For This One Day

A few days ago our friend John came to see us–John whose wife Nancy died a year ago. They were a lovely pair and very close. John wanted very much to talk about Nancy and her death, showing us photos of her last days and letting us inhabit the grief he is going through. It was a great honor, and very touching, to share with him. It reminded me what marriage is meant to be.

I asked John how he managed. He said sometimes he was not sure that he could. It just seemed to be too much. But when he reflected on Nancy as a gift given him for 33 years, an extraordinary gift greater than he could ever deserve, he found that he could manage. He wasn’t sure that he could live without Nancy for the rest of his life, but he could live for this one day.

Wrapping Up Work

Yesterday afternoon I spent several hours with my friend Tom, who is dying from Parkinson’s disease. I had not seen him for a few days, and when I came into the room his appearance startled me. His body seemed to have shrunk to doll-size—he hasn’t eaten significantly in days—and his face was a mask, like a paper cutout. He didn’t communicate, though he seemed to make contact with us from eyes set deep in his head.

We entered the mystery of dying, into which the living can only peer from the outside. We held his hand, sang to him, and talked to him. We watched him and wondered what went on in his mind. But he was laboring at breathing, to the exclusion of everything else.

It takes a lot of work to die. The hospice social worker said to me that it seemed like the counterpart of labor pains, hard, long travail leading to a new kind of life.

I remember my mother, two days before she passed away, coming out to join the family at lunch. From her face you could see it cost her every ounce of strength. Ordinarily so gentle, she looked stern and forbidding from the sheer force of concentration. Walking from her bedroom with agonizing slowness, she joined us. Her loved ones were there; a new grandchild had come to visit. She still owed a debt to the living. She always paid her debts, whatever it cost her.

My father died of Alzheimer’s four months later, which meant that we had little real communication near the end. He had long since passed out of the realm of conscious contact. Earlier, though, I remember how he worked, as he sensed his mind disappearing.

He had a brilliant intellect, shooting like electricity from one interest to the next. All his adult life he devoured theology of a high intellectual order, but somewhere in mid-Alzheimer’s he lost the ability to think that way. He could no longer follow an argument. For a man like my father it was a great loss, but not so great as I had expected. For a long period of time, a year at least, he became enamored of a series of very simple devotional books. They would not have interested him earlier, but now he poured everything he had into reading and re-reading them. He went through entire books underlining every word.

His work went on, perhaps more than ever, as he felt his mental tools slipping away. He loved God. At that he kept working for as long as he could.

Have You Thought About Death?

The Function of Miracles—Part 4

“Healing is part of the normal Christian life. God put it in His book; He illustrated it in the life of Jesus. He told us to emulate what Jesus did. So why is it so easy for us to be fully convinced when we pray for someone to be saved that our prayer will work, and yet when we pray for healing we find it difficult to believe they will be healed? Because salvation, as it pertains to a born-again experience, has been embraced and taught continuously by the Church for centuries, while the revelation of healing has not been widely embraced, and has even been fought. … Disease is considered a gift from God to make people better Christians! Think about how badly the Church has backslidden, to believe such lies! We have tolerated the deception that accuses God of doing evil, which is why today healing remains so controversial, little-practiced and little understood.” [829, The Supernatural Power of a Transformed Mind, by Bill Johnson.]

Johnson goes on to speculate on what the Church would look like if healing had been embraced as “an essential part of the Great Commission. Normal Christians would see deformities and say, ‘No problem.’ Cancer, ‘No problem.’ Missing limbs, ‘No problem.’ We would pray in power without one iota of doubt.”

Johnson neglected to add, “Death, ‘No problem.’”

I am going to go out on a limb and say there has never been a time or place in human history where people said, “Missing limbs, ‘No problem.’” As Philip Yancey has noted, Lourdes displays discarded crutches and wheelchairs, but there are no glass eyes, no artificial limbs.

Why do Christians pray for salvation with confidence, but for healing with less confidence? Johnson is right that the church teaches them that. But I don’t think it’s because of backsliding. I think the church teaches that because it deals with reality. Many prayers for healing are not answered.  And everybody dies.

That is not how it is in heaven. But we’re not there yet.

That’s why, in our prayers, the sovereignty of God is so important. Every single day we pray and hope for God to act “on earth as it is in heaven.” And he often does. Most diseases are healed. Personally, I have been sick many times and God has healed me every single time.

