out she was someone he liked and had hoped to get to know at this party. I wasn’t much of one for niceties like that in those years.

When the party broke up at 1 or 2 we took the subway back to Penn Station but there were no busses leaving until 7. So we joined the ranks of the homeless who squatted in the one room inside the station the cops kept open for them. Once an hour they rousted us to another end of the room, saying “No one sleeps!” But I did as I was riotously drunk and between bouts of laughing at the cops (not a practice I’d suggest) and trudging from spot to spot, I huddled on the floor and slept the fitful half-doze known to both the inebriated and those trying to have conversations with them. Jonathon spent the whole time standing and trying both to stay near me, like I was protection, and being as far from other people as he could.

Eventually the sun came up and at 630 we could buy tickets, with which we could stay the half hour to 7 while the others were bounced into the street. The bus ride was two hours but to me it seemed both like hours longer and just a few moments. We reached town, I walked with Jonathon as far as the corner of Main and North Chestnut where we parted, him to his room and me  to my apartment.

Now this is where it becomes uncomfortable.

I’m one of those lucky few born with some immunity to the bad effects of drugs and alcohol. I’ve never had a bad trip from LSD, never gotten paranoid while smoking weed or hash, never experienced anything but stupendous and unremembered epiphanies on shrooms or peyote. Never had a hangover no matter how much I drank. Except that time.

My headache began on the bus but I put it down to the sun in my eyes and lack of solid sleep. As I walked, I could feel each step travel from my foot through my body to the tiny hammer banging my brain. I had never felt so happy getting to my apartment, so much so I opened the door and did a faceplant on the floor. I didn’t feel like I could make it to bed, I just laid there and slept.

Or I tried to. It seemed that day everyone in the world I knew chose to visit me, either in groups or singly. Again, only fleeting memories but I do remember a stream of drool from my mouth to a small pool next to me when the first person, whoever it was, knocked at the door. Stupid me, it never occurred to me not to say, “Come in,” although that wouldn’t have accomplished much as I had a habit of not locking my door and encouraging people to walk in.

I alternately curled into the fetal position or spread full out like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. I may have even resembled that drawing a little as my hair was curly and long and sweat-plastered to the floor. I vaguely recall Jonathon coming by with another friend of ours, I don’t remember who, and looking smugly down on my pain. I probably cried once or twice. No one, fortunately, stayed long, or I don’t think they did, because I kept drifting back off to sleep after a few sentences describing my head variously as a deflated basketball, a cracked egg, a fishbowl full of fecal water, a balloon blown up by a congested drunken bum. There may have been more.

Eventually the night came, and far from being refreshed, I was so worn by the exhaustion of breathing through a mouth equal parts dry and swampy I fell finally into bed wearing the same clothes I’d worn to the party now 24 hours before and drifted in and out of consciousness until 5 or 6 the next morning, when I got up, stretched my 45 minute routine, and then put on running shorts and took a ginger mile and a half jog. Outside the day-long, incessant hammering, that was my usual start to the morning, which may have been why I didn’t usually suffer otherwise

Sitting quietly

While it's true, as my wife has observed, that I can't take part in a moment of silence without telling somebody that I'm observing a moment of silence, I do in fact spend most of my working day quietly. Between patient visits, of course, I do a lot of reading, usually with a radio on. And when I visit someone who is unresponsive, I'll sit close to them, preferably near a window because I like a view, and relax into my role as nonanxious presence. 

Oddly, I wouldn't have pegged me for someone for whom calm would become a natural state. I bite my nails, I tap my fingers, I hum and sing under my breath. I am a mess of jangling, banging nerves. I promised myself when I was younger that I would never be bored, and smartphones and Facebook have helped me keep that promise. Sometimes, even sitting next to the bed of a person actively dying, it's difficult not to check my email or a friend's status or my Twitter feed. I admit to giving in more often than I'd like.

But I reflect on the situation this way. As a Unitarian Universalist I accept individual and corporate dignity and worth. And a part of that is something I've heard called NODA. No one dies alone. While I can't guarantee to be with someone when death happens, I can be present for a short time as the process plays out. This ministry of presence, as I see it, is as important to a comfortable death as any drug or prayer. It's the best I have to offer, maybe the best any of us has to offer. To accept the sociability of our species, that we like to live with one another, is to accept we also like to die with one another.

My Old Man

Twenty years ago, in an obscure regional magazine, I published a story about my dad. It was called "My Old Man" and it was funny and affectionate and my wife calls it her favorite piece of mine. I am, I think, rightly proud of it.

My old man, as described in that story, is a different old man than the one I come here to visit. There remain some indications he's the same man. He's funny and has the same goofy grin widening his cheeks when he says something he knows people will laugh at. He still sits with his arms folded or purses his lips, steeples his fingers, and puts them in front of his mouth when he's relaxing, often after a meal. He still doesn't want to be seen without his teeth in and a "nice" shirt and pair of slacks on. With shoes, not slippers. He's a favorite of the nurses and aides at his nursing facility, partly because he rarely complains and partly because he will spend days smiling at nothing.

In a deeper, more important way, he is a different person. He's like the hospice patients I visit. When I see him and he's asleep, I sit quietly in a chair next to him, touching his shoulder, holding his hand. When he starts to make sounds, like my dogs when they dream, I gently rub his shoulder, his hands, and he has the same reaction as them. He remains asleep and settles, calmed, relaxed, his breathing that of someone sliding into a warm tub. The flecks of dead skin on his cheeks or the dried milk on his lips remind me he has joined ranks of the elderly who have either forgotten to wipe their faces after eating or no longer care. He loses control of his emotions, on occasion, possibly as a result of his strokes, possibly because of the UTIs his body collects like stamps. It rarely lasts long, a flash of fear and hopelessness, tears, and then he's forgotten it. He's smiling again, at nothing again.

It took me decades to come to love the Old Man I grew up with. He was a good man although like most children I wasn't always aware of it. Frankly, it wasn't until my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and he became her primary caregiver that I realized just how good he was capable of being. When I began to visit him in the nursing facility, I was faced with a different Old Man, one who was more frail and, at that time, not even certain of who I was. He has improved, partly physically and partly mentally, to the extent he can occasionally use a walker instead of a wheelchair and he usually recognizes my face and voice. But he tires easily and I can't spend more than a couple hours with him before he's got to sleep, and doesn't want to see me until the next day. He is, in some ways, the same Old Man I've loved, but in a more profound way I've had to come to love a new Old Man.

