This Wednesday, April 16th, is National Healthcare Decisions day. I'll be leading a workshop at my church to discuss Advance Directives and having conversations with family and friends about our wishes in the event of life-limiting illness or injury. It is also a time to open up conversation with loved ones who may be facing these issues. Almost all of us will, at some point, need to make or help make these decisions for someone we care about.

Here are ten points about end-of-life decision making. At the bottom of this post are some links to other resources. Email me if you have any questions.

blessings,

Nathan

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Ten Points about End-of-Life and Advance Directives

1.Think about what quality of life means to you.
Is it enough to be biologically alive even if machines are needed? If you needed machines to exist, would you want that long-term?
Do you have to be awake for life to be worth living? How awake?
How aware do you need to be to consider it worth continuing? Does your mind need to be fully intact?
Are there certain activities that define an acceptable quality of life for you? For example, “If I can't talk [or eat, or play golf, or listen to music, or go the bathroom by myself] then I may not want to prolong life any further.” Think about whether there's something without which life would not be worth living.
Everyone's answers are different—there is no right or wrong here. For some, not being able to interact with family might be a threshold. For others not being able to perform basic activities of daily living might cause them to make particular choices regarding health care. These are hard questions to answer because as illness or age take things away from us, we often find life still holds enough to keep us wanting to be here. It's important to understand that, in general, we're talking more about acute and clearly life-limiting illness or injury, not chronic, slow progressive processes—though age also is a factor. Decisions you would make at 62 are different than ones you might make at 92. Finances can also play a role here. Many people express concern about being a financial burden to family. Setting can be a part of the decision-making mix. Some do not want, under any circumstances, to live in a nursing home. There is no way to answer all the questions ahead of time, but we can give some thought to the broad categories of possibility in an effort to be more prepared.

2.Have The Conversation with family and friends. Talk about what you think and want in the event of catastrophic illness or injury. Few statements are more powerful than a family member or friend saying to hospital staff, “We spoke about this last Thanksgiving. Jane said she would never want to be kept alive like Terri Schiavo.” Be assured that any discomfort felt now will be more than offset by the peace of mind you've helped provide to family and friends when the time comes for these incredibly hard decisions.

3.Have Advance Directives in place. Encourage other family members—adults of any age—to have these documents in order. Ask older relatives what they want. Give copies of your Directives to family, close friends, and your physician. Revisit your Advance Directives and Financial Will once every decade of life.

4.Have realistic expectations for medical treatment.
CPR survival rates on TV can be as high as 85%, while real life is less than 15% overall and less than 2% for the elderly and/or those with more than one significant medical problem. Those who survive are often worse than they were before and may have brain damage.
Medical technology is such that we can keep bodies alive even when the disease process cannot be stopped and death is inevitable. We often need to make choices about how prolonged the dying process is. Again there are no clear answers. One might, for example, choose to keep someone on life-support until a family member can arrive to say good-bye.

5.Understand that doctors are, for the most part, trained to save lives at any cost. The family often needs to look to themselves for guidance at end-of-life. Doctors will often present all that can be done, but they are not always good at clarifying what should be done. It is reasonable to ask direct questions like, “How likely is this treatment to prolong life with good quality?” Medicine during critical illness is increasingly the role of specialists who sometimes focus on one body system. Ask for the big picture: How is the patient as a whole doing?


6.Artificial ventilation and artificial hydration and nutrition is transitional help for ill people, but often is not appropriate at end-of-life. The natural cycle of death usually includes a decreased need and desire for hydration and nutrition. Providing these items via IV or other non-natural routes at end-of-life can often increase discomfort. If someone wants to eat or drink, they should, if at all possible, be given food and drink. However, for the unconscious person who is in the process of dying, giving these substances by artificial means often creates more suffering. As the body shuts down, it has little need for this material and forcing it in may short-circuit the body's natural way of making us comfortable as we die.

7.All medical treatment has a goal. If the goal isn't being achieved, the treatment can be stopped. The quality-of-life questions discussed in #1 above can help you identify what your goal is, for yourself or for a family member.

8.You, not the doctors, are in control of your health care.

9.In general, there is no reason for a patient to be in pain, anxious, or uncomfortable at end-of-life. As our goal moves from cure to comfort, more options may open up in terms of palliative (symptom management) medicine.

10.Live your life.

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Here are some links to resources:

http://www.pikespeakforum.org/resources.htm

http://www.caringinfo.org/

http://www.nationalhealthcaredecisionsday.org/

http://www.caregiver.org/caregiver/jsp/content_node.jsp?nodeid=401

Where the Wild Things Are

Where the Wild Things are

Intro

Well, I was gonna talk on spirituality and mysticism and that stuff, but then I thought, “y'know they liked the last two sermons about death and dying and pain and suffering. Might as well stick with what works.” Well, maybe not. Today I'm going to leave behind the mundane, but important, matters of planning for the death we want and get to the far more complicated issue of planning for the spiritual life we want.

City and Forest

In any religion there exists a tension between what I'm going to call the City and the Forest. You see on one side we have the tradition holders, those individuals who ensure the continuity and structure of the faith. On the other side we have those who push the boundaries and rattle the hierarchy. The City side creates ritual and hierarchy, establishes the law, and formalizes the original story that inspired them and those who came before. They put that story into a cleaner format, make it more understandable, appealing, and more streamlined. The Forest folk tap into the power of wilderness or wildness. These are the mystics---who push those boundaries, often break the laws, create new stories, embrace the messy and rough edges of their faith. Both elements are needed. A religion that is all mysticism and no structure—in my metaphor all forest and no city--- will almost always fade away as the first generation of enthusiastic practitioners fail to find ways of passing on their passion. And of course a faith with all structure and nothing left of the wild is flat, inert, and stuck forever in convoluted justifications for self-serving hierarchical power.

We need to have a balance, just like in the physical world. A place to live that is all “city” with no trace of the wild “forest” would be a sterile environment—all hard angles and rigid structures. All city and no forest is inherently, indeed intuitively, unhealthy. We know we need a connection to the untamed aspects of the earth if we are to remain sane. Thoreau once said, “in Wildness is the preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.”

Contrariwise, living in a place that was all wilderness and no city wouldn't be a picnic either. You would have to constantly struggle for existence. Even the most rudimentary structures—a tent or tepee, would sort of be part of the “city” and need to go away as soon as it was built. Almost all that we depend on to live is the product of organized labor even if it is only our own. We are structured and quite social animals You can start to see that humans never live in a pure state of wildness, we need structure. Even if it is the barest trace, we need a little bit of “city-ness” around us to orient ourselves and allow us to function in the world.

As with a lot of spiritual metaphors we can see them at work in many places and on different levels. The balance between these two forces reflect physical and spiritual truths that apply to all of us.

This morning, I mainly want to focus on the forest side of the equation, the place the mystics and shamans go to find new wisdom, where the young hero or heroine goes to face the monsters and find the treasure. The city is, in many ways, has more obvious ways of taking care of it. Human beings tend toward organization, though you would never guess that by looking at my desk. That said, we uphold our tradition, our city obligations if you will, by being here Sunday mornings, volunteering on committees, giving money, reading UU World magazine, and by supporting parish ministers like Matthew and maintaining connection to community ministers like myself—by doing these things and more you participate in the structures of Unitarian Universalism. By having a wonderful RE program we nurture the next generation, telling them our story and helping them make it their own. By buying this building and tending to it we have contributed to Unitarian Universalism having a lasting home here in this place.

That said, the mystics and the wilderness tend to be what fires our imagination and seem to call to us, especially to us, who have frequently left the more structured faiths of our past seeking a more direct connection with others, with ourselves, and with the Sacred however we conceive it. The mystics ensure the vitality of the tradition over time by going out beyond the known border—and I don't simply mean north of Woodmen. By going into the wilderness and bringing back new truths, having new experiences and interactions with the dangerous, uncontrolled divine we feed ourselves and our community. Between the stones in the foundation we stand upon there are spaces, gaps if you will, that open up into the unknown and unexpected.

Gaps

I've always been interested in the “gaps.” Perhaps what I love best about Unitarian Universalism as we practice it today is the unprecedented, exhilarating freedom we enjoy to reach out to wisdom wherever we can find it. You have few limits as to what traditions and practices you can draw on as you form your own spiritual life. There are two main limits. The first is that whatever practice or philosophy you adopt should feed the good and be based in love and reason and stand the scrutiny of your fellow travelers. The second limit is far more challenging for most of us—it is the limit we place upon ourselves as we hold ourselves back.