But today I am going to see a dear friend who is in the final stages of Parkinson’s disease. I have watched him slowly decline to the point where he can no longer walk and hardly can talk. It’s painful to see, and I know it’s not the way God means life to be lived. When heaven comes to earth, we won’t.

To tell you the truth, though, I’ve stopped praying that Tom will be healed. I am pretty sure he is dying, and I have no indication that God intends to stop that process. If God wants me to pray for Tom’s healing, he needs to tell me clearly. Otherwise I will pray for signs of grace as Tom succumbs to the power of death. I believe that Tom will be resurrected on the other side.

If Jesus was right and he inaugurated the Kingdom of God, we need to live that way. You can make a biblical case, as Johnson does, that it’s all available to us now, if only we believe.

You can also make a biblical case that we are only part-way there. We await the fullness of the Kingdom, when Jesus returns and heaven comes to earth “like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.” (Revelation 21: 2) We expect that in the hope and frustration of “already, but not yet.”

Who Loves?

Last week a friend shared with me about her sister’s last days. The sister was at home, relying on her oncologist for pain management, and the doctor wasn’t very responsive. The medicine she had prescribed wasn’t working. She didn’t seem interested in seeing her patient or in trying other options. There were scary symptoms that my friend didn’t understand, and it was hard to get the doctor to call back.

I remembered my own mother’s death, and how out-of-control you can feel. It made me thankful all over again for the help that hospice provided—kind, practical, knowledgeable care.

But these folks didn’t have that. They began to discuss whether they should change doctors. It would be inconvenient and awkward. They went back and forth until the patient told her sister (as she related it to me), “I think she is a very competent physician, but I don’t feel that she loves me.”

They changed doctors.

That comment has been rattling around in my mind since. It speaks to all sorts of situations, not just doctors.

Eating Humble Pie

I’ve eaten quite a lot of humble pie in the last few years. I’m not going to go into the details—it’s bad enough to eat it, without vomiting it up in public. Suffice it to say that I’ve had to rethink my belief in my invincibility.

Which may be a good thing, though I can’t say I find it to be much fun.

Eating humble pie has led me to think about the shape of life. All along I’ve had an internal narrative similar to Hardy Boys novels, in which I consistently and heroically come out ahead in the end. Setbacks I tended to see as temporary, creating narrative tension as to how I would overcome them.

Humble pie, however, has led me to ponder two inescapable facts. First, success is far from inevitable. Second, the shape of life leads to decay and death.

I know it’s not an original observation, but it’s one that I certainly have kept well hidden from myself. So, I think, do most people. Perhaps we have to, because it’s not a comfortable thing to consider. For all of us, whether “successful” or not, the visible shape of life is extremely discouraging. In the end you die, and in the leadup to that event you lose your animal vigor, your drive, your agility, your sex appeal, your sex drive (some at least), your mental acuity (again, some), and just about everything else that you hold precious. No amount of money, no number of prizes, makes much difference in this downward spiral. The death rate is 100%; the number of long-term survivors is zero.

Philosophy and religion deal with these realities—or try to. Most people, religious or not, cope with death through a mixture of stoicism and epicureanism. (Forgive me, philosophy students, if those terms are wrong.) I mean, we try to find pleasure in each day as a way to stave off the coming darkness. And, we try to show some dignity in the face of it, demonstrating courage and fortitude. Both of these strategies rely on thinking day to day, and not too much about the end result.

Religions may try to reframe the narrative. For example, Hinduism (I believe) seeks to offer a bigger picture in which our personal dramas are lost in an unchanging vastness. Some versions of Judaism stress a yet-invisible coda to the story, in which all God’s people will be raised from the dead to life in a perfected world. Animistic religions offer a wider view of the universe in which the visible and invisible exist side by side; decay and death represent merely a shifting from one realm to another.

These religious responses do not question the basic narrative of life-to-decay-to-death. They add to the story—a wider context, an unseen ending, an invisible context.

Only Christianity, I believe, claims an exception to life-to-decay-to-death. That is why the resurrection is so critical a doctrine. It indicates how fundamentally materialistic Christianity is. “If Christ is not raised, your faith is futile….” (1 Corinthians 15:17) All coping aside, all reframing aside, Jesus’ resurrection challenges the basic premise that the number of long-term survivors is zero.

