When Jacob arrived at the bakery he found Samuel on his knees trying to put a flame to the pilot light.
“The wind last night,” Samuel explained.
Samuel looked around. “Where’s Jonah?”
“Ruth, the new teacher, met us on the way.” answered Jacob, tearing open the seam of a flour sack. “He went to school with her.”
“Went to school?” Samuel made no attempt to mask his disappointment. “But he learned here. You learned here. You’re a teacher.” “Though the bakery may be a good teacher,” said Jacob, “what I have learned is that the boy needs a father as much as he needs a teacher.”
“Can’t you, of all people, be both?” persisted Samuel.
Jacob watched a cloud of flour rise above the mixing bowl as the stirring arm began its endless turning.
“A teacher loves teaching. A father teaches love. Teaching, I know. Loving, I’m learning,” answered Jacob.
Jane Kenyon - Ice Storm
For the hemlocks and broad-leafed evergreens a beautiful and precarious state of being… Here in the suburbs of New Haven nature, unrestrained, lops the weaker limbs of shrubs and trees with a sense of aesthetics that is practical and sinister…
I am a guest in this house. On the bedside table Good Housekeeping, and A Nietzsche Reader… The others are still asleep. The most painful longing comes over me. A longing not of the body…
It could be for beauty— I mean what Keats was panting after, for which I love and honor him; it could be for the promises of God; or for oblivion, nada; or some condition even more extreme, which I intuit, but can't quite name.
Sermon
[This sermon was overtaken by events. Because I felt a need to address events in the news, the title has nothing to do with the text.]
It’s still the same old story, A fight for love and glory, A case of do or die. The fundamental things apply
As time goes by. The fundamental things apply...This song has been running through my head all week. It’s great for walking the dog and for singing in the shower. And it’s much easier to remember than Stardust. Also all week, I have read about the various legal maneuvers that were supposed to prevent Terri Schiavo’s death and about the complicated story that brought everyone to the present impasse . My attention was caught by the drama and passion of the events – the endless, last ditch efforts to get the legal system to change its mind, the intensity of the people gathered outside the hospice with their signs and the tape across their mouths, the intervention of the Congress for whatever purpose drove them, the determination of the husband and the parents to have the story end according to their contradictory plans. In the public forum, as is so often the case, what was essentially a private and personal event was presented as theater. A tragedy of sorts, but theater nonetheless, with exaggerated emotions and a plot of many twists. We had a multitude of occasions to be shocked, surprised, touched, inspired, and perplexed. The song in my head summed it up: it’s still the same old story.
For what could be more fundamental than a question of life or death? And this episode in our national chronicle did present itself as a question of life or death. But as time goes by, I have learned to look for other issues when I see intense emotions arising out of some difference of opinion. The presenting issue is seldom the whole issue. I start asking, what’s behind all this feeling? Why are these people so determined to have their own way? Why do the parents come back again and again using different legal maneuvers to get the court, which was called in as a neutral body, to change its verdict and find in their favor? Why does the husband refuse to allow the parents to assume guardianship? Why do so many good people of Florida feel that they have a personal stake in the outcome of the ordeal? And why have the good people of the United States, myself included, felt such a strong interest in the daily drama?
Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate...
I know from personal experience that decisions about removing life support from an incapacitated person do not have to be played out before the media, nor do they have to arouse conflict. My father suffered cardiac arrest two days before Christmas in 1985. My mother woke up to find that he was not breathing and called the Emergency Medical Team. By the time they arrived, Dad was dead. The paramedics got his heart started again and put him on a ventilator, but the damage had already been done. His brain had ceased to function except on a very elemental level.
According to California law, a person may be declared to be brain dead if two EEGs, taken 72 hours apart, show no electrical activity, and that was my father’s case. His appearance was deceptive. His skin color was good, he was warm to the touch. He seemed to be sleeping comfortably. But he could not be roused. His cardiologist told us there was no hope. His eyes teared up as he spoke to us. My mother, my brother, and I had to decide whether to remove life support. In what was probably the bravest thing she ever did, Mom gave instructions to remove the ventilator. Dad died within six hours, early on the thirty-first.
The prevailing emotion during the entire time we were waiting for results and closure was sadness. Maybe hopeful sadness, but the hope was small. My father had gone through bypass surgery about five and a half years before. The surgeon had told him that he would gain about five years of life. The fifth anniversary had come that summer. Dad still had some optimism. On the day that he collapsed, he had been fitted with a new set of dentures and had gone around flashing his new smile at folks all afternoon. Nonetheless, he knew that his heart would not be able to sustain him for much longer.