I adore writer Annie Dillard and her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is one that I go back to over and over—and she addresses this issue. She refers to these “gaps” and quotes the brilliant, insightful Trappist monk Thomas Merton when he says:

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain or Lazarus.

And then Annie continues in her own wonderful voice...

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the gaps." The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock -- more than a maple -- a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

These are the dark places, our normal senses weaken in the presence of these mysteries and we are forced to rely on other ways of knowing. In the gaps we must learn to see with other eyes and hear with other ears. We must turn inward.

Three Practices

I want to invite everyone here, and I include myself, to begin to explore the wild within through three practices: love, simplicity, and challenge.

Love

First, let us begin with love. Our relationships with those closest to us are potential sources of profound wildness simply because of the complexity involved being in deep relationship. In our life partners and closest friends we see reflections of our needs, fears, strengths, and wisdom. For our deepest relationships to be part of our spiritual practice however requires a deep honesty, courage, and openness to the other. The poet Rilke said it well when he wrote:

It is ... good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. ... it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances.

Or as author John Wellwood put it, “intimate relationships are ideally suited as a [spiritual] path because they inspire our hearts to open while at the same time activating all the pain and confusion of our karmic entanglements.” Being committed in relationship implies work over time. It takes work and awareness to be intimate and engaged with another. And yet the potential rewards and growth are so great, precisely because the stakes are so high. Nothing I have tried, be it mountaineering or 12 hours of Zen meditation day after day in a Japanese temple is as challenging as trying to be in a conscious relationship with someone as wonderful, complex as my wife. And if she would simply always be how I expect her to be, life would be easier. Conscious relationship is certainly not something I always succeed at. We bring each other in touch with the deepest challenges of our past, present, and future as we struggle together through good times and bad. One of the greatest challenges in deep relationship with a spouse or close friend is to work at seeing them as they are, and not as projections of our own needs and desires. To see them as themselves takes clarity, courage and patience and is a spiritual practice that has been noted and encouraged on across the world's religions.

Simplicity

The second practice is that of simplicity. Simplicity contains gifts for us as we try to connect with what is most important to us. It is no surprise to anyone here that we live in a society that has raised acquisition to the level of high art. And I don't use the comparison lightly. I think about the amount of talent and energy put into advertising, an art form that intends to move us, not toward self-reflection or inspiration or to appreciation but has the purpose of seducing us into purchasing items or services for which we usually have little need or space.

Some of you may have heard of the new holiday named Discardia. A woman named Dinah Sanders pondering consumerism and the amount of junk that had acquired in her life decided that the world needed a holiday that is not associated with conspicuous consumption and indeed is aimed at the exact opposite. Julia and I celebrated it for the first time this year though we are trying to be more careful consumers throughout the year. Still there was something pleasantly festive about going through closets, bookshelves, and boxes looking for stuff to give away or throw out.

It might seem unusual to include discarding material goods when talking about bringing the wildness of mysticism into our lives, but to me it is very much of a piece. Our friend Thoreau's experiment next to Walden Pond was largely one of leaving behind the “city” and some of what he learned at Walden was the art and value of simplicity. There tends to be an inverse relationship between the amount of stuff we surround ourselves with and our ability to engage our lives in an actively spiritual manner. When we streamline our lives we create more space literally and figuratively. Being in a simple environment allows our thoughts and feelings to expand in a way that is more complicated when we are awash in a sea of things.

Challenge

The last practice I want to speak about is challenge. Here I am thinking of the benefits of engaging in some activity that requires practice, allows the practitioner to lose herself or himself in the practice and is a goal in and of itself. Martial artists know this state of mind as mu-shin, no-mind, sociologists call it “Flow.” It comes when you have enough skill in your chosen art to escape self-consciousness and ascend into a form of profound self-awareness even as you lose yourself. I have heard musicians speak of this, and artists, and hunters, and puzzle-solvers and writers and runners and knitters and and and. All you need is a practice you enjoy in and of itself and enough patience to hone your skill into the practice of freedom. For it is in that strange place where we lose and find ourselves automatically that we discover the wild and touch the mystic. You don't have to be a Tiger Woods or Bruce Lee or Pablo Picasso—you just have to let go of the rigid conscious city mind and lose yourself in your own forest.

These practices can be profound and to be found in the world's great spiritual paths. And while they have tremendous potential, they don't have to be tremendously difficult. Start small. Love the ones you love a little more openly, let go of something you don't need to make space for the space you do need, and find a way to lose yourself a little on the way to finding yourself. Don't say inside your head or heart that these are too difficult or abstract or whatever. Practices such as these and many others are just some of the ways that you ensure a life filled with life and inject vitality into this community. These practices encourage us to let go of the great impediment, that which keeps us from growing and loving---the shadow that hold us back from being who we dearly want to be—fear. Fear is the root of all evil, money has gotten a bad rap. The quest for money only points to the fear of lack. Fear keeps us from loving as strongly as we might, fear keeps us from letting go of the accumulated detritus of the years, and fear keeps us from letting go of our small selves long enough to touch the greater self within us.

Daemon & Conclusion

As I wrote this sermon, read in different books, what started coming up again and again was the concept of the Daemon—the inner guide and wisdom that we all possess but often get disconnected from. If you are visiting this morning, I ask that you not confuse the term I am using that comes from the Greek and means “filled with wisdom” with the more common word demon meaning an evil spirit. The words sound alike but diverged centuries ago to mean very different things. God help us all if you go away this morning thinking, “Those crazy Unitarians told me to find my inner demon.” No, what I'm talking about is closer to the “still, small voice” the prophet Elijah heard, it is the voice of the “better angels of our nature,” it is the voice of our deepest and often unconscious wisdom. It is a voice that leads us to the knowledge of the Good and it is a voice we need to learn to hear because when we are out of tune with our Daemon we tend to be less happy, more lost, feel more empty and try to fill that space in the wrong way. When we start to integrate the wisdom of the Unconscious, the Daemon, we tap into the deep centered wisdom we have that helps us fill the spaces inside with love, challenge, simplicity and the rest. The framework of religion, any religion, can set you up for this connection but can't make it for you. For that you need spirituality, you need to seek out those experiences and ways of being that will honor what you know in your soul, your Buddha-nature, you inner Taoist Sage, the god that lies inside you. Part of our faith as Unitarian Universalists is that we do not believe there is one right way, each of us finds our own path, faces our own monsters, finds our own rewards. We come together to compare notes along the way, to share in the victories and the setbacks. But ultimately it is up to each of us to find ways of quieting the noise of the city sufficiently, we have to find ways of leaving it far enough behind to hear the small still voice within that calls to us, loves us, and guides us on the path.

Amen, Blessed be, Namaste

The readings for the day:

From Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Thomas Merton wrote, "There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues." There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious , so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain or Lazarus.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have "not gone up into the gaps." The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock -- more than a maple -- a universe. This is how you spend the afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can't take it with you.

The Summer Day Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Im going to live forever: So far, so good--thoughts on life and end-of-life

After the service a number of people came up to me with stories of their own , opinions they wanted to share. One thing I may not have emphasized enough was that the true heart of my message is choice. If you want everything done--placed on a ventilator, all the drugs available--at end-of-life, that is your choice. If you want to die at home without all of that--that is your choice. If a nursing home or hospital or hospice is the appropriate for you or your family, that too is a choice. Most of all, I want people to think about what they want and make conscious decisions and not have their loved ones struggling when you are no longer able to voice your opinions. If you have questions about Advance Directives or end-of-life concerns, please do get in touch. Thanks and blessings. -N

Jerry Seinfeld once noted that, “according to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

I've gotten over whatever fear of public speaking I used to have and, having read a number of eulogies at this point, I feel pretty clear about preferring to think outside the box, so to speak. As a hospital chaplain however, I spend a lot of time with death or, to be more accurate, with people at the end of life.

End-of-life issues are not all that popular—not easy cocktail party or family dinner conversation, well not unless you hang out with chaplains, ICU nurses, or hospice workers. People tend to be naturally uncomfortable with death. I doubt it's ever been much different. Since the first proto-humans buried their dead with jewelry and tools--a tradition that goes back to at least 60,000 BCE, we have sought to calm our fears about death. Whether you believe in a traditional afterlife, reincarnation, or simple extinction, the fact still remains, the person that you are, that I am, will cease to be in a way that is immediately meaningful for those who survive. The topic of death can be difficult and frightening, and yet, as we know, it is the destination to which we are all walking.

