Of course, with HIPAA and just plain ol’ pastoral confidentiality, I can’t share any specific details. But I can say that I worked in an ICU and saw a lot of healing, recovery, and joy, as well as a LOT of death, grief, and sadness. In a modern world where our lives are amazingly sanitized, death often seems very far away. It can even seem downright mysterious. When I got my first on-call page at 3am, my first thought as I groggily sprinted to the Emergency Room was that I might be about to see my first dead body, apart from funerals. What was it going to be like? Would I freak out? Would it just seem normal? Would I say something so accidentally insensitive that I would be kindly asked to leave the program and never become a pastor?!?! I took a deep, deep breath and said a very earnest prayer. “Jesus, help me do this. And help me not to pass out. Or say anything really stupid.” And, praise be, he did.
Anne Lamott, in Traveling Mercies, says that her two most-often used prayers are “Help me, help me, help me” and “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Nothing made me understand this like CPE. When that pager goes off and there are only minutes to get to the room of a patient, and that patient may be in any state, from death to near-death to just bored and in need of a conversation (this happened much more often than I expected), those prayers fell like my hurried footsteps. “Help me, help me, help me, Jesus.”
Since CPE I’ve found myself thinking more and more about grief, mourning, and death. Not in a morbid or overly-fascinated way. I’m in no hurry to approach it myself, mind you. But CPE has a way of reminding a person how very tenuous life is. It seems like for every person who comes to the hospital with just a broken arm, another person comes in with end-stage cancer or an aneurysm, and never leaves again. Sometimes people come in for something small and find out it's something major. I also didn't really know how ugly and awful the physical reality of death can be. Sure, some people die peacefully in their sleep, but this is something I have yet to see for myself. In the hospital, despite doctors' and nurses' best efforts, death is often messy and unscripted and horrible. It happens at three in the morning or before a loved one arrives or hours after it was predicted, when a family is all but crazed with anticipatory grief.
After my internship this summer, I’ve found myself wanting to cling more closely to Daryl (difficult, as he is hundreds of miles away), to protect him (and the rest of my family and friends) from any possibility of a car accident or a fire or a heart attack.
But I can’t protect my loved ones from these things. No one can. So I’m left to face the scary reality of death and the (perhaps) scarier reality that we am not in control of when death approaches us or the ones we love. This has driven me to greater prayer, but also to greater contemplation of what I believe death to be.
A fellow student in my Theology of Scripture course today said, “You know, death isn’t the worst thing. We treat it like it’s the worst thing, but it isn’t.” So true.
A professor of mine said recently that he has trouble teaching courses on the apostle Paul because Paul is like a pastor to him. Daryl once told me that he didn’t know if he could write his master’s thesis on Bonhoeffer because Bonhoeffer is his pastor. As the winds and waves of seminary have gotten rougher, I’ve realized that I need to return to reading some of my pastors. And perhaps there is no one more familiar and comforting to me than C. S. Lewis.
Two nights ago I finished The Silver Chair. While this used to be my least favorite of the Narnia books (what can I say, I loved horses as a young girl, and they rarely appear in this book…), as I’ve gotten older it’s become one of my favorites. It speaks so beautifully to the utter slog that the Christian life can seem at times. Mired in modernity and confusion, Aslan’s voice can seem very far away, yet we must still follow him.
Anyway, I bring this up because of one of the ending scenes in the book. The book ends with the death of King Caspian. Caspian is one of the longest-running characters in the Narnia series. He appears first in book two (Prince Caspian), sails the world throughout book three (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader), and then appears again in The Silver Chair (I know modern reprintings have changed the order of the series, but I am a die-hard believer in their original order – starting with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and ending with The Last Battle). By the time King Caspian is a frail, elderly man, we’ve known him over the span of three books, and grown quite attached to him. He sails home from his final journey to bless his only son, Prince Rillian, and then he dies.
Soon thereafter, the two children of the story—Jill and Eustace—are brought by Aslan to a great mountain. There is a stream on the mountain, and the dead king lies in it with the waters flowing over him. Aslan, Jill, and Eustace stand over him and mourn. The exchange that follows goes like this:
“Son of Adam,” said Aslan, “go into that thicket and pluck the thorn that you will find there and bring it to me.”
Eustace obeyed. The thorn was a foot long and sharp as a rapier.
“Drive it into my paw, Son of Adam,” said Aslan, holding up his right fore-paw and spread out the great pad toward Eustace.
“Must I?” said Eustace.
“Yes,” said Aslan.
Then Eustace set his teeth and drove the thorn into the Lion’s pad. And there came out a great drop of blood, redder than all the redness that you have ever seen or imagined. And it splashed into the stream over the dead body of the King. At the same moment the doleful music stopped. And the dead King began to be changed. His white beard turned to gray, and from gray to yellow, and got shorter and vanished altogether; and his sunken cheeks grew round and fresh, and the wrinkles were smoothed, and his eyes opened, and his eyes and lips both laughed, and suddenly he leaped up and stood before them—a very young man or a boy. Jill couldn’t say which, because of people having no particular ages in Aslan’s country…And he rushed to Aslan and flung his arms as far as they would go around the huge neck; and he gave Aslan the strong kisses of a King, and Aslan gave him the wild kisses of a Lion.
At last Caspian turned to the others. He gave a great laugh of astonished joy.
“Why! Eustace!” he said. “Eustace! So you did reach the end of the world after all…”
Eustace made a step toward him with both hands held out, but then drew back with a startled expression.
“Look here! I say,” he stammered. “It’s all very well. But aren’t you--? I mean didn’t you--?”
“Oh, don’t be such an ass,” said Caspian.
“But,” said Eustace, looking at Aslan. “Hasn’t he—er—died?”
“Yes,” said the Lion in a very quiet voice almost (Jill thought) as if he were laughing. “He has died. Most people have, you now. Even I have. There are very few who haven’t.”
I love Lewis’s reminder that Christ has gone before us, and for this reason, death is simply the pathway to life. Hard to remember, in light of all the suffering around us, but profound nonetheless.
Dr. Davis taught about funerals in this week’s Presbyterian Worship course. He asserted the importance of having some prayers prepared to help us in funeral services. This was a prayer he used as an example, and the prayer I’ll leave you with today:
God,
You have designed this world and know all things good for us.
Give us such faith that, by day and by night, in all times and in all places,
we may without fear entrust those who are dear to us to your never-failing love,
in this life and in the life to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment