Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, September 29, 2002
Many of you know that our denomination, like most others, has long required that all candidates for professional ministry complete at least one semester of what's called Clinical Pastoral Education. This means that we work full-time for a semester in a prison, hospital or mental institution as chaplains, under the supervision of an accredited chaplain and generally accompanied by other seminarians from various denominations. The days unfold as a mix of clinical experience, meetings with the supervisor and group sessions that are characterized by the bewildered leading the confused -- but in the end they do uncover some genuine group wisdom.
My own CPE training was at UCSF Hospital in San Francisco. On the first day of our training, the members of our group were randomly assigned to the hospital floors where we would work all summer, and then we were given bright blue official nametags, each with our name and then in large caps, the title "CHAPLAIN". I felt a little self-conscious but also pretty important and serious as I put it on. We had a bit of orientation and then were told to simply go to our floors, introduce ourselves to the staff we met there, and prowl the waiting rooms and hallways to see where we might be useful.
My assigned area of the hospital was the intensive care ward. I dutifully followed orders, introduced myself to the distracted and somewhat amused nurses I found at the desk, and then put my head into the first waiting room I found. In that first waiting room I found a middle-aged woman moaning and rocking in anguish, clutching the hand of a younger woman who appeared to be in shock. That younger one looked up at me without curiosity and then glanced at my nametag. Her face shifted into total urgency, she leaped to her feet and stretched out her hands to me and said, "Oh my God, oh my God a Chaplain! We need you! Help us!"
To my credit, I did not follow my first impulse to look behind me and see who she was talking to, nor my second impulse which was to flee when I realized she really meant me. But as the grief poured out over a son and brother in a coma and likely dying, I felt completely out of my league -- self-conscious, bewildered, desperate to be helpful and utterly at a loss. I don't think I probably did that family much good; but when I brought my confusion back to my supervisor that afternoon, I got my simplest and most direct lesson in ministry. In answer to my hand-wringing and my questions about what I should say, what I should do, what I should offer in order to be of use, the Rev. Rod Seeger told me, "Just show up".
It sounds flip and simplistic on the surface. It even sounds like the bare minimum: no advice to 'be compassionate' or 'use active listening skills' or turn to the other tools that might be helpful in a therapy setting. Just show up. But it wasn't flip advice, and as I quickly discovered, it also isn't all that easy. Because to show up, at least in the way that my supervisor intended it, means that we show up completely: that we figure out what it means to be truly present, and bring that presence, that clear and compassionate attention, to the unfolding moment before us. One of the first books that Buddhist teacher Ram Dass wrote was called, "Be Here Now". By his own admission, he spent the next forty years figuring out how to really do it.
The reason it's difficult is that we're completely out of practice. I think we know how to do it when we're babies; the world is so completely new and wondrous that there's not much temptation to do anything except try to get a grip on it. Whatever is right in front of us is reality, and when we're babies we give our whole selves to it. But it doesn't take long for us to fill up with preferences, and then not much longer before we're filled with plans and worries, with agendas and date books and all kinds of notions about how things ought to go.
Most of us juggle our lives most of the time, and our minds are always very busy with something other than what we're actually doing. We make lunch for the kids while breaking up a squabble and making a mental note to call the furnace guy. We return a phone call while planning the agenda for the meeting that's about to start. We listen to the news while cooking dinner and thinking about the snarly conversation we had with a coworker.
We don't have much practice at being single-minded. But if we truly want to accompany another person in hard times, our single-minded attention is the most important gift we can give. And as my chaplaincy supervisor tried to convey, it is also the essence of ministry. This is true whether we are engaged in ministry as a profession or whether we have simply been called out of ourselves by the ministry of the moment in which we find ourselves. An official calling is not what's important. What's important is to just show up -- to whole-heartedly show up.
In her book It's Easier Than You Think, Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein tells a story about settling down for a cross-country flight, eagerly anticipating six hours of uninterrupted writing. She was working on a manuscript against a looming deadline and was just settling down to her work when the woman sitting next to her began to talk. She was anxious about the flight because of a spinal injury that made sitting uncomfortable, and she was clearly hoping for distraction. Boorstein recounts that after allowing a little time for conversation so as not to seem impolite, she shuffled her papers and cleared her throat suggestively, in a way that implied she wanted to work. But each time a conversation topic was concluded and she turned away, the woman found something new to begin on.
Finally, as the seat mate began plying her with questions about her own work teaching meditation, the light went on for Boorstein. She realized the woman was hoping that meditation might help her to manage her own pain. So Boorstein set aside her writing and her agenda and turned her attention to the calling of the moment. She gave some meditation instruction, sat with the woman in silence and then listened as she excitedly talked about it.
She ends the story with this reflection: "I began to realize I was having a good time. It occurred to me that it was totally ludicrous to be writing a book about the joys of selfless acts of kindness, about relating with compassion every chance we get, while trying to ignore a person in pain sitting next to me. During the last half hour of the flight she fell asleep, and I wrote something really good."
Setting aside our own agenda is not always what we're called on to do. But when we set out to help another person; when our goal is to accompany someone else through their pain or sorrow, through their suffering or even through their path to dying, we can't do it well unless we're willing to set aside our own agenda. One of the best quotes I ever heard from William Sloan Coffin was, "There is no smaller package in the world than someone who is all wrapped up in himself." Unwrapping that package, so that we're not self-absorbed but fully available to the needs around us: that is the work of ministry.
I think Carl Rogers' definition of empathy in our reading is a good one: the willingness to look "with fresh and unfrightened eyes". That's the quality of presence that can really make a difference to someone in need. It's the quality of presence that I think constitutes a real ministry with one another.
But now I want to add something that might surprise some of you. I want us to think about this way of being together, this ministry of presence, not in order to focus attention on the Lay Ministry Team that we have just named and greeted and commissioned this morning. Their work among us is of tremendous importance, both to the members of this congregation whose lives they touch and to the professional ministry, with whom they are invaluable partners.
But theirs is not the most important ministry in this congregation, and neither is mine or Dacia's. The most important ministry in this congregation is the one that each of you give when you just show up for each other: when you really show up.
I think of it, honestly, as the mortar or cement between the bricks: it is this ministry of presence that holds us together as a community. The more generously it is lavished on among us, the stronger we are in the great thing that we form together in this congregation. It is not expendable: not on any level, at any time, is this loving attention between us expendable. But there are times of stress or strain on our walls when that bonding strength between us is more essential than ever, and we have entered into one of those times.
Between now and some unknown date in the spring, we will be feeling the stress of a construction zone. In the spring and on into next year and perhaps the year beyond, we will be stretching ourselves as far as we can to financially support this congregation and its brave new commitments. Next year and in the next couple of years as we begin to fill the bright new space we have created, we will be learning together how to be a new size of congregation. All through these chapters in our collective life, what will hold us together is the pure and simple quality of attention we give to one another. This is the most critical ministry among us: our ability, our willingness, to show up: to see each other with fresh and unfrightened eyes.
To me, that is reflected in very specific things. Certainly it's reflected in the ways we greet each other on Sundays, the clarity of our attention in the greeting and the whole-heartedness with which we make a stranger welcome. But it means some other things as well. It means that when five or seven or ten of us gather for a committee meeting, the agenda is not the only agenda. Instead, that little group also remembers -- each person within it remembers -- that the more important work of the committee is ministry, the care and attention each member of the group can give to the others. When we start a business meeting with a personal check-in, it isn't out of some odd devotion to touchy-feely process. It's because it matters for the work of this community that we do the work as community, and therefore make room for the few words, for the touch or the embrace or the silence of sympathy, to notice and honor the personal struggles and joys in each of our lives.
When we start a business meeting with a lighted candle, or with a reflective reading or a moment of silence, it's out of the recognition, again, that there is an agenda larger than the committee's agenda. It's a way to notice that this small piece of work from this one little collective of people is part of something large and solemn and holy. It's back to that old image of the workers building the cathedral. When asked what they were doing, the brick-layer said he was making a wall, the stone-cutter that he was shaping stones, the artist that he was making a mural, and so on. But the one who was sweeping away the stone dust answered, "I'm building a cathedral". It doesn't matter which of the thousand roles here we've taken on. If we really show up for each other with a clear and compassionate presence, we are doing ministry, and we are building this beloved community.
Rachel Naomi Remen tells a wonderful story in her book called, My Grandfather's Blessings. She has lived much of her life with Crohn's disease and all its difficulties, and her life and calling were in many ways shaped by living with the disease. She's a medical doctor, and as such had a particularly difficult time when, in the early 1980s, she began to experience severe new symptoms that neither she nor various medical experts could diagnose. No one could explain what was wrong, and she was becoming very frightened.
In her desperation, she made a last-try appointment with yet another doctor. They would have fifteen minutes together. As she waited in Dr. Smith's examining room, she regretted making the appointment. What could a surgeon tell her in fifteen minutes that her other doctors had failed to diagnose with hours of their time?
Dr. Smith knocked softly, came in, and greeted her. He spent a few minutes reading over her lab results and X-ray studies. Then he leaned toward her and said, "Tell me why you have come." Remen writes, "I looked into his face and saw a genuine concern. I began to tell him all the things I was experiencing. . . . My voice shook a little. He continued to listen.
"Slowly I began to tell him other things, things I had not told anyone else. How the doctor who first diagnosed my illness had told me I would die before forty; that my father had unexpectedly died a few months previously because of a medication error, and that I had brought my mother, [ill herself], . . . across the country to live with me. I shared my anxiety about being able to care adequately for her complex needs, the worry that my . . . health problems might cause me to let down my own patients, the loneliness I felt when friends went on without me because I could no longer keep up. . . . I said it all, and then I just cried.
"It took me no more than nine or ten minutes to tell my whole story. Dr. Smith said nothing to interrupt and just listened closely. When I had finished, he asked a few questions that showed me that he had heard and fully understood. Then he reached for my hand and told me that he realized how hard things were, . . . [and that] this was not all in my head. 'There is no question that there is something going on that we do not yet understand,' he told me. He assured me that whatever this was would declare itself more clearly and when it did,… he would be there. He looked at me and smiled. 'We will wait together,' he told me.
"Like the others, he had no diagnosis. What he offered was his caring and companionship, his willingness to face the unknown with me. In fourteen minutes, he had lifted the loneliness that had separated me from others and from my own strength. . . . Someone else knew, someone else cared, and because of this I found I had the courage to deal with whatever was going to happen. Several months later, when the great abscess hidden deep in my abdomen finally appeared on an X-ray, it was he who did my surgery."
It was the surgery, in the end, that solved the problem of Remen's symptoms. But months earlier, it was the surgeon's willingness to truly show up that helped her survive. Reading and re-reading that story, I find its essence distilled down to the purest gift of presence we each have the chance to give to one another in every encounter.
The doctor came in and looked at Remen with full attention. He said, "Tell me", and really meant tell me, and not, 'let me tell you'. He listened, with great care and without interruption. He took her hand. He acknowledged the reality of the pain, and he said, "We will wait together". Those are the elements that are essential in any real ministry: Look; listen; touch; wait. It isn't a difficult recipe, on its surface. But it does require true intent. It is the most important work each one of us is called to within the circle of this beloved community.
AMEN.