I think there remains within us a sort of superstitious attitude—if I talk about death I somehow invite it in. I grew up with a deeply superstitious mother so, despite my agnostic stance on most everything and a firm commitment to rational discourse, I can appreciate the primordial fear that by naming something we somehow also invoke it. Not unlike speaking of “he who must not be named” in the Harry Potter series, but just as Harry learned, to understand something, to name something, is to reduce its power to induce fear in us.

Shakespeare famously wrote “All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances” This morning I want us to give some thought and perhaps even some planning to our parting number.

Before I started at Memorial Hospital one of my chaplain internships was at a local hospice. I was glad for the experience, but I thought I was leaving the constant association with death mostly behind when I went to work at the hospital—not so much. Just out of curiosity I kept track for several weeks in December, I was involved with 15 deaths in as many days at work. Now, I feel quite certain this isn't a reflection of the quality of care at Memorial, but rather a fact that I spend most of my day in the Intensive Care Unit and with the patients and families in the worst situations. Sometimes I feel like a mid-wife for the other end of the journey.

We've become so distant from death in this country. A short 100 years ago, the average life expectancy in Colorado was roughly 40 years old—by the time you were 15 you had been to any number of funerals. You had probably stayed up all night with the body in the parlor as was the custom. Not so long ago, we mostly died at home, cared for by our families. Funerals were family experiences and indeed you didn't attend a funeral without an invitation. The process of death was familiar—we were more likely to live near, if not with, aging relatives. We would see them, as their time grew near, turn away from the trappings of this existence. When people get close to death their appetites diminish, they may drift in and out of awareness, but often still have enough clarity to have a chance to say what needs to be said. Children saw death, learned the natural way a body shuts down, and accepted that it was part of life, inevitable.

Today the situation is quite different. Death has become a stranger and a process handled by people we hire. Death, like war and other dramatic events, is something we mostly experience through television and movies. Somewhere around 80% of Americans say we want to die at home, but most of us, almost 80% in fact, die in hospitals or nursing homes. Families are often ill-prepared for the reality. I think most people aren't aware of how far medical technology has come in terms of keeping bodies alive. These technologies are in many cases less than 30 years old. Our grandparents never had to decide if our great-grandparents wanted to be on a ventilator for a month or if they wanted a feeding tube placed in their abdomen. Hospice has been an option in this country only since 1974. The questions we face today as individuals and as a society have changed dramatically.

I'm not going to talk much about the details of Advance Directives, the legal documents that allow us to specify what we want in terms of treatment at end-of-life and who will make decisions for us if we are not able. I'm happy to answer questions during coffee hour if folks want specifics or if there is interest we can set up a workshop for a later date. There is also much more to be said about the actual process of dying, but that too can be discussed in detail elsewhere. There will be a links at my blog to websites that more information including free downloadable forms—you don't need an attorney to draw these documents up for you.

A study done in 2005 showed that roughly 25% of Americans have a Living Will, but of those, less than 16% are actually in the medical chart when the time comes. That means that around 4% of patients have the document where it needs to be.ⁱ More problematically a survey of physicians showed that 65% of them would ignore a Living Will if the decisions in it conflicted with the doctor's own beliefs. While Living Wills are important documents they are in some ways quite limited documents. A person intimately familiar with your wishes and empowered by Medical Power of Attorney is far more effective in ensuring that your choices and values are upheld rather than a physician who has never met you before or a random relative.

Yes, random relative—that is not simply artful language. It might surprise you to know that Colorado law doesn't specify a particular order of precedence in terms of who makes medical decisions when there is family conflict—indeed it isn't even limited to family members. So if your estranged sister from Kalamazoo shows up at the eleventh hour to dispute your spouse's choice, your family could well wind up in court. Some states have gone as far as creating “black sheep” clauses where you can specify an individual you specifically don't want having a say in the process. But to have the documents in place is only one step in the process—you also have to know what it is you actually want.

Most people don't want to live hooked up to machines for any significant duration, unable to interact with family and friends--and yet it happens more and more. In fact roughly one in five Americans die in an ICU and of them somewhere between 70-90% people who die in modern ICU die because the decision is made to withdraw care or limit care. That an amazing number to me, and one that I think will continue to rise---up to 90% of people who die in an ICU die because someone makes the decision to let them die. So what is the obstacle between the death we want and the one we so often get—lack of communication with our loved ones is usually the detour that sets us on a path most of us don't want.

No conversation of end-of-life choices can be complete without mentioning hospice. Hospice is not necessarily a place, though it often is, it is more a system and philosophy of end-of-life care. I think hospice is fantastic and I've had several relatives die in hospice care and I fully intend to be there myself someday. One aspect of hospice that I love is the tendency to care for the family as the patient, not just the person in the bed. Unfortunately, most families don't access hospice care until fairly late in the process. Physicians are often reluctant to suggest hospice—they all too often see it as a failure or fear their patients will feel abandoned. Some people see hospice as giving up. Some fear losing the time that might be gained by aggressive treatments, but a study just done in March of last year found that patients in hospice lived an average of 29 days longer than their hospitalized peersⁱⁱ—and I can pretty much guarantee that they had better pain and symptom management and that their families had better bereavement support after the death.

The discussion isn't just about the comfort and dignity with which we die, it's also becomes a dollars and cents issue and aggressive treatment in an ICU is very expensive. Now I'm Generation X, but a bunch of you out there are Baby Boomers—let me see a show of hands. Well, y'all are getting old at an astonishing rate and the number of American over 85 will quadruple between now and 2050. Currently roughly 22% of our lifetime medical costs happen in the last year of life—and that is likely to increase. With fewer and fewer of us dying of what used to kill us, more and more of us die of old age, and increasingly after a period of chronic illness and decline.

One of the reasons for the increase in costs is the increase in technology available to prolong life, or as is often unfortunately more accurate, prolong death. Now I can imagine some looking up here and thinking, “easy for you to say, you're pretty young, in good health, handsome.” And you'd be right, but it's not just about you. When this happens to you, me, anybody—it isn't usually the individual that bears the burden. It's usually a spouse or adult child who has to navigate these difficult waters. I am not, of course, saying that we shouldn't use the wonderful interventions modern medicine can offer, but we need to learn how to really press our healthcare providers about the likelihood that treatment will provide the quality of life we want. Prolonging life should always be our hope, but we should also be aware when we cannot prolong life, we should be careful not to prolong death.

These discussions are hard, but the circumstances that bring them on are not any easier. I've spoken about various gifts that I've learned I can offer to my patients and the people in my life. I hope they are gifts we can all learn to share with each other in this community—of being present to each other, of not being afraid to ask the questions that frighten us, and of acceptance even in the absence of understanding. Another gift we can offer our friends and families is the gift of helping them understand what we value about life and what are the terms on which we wish to stay or to go.

These conversations need to happen in our families, our congregation, our cities and our country. Some places are getting a start. Oregon has the only physician-assisted suicide law in the country. Right or wrong, the political battles and legal challenges about the law led to an unprecedented amount of discussion about end-of-life decisions in Oregon. It was a topic of conversation everywhere and aside from the law being in place, more Oregonians are dying on their own terms—at home, often with hospice care, with friends and family, comfortable.

The proper care of those who are dying is a topic that is well placed within our spiritual communities and also is, in many ways, a social justice issue. If you have any doubts about this then think back to the debacle surrounding Terry Schiavo’s death and the unwarranted intrusion of the state and federal governments into that process—a story that wouldn’t have been a story I might add had Terry had a Living Will and Medical Power of Attorney. Many of us here are advocates for reproductive freedom and choice. We embrace the belief that among the highest of goods is the right of the individual to self-determination. And yet to the matter of how we die, many of us give little thought and sometimes even less voice.

But I can't simply stand here and speak to you about death. To speak only of death is to speak to only one side of the coin. We must talk about life whenever we we talk about death because there is, of course, no separation. How we live is, quite often in my experience, indicative of how we die.

Rarely do Unitarians quote the New Testament, but I am thinking right now of John chapter 10 verse 10—when Jesus says “The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” If I were only to speak on death, I would be the thief; instead I want to preach to you the Gospel. Now, don't get nervous. This isn't the gospel being preached across the city this morning. This is the good news of our Unitarian Universalist faith. The gospel as written by Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, and the other prophets we call our own. The gospel I'm speaking of is what we find together every Sunday, the truth we create together, the freely chosen path that is so central to our enterprise here. We are a very here and now kind of faith. We believe in the value of this world, the protection of its people and the planet itself. We are not a faith much focused on the world to come, we don't look to paradise that we may be rewarded with later, we choose to build the world we want, again here and now. One way we do that is by affirming our first principle—in which we celebrate and vow to protect the inherent worth and dignity of all people. I want however to start with ourselves. I want us to do what is often far more difficult that caring for the other, I want us to care for ourselves. Affirm our own worth and dignity and one way we do this is to live as we choose, follow the spiritual path we chose, love whom we choose, and, hopefully ultimately, die as we choose.

I want you all to write a living will, not only the legal document put down on paper, but I want you to write a living will in your hearts. I want you to have a LIVING WILL, an affirmation of the values, a set of choices so that to paraphrase our beloved Thoreau, “when it comes to die” you find that you have truly lived as you wish to have.

One of the great lessons of Zen, and Buddhism in general, is in encouraging us to find a sense of urgency, an awareness of the fleeting time that is ours. The last words of the Buddha were “This I tell you: decay is inherent in all conditioned things. Work out your own salvation, with diligence.” Many of us have had brushes with disaster and, for better or worse, the air is changed, the sunrise more brilliant, the world sharpens and comes into a different focus. Buddhism and especially Zen with its practice of constant mindfulness strives to move us into that place more fully every day.

It is one of the blessings of my work: every day I walk with people experiencing tragedy and loss and it frequently makes me aware of the fragility of the world I've constructed and profoundly grateful even in that terrifying fragility. I would like to share with you this sensation, this poignancy, this bittersweetness—share it with you in sufficient quantity that you talk with your spouses, children, friends, and even your ministers. You may think that everyone already knows what you want, and you may be right, but I want you to consider the gift you give to those who in the future may need to make a terrible choice. These decisions are rarely clear—there is often some chance of recovery, some glimmer of hope and physicians are not inclined in my experience to present families with black and whites. Think forward to this time and to your loved ones gathered round a table. Think of the peace they might be able to have as they remember a series of conversations in which you said what you want. More than any document, those conversations are what help ease the mind and hearts of those you love. And I can assure you that these choices are only going to become more complicated as technology advances.

Please be clear that I am not speaking of euthanasia, indeed I feel I am speaking, in some sense, to its opposite. What I am advocating is a fully conscious engagement of the issue so that you and your loved ones can make choices that are in concert with your highest values.

I want you to think about your death, certainly to prepare for it in a way that eases both your and your loved one's pain, but more importantly, we should consider death for the reason people have contemplated death as a spiritual practice throughout history. People think about death to help them define their lives and the time they have. People ask me if it is hard to be around tragedy and death so much. It can be draining and sad, but as I said, it also makes me aware of what a blessing life is, what a blessing love is, and quite often, what a blessing death is.

Now is the time to choose not only your life, but also your death, to write your own eulogy—not the few words spoken to your coffin but the eulogy that will be written and spoken in the hearts and minds of those you love. I appreciate comedian Steven Wright's optimism when he quips, “I'm going to live forever, so far so good” but even so the mortality rate for Americans remains very high at 100%. Time always adds speed to life—there is, for better or worse, no standing still. Let us prepare for what will come to us all with, as the Buddha said, diligence. Amen and Blessed be.

http://www.npr.org/programs/death/readings/spiritual/index.html
a variety of literature, poetry, and reflections on death and dying.

http://www.npr.org/programs/death/971208.death.html
Information on do-it-yourself funerals

http://www.caringinfo.org/AdvanceDirectives
Free, downloadable, easy to follow forms for Living Wills and Medical Powers of Attorney, also good information on end-of-life

http://www.hospicenet.org/
varied information on hospice and palliative care

--------------------------------------------

When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver

To One Shortly to Die by Walt Whitman

FROM all the rest I single out you, having a message for you,
You are to die - let others tell you what they please, I cannot
prevaricate,
I am exact and merciless, but I love you - there is no escape for
you.
Softly I lay my right hand upon you, you just feel it,
I do not argue, I bend my head close and half envelop it,
I sit quietly by, I remain faithful,
I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor,
I absolve you from all except yourself spiritual bodily, that is
eternal, you yourself will surely escape,
The corpse you will leave will be but excrementitious.
The sun bursts through in unlooked-for directions,
Strong thoughts fill you and confidence, you smile,
You forget you are sick, as I forget you are sick,
You do not see the medicines, you do not mind the weeping friends,
I am with you,
I exclude others from you, there is nothing to be commiserated,
I do not commiserate, I congratulate you.

iWilliam Colby Unplugged: Reclaiming our right to die in America

iiNational Hopsice and Palliative Care Organization study: Comparing Hospice and Nonhospice Patient Survival Among Patients Who Die Within a Three-Year Window

The Faith of a Chaplain (Dec, 9, 2007 High Plains UU)

Good morning. As Kirsten mentioned, my name is Nathan M. and I am a member here at High Plains. As some of you know I serve as a chaplain at Memorial Hospital. I am also a community minister affiliated with this congregation—at least I will be a community minister once I become ordained. Because my life journey has wound around a bit, I have a full-time ministry position, but just now am doing my internship in preparation for ordination. It's all a bit confusing even to me.

Chaplaincy is one of the roles community ministers fill and I want to give you a sense of what I do as a hospital chaplain. I want to give you a sense of what I do and some of what I've learned so far in doing it, both about myself because I think that sharing our individual journeys is part of what binds us together as a community and because I believe that is what ministers especially should do whether they serve inside a parish or outside in the broader community. Before I tell you the what, let's talk about the why.

You see, chaplaincy, and ministry in general for that matter, were not part of the long term plan. For years I was in academia, a professional student, on my way to becoming a college professor. I had the tweed jacket and everything. Before we moved to the Springs I was at Boston University working on my doctorate in Philosophy of Religion. The cultural shift from academic skeptic to empathetic chaplain has been a bit strange—and I know it's given my wife Julia whiplash at times. So there I was at BU, studying away and serving out the indentured servitude that is the PhD. Luckily I got to teach a lot which I loved. The phrase, “I don't know” didn't pass my lips too often and when it did it was part of the phrase, “I don't know, but I'll look it up.” Knowledge was my stock in trade. I was paid to know things, not to not know things. But now I'm a chaplain and I have never said “I don't know” with such frequency or sincerity, and now there is no where to go for the answers. There are no good answers to so many of the questions I get asked. “Why has this happened?”, “where is God?,” “when will she die?” “Am I being punished?” I thought all my years of study in religion, theology, and philosophy would equip me for such questions. After all I could tell you what a dozen medieval theologians or Enlightenment philosophers would say. But one of the first things I learned is that all those answers, all that I had studied, and learned, none of it was actually relevant because these are questions that aren't really asked in hope of an answer. Oh, the person asking may think they want one, but I learned from experience that any answer offered doesn't satisfy. There may not be an answer. Mostly the questions are expressions of pain and confusion not a quest for knowledge. Still, it's very UU and, to me, very Buddhist—the only answers are those that you come to on your own after struggling with the reality.

Strangely enough, I always assumed that my more traditionally religious colleagues would have answers—not ones that would make sense to me perhaps, but at least to themselves. The fact is that the other chaplains that I work with and have met, often have more in common that one might think. Although we come from very different spiritual directions, we all struggle with why these things happen. We struggle with the pain and sorrow we see every day. I at least had very little to lose theologically, a decade of graduate education in religion had already ruined me, but I see some of the student chaplains I help supervise really struggle with what they've always been taught about God's beneficence and justice and the role of prayer.

In my on-going training as a chaplain, I've been asked several times to articulate my pastoral theology—what is the relationship between my faith and my ministry. I struggled for a while, and still do to some extent, to define such a thing. I am nothing resembling a traditional theist. Indeed, if I am completely honest ,I don't have what many would recognize as a “faith.” I tried—I really did. I tried to embrace some theological perspective that would constitute a faith. I tried to get back to my Jewish roots, I tried to massage into a personal theology the subtle definitions of divinity found in esoteric Hindu philosophy. I read about Process Theology where God is not complete, let alone all powerful or all knowing. I drew on years of graduate work in religion and philosophy hunting for some thread that I might weave into however meager a blanket of faith. It didn't work—or at least it hasn't yet. Maybe the years of academic dissection forever spoiled me for “faith.” Maybe it was family history as one very wise Episcopal priest suggested. Faith in God, she told me, is an analogue of faith in a parent—that didn't work so well in my family. Regardless of what brought me to this point, I am still a minister and one that works outside of the “family” context of the Unitarian Universalist parish. Here, a wide variety of ways of being spiritual are not only accepted but expected and indeed cherished. “Out there” a chaplain without a clear theology is a less common entity. This whole question of how my faith informs my ministry just frustrated me.

