The Rev. Stephen Harding on one of the saddest things he had ever heard

 

Articulating Experiences is the Key to Understanding Them

Those who don't feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don't drink dawn
like a cup of springwater
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don't want to change,
let them sleep

This Love is beyond the study of theology,
that old trickery and hypocrisy.
If you want to improve your mind that way,
sleep on

I've given up on my brain.
I've torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.

If you're not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,

and sleep.

Rumi [1]

***

Albert held my hands. Held them tight. From deep within their sockets his eyes held mine, and in a voice ravaged by his disease he hoarsely whispered, “You feel to me like life.”

This is the first encounter with a patient that I remember, now thirteen years ago. I remember not knowing what to say, or do. I also remember thinking how desperately Albert, at the end of his life, wanted to live, and that I somehow symbolized all that was slipping away from him each day.

***

I went once to see a woman who was a Hospice patient. She lived alone, never married, no children, no brothers or sisters still living – all that she had were her friends, who weren’t there when I came by. In the course of our conversation she told me, “I am sixty-seven years old. I am alone in this world, and I know that I am dying. All I want is for someone to hold my hand, and to tell me that they love me.”

That was one of the saddest things that I had ever heard. I took her hand and held it while she slept. I stayed with her until her friends came later that evening. I couldn’t tell her that I loved her – it wouldn’t have been true – but her awareness of being alone and having missed part of life stayed with me for a long time....

***

These stories are a very small drop in the depth of experiences that I have had as a Chaplain. These stories and the people in them have stayed with me for a long time. As I begin to look back over the last ten years, I have had a remarkable number and range of experiences that involve working with the dying, working briefly in a (large) community hospital, working with pain medicine patients, September 11, and, most recently, being one of the Chaplains for the Fire Department in New York City. In addition to all of my professional experiences, my personal and ecclesial lives have been full as well.

I am finding that there have been so many profound experiences stacked on top of each other that I have lost touch with what they mean to me and what they might mean theologically. It’s time for me to reflect and think, and let the meaning of what I’ve been living permeate me more. There’s a lot of “this is my job” to how I approach the accumulation of these experiences. But at the same time...

Each experience has meaning, and as my friend Rabbi Stephen Roberts and others have said, it is only through the articulation of the experience(s) that one is able to understand what happened. This article is an attempt to bring meaning to the experiences that have formed me.

Bless you for reading.

 

[1] Ode 314, in Like This, Coleman Barks, trans., Maypop, Athens, 1990.