"kryon on line 1"

A few days ago a friend in my class on Unitarian Universalist history and polity did a presentation on the mid-19th century confluence of Universalism and spiritualism and it brought up many things for me.  My own experiences and history with spiritualism, by which I mean contact with the dead, ghosts, possession, in effect the supernatural, and so separate from spirituality, is complicated.  My history is studded with the supernatural and now I have a deep, abiding faith that there is nothing super-natural--that is, there is nothing that is outside nature--in our experience, up to and including god and spirituality.

My mother considered herself a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, and while she kept the Sabbath holy--outside of attending church in the morning, our Saturdays were usually homebound--she was also a fervid reader of Fate Magazine and books by and about Edgar Cayce and for decades she visited mediums and seers, sometimes dragging me or my sister along.  She spent untold thousands of dollars on an ultimately frustrated search for contact with Something Else.  When she died I don't think she was any closer to feeling satisfied with her search than when she started.  She fully, almost desperately, believed in both an afterlife and a supernatural world that existed alongside this one and that collided with it.  She taught me to use a Ouija board and divination pendulums and to read tea leaves and tarot cards.

(For his part, while he believes in a personal god and a redeeming Christ, my dad never had much truck with anything otherwise supernatural, and shortly after my mom died he left the Adventists to return to his childhood Methodism.  He says he feels more at home with the people there.)

I read mom's Fates and Cayce books and a ton of others about UFOs and communication with the dead and reincarnation and yetis and ghosts and all manner of other phenomena.  I believed I lived in a world where mysterious things happened and where I was one of the few who saw or experienced them.  For the same reason I was eventually drawn to Gnosticism, the Rosicrucians, Santeria, Gurdjieff followers, the Sufis and other secretive groups.  I wanted to draw breath in a magical world where there was something large outside myself that existed parallel to daily, mundane reality.

I question one historical assertion my friend made, that Universalism and spiritualism divided in the late 19th century each to its own camp.  They may have done so publicly but I am convinced spiritualism simply went underground into what eventually became UUism.  Nearly every congregation I've come in contact with has multiple members who cross whatever bridges Unitarian Universalists would claim they burned.  My initial experience with a UU congregation came about because of my involvement with a group of followers of Ramtha whose fringes I was on in Woodstock.  I made contact a year later with a larger UU fellowship through members of Eckankar.  (It shouldn't surprise any of my friends that I was involved in both groups because of women I dated.)  When I served a UU congregation in Wisconsin there were several closet followers of Kryon. There are members of UU congregations I've met in the hub for whom fairies are a real presence, as well as others who quietly admit to leaving out offerings for the "little people" who help them with their gardens or who protect their homes.

I will admit it now:  I am guilty of listening quietly and respectfully to each person who relates to me his or her belief in these things, smiling beneficently on the outside and inside thinking, "You are fucking nuts."

I feel that way, not despite my own experiences--because I have had brushes with something Other; I've seen ghosts and spoken with the devil, heard unearthly music--but because of them.  In each of my experiences, I've realized on meditation and reflection, that I can't be certain I wasn't dreaming or mishearing or seeing something that can be explained in some other way.  It does not, despite my earlier dread, make the world a duller place but a more exciting one because the deeper mystery is how to parse out the way my senses and my eagerness to accept something at face value has fooled me.

Does this mean, because I am certain I've hallucinated these experiences, that everyone's experiences can be explained away likewise?  Of course not.  Other people have different experiences than I do.  But I've never experienced anything I couldn't eventually accept as a naturally-occurring event and I suspect neither has anyone else.  It's not as if I don't want to believe this:  I've often said I wish I could be an evangelical Christian, not for the certainty but for the comfort.  I'm convinced there is something bigger than me but I'd call it, after Thomas Lewis et. al., limbic resonance, the beloved community being greater than the sum of our parts.  This is, for me, God, the tapping into something like the Cloud, I suppose, or Jung's collective unconscious.

I can't begrudge my mother her search and I'm self-knowing enough to recognize I'm on a similar one.  I followed her path for some distance and it eventually petered out.  This one may too, or I may round on myself and end up rejoining her.  William Blake and C.S. Lewis and Rumi and the compilers of the Zohar found their spirituality liberally dusted with language, terminology and concepts they could only articulate as magic or super-natural, and it is presumptuous to suggest I'm more advanced or a better observer of humanity than they are.  But I'm also aware how deeply uncomfortable I'm left hearing the words, "I received communication from Kryon for you last night."

spiritual homelessness 1

I've been busy writing this past semester, although little of it has ended up here.  But as a final requirement I've taken a course called final integrative seminar which is meant to pull together many of the threads of my years at seminary.  The exam for this course is what's called a "statement of ministry," and while it may be precocious to call it that--I don't have much of a statement to make about something unless I've been directly involved in it for a long time--it's somewhat accurate.  I'll publish it in 4 sections starting today.

Spiritual Homelessness

My Statement of Ministry

Introduction:  What is my understanding of God?

Like all stories about God, this is a story about loss.  I knew an artist named John Wolfe back east in the 80s.  He was one-legged, had had the other blown off in Vietnam, had a family, a wife, a little girl, and an awfully big talent.  One of the few New Paltz artists to have his own studio, separate from where he lived and not on campus.  He worked in oils primarily.  He didn’t want an artificial leg but hobbled around on two metal canes that ended in cuffs on his forearms, his good right leg, and his stump. 

            He told me a story that took place in the 70s.  He’d just gotten out of the service a few years before, after losing the leg, and was down and out New York.  He couldn’t take it anymore, he said, drinking all the time, angry as hell, in pain when he wasn’t high.  He was sick of people, sick of life, and sick of people in his life, so he decided one night to just get out. 

            “I wanted,” he said between puffs from his Marlboro, “I wanted to be away from people, but not away from people.  You know what I mean?  I was tired of civilization or tired of the people in it.”  He took another drag and stared off into the distance, even though all he could see across the street was the library and the bar.  “People shot at me, they took my leg.  I didn’t blame people, I blamed civilization, or what civilization done to them.  I hated that.” 

            He stubbed out the Marlboro and shook another from the pack into his mouth.  He was fair-haired, wispy bangs blown across a boyish face that was too trusting to live for long on the streets.  His eyes pincered up.  “I got together a lot of money, I don’t know, couple hundred.  Be honest, I don’t remember where I got it from.  Saved it, borrowed it.  Might have stolen some, who remembers back then?”

            He lit the Marlboro, took a long drag, and handed it to me.  I took a single toke—that’s all I did with cigarettes—and gave it back.  He stubbed it back in his mouth and talked around it.

            “I’d heard about this place, down on the Yucatan Peninsula.  Tiny town, no one goes there.  I took a flight to Mexico City, took another flight east to another town.  Had to rent a burro take me up to another town where I caught another flight.  Caught a helicopter from there, one of those passenger things, got a fat belly and room for thirty.  Picked me up from one mountain top and took me across to another mountain top.” 

            He was off in another world by then, watching people come in and out of the library and either head for their cars or the bar next door.  We were sitting in front of the bank, the nicer one in town, but the people inside had never seemed to mind anyone leaning against their wall so we leaned.

            “Whole other air up there.  I could feel like, like my lungs were filling up with something else, something I’d never breathed before.  Something people were really supposed to breathe.  I couldn’t wait for them to open the door.”

            A guy we knew came out of the bar and waved at us.  We shrugged back.  “I was standing on the ledge when the dude opens the door.  What do I see directly across the tarmac?”

            I grinned.  I knew it wouldn’t be good.

            “McDonald’s arches.”  John took a final drag like he’d sucked all the bitterness out of the Marlboro and flicked it in the street. 

            “Did you stay anyway?”

            “Course I did.  I’d put a lot into this place or what I thought it was going to be.  But it ended up it wasn’t nothing.”  He grabbed his cuffs and we headed up the street.  “I came back, started doing some reading, some meditating.  That’s when I started reading Buddhism.  Started painting.  That was the only way I could find that place.”

            John’s canvases were landscapes or cityscapes, sometimes abstractions.  He took life drawing classes on occasion to keep his hand in, but his real work was depopulated, places where people had been and gone.

            I said, “No people?” 

            “No civilization.  People I can handle.  It’s what being around other people does to them I don’t like.”

to the sneakersignal!

last week I watched an interesting documentary on jews in rural wisconsin in which one interviewee said something I've heard many times before but hadn't really tweaked to: to be a jew you need other jews. all the reading I've done this semester, esp in relation to jews, but also about christians and muslims, reinforces that. I think that's a part of being a people of the book, that you can't read the book alone but must have someone to read it with.

then yesterday I was having a conversation with a friend. in the middle I was discussing one of the comments my cpe supervisor had made about me and that I readily admit: that for all my admission for the importance of community--and in unitarian universalism the community is as important as it is for intentional groups like the santarians or the amish or the hare krishna--I find it very hard to be fully in community. I already knew this was true but my epiphany, such as it is, lay in realizing for the 1st time why this is.

I love community. my wife will tell you one of my most overworked words is "communal." I think the good of the community beats the good of the individual in most cases and I'm in awe of people who sacrifice for their neighbors, esp ones they don't know.

but I like being on the outskirts, living out on the edge of a larger group. I identify with the rim, only coming in when I choose to and living outside the group when I choose to. my hero I've always identified most with is the lone ranger who lives somewhere out in the desert with his faithful companion and rides into a situation to right the wrong and then gallops off, unthanked, into the sunset and disappears until the next wrong crops up and he's needed again. (and, at least as portrayed by clayton moore, the masked man I grew up with, never killed anyone intentionally.) sometimes I think ministry is like that, only you're not so hard to get ahold of, more like batman who can be called in with the batsignal. ("if you need me, turn on the sneakersignal.")

I like living with people and I like living near people--I tell myself I miss living in the city--but if I'm honest I'll admit even when I lived in the middle of a city I was usually pretty lowkey and often hard to find. I like to be places where I'm unknown. I'm probably more introverted than I think I am because these days, given the choice between spending time with friends and spending time with my dogs, I'm more likely to hang out with my dogs. I love to spend time with people, but on terms and conditions I set.

this is a pretty privileged existence, I know. I can pretend I don't have to rely on other people (although of course I do like everyone else) and I can choose when to involve myself in the messiness of other people's lives or whether to let them get involved in mine. to provide another metaphor, I'm like the kid playing "duck, duck, goose" (although out here they call it "duck, duck, grey duck") who walks outside the circle and chooses how long he can circle the group and which person to let chase him. I remember in my freshman american lit class learning about the puritan concept of "being in the world but not of it" and I think that informs at least some of this, not that there's a better life for me afterward but that I've got something better going on over here that I'll share but I'd rather not. I don't think that's being a good person of the book and I know it isn't being a model unitarian universalist but there it is for me: "beloved community" is an idea I like very much so long as I can come and go as I please.

last sunday's sermon

We are likely to remember at least a part of early October, 2001. The World Trade Center towers and a portion of the Pentagon in D.C. had planes flown into them, killing thousands, and in a Pennsylvania woods another plane crashed unceremonially. The newly placed President, George W. Bush, famously froze when given the news and eventually went on reading The Pet Goat to elementary schoolchildren. We were all in a daze at the notion that, like much of the rest of the world, we had been the targets of a terrorist attack. It ought to be noted, of course, that such attacks happen in other places on a weekly if not a daily basis, even if they don’t have the same loss of life.

Less than a month later, October 7, we woke to find our nation attacking the small country of Afghanistan, a country which we were told had financed and planned the attacks as well as harboring the mastermind of the organization accused of carrying them out. When our intention to bomb them back to the stone age was reported, one of my students from Afghanistan said, “Then this war should already be over; we are already there.”

We are nearing the beginning of our second decade of bombing the tiny nation back to the stone age. Osama bin Laden is dead; al Qaeda, whose greatest strength, its decentralized leadership, has also turned out to be its greatest weakness, is a sidelined terrorist group; the Taliban, whose name means “students,” were routed and forced out of Afghanistan, only of course to return, making inroads among a rural population long sick of being collateral damage; and ancillary war and military action in neighboring Iraq and Pakistan have blossomed. Despite the rhetoric of President Obama and the withdrawal of a tenth of our troops there, the war continues.

There has been no shortage, from drone bomb deaths on innocent neighborhoods to attacks on wedding celebrations to smart bombs launched at overfilled hospitals, for the Afghan public to turn on its supposed liberators—remember the promises of flowers thrown at the feet of advancing Americans?—and now its invaders and occupiers. On March 11, Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, Jr. gave them yet another reason. A 38 year old four tour serving married father of two from Ohio who had enlisted in those heady days immediately after September 11 who was previously diagnosed with traumatic brain injury from a road accident, he is accused of having killed 17 Afghan civilians, almost all of them children and women, and setting fire to some of their bodies.

Staff Sergeant Bales is the person we blame although there remain questions about what witnesses saw—some have reported that the killings were done by American soldiers—as well as the way events played out—how did an American soldier manage to simply leave a well-fortified post like Camp Belambay, not once but twice, walk several miles in the dark to the nearest villages, and then after his grisly deeds were done simply reenter the camp without having been challenged by guards? The truth is no matter how much evidence is collected and no matter how much investigation goes into it, this is probably one of those wartime atrocities that, like My Lai and the Winter Soldier events of Vietnam, or like who shot JFK or what really happened to Jimmy Hoffa, will probably never be solved to anyone’s satisfaction. Already we are experiencing a notable lack of investigation on the part of American media which is more interested in finding rationales for Bales’ actions than for determining the way he might have done it.