Then I remembered a Buddhist monk I studied with in Japan. Over some cups of green tea, I asked him about faith. He told me that faith in Buddhism was not, as Paul describes in Hebrews 11:1 “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith in Buddhism he said was predicated, based, upon experience.

Remember back to the reading from the Buddha:

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. ...when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

Faith based upon experience. Faith based not upon the unseen and unknown but upon the seen and known. Now that moved me, moves me—quite literally. There is an old African expression that I have tacked up above my desk, “When you pray, move your feet.” Now we're getting closer. I'm describing a process that has taken years and is still very much on-going, but it feels to me like that feeling I get when I am working a cross-word and I start seeing the end in sight, stuff starts falling into place and those hard words are most of what's left, you know 19 letters for a Yugoslavian pudding. All those really tough questions I couldn't figure out start getting filled in by what I already do know. I figure out the unknown part based on my current place, the knowledge I have right now, right here. I finally realized I was working this spiritual equation from the wrong end. I was looking for the faith that would shape and inform my ministry, but the reality, my experience was that my ministry shapes and informs my faith. Indeed, for me, the work of being a chaplain is my faith.

So what is the work of being a chaplain and what faith has it led me to?

Simply put, I provide emotional and spiritual support to patients, families, and staff. And, in some sense, it is just as simple and just as complex as that. Last week was busier than usual, but not atypical. It's important to know that sick people don't go to the hospital much these days. If you're sick, you're usually at home. To be a in a hospital you have to be very sick, or need a procedure that can't be done at an office or as out-patient surgery. To be in one of the critical care wards, you have to be incredibly sick and usually close to death.

A young helmet-less motorcycle rider hit a parked car after drinking too much. It became apparent to his family, who had been at his side for several weeks, that he was never going to make any meaningful recovery. They made the decision to take their loved one off life-support. The daughter of a 78 year old man made a similar choice after doctors told her more surgery wasn't an option for her dad. I spent hours with a woman in her eighties with a delightful German accent who told me wonderful stories about being a war bride and the life she had with her now departed husband. A young, young woman, 23 years old, with a beautiful little girl at home, lay in a bed after she was resuscitated after her heart stopped. She had tried “dusting” inhaling from a “dust-off” can, a bottle of compressed air used to blow dust off computer parts. She didn't get the brief high she was looking for and she didn't know that one of the ingredients used results in sudden death in an astonishingly high number of users including first-timers. Tests were run, treatments tried without much hope, her parents flew in from Alabama, her husband wept. The parents blamed the husband. At one point we had to get security involved because the mother was seriously threatening violence. The young mother died, and in a small saving grace--she became an organ donor. These were, so to speak, the highlights of the week. As always, many got better, some died, but in all cases, no one—families as well as patients, were the same after as before. For each of these families I sat and listened to stories of better times, translated some of the medical-speak the doctors said, helped them think about choices and values, but most of all I tried to provide them three gifts: presence, naming, and acceptance. I think these are gifts we can give to everyone in our lives, even in better times than those I usually deal with.

Three gifts; the gift of presence, the gift of naming, and the gift of acceptance.

I've learned that perhaps the greatest gift we can give someone is to be present to them in their experience. Some might disagree and say that love is the greatest gift, but I see family members all the time who love deeply but in those darkest moments their love lets them go so far, but no farther. To be present to someone is to bear witness to their pain and fear and anger and hope and faith in all the messiness that real tragedy creates. Perhaps above all, being present to someone means accepting that there is a host of things that we can't fix and shouldn't even try. We're such a fix-it culture. When someone brings us a problem or a pain we want to solve it or take it away, but so much of the really serious stuff is beyond our power to fix. Often people don't need a fixer, we either have someone else filling that role or we know the answer already. What we need is someone to be there with us. This is the work of the chaplain, to be a companion to those facing that which no one wants to look at. The chaplain walks with the person and often names their concerns. I say things to people that I never thought I would say. Name fears and hopes that are usually left unsaid, unacknowledged and usually made worse for the silence.

I've learned that to name the emotion or the fear that is present is a gift---not a burden. We so often are afraid to ask the question because we fear that we will make it worse. We're afraid to ask if the doctor said the lump is cancer, or if the baby will die because we have this sense that we might plant the idea and thus cause the fear to grow where none was a moment before. Somehow we don't translate our own experience that tells us that when something scary or bad is happening, we're thinking all the scary thoughts there are to think. Naming doesn't bring the fear into existence, indeed it does the opposite. By creating a space for those concerns to exit the dark interiors of our frightened souls, we allow in a little light. A barrier to presence is the fear that openly acknowledging the elephant in the room will some how make the situation worse.

To say to someone “you must be afraid” or “You must be wondering if she'll die” doesn't make it worse, it makes it better. It gives a kind of permission to explore the feelings, to acknowledge them and the fears associated with them. We have some sense that there is right thing to say to someone in crisis or facing tragedy—there isn't, and we so often lose the good that might be done out of fear of saying the wrong thing. There are wrong things to say, “I know just how you feel” is often less than ideal, but there is no way to take away the pain—which is what we often want to do.

I have also learned about the gift of acceptance. This one is tough and continues to be the most challenging. There have been so many surprises in my time at the hospital. I didn't realize how much I would learn about horrible diseases—and for someone who teeters right on the edge of hypochondria it's been, well let's just say interesting. I hadn't realized how much I would learn about the funeral business. I know more about cremation and embalming than I ever wanted to know. And I hadn't realized how much this ministry would be like living in a foreign country, how what seemed like simple tasks and concepts would take on new complexity and be turned around. It didn't take long to realize that it was easy to develop rapport with the liberal, spiritual but not religious, patients who were originally from the East Coast—that's my mother tongue. It was harder to learn to hear the conservative Southern Baptist from Louisiana, and to pray with her in a language she would recognize and find comforting. It was a foreign tongue to me.

But even feeling “Lost in Translation” as I often do, I've learned to listen beneath the surface and, as needed, to translate into a language that makes more sense to me or in some cases just do my best to appreciate the sound of a language I'll never really become fluent in. Regardless of my fluency or comfort with the language, I've learned to accept and love--even when it is difficult.

I took care of a young man, just turned 18 who had come here from South America to be an exchange student. First week he was here, he got into a car accident and a pretty bad one at that. We weren't at all sure he would make it. His homestay mother was a deeply religion Pentecostal Christian. I had the hardest time listening to her go on and on about how this was all in God's hands. How the doctors didn't really do anything—it was all God. God was going to fix everything. I won't even go into how distracting it was when she would ask me to pray and then start speaking in tongues. She would just repeat these phrases, “God will heal you, God will fix everything, the blood of Jesus will heal you.” Over and over she would say these things. This whole abdication of everything to God makes me a little crazy. If God took care of everything where was he when the kid hit the tree in the first place? I don't know. I don't believe in easy answers to impossible questions. It was very hard to listen to her, but then I started listening to what else was being said behind the words. I'm sure she did believe as she said, but I also started hearing the needs being expressed through the constant expressions of faith. I started hearing her feeling overwhelmed, I started hearing her fear, I started hearing her pain and her need to have someone be in control when she felt so out of control.

But you know I actually get it, I really get it. Just this week has been filled with enough to make my heart cry out for some order in the universe, just the slightest trace that there is someone in control or aware of how my life unfolds and yet I can't believe it. I'm not saying it's not there, I'm just saying at this point in my life, having had the experiences I've had, having learned what I've learned, I can't believe it. But I still need to serve a lot of people who do believe and when the crisis comes need to believe even more, but it is a kind of faith very foreign to me.

The poet Rilke asks us to:

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

I think I'm learning to treat people in this same way—like they were books written in a foreign language. We should always try to understand others, but I think we also have to learn to accept the fact that other people's beliefs may never make sense to us, but we can learn to accept them as they are, trusting that they are doing what we are all doing and part of why we come here—to try and make sense of our experience. I think this is a gift we can give people in our lives—friends, co-workers, family members, anyone struggling with anything which I'm pretty sure is all of us. Sometimes it isn't helpful to try to understand, it can be more powerful to simply accept them as they are.