Now, noticing the distinctiveness of this claim is one thing. Finding reason to believe it is another. It’s no small thing to put your faith in an exception to the rule of death, especially when the purported exception took place two millennia ago.  If someone really wants to look at this, I strongly recommend N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. It attempts, among other things, to carefully examine the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection, and it’s about as thorough and fair-minded as you are likely to find in this life.

Whether you believe in Jesus’ resurrection or not, you can see why Christianity made such a shocking impact in the first century. It wasn’t one more religion or philosophy, as such were generally known. It was a claim that the facts of the visible universe needed revision.

Surviving a Crisis

Over the past months of economic and publishing crises I’ve reflected on a book I read last year, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why by Laurence Gonzales. It’s far from great literature, and to my taste does way too much wandering around in the mysteries of brain chemistry. (I am pretty sure nobody really understands this stuff, though journalists and pop psychologists regularly pick through the journals, find a few intriguing results, and make it sound as though the brain is about as complicated as a toaster oven.)

That said, Gonzales is very interesting in describing myriad crises (people who survived plane crashes and found themselves lost in wilderness, people whose boat sank on the open ocean, people who got lost in the mountains, etc.) and trying to sort out why some live and some die.

A lot of it comes to handling your emotions. It’s natural to panic, and panicky people often freeze up and don’t do anything, or else run off making bad decisions. For example, people lost in the mountains often just keep going, thinking that their destination lies just ahead, instead of retracing their steps. Panicky people often know better than what their response suggests. If they could stop and think clearly, they would do better. The problem is that it’s very hard to think clearly in a crisis. You get your adrenaline running (this is where brain chemistry comes in) and your thought processes don’t work very well.

Of course, in a real crisis you may do everything you should and still die. But people who have made it through terrible calamities share certain approaches. I’ve found some of these relevant to my life.

One common response is prayer. Even people who don’t believe in God find themselves wanting to pray. Referring problems to a wise, all-knowing and objective Person out there seems to help them calm down and take courage. It makes sense. When you pray you are remembering a bigger context. Even if you aren’t able to see your situation objectively, you are recalling someone who does see it objectively. That can help you to step out of your situation far enough to detach yourself from its terror. Gonzales isn’t religious, as far as I can tell, but he does respect the helpfulness of religion in a crisis situation.

Humor also helps—often gallows humor. It can help you calm down, detach yourself from the immediate threats, and see the situation from a different angle. If you can look at something with enough irony to laugh at it, you are no longer in the immediate grip of panic.

Interestingly, people who survive are often those who come to the point of accepting that they are likely to die. Somehow this helps. Some decided that if they were going to die, they wanted to do it with dignity, having done everything they could possibly do for survival. Some thought of the stories that would be told of them when their bodies were discovered. Others crystallized a new determination to survive based on a desire to live for someone else—a family member, often enough—or for an unfinished project. The knowledge that they were likely to die both calmed them and steeled them for the effort to keep on trying.

I’ve thought of this particularly as I approach my sixties. In a mid-life crisis some people panic (get divorced, buy a sports car, go to Costa Rica) and others despair and give up (watch TV, stop working out, quit trying at work). But the realization that we are going to die, that our lives (as well as our working lives) have a limit, may help us to focus on ending well. I think that’s why medieval philosophers were often portrayed contemplating a skull.

The most important point I got from Gonzales’ book was that survivors make a plan. They take action, but they don’t rush into action—they calm themselves and figure out what’s best to do, even though there are many unknowns. They don’t let the unknowns of their situation paralyze them. They carefully reflect on what they know and don’t know, they think through what can be done to maximize their chances of escape, and then they act on that plan carefully and systematically. Knowing the plan is imperfect, since perfect plans depend on complete knowledge, they still follow through, developing a regular routine to help them keep to the plan.

Crises are rare. We are never adequately prepared for them, and what to do in response to them is never obvious. That’s true whether we find ourselves floating in the ocean without a life raft, watching our lifelong savings disappear, losing our job, or finding ourselves in a family crisis. If these situations were easily figured out, they wouldn’t be real crises. Prayer, humor, life perspective, and a plan of action—these don’t necessarily solve anything, but they help us do the best we can.