On this last point the essayist Glenn Greenwald has written: “Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivated U.S. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales to allegedly kill [17] Afghans, including 9 children: he was drunk, he was experiencing financial stress, he was passed over for a promotion, he had a traumatic brain injury, he had marital problems, he suffered from the stresses of four tours of duty, he ‘saw his buddy’s leg blown off the day before the massacre,’ etc. Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivates Muslims to kill Americans: they are primitive, fanatically religious, hateful Terrorists.” We do tend to relegate the actions of people we already disapprove of to evil and, when faced with proof of our—“our” in the same sense we talk about the team we follow—own evil acts, we experience what Greenwald calls “a desperate need to believe that when an American engages in acts of violence of this type…there must be some underlying mental or emotional cause that makes it sensible…” We live in chaos; people behave in ways we can’t predict or control. Chaos, with good reason, frightens us so we paper it over with narrative, impose order on it, so it makes sense.

Similarly, we are trying to make sense of another, older killing, that of young Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, by George Zimmerman. His death occurred in late February this year and came to many people’s attention by way of social media, articles on websites, and the publicity of a large march by people wearing hooded sweatshirts. Unlike the Afghan killings, it was several weeks after Martin’s death before people heard about it—I’ve tried to trace back my own discovery of the incident and I think it was a report on the article-accumulation site gawker.com dated March 8, nearly two weeks after his death and five days after his funeral. I hate to say it but articles like this and events like this happen nearly every day in contemporary America and the only reason I’m likely to have noticed it myself is the use in that first article of the incredibly affecting photo of a tween Trayvon staring plaintively into the camera and wearing a hoodie similar to the one he was killed wearing and the title’s emphasis on the word “unarmed.”

In the short time since this story became a national headline so much has been said about and commented on the events of February 26th that it may be necessary to reiterate what we do know. We know that George Zimmerman, who has operated as a one-man neighborhood watch in the gated community for a number of years, sighted an unfamiliar black youth walking in the rain with his hood up. Trayvon Martin, who was on suspension from school at the time, was visiting relatives who lived in the neighborhood and had just come from a local convenience store where he’d bought Skittles and iced tea. He noticed Zimmerman following him and called his girlfriend, who has fortunately remained anonymous in the media, who was probably on the phone with him when he was shot.

Zimmerman, who has logged in many calls to the local police department—the number 46 seems certain although whether that is since 2001, 2006 or since December depends on the source—alerts 911 whose dispatcher tells him it will be checked out by police and that he should not confront or follow the suspect. Zimmerman, saying “These assholes always get away,” instead leaves his SUV, approaching Martin on foot.

This is the point at which we don’t know what happens, only what the result is. Zimmerman claims he had chased and lost the suspect and was returning to his SUV when Martin attacked him, breaking his nose and banging his head on cement. The 911 dispatcher, who kept the phone live, records someone yelling for help—the police say it was Zimmerman, Martin’s girlfriend who was also listening via his cell phone says it was Martin—and then a gunshot. Several witnesses report hearing multiple gunshots although no one alleges that Martin had a gun. All of this occurs between 7 and 7:25 that evening. The police have determined that George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin with a shot to the chest at about 7:25 and approximately five minutes later officers arrived.

Zimmerman tells the officers he shot Martin in self-defense. An officer notes in his report that Zimmerman is bleeding from the nose and head. He is placed in handcuffs and taken to the station for processing. However, he is not charged, and when he is released his gun and his gun license are returned to him.

As more than one reporter has noted, the more we learn about this case the more complicated it becomes. George Zimmerman accused his former fiancé of having attacked him in 2005 and biting his face (she claims he attacked her and her dog bit him). Martin was suspended from school for having been found in possession of a plastic bag with trace amounts of marijuana in it (one commenter I read pointed out, quite realistically in my opinion, such a charge and punishment would be laughed off by most white suburban high school students). Zimmerman’s father, who is a judge, has pointed out that his mother is Hispanic and this point has been remarked on repeatedly by his defenders as a reason this couldn’t possibly have been a racist attack, as if racism is the result of a formula, the introduction of one element negates another, rather than an incident based on cultural and social assumptions, and there’s no indication Zimmerman self-identifies as Hispanic. The Sanford police chief, Bill Lee, has stepped down in the face of a state-led investigation of this and another case involving his refusal to charge the son of a prominent citizen for killing a homeless man. We have seen in the past few days the release of surveillance video of Zimmerman’s arrival and processing at the Sanford station that night during which he looks neither injured nor bleeding, and even if he had, as some defenders claim, been “cleaned up” before arriving, he certainly does not look like he’s suffering a broken nose.

The primary means for explaining the rather lenient treatment of George Zimmerman barring some rather strong and justifiable beliefs of racism on Zimmerman’s part or on the part of the police has been the Florida law on justifiable use of force by civilians, also known as the “Stand Your Ground” or “Castle” defense. Subsection 3 of Chapter 776 of the state’s 2011 Statutes, the relevant section of Florida’s Law Code, reads, “A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked…where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm…or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.”

I’m certainly no criminal lawyer but it strikes me by a cursory reading of the law and the information that we have of what transpired on February 26 that George Zimmerman may very well be not guilty of the murder or manslaughter of Trayvon Martin. But it strikes me also that Zimmerman, the Sanford police department, and indeed the law itself, are guilty of something.

What is that something? To answer, I’d like to return to the tragedy I began with, the killing of 17 Afghan civilians allegedly by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, Jr. What do these two incidents have in common? They are tragedies, surely, happening in both instances to people we must presume are innocent of anything punishable by a death sentence. Both became needfully more complicated the more information became available. Both too are examples of killings that should have been easily avoided: Zimmerman was told to stand down by the police dispatcher, Bales should have been confronted by guards when he first left Camp Belembay. Both too are examples in my mind of misplaced policy. There should not be a continuing war in Afghanistan in which a Robert Bales, Jr. experiences a fourth tour of duty—contrast that with the average experience of a Vietnam veteran, the penultimate suffering soldier of my generation, who served a single tour that was both shorter in duration and less intense—and there should not be a “Stand Your Ground” law on the books in Florida or anywhere, wherein anyone using a gun against a stranger is given the benefit of the doubt about his motives. Such use of deadly force should always be investigated thoroughly and its user, as the survivor, should be presumed guilty until proven otherwise.

But the two tragedies have another similarity and that’s the one I want to talk about finally. It’s a sense of entitlement. Entitlement has become a dirty word in our current political climate, used by candidates and politicians to mean something unearned, like food stamps or healthcare or voting rights. As if we lived by the maxims “no work, no food” and “if you’re sick you’ve sinned” and “you don’t play unless you have skin in the game.” But that’s not the entitlement I’m talking about.