But all that said, all those mental gymnastics having been done, my ministry as a path leading to my faith rather than vice-versa, the question still stands, what does it mean to me to be a chaplain?

I do not know if there is a God. I do not have that absolute knowledge. Sometimes I think I've seen in the eyes of many faithful people the slight glimmer that they don't know either—but they choose to believe. And so many people I meet have faith like a rock. I however remain without clear knowledge, that is to say, I am an agnostic. I don't know about an afterlife having never, to my recollection, been there. I don't know about God's answering of prayers because although I have prayed and seen those events come to pass, I have also prayed and been seemingly ignored. I don't know anything about the supernatural. I'd like to, I've spent many years of my life trying to understand and gain that knowledge that comes so easily to some. I readily accept the philosopher Kierkegaard's premise that faith is not a project for which the brain is the appropriate tool. How can the finite organ that resides in my skull be capable of perceiving the infinite that we call God? But still I am an intellectual, basing my life in rational thought and I am not ready for that leap of faith. So I've now spent a lot of time telling you what I don't know. As you might imagine I could spend days telling you about the things I don't know. But let me shift to what I do know.

Here I go to back to the reading from Robert Ingersoll, if the naked and hungry are to be clothed and fed, it must be us who provides. In my role, in the world I work in, I see it as whatever healing and comfort is to come, must come through the efforts of humanity—divinely inspired or not. We must act.

I don't know what role a transcendent being may play, but I know I can't rely on any particular response. It might be out of her power or not part of his plan or I might simply be too small to notice.

So I find myself in a bit of a faith vacuum, but not much can survive in a vacuum so I have to fill that space with something. For me, I fill that space with service in the absence of knowledge. I find myself back at that crossword puzzle. Lots of blanks to be filled in, but I take what I know and go from there. What I know is that I can act in the world. I can see needs and help to meet them. I can care, and listen, and hold a hand, and love. So for me, my ministry leads to a faith, a faith in humanity. When you pray, move your feet.

Amen and Blessed Be.

Out of the Depths and into Easter

Today is Palm Sunday. The 6^th and final Sunday of Lent, 40 days after Ash Wednesday. On Palm Sunday, we recall that Jesus the Christ, some 2000 years ago, rode into Jerusalem on the back of donkey. As he entered the city, the people welcomed him singing, waving or maybe laying palm fronds in his path in sort of a middle-eastern red carpet. The entry into Jerusalem is said to have fulfilled prophecies of the messiah and began the countdown to the final Passover Seder, the Last Supper meal that happened on Maundy Thursday where Jesus compared bread and wine to his body and blood and asked his closest disciples to remember him in the gestures of eating and drinking. This, of course, gives rise to the ritual of Holy Communion. The following day, known as Good Friday, he was tried, crucified, and died. On the third day, we are told, he rose from the dead and appeared to his followers. Having died for our sins, the Son of God cleansed us, and prepared the way for us to enter the Kingdom of God through his ultimate sacrifice. The resurrection of Jesus is, of course, to most, the central element of Christianity. As Paul states in Corinthians 15:14 "If Christ was not raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your trust in God is useless" But the Gospel tells us that he did arise and appear to some of his followers. Amen and all praise be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

All that said, like a lot of UU’s, I have a hard time with Christianity—and we are in the thick of the Easter season. Millions upon millions will celebrate the triumphant conquering of death and sin made possible through the painful death of Jesus. Christmas at least sort of has it own rewards, that is to say presents—and I rather like some of the songs.Easter is harder for me—now that I’m an adult I have pretty good access to chocolate year round. Easter is also hard commemorating as it does the aspects of Christian faith that I understand least, let alone believe. But, for better or worse I live in a society that is predominantly Christian and a city that is home to some of the most conservative Christians on the planet—or at least it feels that way.

I can trace some of my lack of ease with Christianity to my upbringing. Growing up in an orthodox Jewish setting made me a little leery of Christians. I was taught that Christianity was a mistake, and that most Christians were, to some extent, anti-Semitic—a fear that in a post-Holocaust world seemed justifiable. There is also the simple fact that I didn’t actually go to a church service until I was in my twenties. Christianity was and is, in many ways, quite foreign to me. My wife Julia and I almost didn’t stay at the UU church we walked into in Boston some years ago because of the none too small gold-painted wooden cross that was up front—although it turned out almost everyone was uncomfortable with but it had been a present from a former minister’s family and so was more family heirloom than religious symbol.

But more than cultural elements, I think my discomfort with Christianity stems from some elements implicit in its theology. I have never agreed with the doctrine of Original Sin, I resist the idea that we are fundamentally flawed, perverted, and unable to be good on our own.

I’ve also never understood atonement theory—the idea that Jesus had to die for my sins. I have certainly made mistakes in my life, but none that should require anyone’s death. And let me get this straight, God, for some reason, creates a son, who is fully God and fully human, and then kills him/himself to redeem humanity. Seems kind of a round about way to do things for a supreme being. Don’t even get me started on the Holy Spirit and how the Three are actually One. I’m bad at math to begin with.

Now none of this would really be a problem—if Christianity weren’t so ubiquitous and if I didn’t want to get along with the Christian faith. I spend too much time with Christians to write it off entirely—so what do I do.

In chaplaincy we sometimes talk about “reframing.” Now reframing is not what you have to do when you build a house wrong the first time, rather it is trying to take a certain set of circumstances and help someone understand them in a new way. This is a glass half-empty half-full sort of thing. Yes there is an element of psychological and spiritual sleight-of-hand inherent, but it is also true that how we think and feel about the world determines reality far more than actual facts do.

I’ve been trying to reframe Christianity and the story of Jesus—and I want to share some of what I’m thinking with you.

Years ago I might have balked at this, Academic that I was, I would have been concerned that I would distort the tradition too much, so much so that it would cease to be recognizable to an actual Christian. I would have worried that endeavoring to reframe Christianity would be like going to a Mexican restaurant and ordering nachos but asking the waitress if you could have that without the cheese, meat, salsa or chips but with long noodles and tomato sauce instead. I would worry that if you deconstruct something too far, it isn’t really what you started with in any meaningful way. But, you know, I just don’t care about that much anymore. Reframing in this way isn’t about being true to the tradition, it’s about coming to peace with it inside oneself. Christians can understand their tradition the way they want to, I’ll understand it how I want to.

One place we can start for help in this reconstruction project is with people like Paul Tillich. Tillich was a German theologian who came to America after disagreeing with the Nazis. Deeply influenced by French Existentialists, he believed that the old stories and symbols needed to be interpreted anew. The old ways of understanding them were clearly limiting and, in many cases, impossible in light of the modern world.

Tillich reinterprets, takes the meaning of the potent symbols of Christ and Original Sin and represents them, re-presents them differently. His understanding of Original Sin departs from moral judgment or damnation and focuses instead on a more psychological, though still profoundly spiritual interpretation. In sin, Tillich sees estrangement from, as he puts it “the ground of …being, from other beings, and from him [or her] self.” We can see some of this in the ancient story of Eden. In the story there is at first harmony between the earth, the animals, humans, and the Divine. The first sin, which some might see as disobedience, can also be seen as the creation of distinction. Humans, having eaten the fruit now know the difference between good and evil—that is to say they now see the world as divided, binary, no longer one but now separated into good and evil, male and female, self and other, sacred and profane---the loss of unity, of harmony. The creation of distance is the first sin.

So many philosophers and theologians, especially of the modern age, speak of this estrangement, separation, division, loneliness, anxiety that characterizes the modern human. Hegel, Kierkegaard, Tillich, Sartre, Nietzsche all speak to the deep unease that seems to fill the modern mind and soul. Although more modern thinkers seem to focus on it, the sense is not necessarily new: the Buddha spoke to it 2500 years ago when he spoke of Dukkha—the deep dis-ease that so often afflicts us.

Some attribute it to the breakdown of social roles, to the rise of dehumanizing technology, to the industrial and commercial homogenization of the human spirit. While all that plays a part, it is simply a truth that to be free is to have a certain amount of anxiety. We are free to choose our lives—for good or bad. Plato noted this many centuries ago when he says in The Republic, “the life which he chooses shall be his destiny… The responsibility is with the chooser – God is blameless.” Through this angst we lose our sense of connection to our Self with a capital S, our deepest sense of who we are and our connection to the whole.