A sigh is still a sigh.. The fundamental things apply, as time goes by...
I know from my part in that decision that such things can be done without rancor and without conflict. So, why all the passion, why all the jealousy and hate? Some might chalk it up to Original Sin. I prefer to call it the Human Condition, which is to say that we are destined to discontentment – our minds are capable of imagining an utterly more beautiful existence than life is able to provide, and we chafe at the difference. We can look at the beauty of an ice storm with its magical patterns of light, its suggestion that the entire earth has turned to mirrors, and our minds can carry us into deep longing for communion with the source of all beauty. We long for perfection. We have these hungers, these intimations of immortality, these painful desires that the world be reasonable and peaceable. Our hunger extends beyond the longing for perfect beauty to a longing for perfect love, for perfect justice, for perfect health, for perfect oneness. We may even take it personally when life fails to follow through on our desires.
Such longing can make us impatient, even disdainful of what life actually offers, with its ambiguous choices, its compromises, its transitoriness, its vulnerability, its dailiness. Few of us are able to see the godhead of the breakfast table. Instead, we try to impose our desires on life. But life as we must live it, day in and day out is, as the saying goes, what happens while we are busy making other plans. And what we crave is control. We want control over our bodies, control over our futures, control over our privacy, control over our identities. We want the plans we make to be the blueprints that life follows. And when something unexpected happens to endanger our lives or to deny us our ability to control things, we begrudgingly shift focus and try to control what follows after.
One of the hardest things we face as parents is letting go of our children so they may live their own lives, which usually means letting them make their own mistakes. And one of the most difficult things for a parent to accept is that our children may not even want our help and guidance any more. After two decades of creating a controlled environment, we surrender our offspring to a world we have no control over. How confusing the whole issue must be if the beloved daughter, who wants very much to be her own person, who had married a stranger, still lives in her parents’ home. Both her identity and that of her parents is challenged again and again.
That, of course, was Terri Schiavo’s story, up to the time that she collapsed because of an electrolytic imbalance caused by her bulimia that brought on cardiac arrest and brain damage. She and her husband tried to create a marriage, a shared identity, while they were living in her parents’ house. After Terri’s collapse, the parents and the husband apparently invested all their energies in proving that they loved her beyond reason and beyond doubt. They visited her daily; they made life miserable for the hospice staff because of their demands, they subjected her to therapies and training which proved fruitless. And I can’t help feeling that they were acting for their own sakes more than for hers – to assuage guilt, to control death, to create meaning in their lives, to seize the high moral ground. They built an identity around taking care of Terri.
It’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die. The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.
The rest of us watched all this unfold with some dismay. We expressed shock or cynicism or relief at the interventions by the Congress; we got caught up in the question of whether Terri was brain-dead or disabled. We marveled at the crowds gathering to protest. All these people trying to make Terri Schiavo’s story somehow their own story, trying to shape an identity out of the stand they took regarding her life or death. These were not close friends coming together to mourn or to demonstrate their love. They were strangers who were trying to make a point. Again, they used Terri Schiavo for their own purposes, whether political or emotional. I’m not at all sure that my writing about her situation isn’t using her for my own purposes, showing that I have the superior perspective...
On the surface the actions of all these people appeared to be expressions of concern, of love even. However, it seems to me that we human beings are just in the beginning stages of learning what it means to love. We get love for another all mixed up with hungers and needs of our own that have nothing to do with the one we love. We stir love in with pride and lust, guilt and defiance, hunger and loneliness. And we have almost no concept of what it would mean to love ourselves, and that is supposed to be the benchmark is it not: love thy neighbor as you love yourself...?. When one of these curious ways of being in relationship or showing love becomes fodder for public consumption, we watch with fascination to see whether these folks have figured out how to express love authentically or whether they are just as messed up and conflicted as we are.
Nor do I have much hope that we will learn all that fast how truly to live authentic love. We’re back to the human condition. Everything is a jumble inside us. Our motives are a confusion of drives and hopes and demands and needs. Loving ourselves would mean at least starting to accept the fact that our feelings are never pure, or at least never singular. (A therapist once told me to try to name at least four emotions that were at work in me at any given time, as a way of breaking out of either/or thinking and getting closer to reality.)
If it helps, we might also consider that the same jumble of feelings is at work in everyone else. Loving ourselves as we are just might be the first step toward loving them as they are. For all of us, it’s still the same old story, a fight for love and glory. These are the fundamental things. When we find ourselves fascinated at the way they gain expression in someone else’s story, we are probably ignoring the way they shape our own.
A sigh is still a sigh as time goes by.