Nor am I talking about the entitlement that most of us feel when we walk the streets unmolested by others, safe in our own environs or safe in the areas where we know, because of the color of our skin or the power of society behind us or our ability to fend for ourselves, that we won’t be bothered or at least not for long, that no one is likely to physically harm us or steal something from us or accuse us of something we haven’t done. I’m not talking about the entitlement we feel when a cop car passes us by, secure in the knowledge we’ve done nothing wrong and they won’t stop to ask what we’re doing.

The entitlement I’m talking about is the sense that, having been harmed somehow, whether by a horrible war whose ravages we suffer or by the predators, both real and imagined, that take advantage of society, that we are within our rights somehow to avenge ourselves, our families, our culture, on other people, on the representatives of those predators, willfully blind to whether they are adults or guilty. Perhaps, like the war in Afghanistan, this entitlement is a reaction to the experience of September 11, as if having been victimized on a national level gives us the right to ignore what the Gospel writers point out about our responsibility to turn the other cheek. It’s a human reaction, maybe even so universal as to be a mammalian reaction, to strike out against someone or something that harms us or harms what we consider our own. To take revenge for slights that are real enough to cause us pain.

But as much as it’s human it’s also arrogant especially when it’s applied against someone who, in the cold light of day rather than in the middle of the night or when it’s rainy, can have had no part in harming us. To do so is to sin. You might remember Michael Milken, the so-called Junk Bond King from Drexel Burnham who was indicted, along with Ivan Boesky, for racketeering, securities fraud and insider trading, and who spent two years in prison. Milken, of all people, has what I think is the most cogent definition of sin, probably by reason of his experience: “Sin is treating other people as means and not as ends.”

It is this sin that that the United States commits by continuing an unnecessary war against Afghanistan. It is this sin that Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, Jr. and George Zimmerman committed against innocent Afghans and against a young black man in a hooded sweatshirt. To both men these people were only representations of forces that had impinged on them and theirs and killing them served to exorcise, but only for a moment and only in their own minds, whatever evil bedeviled them. Both Bales and Zimmerman gave in to their own sense of entitlement that they were the persons capable of determining guilt and punishment for other people. Both are wrong. In both instances, we demand justice over blood. We demand investigation over concealment. We demand responsibility over retribution. In pursuing answers in these cases we are demanding nothing less than that life, with uncertainties, messiness, and indeterminacy, is privileged over the certainty of death.

rethinking his writing

like many others, I've had little but condescension for the columnist frank bruni who is, by my lights, a 3rd-tier frank rich and furlongs behind russel baker, both of whose coveted sunday real estate he is parked on at the nytimes opinion pages. that said, this piece is really, really well done. it's nuanced, apologetic without being obsequious, and at the close, when I expected an unearned "awww," a good kick in the teeth. reading bruni could become the columnist version of the reason I watch law & order: svu each week. it is generally hackwork with some good turns of phrase but more often misinformation and inexplicable human behavior and once in a while really, really well done.

sunday sermon in willmar

this past weekend I drove to willmar, mn, twice as far on the west side of the hub as we are from the east, directly into lakes and woods and beaver ponds next to the road. I was asked back in november to speak at the uu church there and to sermonize on a uniquely uu subject. I gave my sermon about prayer and somehow it didn't feel right.

by that I don't mean the sermon itself didn't feel right, although I may not have been feeling as good in delivering it as I have in the past. the sermon itself is unaffected but I've heard that the feelings of the sermonizer can affect the way an audience experiences it, and it might be that that's what I felt. I was excited about the sermon--I think it's a good one that I enjoy reading to people--and I felt pretty good about the circumstances of being in willmar where I was surrounded by lakes and trees and the building itself, a century-old former xian science church, was beautiful and old-smelling and comfortable. that day's attendance was smaller than I'd expected, about 25, but that's a larger turnout than I usually got at menomonie and there were several kids and a teen there too. but I was on the younger end of the age spectrum, a couple young families there, and a single woman attendee I'd hoped to have the chance to speak with as she sat forward in the last pew the whole time in that stance of great interest people have when they're surprised.

but something didn't seem right, whatever that might mean, and I'm not certain why. I arrived about 6 the previous evening at a home where a lovely woman named mary lou was kind enough to put me up, and she'd invited several members over to dine with us. the night was spent talking about uu denomination and local congregation matters and birds and gardening and gazing at jupiter and mars and venus in the sky above eagle lake and drinking red wine--I drank red beer--and when I finally crawled into bed at 10 to read and play scrabble by phone with my wife, I was tired in a good, at-rest way and slept the sleep of the just plain tired.


on the drive there I'd stopped to wander at a park in waverly named for local son hubert humphrey and that was fine. I was relaxed into my seat, listening to the radio and watching the sun go down ahead of me so it seemed as if I was heading into it, a sensation I always loved when I lived in my vehicle and retain. in other words, all the very subjective events pointed toward a wonderful sense of peace and oneness as well as a sense of having made an effective appearance. still, I could not help, immediately after the service and on the drive home, feeling as if I'd spoken with my zipper open or unknowingly wearing an offensive t-shirt (and as I'd had to point out to my wife, I'd worn a nice black oxford and black jeans with black sneakers and my colorful robert bly vest at the pulpit and not the raggy baggy pants and hawaiian shirt I arrived home in). nothing was said and no one acted oddly but there was something decidedly off in my appraisal of my appearance. perhaps it is true, that we are our worst critics, even when we don't know of anything to criticize.

white boy in harlem

here's a quick bit from a reflection paper due today in my class on multicultural foundations for helping and healing professions, triggered by a classmate's story from last week's meeting:


I grew up a couple hours north of New York City and for me and my friends there was nothing to going to The City for a day to wander and see shows and experience something outside the norm. But even we shied away from Harlem. The stories about what happened to white kids in Harlem, while we scoffed at them, still kept us from seeing what the place was like. When I was a junior our school sponsored a bus trip for a couple Broadway shows. The bus I rode on broke down in—you guessed it—Harlem. The driver radioed for another bus and we huddled inside while a crowd, looking curious, gathered around the bus. Even Chris, one of the few black students at our school, said he wasn’t going out in Harlem. Finally, Klaus, our typing teacher, bless him, said, “Why are you hiding? Get the hell out of the bus” and pushed us out to talk and mingle with people. We were surrounded by men and women who asked if we were all right, where we were from, where we were going, clucked appreciatively when we said our bus had broken down, and offered to snap photos of us together, give our driver directions to avoid the busier streets, told us stories about where we were (our bus had broken down just a block from the Apollo Theatre and that was the first time I’d heard it spoken of as a place that still existed—I suppose until this time I’d thought of it as a place that had closed down long before), and just generally helped us pass the time until our replacement bus arrived. We piled on, waved goodbye, they waved goodbye, and it instilled in me a love and fascination with Harlem. I began to see a complexity to ideas about it, where for many the place evokes danger and the ghetto but for many others it suggests hope and community. I understand Bill Clinton’s decision to have his New York office in Harlem—Clinton, justly or unjustly celebrated by Toni Morrison as our first black President, recognizes the optimism and future suggested by the best of Harlem. I suspect he feels at home there, enveloped by a community whose language he speaks and whose concerns he shares. At the same time, I recognize his and my privilege in being able, as white men, to feel safer in Harlem than many black men or women feel in, say, rural Bemidji or parts of Duluth. Perhaps because of the persistent media stereotypes about black men, most black men have a stake in proving them false, and Clinton and I can count on that, while the same may not be true for rural Minnesotans (although it also may; I know when I traveled in the Deep South I came across a lot of people, white and black, especially in Birmingham, who went to pains to disprove what had been said about them).

haunted by hayrolls

we're absolutely haunted by the presence of hayrolls here on the rim. every field has dozens either dotting it or lined up along 1 end--usually closest to the road--and there is a field every other mile. this time of year the hay smells of sweet decay, the scent of mouldering books and the tar or pitch or whatever it is that coats twine these days. the tang blends too with the odor of woodsmoke, oak or cherry or cedar or pine, that wafts off the roofs of farmhouses we pass.

when I walk my dogs this time of year I have to be ready for the sudden snap of wind that slaps me at the tops of hills until my face feels flayed. I'm taking a course in buddhism now, which is like drinking coffee with an old friend, and getting back into practice as much as I can. I practice tai chi most mornings and meditate while walking. but the monkeymind--the name zen writers give to the ceaseless roil that's in our minds--in me is strong. one is supposed to turn off monkeymind but I don't think mine has ever even slowed down. it's like a springfed stream in me, constantly refreshing and splashing and bubbling and babbling. I try to let it go by without focussing on it and sometimes that works and sometimes it is a woodpecker knocking against the walls of my brain.

I don't live in silence much--I have the radio on all the time in my car and in the house, and even when I'm walking with the dogs I have a constant litany of 1 or 2 songs rumbling through my head. today it was this tune, altho why I couldn't tell you. there's also the roar of the wind across the snow and the crows and the faroff trainwhistle to the north and the rumble of trucks on the interstate and gravel crunching under my feet. it's a symphony.

identifying where I came from

I remember when my dad brought home our first television in 1967. It was a portable black and white set with rabbit ears. It was a Saturday morning and the first thing we watched was cartoons. Due to my mother’s influence we also watched coverage of MLK’s and RFK’s murders, the moon landing, and the Watergate hearings and Nixon’s resignation. There weren’t many books in the house aside from the World Book encyclopedia my mother bought as a hedge against our ignorance and a couple dozen assorted paperbacks and hardcover classics they’d accumulated, and the soundtrack to my growing-up was a mixture of Johnny Cash and Mitch Miller.

My parents came from rural western New York and nearby Pennsylvania and were the first of their families to go to college, although my dad dropped out after his first semester. Both became professionals, my mother a teacher and my dad a banker. My dad’s father was a factory janitor and his mom raised the six kids; my mother’s parents were farmers, although her mother had been a teacher at thirteen because she was the eldest in her area. She eventually gave birth to over a dozen children but only four lived past infancy. My folks married in their late 20s and steadily moved their ways up their respective fields until their retirements in the early 1980s. Since they thought of themselves as thoroughly modern—they’d done the Twist with Chubby Checker at the Peppermint Lounge, after all—they divided up family responsibilities: my mom was in charge of food and raising my sister and me, while my dad took care of the cleaning and laundry. Since they’d depended on gardens during the Depression, real food to my folks came out of a box or a can—only the desperately poor eat anything directly out of the ground—although they retained their love for comfort food of bread and milk. I was raised in the country, and while I’ve lived in several big cities, and in some ways prefer them, the “make do” attitude of country people I grew up with informs my decisions.

I was born in 1960 in their trailer. I was meant to be born in March but didn’t show up until near the end of May. I was supposed to emerge at the local hospital but ended up making my appearance on the kitchen floor.

My sister followed three years later but at the hospital. We moved three times between my birth and hers, and then moved another three times before I left home. Afterwards, my folks went on to move another four times. All the moves came within a single rural county. Each house was progressively larger until my final place after which they moved into progressively smaller places, often renting. Then they moved back to their home area. A few years ago my cousin who has a store in Austin, Pennsylvania, not the middle of nowhere but a place where you can see it, offered my folks his mother’s home after she’d been placed in a nursing home. It’s a converted doublewide trailer. They’ve lived there since. My mom died two summers ago and my dad has decided to remain.

pastoral clinical week 15

CPE REFLECTION WEEK 15

I met with one of my residents at her mother’s viewing and funeral this morning. It was as good an experience as I could have hoped for and helped me to recognize some of the ways in which I’ve been privileged during this experience.

First, the preparations for making her aware of her mother’s illness and death were more complicated than they needed to be. But this should be expected, I suppose, when dealing with a family whose relationships are as riven with bitterness and suspicion as those between her sister, the resident’s husband, and the resident’s children are. The complications were magnified by distrust between the sister, her other sister, and her husband, each insisting someone else should be the one to tell her about her mother’s illness and death, but none willing to let an outside source do it. Finally, her husband visited and told her about it, and then we went into the question of whether she wanted to attend the funeral and who would take her.

But this morning’s experience made all that moot. She was welcomed into the grieving group in a way I wasn’t entirely expecting. I have sometimes wondered if her husband is behaving lovingly toward her in response to what he hopes for others to see; but I saw some behaviors between them that seemed genuine, and I didn’t think he could know anyone was watching or listening to him. They were little things, like his gentle wiping of the drool that pools in pools in the cleft between her chin and chest (which is something I also do repeatedly, thinking of her dignity) and running his hand soothingly over her hair. At one point, while he took her to use the bathroom and I was watching outside the door to ask anyone approaching to wait a few moments until she was finished, one of her sisters-in-law said she had to take her child in to throw up, and in the moment when she opened the door, I could see her husband slowly and carefully lowering back into her chair. I am convinced that he is genuine in his dedication to her.

Similarly, a woman who grew up with my resident, went to college with her and with whom she shared an apartment for years, and who is a nurse now in Buffalo, came directly to her when she walked into the funeral home, got down on one knee to be at her level, hugged her, and then spent most of the funeral talking with her, running down memories and experiences, and at times crying with her. The affection in her eyes was wonderful to see.