I don’t think we need turn to philosophy to teach us this truth; I think we feel this disconnection intuitively. It strikes us hardest during adolescence when we are least certain of who we are, but stays with most of us to some extent throughout our lives. We know when we are aligned with the flow of life and when we are struggling against the current. Here the idea also leans toward the original Greek word for sin, Harmatia—missing the mark, as an archer might miss her target. Original Sin reinterpreted in this fashion moves away from the judgmental indictment of man’s supposedly fallen nature and instead points toward an acknowledgment of the pain and anxiety that are inherent to being a human being in the world.

Tillich sums up this disconnection when he speaks about how modern humans live mainly in the horizontal dimension and have lost our sense of depth. It is this depth dimension that makes a picture into art, a bunch of words into literature, and human life full of meaning. Without this deepening of our experience, our understanding, our spirits, we become simply “a things among things.” Items simply to be manipulated. Without this dimension of depth, we spend our lives pursuing money for its own sake, fame for our childish egos, and shallow connection instead of deep relationship to others, our planet, and ourselves. The loss of the depth dimension of life is the real Original Sin, the true Fall of humanity.

For Tillich, the reason that Jesus is the Christ, the Anointed One, the Savior, is not because of his crucifixion, but because Jesus had not lost this connection to the ground of being, to the source. He was aligned with the river of life. He had recaptured that fundamental harmony, was unaffected by the sin of false dualisms. Tillich calls Jesus the “new being”—a being that lives in the vertical fully as well as the horizontal planes of engagement. His death and resurrection not only remind us to look around during this time of year for the real miracle of spring and the true rebirth we see happening around us, but the resurrection also reminds us of the constant opportunities we encounter to die to what we were and be born again as what we might be. Jesus leaving the tomb is not about a redeemed animated corpse or escaping the fate we all eventually face, but rather it is about the potential inherent in each of us to come into harmony with ourselves and the world around us and in doing so become part of a larger life--a larger life that is, in very real ways, unending, loving, forgiving, and, yes, even potentially redemptive. Jesus becomes a symbol directing us to something deeply internal and external, inviting us into a deeper, more intimate relationship with the holy and ourselves.

Many of us here dig in a bit and reject such characterization of Jesus as perfect in any way. He was just a man, a moral teacher. I often hear UU’s speak of Jesus in this way—as an important ethical teacher, a social rebel, but they get nervous when any transcendent wisdom or spiritual powers are ascribed to him. What would it mean to be a person whose inner and outer being were in complete harmony and in harmony with the world around him? I think such a person would be called a Sage in the Taoist tradition, perhaps a great shaman or medicine man in the Native American tradition. One might say that the individual who was in such a state of harmony has awakened in some profound sense. There is a Sanskrit term from India for such an awakened being--“Buddha.” Strangely enough, I rarely hear people get upset about characterizations of the Buddha as having special insights or powers and we flock to hear spiritual gurus and healers from around the world

Now I can’t talk about Christ without talking about Christians who, truth be told, can be the harder part to deal with. Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” They sin in consigning Jesus and the wisdom to be found in the Bible to the musty tomb of 2000 years without acknowledged growth or change. Jesus himself challenged the prevailing wisdom of the time, tore down barriers to unity and died for his beliefs. I think we all know how much courage it takes to be a real agent of change. Those individuals who have the strength and clarity to really have an impact are rare—and so, some of us, afraid that we ourselves may be called to such challenging tasks, make Jesus separate—not a man, who might in his shared humanity require us to act in a similar way, but instead he becomes a all-powerful God, strangely rendered far less threatening once he is all-knowing and all-powerful and eternal and not very much like us lowly creatures.

It is not as if Christianity has not adapted and changed before. It is no real surprise that the Christian holiday marking resurrection tends to fall right around the Vernal or spring Equinox. The goddess celebrated during this time is named Ostara. Yes, that is where we most likely get the word Easter from. The early church realized it was easier to co-opt or at least compete with the holiday then to try and eliminate the pagan practice all together. The historical Jesus was likely born in September, not December, but December, and December 25^th in particular was an important date for various ancient religions. And while the fluid nature of the dates might further discredit Christianity, we can reframe this as well. Christianity is not now nor ever has been a static tradition. It has grown and changed, adapting to and adopting from different times and cultures. Those who wish to lock it down and embed it in stone are the ones who miss out.

Christianity’s symbols are potent ones: flesh, blood, death, rebirth, sin and salvation, the possibility of human growth—maybe not perfectibility but certainly transformation. The story is a captivating one: a young, innocent woman, a humble birth, a brave prophet with a powerful teaching, apparent defeat, and then a triumphant end. The story of Jesus is not unique—it is echoed in and echoes the story of the hero in many cultures. We need not reject it, just because it is a dominant myth in this culture.

I had thought about offering communion today, but decided instead to invite you into a different sort of communion ritual---one that is found in the world’s contemplative traditions. When you leave here and go have lunch as most of us will, I’d like you to take a moment and take a sip of whatever beverage you are drinking and really taste it, savor it, be present to it and yourself. When you take the first bite of whatever you are going to eat, really take a moment to appreciate the flavor, the texture, the temperature. Eating has become an activity that is mainly horizontal in Tillich’s terms—we eat quickly and without much thought. Take a brief moment and turn it into what it is, a life-giving activity. Appreciate the cycle of death and rebirth that happens in your body in every moment. Walking on water is nowhere near as amazing as what is happening in your body at this very moment. Appreciate your freedom. Do this in memory, not of me certainly, and not even of Jesus, but of yourself—of who you are, who you want to be and the depths of possibility within you. Amen and Blessed Be.

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The Strength of the Spinning Wheel

The Strength of the Spinning Wheel

A Sermon by Nathan Mesnikoff

I had neck surgery a couple of months ago—my second spine surgery in two years. Overall, my recovery is going remarkably well—not too much pain, sleeping OK. I couldn’t drive for a month and a half, which was a real annoyance. But most frustratingly, I am not allowed to ride my bicycle for three months, three whole months—a long time especially considering I had just saved up enough to buy a new bike a few weeks before the surgery. I bought it because I really enjoy riding and also in an effort to inspire myself to a moderate amount of exercise. Aside from the health benefits, exercising gives me a sense of control over and hopefulness about my physical state. I’m glad I’m so eager to get back to riding. I have, like many people, a love-hate relationship with exercise.

I know I need to move my body, and I know very well that I genuinely feel better when I do. When I was younger I practiced Japanese martial arts with an almost fanatic passion. For a long time, karate, judo, and aikido were my main form of exercise. I slowly stopped for a number of reasons during grad school. My back problems have put an end to any intentions of returning to judo or karate. But I can ride my bike and I really enjoy it. The feeling of cruising along, the speed, the wind in my hair, well at least on my face. I actually found myself in the garage a few days after surgery simply staring at my bike. Pathetic, but true.

Well, I didn’t come here today to talk about my workout schedule and how I keep this slender figure. You see, as I’ve been pondering about bicycles and exercise I read a book that shifted, so to speak, my thinking as to where strength comes from and pointed me toward an unlikely place.

Riding with the Blue Moth was written by Bill Hancock, director of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. The first few pages of the book detail how wonderful his life was—a job he adored, a wife he loved even more, two sons with whom he had very close, loving relationships, a new grandchild, friends, money: the whole proverbial enchilada. But then his older child Will is killed in a plane accident and he and his wife, Nicki, are struck by a profound and understandable depression. Their lives have changed forever and they are lost. They have no idea how to move forward.

Now, I had just requested the book from the library along with a bunch of others on bicycling—some on repair and several stories about long journeys by bike. I was thinking this book was just about a guy who rode across the country. I hadn’t bargained for this much drama, but the writing was good and I was drawn through the book. The title, Riding with the Blue Moth, comes from the author’s metaphor for depression—it seemed like a large blue moth that came and went, at times disappearing only to reappear unexpectedly, smothering him with the pain, confusion, and guilt surrounding his son’s death.

Hancock, pedaling through the deep South, spends his hours in and out of the saddle carefully observing various cultural elements, a close study made possible by the slow speed and intimacy with which he is passing through the region.

He writes,

In Linden, population 2,400, I rode past the Marengo County Academy, a private high school. Laughing teenagers piloted flashy vehicles out of the parking lot. A couple of miles north was the Linden public high school. [Racial] Integration had caused private schools to spring from the ground like rain brings mushrooms. In the last six days, a dozen white people had told me to avoid blacks. No black person ever turned tables. As I struggled to find the meaning, I happened to look down at my bicycle wheel. The wheel is supported by flimsy spokes and gets its muscle from the spokes as they pull toward the center. That force, from pulling together, gives the bike’s wheel its strength. Somehow, many people had managed to overlook that simple technique in life: pulling together creates strength far greater than what each of us could muster individually.

A bicycle wheel is, indeed, a marvel of engineering and hidden strength. You take a rim made of thin aluminum, a circle that should crush instantly with any real weight on it, and you attach it to a small hub with very thin little metal spokes that would also bend and fold with any force applied. You put these elements together and all of a sudden you have an incredibly strong system—one that easily puts up with my 200 lbs going over curbs and potholes on the streets and even worse abuse off road. So how do we go from having simply a collection of individually fragile items to the strength of the spinning wheel? It comes from, in the first place, bringing the items together, and then binding them strongly with a fair degree of tension.

As I thought over the author’s words, and about the bicycle wheel, I continued to see how astute Hancock was in his observation. A wheel isn’t all that different than a community. You take a bunch of individuals who by themselves have real, but in many way quite limited strength, bind them together with bonds of love and necessity and then throw in a fair degree of tension and stress and, if it comes together properly, you have a system with tremendous strength and the ability to support great strain.

The bicycle wheel, and its unlikely strength, makes me think about UU faith communities. We are a curious bunch. We don’t have a unifying faith system anymore—unlike our Unitarian and Universalist forebears who had more specific beliefs that they shared. We hold very little in common in terms of specifics. We certainly have common threads—a concern for social justice, a belief that each individual must find their own path, etc, but we rarely agree on specific theological points. And yet we form communities, we come together to share in our individual journeys and have company along the way, sometimes have another path or perspective pointed out to us.

We exist in tension with each other and, right now, with what feels like the dominant culture. Within our congregations our lack of common faith means we have much more to negotiate between ourselves. This tension can pull us far apart from each other, leaving our congregations feeling disjointed. We see this disjointed-ness when we have trouble raising money. We see this separation when we have trouble finding enough people to serve on needed committees. We see the centrifugal force that threatens to whirl us away from each other when we allow the diversity of our opinions on politics, theology or ministers to lead to the division of our communities. Every congregation I have been a part of has these energies and arguments that move us further away from each other.

And yet, there are forces that can help us harness our tensions. Ideals and values that can take the tension and use it, like a bicycle wheel does, to create strength, to create communities that can support heavy weights and carry us great distances. Our principles and purposes can act as the rim and hub of our wheel—defining our general form, lending us shape, but the strength still has to come from the spokes, from the individuals as they contribute. But you can’t exclude any part. The strength doesn’t come without the stress. A wheel free from stress, with all the spokes loose, quickly falls apart. Indeed a wheel with loose spokes is, interestingly enough, said to be out of true. We are true when we all have a certain amount of tension, when we are all pulling toward the center.

Without our tensions we would not be who we are in this free religious tradition. I hope that increasingly we perceive that freedom as a “freedom to” rather than “freedom from.” Freedom to, for me, implies positive choice. We are free to choose to associate, free to choose our own path, free to express our political views, free to love who we will. Freedom from, what political philosophers call negative freedom or liberty, implies more impositions from the outside. Freedom from prejudice, freedom from totalitarian governments—democratic or otherwise, freedom from the religious baggage of our birth that so often keeps up trapped. Freedom from is good too, but I would hope for us the autonomy and self-determination that the positive freedom to implies. I don’t see this as being in conflict with all I’ve said about being a spoke in the wheel; we make a choice to be part of this community, to be part of that strength, not be coerced by external or internal forces.

All faith communities have internal tensions—this is true of us as well as evangelical mega-churches like New Life church here in the Springs or the most conservative mosques or synagogues in the Middle East. To be in community is to have disagreements. It is sometimes easy to think that our more conservative cousins have it much easier than we, but that is an error in thinking. It leads us to think of other faith traditions and political views as monolithic structures when they are in fact not. My time as a chaplain here in Colorado Springs has been an eye-opener to me. Just as Bill Hancock had his own prejudices and expectations both about people and the Blue Moth of depression confounded, I too have had my assumptions and prejudices exposed. Even in as conservative a town as Colorado Springs, I have been welcomed and loved despite the fact that my own faith journey is quite different than many of my colleagues. I had too often equated certainty of belief for arrogance, when I was in fact the arrogant and overly certain one. I assumed the tension between us would be too great, but once again, properly used and understood the tension can lead to tremendous and unexpected strength.

Bicycles are not the only place we find circles of surprising strength. The martial arts I used to love so much are not without their own spinning wheels—several judo throws are known as “wheels” for the way the person gets spun around, and the martial art I practiced the most, Aikido, consists primarily of circular movements. Judo and Aikido are cousins, both deriving from older arts and both focus heavily on using your opponents weight and momentum against him or her. On many occasions, both here and in Japan, I saw elderly experts toss younger, bigger, stronger players as if they were rag dolls. In fact I was the younger, bigger, stronger rag doll on a number of occasions. I was always amazed at the incredible skill these little old men had and how little trouble they had throwing me around no matter how hard I resisted.

Aikido and Judo both ask practitioners to learn the difficult lesson of harmonizing with an attack rather than simply opposing. In Aikido one doesn’t block and strike, instead you learn to take the incoming energy and spin it off in a direction that is harmless to both you and the attacker. Here we are harnessing the energy of the wheel and its motion.

And again strength is found in an unexpected place. If the lessons from the bicycle wheel are about the role of the individual in community and the need to accept tension and the strength that comes with this, what do the wheels in Judo and Aikido offer? I believe here we learn about the strength in weakness or perhaps more accurately in softness, in flexibility, and acceptance.

The world’s spiritual paths are also, of course, filled with images of circles: from Dante’s vision that culminates in the heavens and the believer circling the divine in heaven, spinning round and round, driven by the motive force of love; to Buddhism’s wheel of existence; to the well-known Taoist Yin-Yang symbol. Circles are among the oldest symbols for life, love, and nature. The Sufi Poet Jalal’adin Rumi, who wrote our opening hymn, founded the Islamic order of mystics known for their spinning dance, the Whirling Dervishes. Rumi invited us to, “Come out of the circle of time, and into the circle of love.”

Certainly the Wiccans and Pagans and other holistically and environmentally-minded here would remind us of the great circles in which we all participate—that of life and death, the seasons, and the almost infinite circular repeating cycles of nature. They would also remind us of the dangers, the loss of strength we suffer and havoc we create on our planet when we try to ignore or remove ourselves from these cycles. Here the strength comes from knowing and accepting our place in these macroscopic circles, allow the energy inherent in the wheel to carry us with it, rather than struggling against it or looking for ways to circumvent it. When in ritual we call the corners or draw a circle we are not, to my understanding, separating ourselves from the world around, we are not creating walls or boundaries that exclude, but rather we are embedding ourselves in the world more firmly, pointing out our connections to each other and the planet.

We are, of course, always spinning—on this planet, in this solar system, in the galaxy, in this body. Our blood circulates, the tides ebb and flow, the moon spins, our days and years pass. We are constantly immersed in circles within circles. I think the trick lies in finding ways of moving with those cycles, of hearing the hidden harmonies, of surrendering to the tides we so often struggle against. That is one reason we come to this place, to create a circle of care, to carve out a small niche in our busy lives so that we might have the chance to listen and observe the cycles of our souls.

And so I’ve counted down the months, weeks, and days until I can ride again, until I can connect with the spinning wheels of my bicycle. In the meantime I hope to pay close attention to some of the other cycles in my life, try to catch their rhythms and contribute what strength I can to these other wheels, other patterns and cycles. I’m going to try to listen to poet May Sarton when she advises that, “Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help.” I’m trying to find a bit of grace and maybe a little strength in this time off my preferred wheels. May we all lend our strength to whatever rapidly spinning circles we move in and are part of. And may we find the time to slow down enough to catch glimpses of the patterns so that we may appreciate all the more the inevitable turnings of the wheel.

As it says in the 2^nd chapter of Ecclesiastes:

A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever.

The sun rises and the sun goes down, and hastens to the place where it rises.

The wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north; round and round goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns.

All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full; to the place where the streams flow, there they flow again.

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun:

Amen and Blessed be.