Her children, with whom there are apparently many issues—I discovered in talking with them that both had spent the intervening years since her debilitating aneurysm living with their father—most particularly their unwillingness (according, separately, to both her sister and husband) to visit her, attended the funeral. (My resident has three children and a fourth adopted daughter whose name has not come up and I didn’t think it was prudent to ask about her. The two who live closest came.) Her eldest son came directly up to her when he came in but awkwardly stood next to his father while he said hello, and then just as awkwardly stood around during the viewing, the funeral, and the social time afterward. Her daughter, who lives in St. Paul, pointedly ignored her mother when she came in, managing to catch her dad during one of the times while I sat with my resident alone while he mingled, and then passed without looking at her when she went in to sit down. (She was looking at me out of her single good eye then and didn’t see her walk past.) But after the funeral she came over to her mother and took her hands and got down on her knees to hug her. She looked up at me as if to tell me, “My daughter. This is my daughter.”

If she didn’t have a good time, which I doubt anyone can say they have when they attend their mother’s funeral, at least she didn’t have a bad time. This whole experience affected me profoundly, as I felt privy to a few hours’ window into the intimate and previously functional life of someone who’s entered my life as a person in need of constant, sometimes overwhelming, care.

On my drive back to the facility, I reflected on how many intense but common experiences I’ve been allowed to share with residents during this CPE. I’ve visited people in the hospital, spent time with them while they were most vulnerable and afraid of death, sat their bedsides while they were in the process of dying and then handled their bodies after they died, talked with them about their families and their relationships with other residents, talked them down when they’ve been angry or frustrated. Outside of birth and marriage, these are the most intimate and bewildering experiences most of us have and most ministers go through with their congregants, only I have been privileged to see them in the course of a few months’ time. I am humbled by their power.

pastoral clinical week 13

CPE REFLECTION 12

This last Friday was the last day for the Music Intern at my site. We’ve had a cordial relationship, having a few conversations mostly about her concerns about having no work lined up for the immediate future and uncertainty about moving back to Iowa, and she’s served as the music accompanist for some of my chapel services. Which is to say, we’ve had a good, cordial, and professional relationship. So when I stopped by her office to say goodbye on my way out, I was completely taken aback by her suddenly hugging me.

Make no mistake, I’m no stranger to hugging goodbye. Back in New York, it’s often the way people take leave of one another whether they expect never to see one another again or to see them in an hour. I tried keeping that tradition after moving here to the Midwest in the early 90s and came to the conclusion after a few years and marrying into a Midwestern family that the correct procedure is that people who are related or have experienced some important and nigh life-changing adventure together are all right to hug. Outside those criteria, hugging is strictly frowned upon.

I’m exaggerating, of course, but the fact remains that I was surprised by her hug. I hadn’t thought of her as a hugger or someone sentimental about the few experiences we had shared. By the same token, I was surprised at how the Nurse Manager on my floor took time from rushing off to yet another management meeting to discuss with me her recent decision to move from management back to fulltime nursing. I had stopped her on the stairs momentarily to ask if she was comfortable with her decision, and her first answer was a quick, “Yeah, yeah, I’m very okay with it.”

We’ve had many conversations over my months here and so I followed that with another question that might not have been thought within the boundaries we’d set. “I wondered if, given what you said a few days ago about the comments your boyfriend had made [these questioned her decisions to sometimes stay late in order to talk with residents and staff when they had concerns and he had argued she’s not as important as she thinks she is], if that had anything to do with your decision.” I expected a kind of perfunctory, “No, it hadn’t,” response but instead she took a moment to gather her thoughts, looking off for a moment into space, and then launched into a solid five minute explanation of what went into her decision-making: her years of considering the loss she feels moving away from practice into supervision, the doubts she has about her efficacy in management, her need to feel as if she’s doing something immediate with residents that doesn’t have to filter through other people, her desire to feel a part of things again. Finally, she said, “When the list of nursing positions at the new place opened up, I looked at it and thought, ‘Maybe this is my chance to go back to what I really love to do.’ I thought that might not happen again, so I took the chance.” I came away from that conversation feeling very confident she had made her decision over the course of years rather than moments and it wasn’t in reaction against some experience, as I’d feared, but in response to something inside her.

Similarly, while our schedules matched only a few times, another intern and I had several fruitful conversations during the couple weeks when only the two of us were here at the facility. Often they were theologically based, usually asking one another about subtleties in our different religions. These were in-depth questions about dogma and practice and I think we both came away from them with a better understanding of our respective faiths. Most of my questions hinged on events or situations I’d read about and wondered, while most of his seemed to revolve around questions about Unitarian Universalism he’d considered for a long time. They were good questions and good opportunities.

It’s surprising to me that I’ve made these connections with people I hadn’t expected to because of the shorter time CPE is happening (as opposed to the eight months my wife is taking to do her CPE) and to the lesser time I have spent with staff and other interns. Most of my time of course is taken up on the floor and so I expected to have strong connections with the residents I saw and talked with everyday. But I’ve been surprised by the joy I’ve experienced coming into community with these other people I likely will never see again I’m not certain if it’s a case of lowering my guard (or of theirs) or the shared sense of change that being thrown together encourages in most people, but it is a benefit of the CPE experience I hadn’t expected.

pastoral clinical week 11

(I'm late getting this written partly because it's not due to be turned in for another week and partly because I've been writing it in my head for a couple weeks. it's actually a reflection of a pre-christmas situation.)

CPE REFLECTION 11

I’m not certain how upset I ought to be over this situation, as it may be me simply over-thinking it by placing myself in the resident’s place. But I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t have let the situation remain if I were still working in group homes.

Earlier this week I stopped in to visit a resident who’s been on a rollercoaster of health lately; sometimes in good shape, sometimes otherwise. When he first joined my floor he was starting the slow descent into dementia which has sped up in the ensuing months, to the point at which he sometimes seems uncomprehending of his surroundings. When I dropped in on him it was roughly 6:30 in the evening. His door was closed completely, which is unusual, and at first I thought he might be in bed already. But I knocked gently anyway and walked in. He was sitting in his wheelchair, indulging in his habit of ripping pieces of paper into smaller and smaller pieces of paper.

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. We were having our usual conversation about how he was feeling and how he was doing when I noticed his sweatpants were down around his hips. I said, “Were you trying to change your pants?” He started to absently pull at them like he was pulling them up but I asked him to wait a moment I couldn’t see whether his undergarments were on. I looked behind him and realized he was sitting in a very messy undergarment that he’d obviously recently shat in.

I told him, “Wait a minute while I get someone.” I stepped out into the hall and caught a staff I knew and told him, “This guy's Depends are messed and I think he might have been trying to change his pants.” He said okay, and followed me back into the resident’s room. When we got there he gave him the medication that he’d been preparing, then asked if he was all right. The resident said he was. The staff couldn’t have helped noticing his pants were around his thighs and the undergarment was soiled but turned around and shrugged at me and then left the room. I stayed with my resident a few more minutes until I simply couldn’t take the smell any longer and left.

This disturbs me because I’m not at all certain I handled the situation right. My first inclination was to help him change (but I don’t do that work anymore) so my second inclination was to find someone who would help him change. However, that person seemed to take my resident’s word that he was all right sitting in messy undergarments.

On reflection that night, it struck me that the door might have been closed so that no one would enter and he could have some privacy to sit in his room. But I can’t imagine anyone opting to want to sit in a shit-filled undergarment, privately or not. The staff I approached is someone I’ve worked with on the floor for my whole length of time there and I trust his judgment. I didn't get the sense he was simply walking away from a situation but was acting on how he understood the resident to prefer. But I also can’t imagine allowing someone to decide for himself to remain in such a situation, particularly someone with the recent history of health issues of this resident. Should I have confronted the staff afterward and asked if we were making the best decision? Should I have alerted someone else?

I’m conflicted about the situation. My immediate reaction was to change the resident’s undergarments, and frankly I’m glad I waved that option away because I’m not qualified to do that anymore. I’m glad too of my second reaction, which was to recognize my role as being part of a team and report the situation to someone who could correct the situation. This is a role I've been working at. But I’m uncomfortable with the way the situation ended. Is it, I wonder, all right to let a resident opt to sit in shat-in adult undergarments, however privately, for an unspecified amount of time? Should that be within his rights? And can someone like this resident, whose thinking has been muddled at the best of times but is nearing the end of his life and is clearly showing increasing dementia, be permitted to make that decision?

pastoral clinical week 10

The most affecting experience I’ve had this week has been finding and then going through the artwork and photographs in a resident’s room for her memorial. I was lucky there was such a large cache to go through and I’m disappointed her remaining wants nothing to do with them.

First of all, the artwork is rather nice. It’s not something that will blow anyone away, some hidden Picasso or Chagall, but she had talent and a flair for drawing that comes through nicely. The photos of her sculptures were also impressive: some were horizontal, like a woman looking as if she were coasting through the waves, and were these massive, granite slabs often teetering as if playing with gravity, while others were vertical, like one that resembled a stylized milkweed, and willowy and slim.

But what really affected me was the implication of these photos and artwork that our residents were not always the people in the conditions that they are in now. Intellectually, we all know that. But as I sorted through the work in the interns’ office, sometimes holding something up and saying to anyone there, “look at this,” we were reminded constantly of that fact and commented on it. After her memorial, I showed the display to a nurse who had known her when she was still mobile and somewhat verbal before disassembling it, and she was like a little girl pawing through the work and saying over and over, “she was really, really young once.” I think that’s the takeaway from this experience, that while we’re all aware these folks had previous, maybe extraordinary lives, it’s nonetheless good to be reminded that those lives often didn’t include whatever illness or disability defines them for us now.

pastoral clinical week 9

(this is week 9 although it's my 8th reflection. last week was our midterm.)

CPE REFLECTION 8

If you could see the image reflected on my computer screen as I write this, it would be of me leaning forward and a large white cat curled against my chest so that my arms have to make a wide circle coming from extreme ends of the keyboard in order to type. This would be the most relaxed I have been this past week.

It hasn’t been a rough week, just a busy one. Generally, I think of Thanksgiving week as a time of rest and recharging. Normally, in the academic world, it is, and I did have off from seminary classes. However, between the time I spent at the facility and the time I spent preparing for another wedding, plus the time spent with my wife’s family, I ended up thinking (fantasizing, really) about quitting everything and moving back into a van.

Again, not a rough week, but a tiring one. Last Monday was a long, eventful day full of conflicts and confrontations among our group of CPE cohorts. While no major bombshells were dropped, and no new conflicts were begun, I had a feeling of lassitude and exhaustion throughout it. It was nice to hold the seminar in someone’s home rather than the boardroom at the facility, and that gave a nice change in atmosphere, but it also lent the day a sense of informality and ease that wasn’t really borne out by the discussions. Too often I feel as if we are developing artificial conflicts, each given the opportunities to open up and disgorge some wrong or imagined wrong that, in real life, we ignore or pass off on the other person as a momentary issue brought about by too little sleep or not enough fiber. I remember being in Direct Centering in the late 80s and undergoing this process for weeks at a time, and while CPE seminar is sometimes dreadful, I have to admit it has nothing on that.

But that’s not to say I don’t find some fault in the way we relate to one another. The emphasis on seeking some true rationale inside ourselves, while it’s a good idea, also lends itself to the opportunity for some of us to enlarge petty grievences into major issues. These take up a lot of time and energy that should be spent on more immediate topics (like clinical issues).

At any rate, adding to the tiring week for me was Thanksgiving Day itself, spent with my in-laws. This isn’t usually an issue, since we typically spend one day a week with them, but between my wife’s father being in hospice and her family congregating on him for a day, it just added up to a load of quiet drinking and football watching. I lit out for the facility for a few hours the earliest I could.

There was also the preparation for a wedding. I love officiating at weddings—of all the pastoral work I do it’s probably the element I enjoy most (next to just visiting churches). I love the meetings over coffee and talking with the prospective partners about their past and what they want to do and how they’d like their ceremony to look. I love pointing out to them little elements they hadn’t thought of, like the symbol behind a minor change in words or the subtlety of the two of them shifting from one side of the altar to another. I love writing the homily, using information I’ve gleaned from those visits to come up with a new metaphor for what their marriage can be. And of course I love the actual ceremony itself, the quickening of my pulse as I count down the final hour with them, making certain everything is in readiness and, if it’s not, making quick decisions about how important that element is (it’s rarely important). I often tell my couples my job will be to remind them, “Everything’s all right.” This Saturday’s wedding was no different except that my wife accompanied me, and that made all the difference to me. I really enjoyed sharing the ride over and home and having someone with me at the reception and dinner. She felt somewhat fifth wheel-like, she said, and doesn’t intend to join me again. But it was nice to share this part of what I do with her.

Finally, I was asked to do a Thanksgiving Seder for the congregation in Burnsville I sometimes preach for. I’ve done many of these and they’re all different. It’s all a matter of choosing words and rituals that will mean something to the congregation. This one wasn’t difficult to compile—I chose all the readings and communion that morning—but the emotional preparation is wearying and by the time I was finished I wanted nothing more than to sleep in the sun with my dogs, belly-up. The cat reflected in my computer screen will have to do for now.